20 – Don’t Go Alone (But Stay Inside Though)

April 20, 2020 David Sharman

Social distancing is of the utmost importance right now, and yet everyone is running around with Companions? What’s going on??

Jokes aside, it looks like some peoples’ fears over the Companion mechanic being broken might not have been unfounded. Lurrus of the Dream-Den is EVERYWHERE, and Gyruda, Doom of Depths has actually been temporarily banned from all formats on MTGO because of a bug with its interaction with Leyline of the Void type effects – you should be able to return cards exiled with its effect but Magic Online isn’t letting you. On top of that, we’ve seen eight out of ten ~~cats~~ Companions top 8 online tournaments across all competitive constructed formats. It’s clear these cards are busted.

Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger

Price today: 16 tix
Possible price: 25 tix

The Standard Aristocrats deck has picked up a lot of new and powerful tools with Ikoria. Lurrus of the Dream-Den is obviously great and doing some crazy stuff all over the shop, but other cards like Fiend Artisan, Whisper Squad and Call of the Death-Dweller are putting in work too. A couple of different flavours of the deck have been tried out so far, with both Orzhov and Rakdos showing promise, and Kroxa is proving to be great in builds including red.

Kroxa fits the bill to play Lurrus as your companion, which is the first thing we need to be able to check off here, and so coupled with Lurrus you can be casting and triggering a Kroxa every turn without the need to Escape it. That’s some serious value, and doesn’t even take into account the fact that you might have a Witch’s Oven or Priest of Forgotten Gods in play.

Kroxa has already put up results over the weekend in Team Lotus Box’s Standard tournament, making a top 8 appearance in a Rakdos Aristocrats build. Although it doesn’t have quite the pedigree of its associate Uro, Kroxa does see a reasonable amount of play in Modern too, showing up in Jund and Death’s Shadow builds. This mythic from Theros is already seeing some upward movement and will be over 20 tix in short order, and I don’t think 25-30 is unreasonable.

The Ozolith

Price today: 1.3 tix
Possible price: 5 tix

Now onto quite a different card in the Ozolith. This hasn’t been seeing any standard play as far as I know, but it has been showing up in Pioneer. Hardened Scales is a deck that somewhat fell off the radar when Once Upon a Time got banned in the format, but this one mana artifact has given the deck new life. Lurrus (how many times am I going to have to mention that card?) has also been working some magic for the deck as a Companion, and combined with The Ozolith I think the deck really has some legs again.

In a Scales deck, The Ozolith just acts as a store for all of the +1/+1 counters from any of your creatures that die, and combined with Lurrus it’s a recipe for large, repeatable threats. Throw a Metallic Mimic in the mix and you can really start going crazy!

The Ozolith is fairly cheap online at 1.3 tix at the moment, and although it might be a bit of a narrow card, I think it has a lot of potential. It might even breathe life back into Modern Scales – although Mox Opal is no longer a part of the format (RIP), The Ozolith can do some serious work with an Arcbound Ravager, making for a very quick kill with an Inkmoth Nexus. A slightly more speculative pick, but there’s no doubting the potential of this card.

Seasoned Pyromancer

Price today: 19 tix
Possible price: 30 tix

Speaking of Modern, let’s have a look at what has been doing well recently. A couple of weeks ago I talked about Klothys with regard to the RG Midrange deck that has been popularised recently, and since then its metagame share has only gone up. Alongside Bant Uro and Niv to Light, these midrange decks are appealing to Magic players because they get to play a lot of Magic with them. It’s good old creature-based interaction, served with a small side of land destruction – just as Garfield intended, right?

Whether or not you’re a fan of this type of deck, it’s the most popular (and likely the best) thing to be doing in Modern right now. Combo decks are seemingly out of the picture for now (although that still hasn’t stopped Caleb Scherer top 8ing with Storm), and midrange is king.

Anyway, back to talking about this RG deck – Seasoned Pyromancer is one of the key value engines in the deck, providing card selection and extra bodies on the board. Since the Modern Horizons flashback draft the other week, Pyromancer has actually bottomed out slightly more and is now down to 19 tix, from a high of 30 less than a month ago. It’s a mythic and so supply is on the lower side, and with the increased popularity of this deck I expect to see it back up to 30 tix in the next couple of months or so.

Bonus Pick!

Go and buy Lurrus. Do it. Then sell it sharpish before it gets banned in everything.

David Sharman (@accidentprune on Twitter) has been playing Magic since 2013, dabbling in almost all formats but with a main focus on Modern, EDH and Pioneer. Based in the UK and a new writer for MTGPrice in 2020, he’s an active MTG finance speculator specialising in cross-border arbitrage.

Casual Fridays

Who Sits The Throne?

