Casual Fridays

The Plan for Modern Horizons

All right, everyone, the full spoiler is out this morning, and while I’m sure there’s a couple of doozies that they’ve been holding out on, we’ve got most of the set known and it’s time to make some plans.

The set goes into prerelease next weekend and full release after that. Let’s keep in mind some basics, and then get into what we ought to be doing, using other Modern releases to guide our thinking.

So the set is the same size as a Standard release, but the big differences are going to be the price and the size of the print run. There is no MSRP on this product, but with boosters being $6.99 on MTGO, that’s a reasonable starting point. As usual, there’s 36 packs to a box, and with a distributor price higher than normal, the box prices are somewhere in the $200-$240 range, often depending on is the Buy-A-Box NONFOIL Flusterstorm is included.

If you look at the preorder prices for the set, you’ll notice that there’s a whole lot of pricey cards. That’s to be expected when the pack price is nearly double: a higher cost associates with higher prices in general.

The other key logistical detail is that we’ve got Core Set 2020 releasing on July 12. Traditionally, previews for a set start three weeks before prerelease, as they did with Modern Horizons. That schedule means that preview season would start on Monday, June 17…three days after Modern Horizons was released.

I would guess that the preview season for 2020 will be shorter by a week, but that’s about the most they can do, short of dumping it all on us at once. I’m not ruling anything out, though.

So we have a more expensive set, only relevant to Modern, and with an abbreviated run. This is a formula for some incredible profits. We know that this set is going to increase interest in Modern by adding new cards and hopefully new archetypes. Modern Masters sets have had a predictable price curve:

This is for Noble Hierarch, one of the most-played creatures in Modern, and a card with multiple printings. Every additional printing the price has gone down right away…only to creep back up again. For fun, let’s look at the graph for the Conflux version:

Oh yes, that means I love buying cheap Nobles right now. The high-end ones are a ceiling on the price, but the box topper especially has room to grow to the $150 range.

This is the pattern: Everything from Modern Horizons is going to get somewhat cheaper as the set gets opened, but within a couple of weeks of Core Set 2020 coming out, supply will be mostly maxed out, and that’s when it’ll be time to buy.

I don’t know which of the cards are going to make the biggest splash in Modern or Commander, but there are a few that I’m targeting.

Foil enemy Talismans (no price as yet)

We’ve got a couple of folks preselling these on eBay in the $10 range, and I think that’s fairly reasonable. I’m hoping to come down to the $5 threshold, as they are only uncommons but we are not getting one foil in every pack. These are slightly worse than the Signets, but this will be their only printing and the only foil. This is a long-term hold.

Scrapyard Recombiner (currently about $3.50)

There’s 140 Constructs in Magic, but the most relevant for us are Walking Ballista, Steel Overseer, Hangarback Walker, Kuldotha Forgemaster, and if you’re feeling spicy, Metalworker. That’s a list of some of the best artifact creatures you could have in Commander, and if this gets as low as $2 I’m going to pick up quite a few.

Echo of Eons ($38)

This is the card that I think will get broken first, in Legacy or Modern. This is just ridiculous, to be able to discard it and have the Timetwister effect ready to go. They just gave us Narset, Parter of Veils to go with this! I wish this was cheaper, because I’m not sure how far down it can go. I hope it becomes quite cheap, especially in foil, but it won’t. I’m likely to pick up a couple playsets when it (hopefully) hits $15-$20.

Plague Engineer ($4)

I’ll be interested to see where the foils of this land, and how many copies get played in assorted sideboards. Being three mana is a real drawback, but it’s instantly lethal to Thalia and Hierarch in the Humans deck, which is likely the best tribal deck in Modern right now. Being able to kill relevant cards and develop your own board is a formula for success, and I’m going to want a healthy supply of these going forward.

Goblin Engineer ($5)

There is a lot of talk about this being a fixed and shifted Stoneforge Mystic, and that’s not far off. This is an amazingly flexible card, and one that’s only a rare. Getting Swords of whatever and whenever is always going to be fun in Commander, but the Modern card that loves this guy is Ensnaring Bridge. Having this range of freedom, getting one thing back over and over, is going to have a lot of game for some decks and i’m a big fan.

Foil Everdream (no price yet)

This is quite likely to be the card I buy the most of from this set. I’m hoping it’s a dollar foil, though I’d be content at two bucks. It’s breathtaking to play with. How about 2UR to deal three and draw a card? Or 2UU to draw a card, scry 2, and then draw a card? 2UW to exile target creature, they find a land, and you draw a card? This is a card that will have you gnawing at the table in frustration because the spells player is so amazingly far ahead in terms of cards and you’ll never ever be able to keep up.

