We’ve got an entire seven days between us and the latest Pioneer ban announcement, which means we’ve got marginally better data about how the format looks without Once Upon a Time and Smuggler’s Copter. My initial impression, scrolling through a list of league 5-0s, is that despite what I imagine is Wizards’ desperation to not reveal it as such, Oko is setting the tone of the format. Gilded Goose and its keeper are doing a lot of work in Pioneer right now, which puts us all in a tough spot. Do we spec and buy cards presuming that this is how Pioneer will look for several months? Or is WotC going to do what needs to be done, performing a major reset in the process? This weighs heavily on me this week as I dive in.
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Travis Allen has been playing Magic: The Gathering since 1994, mostly in upstate New York. Ever since his first FNM he’s been trying to make playing Magic cheaper, and he first brought his perspective to MTGPrice in 2013. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.
The Secret Lairs are shipping, and there’s a surprise waiting in there!
Well, it’s not really a surprise anymore, and that’s a HUGE relief.
Let’s talk about the stained glass planeswalkers, at least the ones we’re getting in the Secret Lair drop…
First of all, it appears that there’s only 15 of the 36 planeswalkers in this drop. An asymmetrical number, to be sure. I don’t think there’s mystical significance, and we are already able to get some prices, thanks to Wizards’ decision to print a bunch ahead of time and then print more to fill the demand.
Blessedly, everyone who wanted one got one, and a max of ten. The different price points are interesting too–I can’t remember the last time the offered price on these varied, as they know that some of these sets are more valuable than others.
Card
Stained Glass Market Price
JP Alternate Art in Foil
Teferi, Time Raveler
$92
$94
Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God
$72
$80
Jace, Wielder of Mysteries
$30
$50
Ral, Storm Conduit
$15
$27
Tamiyo, Collector of Tales
$14
$45
Gideon Blackblade
$14
$41
Domri, Anarch of Bolas
$13
$19
The Wanderer
$12
$10
Ashiok, Dream Render
$10
$43
Angrath, Captain of Chaos
$10
$5
Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord
$9
$40
Nahiri, Storm of Stone
$8
$9
Ajani, the Greathearted
$7
$13
Teyo, the Shieldmage
$7
$7
Huatli, the Sun’s Heart
$5
$8
I put the prices for the alternate-art planeswalkers up because it’s a handy comparison. How far will we go?
Clearly, we won’t go as far. The stained glass is only in the background, making the change minor and the price bump not as significant. I’m a bit surprised by this, because I don’t have any figures on Secret Lair sales, but I’d have to imagine that there’s a larger number of Lair sales than foil JP walkers.
It’s also worth mentioning that we haven’t reached saturation on the Secret Lairs yet either. Lots of copies are still being printed or shipped, and that’s a lot more copies of these stained glass cards coming into the market, lowering the price further.
So where will these settle? Well, that depends on their playability.
Teferi is clearly going to be the winner in this regard, as he’s super-popular in Legacy and Pioneer, with a healthy dose of Modern and Vintage in there too. His star isn’t shining bright in Standard at the moment, which makes his price that much more likely to stick. If you haven’t embraced the warm, cozy feeling of having Teferi, Time Raveler in play during a Commander game, I strongly urge you to try it out. Feels pretty amazing, knowing you’ll get to do your thing.
Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God is going to fall a bit farther, I think, probably to the $30-$40 range. This is the FIFTH version of this card, as you can get it in original pack art, Mythic Edition, SDCC, Alternate Art, and now Stained Glass. For a mythic, that’s a ton of copies, and it allows people to pick the art they like best and roll with it. I don’t like this card long-term, precisely because of the glut of copies around. If it does go up, it’s going to be after a long, long, long incubation period, and I have other places to put my money.
Fun Fact: NBDG just broke the tie with Liliana Vess and Jace Beleren, as ‘card with most arts’ when all of them were stuck at four. (Do you know of others? Drop a comment or hit me up on Twitter @WordOfCommander)
I think Jace, Wielder of Mysteries can stay at $30, and given the win condition he represents in a lot of combo decks (especially in Commander, where it’s not always easy to make three players draw their decks) this price is likely to be sticky. Just enough people are playing copies and this is a nice upgrade over a regular copy without breaking the bank for the foil JP alternate.