April 17, 2020 Cliff Daigle

I know our eyes are full of new cards, and there’s a wild west going on with actual card availability, so I want to take a moment and look at Throne of Eldraine, a set that has another 16 months in Standard, and make sure I’m aware of what the underpriced cards are.

Traditionally, for the big fall set, the highest price is about one year, or the halfway point, whichever you’d prefer to call it.Let’s look at a couple of examples from recent sets:

Legion Warboss (Currently about $2)

The Warboss dropped to under a buck at release, and took about eight months to get picked up in a deck. At that point, you could have made $7 per copy under ideal conditions, and that’s a lovely feeling for a card you snagged at such a low point. Notice that it’s heading for zero, but it’s a fun card to pair with Goblin Rabblemaster in those sorts of decks in Modern and Pioneer. It’s nice when one creature gets you an entire army.

Vraska’s Contempt ($1)

This card fell to around $5 during Rivals of Ixalan, and then started to rise like mad. By October 2019, they were going for just about $20 each, as the premier removal spell of the format. You’d think four mana was too much, but add a little lifegain (and make sure there’s nothing better around) and you’ve got a winning formula.

So what cards in Throne meet these sorts of criteria?

Murderous Rider ($2 regular nonfoil/$4 regular foil/$3 Showcase nonfoil/$6 Showcase foil)

We got some sweet removal spells in Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths but nothing this universal and multifaceted. The fact that your three-mana instant can kill anything that needs killing and then, whenever you have mana, can be a 2/3 lifelinker is pretty amazing. It’s not a popular metagame card right now, because it’s not green and Wizards decided we needed a year where every overpowered card was Simic. It’s too much value to be this low and I personally have about a dozen nonfoil Showcase stored up, and I’m debating about getting more.

Removal spells tend to be as strong a spec as you can get in Standard, and we’ve had a good line from Hero’s Downfall to Vraska’s Contempt to this one. When the metagame shifts at rotation (farewell to Nissa and Krasis especially!) I would look for this to be ascendant.

Keep in mind that even with a lack of paper tournaments, Rider is the third most commonly played creature in Pioneer, showing up in a wide variety of decks. Always feels nice to buy a cross-format card at its lowest point.

Bonecrusher Giant ($1/$2.50/$2/$3)

This is another one that is pretty mindblowing to me. It’s incredibly ubiquitous, and yet has such a low price. It’s the #2 creature in Standard right now, and the #9 creature in Pioneer. Decks generally play three or four, because it’s cheap interaction when you need it and a beefy body for cheap after that.

I like picking up the nonfoils more, because this is for those who play in paper tournaments, and that goes for the Rider above too. Players like making their deck unique without the literal warping effects that foils can have. This feels like a slam dunk to me, and I hope you’re able to stock up effectively.

Fae of Wishes (50¢/75¢/$1/$3)

This is a bit lower in price because the current demand isn’t there, but we’ve only had a couple of months to get used to wishboards again. Currently, only Fires decks make use of the card, but it’s a very low buy-in for a card that has such a unique effect. We’ve got more than a year to make this card broken as hell, and there’s a very good chance that the cycle of Ultimatums turbocharges the deck. These seven-mana, seven-specific-mana spells are usually terrible draws but the perfect card to tutor for in the right situation.

As ever, I prefer buying the nonfoil Showcases but I wouldn’t fault you for getting in at near-bulk prices on the Fae.

Fabled Passage ($11/$14/$20/$80)

Finally, a card that is in a Challenger deck and the price graph proves the point:

The Challenger decks are out now and represent a minor reprint for the most played nonbasic land in Pioneer and the #2 land in all of Standard, losing out to only Mountain. Eleven bucks is quite the steal, and that’s with more than a year to go in Standard. I do expect these to be present in next year’s Challenger decks, or reprinted in some other set along the way, but there’s a window for excellent profit here, especially with the Extended Art version. Just like foils used to be a safer play (and in this case, still a delightful one) the EA/Showcase is much less likely to be reprinted and therefore a safer place to put value for a while. Grab a few and thank me later.

Arclight Phoenix ($4)

As a bonus, I’m picking a card that is going to rotate and shows even a Challenger deck can’t hold down a good card. Phoenix took quite a hit right before Throne of Eldraine and rallied back wonderfully, but it’s now gliding towards its rotation out of Standard. Phoenix strategies are still very very valid in Pioneer and will have their day again in Modern, and I’m hoping these fall even further. If you’re playing the Phoenix strategy, you’re definitely on the full playset, and as a Mythic, even one with supply bumped a little, you’re looking at a very solid spec.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

Jason Alt

Unlocked Pro Trader: Snakes on a Plane

April 14, 2020 Jason Alt

Readers!

Is it cool if I spend some of my opening paragraph talking about something that bothers me a little?

