Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: In Defense of Just Buying the Things

Readers!

We’re in the thick of a 4 day “reveal all of the commander decks at once like animals” week and boy has it been a doozy. I’m writing this on Tuesday, when exactly half of the whole decklists have been revealed and people seem pretty upset. Gavin Verhey assured everyone they read everyone’s disappointed reddit posts about the lack of value despite the price of the decks going up $5 and came on Brainstorm Brewery and assured us they would make some changes with the decks going forward. At first blush, they appear to have done… not that.

This looks pretty bad at first. People were expecting a big, flashy reprint, sort of like Wurmcoil Engine, or an obviously busted Legacy crossover card like True-Name Nemesis or Containment Priest. This has neither. The most expensive reprint is Seedborn Muse which is coming off of another recent reprint and is about to get dinged a lot more, currently sitting at about $7.50 for Battlebond copies. Most of the rares and mythics are bulk rares and none of the new cards look like they can soak up all of the value. Worse still, obvious cards like Ixidor and Dream Chisel we omitted from the deck, forcing people to go out and spend even more to make the deck serviceable because of the glaring exclusions. People seem pretty upset online. Are they right?

Let’s look at the list that came out today.

This looks even worse. River Kelpie and Ghostly Prison are about $5 but there is no big, sexy card and cards like Past in Flames were left out.

Is it really as bad as it looks? To answer that question, let’s go back and look at Commander 2018 and see how it looks a year later.

On paper, this looks like trash. Avenger of Zendikar was basically the only money reprint and the new commanders all looked like trash. Obvious reprints like Burgeoning, Exploration or Oracle of Mul Daya were excluded. Cards like Deathreap Ritual, Budoka Gardener, and Sakura-Tribe Elder that were showing signs of growth were going to tank and the new cards are pretty lackluster.

If you add up the current values of all of the cards in this deck, a year later, though, you might be surprised to find that the contents of the deck add up to roughly $80. There are plenty of completed listings on eBay for $60. Whiptongue Hydra, Nesting Dragon and Windgrace’s Judgment are $5 cards. Budoka Gardener climbed back to over $2 and EDH staples like Sakura-Tribe Elder, Sol Ring, Cultivate, and Explosive Vegetation basically shook the reprinting off. At the time, this seemed like the weakest deck but value-wise now, a year later, it’s the second-best (the worst is the Estrid deck, to the surprise of few and the chagrin of many).

How misleading is the “$80” figure? After all, there are 100 cards and if they’re all retailing for 80 cents, that means they’re worthless and won’t buylist for much. Wouldn’t a more fair way to look at it be based on buylist value? We’re not going to buy at retail and sell at buylist on the Commander 2019 products, but it’s still a good idea to look at those values.

If you look at the cards in the morph deck, there is some value there. Some of the cards will obviously tank, but a lot of the good ones will recover in a year and currently the buylist numbers aren’t too bad. If you put the 83 non-new cards into TCG Player and tried to buy them all, it would cost you $100, first of all. That’s not that telling, but it’s worth noting. The number of cards that in the Morph deck that currently buylist for a dollar or more is a staggering (Hooded Hydra, Ixidron, Grim Haruspex, Den Protector, Seedborn Muse, Thelonite Hermit, Great Oak Guardian, Sakura-Tribe Elder, Overwhelming Stampede, Tempt With Discovery, Strionic Resonator, Sol Ring, Thran Dyanmo, Darkwater Catacombs, Exotic Orchard, Llanowar Wastes, Sunken Hollow, Thespian’s Stage, Yavimaya Coast, Ash Barrens, Bojuka Bog, Command Tower, Reliquary Tower). That’s $32 of your $35 right ther, buylist value, excluding the 17 new cards whose values are unknown. Do we expect any of them to be worth anything? Well, historically, the decks will have at least 2 new cards worth $5 (Arixmethes and Estrid’s Invocation, Treasure Nabber and Endless Atlas, Lord Windgrace and Windgrace’s Judgment and Nesting Dragon and Whiptongue Hydra , Aminatou and Yuriko). If you tack on at least another $10, you’re reasonably safe buying at $35, especially if you want any of the cards. If there is a Yuriko this year, which has settled around $15, you’re in even better shape.