The rest of the prices, at $15 or less, I’d feel okay about picking up now if you want to collect the first half of the stained glass set. This is the time to buy, as people get their Lairs in the mail and open them, seeking to gain what value they can. Once these are opened, that’s it.
As I wrote three weeks ago, collecting Magic cards and then hoping for a rise in value just because you picked up special versions is a losing play. You might want to get a stained-glass set of Teferis, and I’d support that because Teferi is a very good card in Eternal formats. The price won’t go up because it’s stained glass, it’ll go up because Teferi is really good.
Rest assured, if you’re collecting the set of Stained Glass (to match your WAR originals and your JP Alternate Art) you’ll have a chance to buy the rest of the planeswalkers that didn’t get the stained glass treatment this time. Maro alluded to it on his blog, and even if it takes a while, they will get to it.
Might take a while, but I think they are on a shorter timeline than a project like Sword of X and Y completing the cycle.
There’s some real winners in the 21 left to be printed. Nothing is going to match the prestige of a foil Amano Liliana, but this version of Narset, Parter of Veils will command quite a price, as will the Karn, the Great Creator. When we’ll get these cards is entirely subjective, but I’d be willing to bet that they will be released before War of the Spark rotates out of Standard this coming October of 2020. Just be patient!
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.
(Yeah, my title is a Blondie reference, and I’m fully aware that the song predates Magic and most of its players. )
Rather than rehash picks from the last year or write some lame duck article about more picks from a set that came out like 4 months ago, I decided to comb through my articles from the last year and coalesce all the techniques I came up with that were new in 2019. There were quite a few, they were the result of doing this for 8 years and I basically mentioned them and then didn’t again. If I do this it will both serve as a revision guide so you don’t have to re-read everything I wrote for a whole year (you’re welcome to, I’d like to think it’s pleasant and informative to read my writing) and it will also serve as a handy reference for all of 2019’s new techniques. Let’s do it to it.
The synergy score on EDHREC is a little mysterious and if you’re not sure what it means, it can be misleading. In the article, I gave the example of a lunatic who jams Sorrow’s Path into Atraxa giving Sorrow’s Path a high synergy score for Atraxa since every Sorrow’s Path in the database is in an Atraxa deck, but a low inclusion score because only one Atraxa deck ever has it. They’re not exactly opposites, though, because a high synergy and high inclusion means it’s a staple in the deck and most copies of the deck run it. A low synergy score is a format staple, a high one is a deck staple. Taking the two scores together, I identified cards I might have otherwise ignored, like this one.
Foils of Plunderer were $4 and now they’re sold out at $10, so I must have been onto something. Don’t just look at one score, try to find cards where both scores are high. If the deck is built a lot (Teysa was the #1 deck from that set eventually and still is – Sorry Vannifar), the card will pan out.
The War of the Spark Mythic Edition was… fraught. I still have like 4 uncut sheets because they kept sending me bent ones and saying “Oh, my bad” and then sending me another bent one until I got bored. I sold one to someone to have it cut up and just kept the rest, unframed, just in tubes. If anyone wants to buy one, let me know, I have one good one.
The roll-out was botched but I wanted to see if we could predict the prices of the ‘walkers to see if it was worth it to buy, or at least see if there were any that were going to be over- or under-valued. I ranked the planeswalkers based on both EDHREC and MTG Top 8 rankings and averaged their rankings to see which had the best cross-format applicability then ranked them by price. Lo and behold, a few stinkers were immediately obvious but ultimately, it was a good buy.
That analysis wasn’t great for everything, but I imagine that technique of using data from both sites will come in handy again.
EDHREC displays prices from two sites – TCG Player and Card Kingdom, right below the cards.
You will not be surprised to learn that TCG Player is almost always cheaper. Sometimes TCG Player is charging half as much. Those cards deserve a look because that means Card Kingdom is selling out of its smaller number of copies quickly and is repricing higher and TCG Player will take longer to sell out and adjust. Sometimes this process takes a long time.