I think that people don’t yet know how good this is, or they recognize that adding three mana to stuff in Modern is bad. I can’t wait to see this in every Commander deck that runs lots of spells, and that makes it a solid long-term investment.

Snow-Covered Lands (fifty cents to $1.25 or so)

Finally, let’s talk snow. There’s not a lot of reasons to go heavy snow, but if you freeze all your basics, you can add some very powerful effects. We have one ETB tapped cycle of allied snow lands (did we get more this morning??) and that makes it difficult to go ham on cards like Dead of Winter. We know Gates Ablaze is good and this is better. I’m not sure that there will be some awesome snow deck in Modern, but the good news is that when you go to your store and do a draft, you’ll be able to trade for these pretty easily or even scoop them up in the leavings if you go to the MagicFests where this is the Sealed format.

Pick up all the spare snow lands you can. Don’t forget the people who like to maximize their advantage by playing snow lands in a Commander deck and then using Extraplanar Lens to great effect. You’re stocking up to feed their needs later.

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 ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: One For One

Readers!

What do we do when there’s no EDHREC data yet? Whatever I want, this is my column. Today I am going to look at a bunch of new cards and try to find a card that could be poised to move on the basis of the new card. Sound good? This will be a fun one.


Second spikes are usually pretty hard and this one is poised. Already on the upswing following a crash when people didn’t quite build as many Hapatra decks as people thought they might, Skitter is a perfect target. I think Yawgmoth is likely to spike 10-20 cards on his own but this is the most obvious so it’s going to go first. We’ll talk about him in depth in his own article when it’s warranted.

You could find 20 targets on just this one commander’s page but I think one I want to highlight today is this one.

If you have Flourishing out, this is Boundless Realms for cards like Gaea’s Cradle and Nykthos. You may not get the exact lands you want and putting 7 mana into it doesn’t guarantee you as many lands and Realms does, but this also puts non-basics into play untapped and I think that makes this a very different card. When X=6 you look at 12 cards and statistically get 4 lands, untapped. That’s a 2-card combo with Flourishing, but so is Realms and Amulet of Vigor. I dunno, this is on an upswing and it’s going in every Flourishing deck if people are smart.

I have seen people talk about cards ranging from Tibalt to Witch Hunt to Leyline of Punishment, but here’s a funny one.

This puts you in black but it’s also pretty hilarious to dome everyone for 10 and then burn them out with spells. This also gives you access to spells like Exsanguinate which get better when you have a ton of verse counters. Of all the cards to pair with Aria, which may or may not be a thing, this is the most hilarious and is already trending up, albeit minimally.

Kidding.

Check out which decks run Stony Silence, I guess. I’m not sure what this does, besides make Lattice more desirable than it already is, which is lots. A Karn, Ouphe, Silence, Null Rod deck could be nasty.

This has already spiked a few cards, including Deranged Hermit, but if people are going deep on Squirrels, there are things they have missed.

People aren’t going super deep on Squirrel stuff, but they should. Pretend they’re nuts and collect them.

A lot of these effects are good paired with Wrenn which isn’t going to be a new EDH deck, but could be in Modern and also could get people to dust off Mina and Denn or Angry Omnath. 2 mana ‘walkers are historically bad but this doesn’t appear to be in that camp. I also like Strip Mine and Wasteland right now.

This peaked hard and high on the basis of the Commander deck and now that all the copies are concentrated in the hands of dealers, this could have some real growth potential. We aren’t done talking about this sicko card, though, it’s going to be great!

Sorry this week felt like a bit of a hodgepodge but I didn’t want to go too deep on anything in particular. Feel free to do that yourself! If there are cards like it that exist, see which decks play them on EDHREC and which cards have high synergy scores from getting played alongside them. I’ll be back next week to go way in depth on a commander and scoop up all the picks people forgot when they bought out all the obvious cards. Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 5/28/19 for ProTraders – Plan Your Specs

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy.

Modern Horizons spoilers have been going bananas. This set is not disappointing. Wizards has managed to include cards for both Urza and Yawgmoth, two new allied color swords, the return of snow, squirrels, and ninjas, forty-something keywords, an insane new Sliver legend, and plenty more. Specs have been going bananas too, and we’re going to have way too many cards to discuss while recording @mtgfastfinance tonight. And this is just the beginning. Once the set is fully spoiled, there will be months of people finding and exploring deck designs that unlock even more cards.