Are these a great investment? I don’t know how you feel about buying at $35 to sit on them for a year and sell for $58 BIN on eBay but in the short term, there will be money to be made busting for singles, selling the new, hot cards before they equilibrate down and holding the reprints while they equilibrate up. If you’re a player, absolutely preorder one of each deck at $35 each (you should be able to do better and get a set around $120) and build to your heart’s content.

We haven’t seen the other 2 decks but I’m not sure we need to – I am confident these are a better buy than people think, the value looks a little better than last year with a lot of money in pricey lands like Sunken Hollow and creatures like Seedborn Muse and there are bound to be some sexy, $5-and-up new cards. Here are a few I like.

Old Docksides, as he likes to be called, is pretty punishing in multiplayer. I have heard people talk about using him in Vintage, which probably can’t happen since the decks that let you cash in with him probably have lethal on board or a Mycosynth Lattice and Karn lock. This is nuts, however, in a format where everyone has Sol Rings and Signets. Bring him back over and over with Grenzo, tutor for him with Goblin Recruiter or Matron, blink him with Deadeye Navigator or Conjurer’s Closet or just play him, get a pile of treasure and win with Revel in Riches. This isn’t Smothering Tithe but it sure is close.


This card is stupid. I love it.

Historically, I have said that I tend to ignore supposition about the cost of Legendary creatures and prefer to focus on the decks that they’ll enable, but since we have data from last year, we can look at it. The Legendary creatures and planeswalkers from Commander 2018 worth more than $5 are Aminatou ($5), Yuriko ($15), Arixmethes ($7) and Lord Windgrace ($5). Nothing from the Saheeli deck mattered, as much as everyone raved last year about how you should buy Varchild’s War Riders. Pramikon has meme value and could end up being this year’s Arixmethes, which is a bad card but a huge casual hit. You know how many people are swinging with tribal sea monsters? More than are playing the Tuvasa Voltron deck everyone on reddit said couldn’t be beat.

This isn’t as bad as everyone says it is and I bet the deck it’s in is the worst one, helping its value even more.

If I had to guess, I think this will surprise people and get built a lot more than the marquee cards in the decks. This is what EDH players want.

That does it for me this week. Buy the decks, I think. I’ll be back next week with some data and some supposition about which specs to buy. Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 8/5/19 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.

GenCon brought with it our next slate of money engines in the form of the new commanders. 2019’s mechanics were made public, intentionally or not, about a week ago, so the overall themes weren’t a surprise. The commanders themselves were new though, and there’s definitely a power level gap across the four. For my money Anje, the madness legend, is by far the most fascinating, boasting a high potential power level while not pigeonholing players into a specific course of play or experience. On the other end of the scale is Ghired, the populate commander, who I’d consider the least engaging. I ranted about him on Twitter a little bit already, but basically, you have to put your 2/5 commander into the red zone every turn, all to score a single populate trigger, that could arguably be worse than a normal populate trigger. 

Big Game Hunter (Foil)

Price Today: $11
Possible Price: $25

Anje’s really only got two lines of text;  “T: Loot,” and “if it had madness, do it again.” Whether you’re in the market to build the deck aggressively, or as a control build, or as a vampire build, it’s up to you. Truth be told, the limiting factor on Anje is the dearth of meaningful madness cards out in the wild. The mechanic has typically been designed as a low-to-the-ground cost cutting tool. There’s lots of lightning bolt approximations that only cost lightning bolt mana in the madness cost. Jumping through hoops to cast bolt in Standard might have been worth it, but EDH is a different game entirely. Here’s hoping they really go to the wall on the madness support in Anje.