Sometimes Card Kingdoms is cheaper, which bears looking into, also.
The technique here is to just train myself to notice these discrepancies and when you find one, check the price trajectory on MTG Price. Sometimes you’ll see what’s going on immediately, sometimes you won’t. Either way, you’ll notice things worth checking you didn’t notice before.
Figuring out what goes in which deck is useful, but figuring out the contents of a deck no one is building is less useful than the decks everyone is building. I figured that if I compared the number of decks for each commander to the number of decks built for the most-built commander, you’d see which ones had more impact and which had less. That week, it was Yarok, so I figured out the relative build percentages of the other decks as a percentage of how much Yarok was built.
Didn’t make sense to dig too deep into Kethis if we didn’t figure out Kykar first, right? The colors were arbitrary but I think they illustrated my point well. I don’t do this every week but you could do it yourself in excel in 90 seconds and it helps to see which decks you should be looking at.
The conventional wisdom used to hold that you could wait for rotation to buy EDH cards because Standard players who had the stranded in their binders would sell them for pennies at rotation just to make room for the next block’s cards. Prices haven’t been doing that for a while, and they haven’t been cheap when they’re in Standard and still in print, either, even if they’re not used in Standard at all. EDH is the #1 format driving finance these days and we need to look at rotation differently. I went back to the last rotation and looked at graphs to see what popular cards actually did and how we should have acted. If you read one article from me in 2019, it should be this one.
Using a few websites that compared large lists of cards and distilled a list of the cards that were in all lists, I compared a lot of decks to see which staple cards would appear in all of them. I used a non-intuitive EDHREC feature to get text lists of the decks to import them and crunched a lot of numbers quickly. It was quick and dirty at first but it yielded important results. Best of all, it’s a simple thing you all could do yourself easily.
Once we had the technique, we applied it to the Secret Lair packs coming out to see if there were cards in common among the new decks likely to be built when people go shiny new versions of older cards. Don’t read this without your nitroglycerine pills handy, but they were tribal cards. Still, this technique can be applied to comparing any number of any decks and it’s worth me having figured it out for you.
All in all, I had a prolific 2019. I developed a lot of new techniques rather than just coast on what has been working and you can refer back to this if you want a refresher or need to locate the full article where I explained the new techniques. Thanks for reading! We have a few more weeks of 2019 to go and I have more year-end wrap-ups as well as Theros speculation planned. Until next time!
Now that Standard has returned to something approaching normalcy with the removal of Oko and crew, this weekend’s Mythic Championship looked great. Deck diversity abound (at least as far as Standard is concerned) which is all anyone wants. Simic Flash, Jeskai Fires, GB Adventures, Simic Trade Binder, etc. Get ready to start riding the rollercoaster, because Wizards is watching. The cycle is going to be 1. Print cards that are almost assuredly busted, 2. Let those cards either prove to be fair or, more likely, slowly take over Standard 3. Finally ban the card after it’s become entirely oppressive 4. Reap the reward of people being excited that Standard doesn’t suck any longer. Imagine that in a “10 20 goto 10” joke format if necessary.
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That’s right, a non-foil Standard pick. Truly remarkable.
Cavaliers, while having been slow to start, are making a foothold in Standard. Cavalier of Thorns, the green Cavalier, was beating people up in Simic Ramp at the MC, and Cavalier of Flames and Gales are both a big part of Jeskai Fires. There’s no question the Cavaliers pack a big punch. That’s to be expected, since they’re five-drop mythics that have deep color requirements. No question they’re intended to be titans redux, if not a little more fair.
Ok, what’s my point. Well, back in the days of the original titans, they each had their moment, and it was a different time for each. Frost Titan specifically stands out in memory, as it was the cheapest of the group, until people realized that it was the Titan that beat the other titans, and the price soared. Over time, each Titan found a home and became a staple. Just because it doesn’t land immediately, it doesn’t mean that shifting formats and new cards won’t make one a staple.