You got snakey boi over here, and he has flying, and that’s cool. He hangs out in a place called Bespin, which is a city that flies for some reason. There are a bunch of spires hanging down for people to pop out of if they happen to fall off of one Bespin’s many catwalks with no handrails and slide down a giant tube full of trap doors. That’s fine, but when your opponent draws extra cards, something that happens ALL THE TIME in commander, Xyris births a snake. This snake is Green, it’s 1/1 and it does NOT have flying. So Xyris farts the token out and I guess it falls out of the sky, accelerates at about 15 meters per second per second and impacts the earth? Kinda messed up. This is why I don’t get into Vorthos, there’s too much that’s implied by the art that I find disturbing. What I DON’T find disturbing is the amount of value this card generates.

Hitting them with a dragon is fairly easy to do since it costs 5 which is a turn 3 play in a Temur deck. You draw cards, make them draw cards, make snakes and make the snakes make mana. It’s dirty but that’s how the card is designed and I am not inclined to argue. Making them draw cards is also fairly easy, and Commander 2020 has a copy of Windfall (In the Jeskai deck) and The Locust God (In the Jeskai deck) and Magus of the Wheel (In the Mardu deck) so you can do really silly shenanigans right out of the box if the box is three boxes. I think people are going to quickly figure out how to make this deck brutal and since we already have EDHREC data, we don’t have to guess.

This deck is actually sort of boring to me already. I’m going to build it, but it’s so linear it’s going to bore me, so I might as well make it the deck I play when I want the pod to be miserable. We know how to make people miserable, so how do we make money?

FF over here dropped from about $20 to about $10 with no change in supply. This won’t be a second spike but it will be a case where there are no cheap, loose copies in LGS bargain binders – prior spikes concentrated copies in the hands of dealers. The supply is the same, the demand is back up and these $10 copies likely become $20 in the near term, letting you get out if you got in early enough. TCG Player is mostly shut down and everyone with these at $10 has 1 copy which means you pay a lot of shipping costs. I had to buy on Card Shark, that’s how few copies there are easily accessible with so many retailers shut down. Check Amazon, eBay and other, smaller stores for cheap copies and be ready to sell these when people finally get their hands on the precons. This is a slam dunk.

Now, will cards in Xyris be good at all? Last week Xyris was the most expensive card in the set and it’s currently on par with the other most popular commanders built on the sites we scrape.

Kalamax may be currently more popular but Xyris is more linear and it’s going to spike more cards that spiked before so it’s worth doing first since you have weeks to pick the stuff up.

In addition to Forced Fruition, which goes up often, here’s another card I used to pull out of bulk boxes and which keeps making me money like clockwork.

This was buylisting for $15 a year ago so enjoy the free value. This likely goes up again from Xyris, and if it doesn’t, it will again someday. There are just too many ways to make a card that makes everyone draw a ton of cards go up in price.

COVID sort of nerfed the effect they expected from Mystery Boosters since supply is out there but no one that didn’t buy packs can access it. It’s going to spread out the effect of the new supply, but the price is already down to $12. I don’t know if it will go much lower since people won’t be competing with each other that effectively to race to the bottom, so the price may settle around $12. If it goes even lower, just buy twice as many copies again to bring the average price down enough that you aren’t mad at me for saying to buy around $12 and watch it go back to $20+.

Are you into penny stocks? Here’s one for you. This has already flirted with $2, I think this could hit $3 fairly easily and is gettable for far less, although not every Xyris deck is about that snake life. I’ll probably play it in mine but I plan to use the snakes to make mana with Cryptolith Rite so this could dome people pretty good. Xyris is a snake, remember, so this could pretty quickly help deal 21 commander damage. This isn’t in every deck but it could be in enough.

This has gone about as low as it’s likely to, the buylist price is not decreasing and I think less Modern Horizons was purchased than people think. I don’t know if Xyris is enough to double this up, but I bet time, other formats, the copies starting to dry up on platforms where only a small portion of the usual sellers are operating and other factors can conspire to help this hit $10.

Barring a reprint, this is a $20 foil eventually. Yank the non-foils out of your bulk while you’re at it.

A second spike on this could potentially beat the previous high score of $12. This is in low supply, dealers have all of the copies, it’s sort of absurd in this deck especially, 6 mana isn’t a huge deal for Temur and this even pumps Xyris. Commanders that are encouraged to attack getting passive buffs is way more powerful than people imagine – this turns your 7 turn clock into a 5 turn clock on its own. Add Kaseto and it’s even faster.

The rest of the page is worth looking at, also, but these are the cards my gut tells me are the easiest to make money off of. If you’re interested, here is my list from Coolstuff this week which goes in depth into the cards I’d use to make the deck run. If you don’t have the time, I like using Earthcraft, Cryptolith Rite, Opposition and other enchantments to make the most of my snakes. Next week I’ll be back with specs from whichever deck is the most popular on EDHREC because boring works, turns out. Until next time!