Though the existing madness pool is uneven in its options, there’s a few standouts that will be locks for any Anje deck, and Big Game Hunter is one of those. His iron price is B (good) and he destroys any creature with four or more power (also good). Even his gold price is a respectable 1BB, which means the card isn’t unusable if you don’t have a madness enabler. There’s no way to build Anje that BGH isn’t going to be a useful tool in your 99, and unless every single card in Anje’s box is a competitively costed madness card, players are going to need to branch out to find more. That’s when they’ll find BGH.

BGH has just a single printing in his history, as an uncommon from Planar Chaos. That’s not a particularly deep well to draw from. Foils are sparse, and they won’t last long once the deck is in the hands of the players and they start looking for cards to add, or cards to foil. If you can scare any up at $10 or $11, I fully expect at least a double up on your investment.

Altar of the Lost (Foil)

Price Today: $.5
Possible Price: $5

As far as the new commanders go, I’d consider Sevinne rather bland. His immunity isn’t underwhelming, it’s just doesn’t whelm. There’s no whelming to be had. Doubling flashback spells is nifty, and we know that doubling spells is reasonably popular as is, so that will light a few fires. I would have liked to see something more fascinating than “do the thing you want to do twice,” but, ah well. There’s more flashback spoilers to come another day this week, so maybe an alt-commander will be more thrilling.

Whichever flashback commander you end up playing, you’re going to want two things: flashback spells and mana with which to cast flashback spells. Flashback costs tend to be prohibitive, so adequate mana will be key in making that deck function. There’s always your standard options; Sol Ring, Thran Dynamo, etc. Aforementioned mana rocks tend to produce colorless mana, which you accept because of the raw output. Altar of the Lost is a special case that’s rarely worth its slot, but in Sevinne decks, will be a better Worn Powerstone. Worn Powerstone is in 25,000 EDHREC lists, so a better Powerstone is going to be great in Sevinne. 

Of course, Altar of the Lost is only going to be useful in flashback oriented decks, so it’s not like this is going to reach the level of play any of the other rocks do. Still, every Sevinne player will want to include a copy, and plenty should go pick up a foil as well, since they’ll be affordable. Getting in now at 50 cents may give you the opportunity to sell piecemeal at $4 or $5 each, or dump piles into buylists at $2 to $3. Either way, it’s a small ball choice that should see some real increase in demand over the next few months.

Alchemist’s Refuge (Foil)

Price Today: $11
Possible Price: $25

Let’s say you enjoy metal. Specifically, altering and transmuting metal into other metals. You might be inclined to call yourself an alchemist even, if you’re pushed to it. And let’s say you’ve been working hard and need to take a break. Get away from it all for awhile. Stop thinking about lead and gold. Where does one go to escape the clanging and banging of everyday life? Some sort of retreat I’d imagine. Perhaps even a refuge.

I’m fairly confident I’ve talked about Alchemist’s Refuge before in this column, perhaps more than once. I don’t know what the price was when I first started talking about it, but you know what: I still like it. Supply is extremely low, there’s still only a single foil printing, and that doesn’t look to change anytime soon. On top of that, Kadena adds a new layer to demand profile. Kadena notably says “each turn,” not “your turn.” If you’re able to play creatures at instant speed, that means you can take advantage of that three mana discount again and again. Find a way to untap that Refuge and you’re really getting paid. (And no, Aluren doesn’t work with Morph.)

Any copies you can find under $10 are basically a complete lock. Enjoy.

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

More Rotation Pickups

Yesterday we got confirmation that the materials leak was correct, that the Commander 2019 decks are all about mechanics. I was almost dead-on in my predictions, and hopefully you bought some fifty-cent Secret Plans while the getting was good, or you bought some seventy-five-cent Field of the Dead and are reselling those right now.

I’m surprised that red is getting populate as a mechanic, but that’s neither here nor there.