Looking at this pattern from several years ago, I find myself wondering about Cavalier of Dawn. There’s no question the enter play ability is potent. Beast Within was a key card during its own Standard, and continues to see sporadic play in various other 60-card formats, and is a staple in EDH. With the rise in Planeswalkers, especially lower on the curve, this is an even more potent effect. Nice Oko idiot. Here have an elephant. The general way to evaluate an effect like this is “if there’s no good target for the ability, you’re already winning.” Even the death trigger is useful, since we know Banishing Light is returning in Theros from the leaks several weeks back. Cavalier returning a Banishing Light that got destroyed a few turns prior on death will be helpful.
Of course, right now the card is completely unplayed, which makes this purely speculative. Can we buy Cavalier of Dawn based solely on the fact that the other Cavaliers are good? No, probably not. There’s more here though. We also saw the Elspeth Planeswalker from those Theros leaks, and that card also looks like it’s going to be legitimate. Playing Elspeth on four and then Cavalier on five is going to be a hell of a whammy. That also puts you in a position to be playing devotion as well. White wasn’t the color you went to for devotion in the first Theros, but that could change this time around.
All of this makes Cavalier of Dawn a highly speculative pick, but I like the way the pieces are falling into place. Buying in playsets you’ll pay about $2.50 a copy today. I’m not recommending you start adding them to your cart, but you’ll want to pay close attention to the card as Theros creeps up on us.
Creeping Chill (Foil)
Price Today: $3 Possible Price: $10
We started with Standard, now we’re doing Pioneer, and we’ll finish the week with EDH.
Creeping Chill should be familiar to anyone that’s played Modern. Milling the card domes for three, and in a strategy that’s putting plenty of cardboard in the graveyard, you’re looking at 9 to 12 damage for free in a game. It’s become a common sight in Modern strategies, although you’d be forgiven for not knowing that at this point, because who is looking at Modern lists?
A recent Pioneer league saw Dredge manage 5-0, and in the main deck, four copies of Chill. That got my attention, because so far the archetype has been relatively quiet in Pioneer, but that is highly unlikely to be the case for long. Wizards can’t stay away from the graveyard for too many sets in a row, and in fact, in Theros alone we know we’re getting a mechanic that returns cards to the battlefield, and supporting pieces to go along with it. If Dredge doesn’t have the tools to make itself a serious part of Pioneer today, it’s only a matter of time.
As graveyard strategies do more work in Pioneer, I expect Creeping Chill to be a mainstay. It’s good enough for many Modern lists, and there’s certainly more room for it in Pioneer lists. Furthermore, as a card that isn’t EDH-oriented and was recently printed, it’s going to be a long while before we see another copy, especially foils.
There are only about 40 vendors on TCG right now, and there’s no inventory walls to speak of. A few players looking to fill up their collection are going to quickly tax the available inventory, and then these will be another annoyingly expensive foil uncommon.
Shalai, Voice of Plenty (Foil)
Price Today: $6 Possible Price: $15
I didn’t expect it when she was printed, but Shalai has become one of the most popular creatures in Commander, period. She’s a top 20 popular creature over both the last two months and the last two years — and remember, she was printed less than two years ago. Giving most of your permanents hexproof is big game in EDH. While that sort of lock isn’t quite as airtight in EDH as it might be in Pioneer or Standard, it’s still a monstrously powerful effect. Add in the mana sink, which gives your board a permanent boost when you’ve got excess mana, and plays into the +1/+1 counters theme that’s so popular, and it makes sense that Shalai is seeing so much play. Hindsight, etc. etc.
Flip over to the foil inventory and things look good. Again, about 40 vendors have stock, and nobody has much that’d deep. ChannelFireball, one of the parties notorious for having a block and slowing price gains, is only holding seven copies. Other than that, it’s primarily one-ofs all the way down. Ok, I admit there’s a guy with 13 copies listed — although they’re at $16. Given that Shalai keeps putting up numbers over and over, these should pay off in 2020.[/hide]
Travis Allen has been playing Magic: The Gathering since 1994, mostly in upstate New York. Ever since his first FNM he’s been trying to make playing Magic cheaper, and he first brought his perspective to MTGPrice in 2013. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