MTGO, Watchtower

The Watchtower 04/13/20 – MTGO Tix are the New World Currency

April 13, 2020 David Sharman

I had a bit of a think yesterday about something different I could do for this week’s article, but seeing as Cliff and Jason are still writing about real cardboard I thought I should continue talking about imaginary cardboard for y’all to buy. The strain on the USPS is starting to show, with warnings coming that it could shut down by June without significant financial aid. Losses have been increasing, and this has meant that it’s a bad time for us to be buying and selling physical cards – and that’s not even taking into account the potential danger of transmitting Coronavirus via mail. So it’s more MTGO picks from me for the foreseeable future, with maybe the odd special article here and there in between.

Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger

Price today: 11 tix
Possible price: 20 tix

Classic Tron has long been an unwavering mainstay in the Modern metagame. It’s had its ups and downs, but I don’t think this deck can, or will, ever die as long as Karn and his Tron lands are legal in the format. Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger started to be played in the deck soon after its printing in Battle for Zendikar, and became more of a staple once Eye of Ugin was banned and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn got pushed out of the deck.

Albeit a pricier deck in paper (it’d run you around $600), Tron is much cheaper online. You can pick the deck up for as little as 200 tix, and that coupled with the fact that it can be a relatively straightforward deck to pilot to a reasonable proficiency makes it ideal for the players that are currently migrating to MTGO for their Magic fix. The deck has been sat in the top five for metagame share for the past few weeks, and I don’t think that’s going to dip down much.

Ulamog is a single print mythic from nearly five years ago, which means that supply online is on the low side. Until it sees another print or release online, I think that this is going to keep ticking upwards towards 20 tix again.

Fabled Passage

Price today: 9 tix
Possible price: 15 tix

Fabled Passage is currently being played in pretty much every deck playing more than one colour in Standard. It fixes all your colours painlessly, as well as having extra utility like providing food to cast cards for their Escape cost in Uro decks and enabling triggers for Mayhem Devil in the Rakdos Aristocrats deck.

As we approach the release of Ikoria, I think that Fabled Passage is going to be more in demand for Standard decks. With the new tri-colour Legendaries, Ultimatums and Mythos(es?), colour fixing is going to be more important than ever. The new tricycle lands (yes, that’s what they’re called, don’t @ me) will help a lot with this, but you’re going to need fixing that comes into play untapped as well.

One of the decks I want to focus on here is the Rakdos Aristocrats deck – it looks like the addition of Luminous Broodmoth could be a big boon for the archetype, effectively giving all your creatures twice the number of sacrifice triggers. Fabled Passage is already a four-of in the deck, both for mana fixing and to trigger Mayhem Devil, and I think that this deck could rise even higher than it already is with the incoming new tech.

Fabled Passage saw a spike up to 18 tix a couple of weeks ago and has since retraced to 9, so I think this is a great spot to be picking them up. Throne of Eldraine grows older by the day, and I like buying these now to sell into Ikoria hype, or even to hold until rotation in the fall if you’re happier to sit back on these for a while.

Thassa, Deep-Dwelling

Price today: 1.3 tix
Possible price: 5 tix+

This is by far my most speculative pick this week, but I think that Thassa, Deep-Dwelling is probably the most powerful of the Gods from Theros Beyond Death (if we set aside the Heliod/Ballista combo; Heliod isn’t great outside of that).

Thassa had quite the hype around her when THB was first released. Flickering your creatures with powerful enter-the-battlefield triggers is great, and if you can turn on Thassa’s devotion then even better. We initially saw her being used in UG ramp/ETB shells, flicking things like Risen Reef and Agent of Treachery. Since the first couple of weeks of new Theros Standard, however, she’s fallen off the radar a bit, other than seeing a smattering of play in less competitive Flicker or Elementals decks.

As we move into Ikoria, there are definitely some more interesting enter-the-battlefield triggers that we could be repeating with Thassa. There are quite a few Companions that could work really well with her too – Keruga, the Macrosage and Yorion, Sky Nomad both spring to mind as cards that could be great to build a Thassa deck around. The Ozolith also seems like a card that could be busted with Thassa. I’ll leave it to better deckbuilders than me to figure the details out, but I feel like Thassa is a strong enough card that should definitely be more than 1.3 tix. I’m honestly not sure on what the ceiling could be for this card, but it’s one of the lowest priced Mythics from THB so I think that the only way is up from here.

A note of advice to finish: if you’re missing the feel of playing Magic irl, take out a deck a couple of times a day and give it a shuffle. Feel the sleeves slip through your fingers…take a card out and smell the cardboard, fondle your favourite Commander…okay nah this got weird, we’re done. Bye!

MTGPrice Blog