With rotation upon us, there’s some headliner cards that are losing value at a rapid pace, and we’ve still got about two months until official rotation. Yes, your eyes are going to be drawn to the Commander decks and the new previews and the new spikes, but really, making money there is just a question of listening to the groupthink on the ProTrader Discord channels. 
If you can’t keep an eye on that rapid scroll of value, fear not. Cards are getting dumped as rotation approaches, and some of these cards don’t deserve that treatment at all.

Legion Warboss ($5 nonfoil/$9 foil)

I recognize that Warboss isn’t about to rotate, but this is too low a price for the confluence of factors at play. First of all, the foil multiplier is too low. This ought to be in the range of $15 for foils, especially because this is a very popular card in the Legacy and Modern prison strategies. The benefit here is that you spend 2R, and instantly get two creatures, one of which even has haste. Warboss might not end the game quite as quickly as Goblin Rabblemaster, but the benefit of not having to attack is a real one. 

Field of Ruin ($3/$15)

Field of Ruin has quietly become one of the most ubiquitous cards in Modern. A whole lot of decks are playing a couple, especially alongside other basic-finders like Assassin’s Trophy, Ghost Quarter, or Path to Exile. I’m quite surprised that this was never an FNM promo, being an uncommon, but here we are. I don’t know when it’ll get reprinted, but I’m gladly going to pick up foils in anticipation of $20 or $25. It’s just in so many decks!

Vanquisher’s Banner ($5/$10)

Foils especially should be targeted here, because it’s in 12,000 Commander decks and they are safe from being reprinted in Commander 2019. This is a long time to go between potential reprints, so get your personal copies and then add a few more. Sunbird’s Invocation is in a similar spot: Buy your foils now and thank me when they spike.

Timestream Navigator ($2/$5)

Yes, this is a niche card but the extra-turn effects are never to be underestimated, and this is a card that will eventually be broken. It’s designed to be difficult to break, but foil mythics from the last small set are always going to be appealing to me.

Blood Sun ($1.50/$6)

This was about half its current price before the Internet freaked out on the realization that this turned off the drawback of Lotus Field, and honestly, that mentality is something I want to capitalize on. It’s not difficult to imagine that there’s going to be other lands that this is good with. For example, this also turns off the sacrifice clause of City of Traitors or can be used offensively to turn off fetchlands for both players. It’s open-ended, a trait which just means you want a handful of foils waiting patiently for their day in the sun.

All the flip cards from Ixalan block – Just pick up some foils now. Go for the special promo Buy-a-Box versions if you can, but foil flip cards are very rarely reprinted and you should feel good about this acquisition. 

Oath of Teferi ($1/$5)

Yes, it’s in two colors and that makes it problematic for Commander as opposed to The Chain Veil, but I like getting in here at a pretty low price. War of the Spark triggered an increase because somehow we thought Standard would devolve into Planeswalkers fighting over value on the board. Silly us! It’s still very strong in Commander, if not hugely adopted yet. 

Foil Sagas (varied prices)

The Sagas have high foil multipliers nearly across the board. Lots of them are in the 5x range and a couple are crazy high, like The Eldest Reborn which is at a split of $0.50/$7. It seems that there’s a large group of collectors who wanted foil Sagas, because I can’t find a source of demand listed. EDHREC doesn’t show them being used a lot, nor does tappedout or any other database I use for this. It helps that these are pretty unlikely to get printed again, and especially not in foil. I can imagine a scenario where a lot of Sagas spike pretty hard (counter manipulation?) and foils could really hit a high. 

Foil Rat Colony ($0.75/$3)

All of the cards that let you break the four-of rule in Magic have eventually been worth more than expected. Relentless Rats has been printed three times and is still a dollar common. Shadowborn Apostle is more, with a single printing and a theme it can be dedicated to. What I am noticing is the synergy between the Colony and the Relentless Rats (the extra black mana is worth it to get the growth in toughness) and that foils of the Colony are cheap compared to the others. Get while the getting is good!