Second Chance

Price Today: $8
Possible Price: $25

Disclosure: I’ve got a chunk of these laying around.

Many of the new cards have caught my attention. Some are intriguing, but I’m not sure what to make of them. Some I can plainly tell are quite powerful, but I haven’t found the other half of the equation. And some I find the answer on social media almost immediately, and just say “yep.”

Hall of Heliod’s Generosity is a great utility land that’s going to find homes in EDH right off the bat. For two mana you get to put an enchantment card back on top of your library. People are going to be flipping Ghostly Prisons and Doubling Seasons and Omnisciences left and right. Why wouldn’t they be? You always have the choice to, instead of drawing a random card, draw the best enchantment in your graveyard each turn. That’s going to come up often.

The juice comes from Second Chance, an enchantment that sacrifices itself. To what end? Why, to get you an extra turn. And what do you do on that extra turn? Why, put Second Chance back on top of your library! Once you’re fateful hour’d, you can recur Second Chance every turn for a hard lock. From there, you can win at your leisure.

Second Chance’s biggest barrier is that it’s not legal in Modern. Our applications are limited to EDH, Legacy, and the kitchen table. And at 127 current decks in EDH, there isn’t exactly seething demand for it there. In this case, I see that as a silver lining though. There’s virtually no EDH demand for Second Chance right now. What about after a land has been printed that a huge percent of white decks will want to include anyways, that happens to set up an infinite-turn combo under specific circumstances? People that would have passed on it before may swing back around and toss it in, since while it wasn’t good enough on its own, it’s definitely above the cut once you can accidentally walk backwards into a combo.

With supply low and prices in the $7 to $8 range, there’s already some latent demand. Adding this land may fuel the fires in a few spots, and it doesn’t take much to kick Reserve List cards off.

Academy Rector

Price Today: $55
Possible Price: $100

I stumbled upon Rector while looking for cards related to Heliod’s land, and while it’s not exactly going to pop in response, our old buddy the rector is still well positioned. Heliod’s Hall will make its way into plenty of decks where its marginal, and in response, pilots may be inclined to shore up the enchantment theme. It won’t take much either; if you’ve got three decent enchantments in your deck and you want to play Hall, but don’t want it to feel like a waste most of the time, what can you do without adding nine more enchantments? How about you toss in Rector? It’s a single card, but now all your tools for searching for and recurring creatures apply to one that then goes on to find one of your three great enchantments. You’ll go from playing roughly one a game to playing your three enchantments six times a game, just by adding Hall and Rector.

Rector rates at about half the popularity of Grim Monolith, a card of similar age. Grim Monolith is colorless, so of course is viable in every EDH deck that exists, relative to Rector, which can only land in white decks. They both end up at roughly 3% usage, which I’m a bit surprised by. That tells me a two things. Despite costing nearly $200, Grim Monolith sees just as much play as a card that costs less than $60. And Monolith, a generic mana rock, currently costs nearly three times as much as Rector. Both of these point to Rector being underpriced at $60, especially with a new tool for enchantment decks coming shortly.

Also good luck with foils, they’re nearly a grand. If that upsets you, consider how I feel, having found a TCG email stating that I sold four foil Rectors for $80 each three years ago.

Worm Harvest (Foil)

Price Today: $1
Possible Price: $8

One card that’s wrinkling my brain today is Ruination Rioter. His on-death trigger targets anyone with damage, and if you do some work, a LOT of damage. Imagine you’ve got five, nine, or even fifteen lands in your graveyard. You put Rioter on the stack. Without a counterspell in hand, what’s your opponent’s choice? Once it resolves it’s a ticking time bomb, and their only outs are exiling your graveyard and pathing it. Threatening a bolt the whole time reminds me of playing with Shrine of Burning Rage, a card that constantly gave me conniptions during Scars of Mirrodin Standard.

Anyways, I like Rioter, and went looking for ways to make it work. Along the way I stopped on Lord Windgrace’s EDH page, and felt compelled to check out Worm Harvest. The numbers on this guy are tempting. Eventide foils are completely out of stock on TCGPlayer, with the last sold copy at $10. Modern Masters, the only other foil reprint, has less than 20 copies available, most around $1 to $2. It’s going to take one person doing a pass on this to empty inventory and set prices on MMA foils at $6 or more.

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 2012. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.

Casual Fridays

Value in Guilds

One of my guiding principles in buying, trading, and selling cards has been the belief that attention and new things can really distract us from potential profit.

For instance, right now we’re all loving the new Standard format and Modern Horizons is making things go absolutely bananas. This is wonderful, because there’s a lot to look at and some profit to be made.

I want to look at the last two sets especially, because they have more than a year remaining in Standard. There’s two characteristics that have to be true for me to want to buy a card at this point:

First of all, I have to be content with the card as a long-term hold. It’s entirely possible that none of these hit and I’m stuck with copies for a long while. This is tricky for me, because generally, I like foils a lot more for long-term holds, but being able to put them in the long term box and move on with my life is important.

Second, I have to believe that the card does something relatively unique in Standard. This can mean good removal, or a planeswalker that’s being held down by the current environment. To put it another way: What might be better when Ixalan/Rivals/Dominaria/Magic 2019 rotate out in four months?

One pitfall I want to avoid: A great selection of cards was added to the Challenger decks this year, so I want to stay away from stuff like Conclave Tribunal (easy $2 uncommon) or Experimental Frenzy (buy the foils!) so that’s ruling out a few cards right away.

March of the Multitudes ($4 nonfoil/$9 foil)

A banner mythic and the quintessential ‘win more in Commander’ card, I love a relatively low buy-in point. The foil multiplier is lower than I would have expected, but I have a big sticking point: Finale of Glory. Being an instant is a very good thing, and Convoke basically means you’ll double the number of creatures in play, but Finale is just better when you get to it. The creatures are bigger, and should 12 mana be hit, it’s hard to imagine the game’s not over.

If March falls to a dollar or so I’ll get in but the price is a bit too high for me right now.

Risk Factor ($5/$8)

That’s a really low foil price compared to the original price, and I have to admit that I’m surprised to see that this isn’t seeing any Modern play at this point. This is not a good Commander card, so what I’m asking myself is “What deck wants this at rotation?” Mono-Red is basically gone when rotation hits, but losing the low-curve threats might open up a little more midrange in red, and that’s when this can shine.

I’m in for a couple of playsets, hoping for the spike to $10 by Christmas.

Expansion // Explosion ($5/$9)

There’s an infinite combo in Standard, and it’s convoluted as heck. You need Ral, Storm Conduit in play, and two of these, or Ral used his -2, and you’ve got an instant on the stack plus one Expansion in hand. Basically you’re copying the copy spell infinitely, and dealing that damage with Ral.

I also like picking up Ral in the $2 range, because any deck that wants to combo off will want four of each of these. Explosion will always be Standard-legal with Wilderness Reclamation, which is a nice fallback position. Someone’s going to spike a big tournament with this wacky combo deck, and I want to be ready to sell the pieces of that deck.

Deafening Clarion ($1.50/$3)

Fiery Cannonade is good, but this is better and right now, we’ve got nearly-perfect mana for any color combination. We have all ten shocks and all ten checklands, which makes some decks run no basics at all. Jeskai Superfriends did very well the last two weeks, and this is one of the cheapest cards.

Even a minor bump will pay off quite nicely.

Thousand-Year Storm ($3/$8)

We’ve seen some decks trying very very hard with this card, and I always appreciate those willing to go the extra mile to get ten Shocks on the stack.

It looks like the red and white aggro decks will lose most of their good cards at rotation, so a janky combo card like this might be exactly what’s ordered. Plus, lots of decks have some random enchantment hate due to Search for Azcanta, and if TYS stays in play it’s going to be quite difficult to lose.

This is also great long-term, as being able to get 5+ Time Warp on the stack is exactly what Commander decks are looking for.

Trostani Discordant ($2.50/$5)

The good news is that this is a mythic card that is pretty cheap. The bad news is that as a legend, very rarely will the full four copies make it into a deck. Even the Selesnya Tokens lists would only run three.

However, picking up the foils at $5 is a pretty easy grab. Long-term, this has too many abilities not to be Commander-relevant and the foils will offer a much higher rate of return when they hit.

Ionize ($1.50/$4) and Absorb ($1.50/$5)

Right now, we have the mana to make three-color decks pretty easy. When Dominaria and Ixalan rotate in October, we lose the checklands, and I don’t know if we’ll get replacements in Magic 2020.

Control decks are also going to have Dovin’s Veto (an $8 promo right now, trade for them as soon as someone wins it at your FNM) and Sinister Sabotage as possibilities. What these decks want most, though, is a way to have the counterspell do something to help them win while keeping card parity.

I like Ionize best, because there’s a lot more copies of Absorb out there. Losing Teferi, Hero of Dominaria is a huge blow, though, and I wish I knew which flavor of control deck will be the go-to after rotation.

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.

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