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: I Almost Made A Pun About A Spec

Could you imagine? Locking this article for Pro Traders only for 48 hours but I put the name of a card to spec on right in the title? Total disaster. I blame the lack of sleep I’ve gotten lately at the hands of two children who, working as a cohesive unit, are keeping me deprived of sleep more efficiently that any two professional interrogators. Despite the psychological war being waged against me, I’m possessed of enough of my mental faculties to remember that we should be looking into the future to buy stuff before it spikes. Did you buy any copies of Painter’s Servant in 2018? Then it was probably an accident but I hope you bought a lot. Did you try to buy them the day of the unbanning announcement? Sorry about your cancelled order due to “selling out on multiple platforms” or whatever nonsense they fed you. Since we have to buy far ahead, let’s do it. We’ll do it by looking at a card that people already forgot was spoiled, it’s that far ahead of the set it’s in. Like, we haven’t seen a single card from Commander 2019, so having an Eldraine card is pretty nuts. Let’s take advantage of that and use it to our… yep, no way out of this sentence without using the word “advantage” again so I’m just going to bail out and try to smoothly transition to the next paragraph without arousing any

Eldraine is set in a Fairytale setting and while that doesn’t mean Bitterblossom is a good buy (I had a good laugh at all of the people buying faeries cards because of a spoiled booster pack wrapper) it DOES mean Legendary creatures. Also, funnily enough, MaRo said some of the cards that seem like they’d be Legendary won’t. It’s tough to build decks where every creature in the set is Legendary. Remember how Civilized Scholar//Homocidal Brute was supposed to represent Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Same deal with Eldraine. Anyway, there will be Legendary creatures. We’ve already seen one that’s going to be in a Throne of Eldraine Brawl precon and it’s pretty spicy. I think the deck will get played in EDH even if this fails to make Brawl palatable which is fine since all of the cards that are good with it won’t be legal in Brawl. Let’s take a look at said creature.

A character from Irish folklore, Cú Chulainn was the incarnation of the god Lugh who joined the 27 club after being tricked into an unfair fight. Irish people are pretty stoked to see a character from their lore represented, and rightly so. I’m pretty stoked to see a value engine like Chulane is and people are already thinking of ways to abuse him. There are several and if he catches on in EDH and cEDH like I think he might, some expensive stuff could get expensiver. We have 1 deck on EDHREC so I had to do some digging online, but I’d have to do that to find cEDH stuff anyway, so here goes.

I’ll say before I actually launch into the picks (I’m a tease, I know) that this is a bit preliminary and I usually wait for EDHREC data but I think we can make a few reasonable assumptions about what people will try to pair with this when it’s closer to being released in a few months and we need to get ahead of them if we want to grab the obvious stuff. The non-obvious stuff will still be there later but this is a part of the process we don’t often engage in but I think he’s been overlooked and with Commander 2019 spoilers next week poised to bury this card, we should be thinking ahead.

This climbed a lot faster than I had thought it would. It’s good in basically every Green EDH deck but it’s especially good here. I wish I had called this at $1, but if you buy them now, you’re going to be saying “I’m glad I bought these under $5” rather than “I wish I had bought these under $2.” Missing stuff happens when it climbs smoothly and other cards in the set overshadow it, but people are done opening RNA and with the mythics mostly all crashing, the value has to go somewhere and, here’s it goes. Guardian Project has a vague name and a powerful effect so it has high to very high reprint risk but it’s also a dumb card that goes in a lot of decks. How many decks?

Second to only Smothering Tithe. That’s how many decks. It’s in the best color in EDH, it draws cards for what Green does best and it’s under $5. It will only get better paired with Chulane and if it’s not in the Brawl precon, which it might be, it’s going to be a $10 card someday. If it is in there, it will be a $5 card someday.

Remember me? I keep popping up year after year, enabling dumb commanders like Prossh, Tazri and Niv-Mizzet. This is mostly a cEDH card given how expensive it is, but it’s also very good in Chulane and I could see people playing it anyway. Even though it just missed the cut-off for the Reserved List, I don’t know how likely a reprint of this is given its high price tag and this may be a “get your copy if you need it for Chulane” sort of a situation. If you wanted to invest, maybe look at a card that’s on the Reserved List and has a lower buy-in. Maybe look at

Aluren. Gettable under $20, ridiculous with Chulane, demonstrates the ability to crest the $40 mark on a repeated basis and on the Reserved List. If there was one pick for this week that I would push hard for, it’s this one. It’s not just good with Chulane, it’s insane. Whitemane Lion, Shrieking Drake and a host of other gating creatures are good with Chulane and INSANE IN THE CHULANE MEMBRANE with Aluren. Draw your deck and dump every land. Win that turn. Aluren is a card that keeps coming up and if you have copies, you may have been holding them for a while but Chulane, if it takes off, has to play this card.

I don’t know how controversial it is to say to buy a card that’s in the midst of going up because of other decks, but Curio is a likely inclusion in Chulane and since it’s climbing, you won’t be able to get them for cheap later. I think with two potential reasons to spike, we may have seen the last of this card under $20.

Even if the incoming second spike on this card isn’t higher and harder, it should maintain its ceiling for longer.

However, in lieu of more picks, I want to discuss the shape of this graph. Today I’m talking about “obvious” stuff that cEDH people are going to put in their cEDH decks rather than the cards that EDH players are going to use with Chulane. A lot of the cards are likely the same, but do you remember why Intruder Alarm spiked in the first place? It was in the last year so you probably do. It was Vannifar. Alarm was “ZOMG OBVS” in the deck, it and cards like Thornbite Staff all disappeared. Some quick people made money but I think people were a little upset with me that I seemed to be staying out of it. After all, Vannifar was the cEDH hotness. What’s the case for not being all over it?

For one, a few months later, Vannifar is the 4th best commander in a set that doesn’t even have 5 good commanders. Vannifar was obvious but Teysa Karlov is hotter. I made a lot of money on Teysa cards and I had a much longer time to pick them up, and my selling window was longer, too. Let’s look at cards that spiked as a result of Teysa and compare the shape of their graphs to this last section of the Intruder Alarm graph.

It didn’t crash. People are still racing to the bottom a bit on TCG Player but stores like Card Kingdom aren’t lowering their prices and they’re still moving copies to players. Card Kingdom isn’t competing with anyone like TCG Player is on Intruder Alarm, either, and they keep lowering their price on that. It seems to me that as much as I get some FOMO static from some of my readers who feel like I’m losing them money by not being super proactive like I was this week and getting those “obvious” cards, the stuff we select with my method maintains its price better because it’s based on what people are demonstrably playing, backed by data and not what is obvious to people who didn’t build a Vannifar deck. Hallowed Spiritkeeper peaked at $8 and is now around $6.50. Massacre Wurm peaked at $30 and settled at $25. Intruder Alarm lost half of its value and it’s a much more powerful and less niche card than something like Vindictive Lich. The demand for cards that are selected by my method is like a $7 Avocado – organic.

Aluren has had a lot of peaks and valleys in its graph. Cloudstone Curio is getting help from another card. Food Chain is always going to be above $40. The rest of every cEDH deck is always the same – Force of Will, Enlightened Tutor, Brainstorm, Sylvan Library, Mox Diamond, etc. Intruder Alarm has some upside with Chulane comboing with it but you need a lot of mana dorks. I think we likely haven’t seen the Vindictive Liches and Hallowed Spiritkeepers Chulane will bring us yet. I think we have time and with the number of Chulane decks going from 1 to 30 in the lat 24 hours, I think we’ll have time to make our purchases ahead of what people are really going to play. Chulane is powerful, he’s being hyped by WotC to get people to build Brawl and I also think there are cards I can safely predict that are going to look a lot more like Massacre Wurm than Intruder Alarm.

If these weren’t obvious to you, they also won’t be obvious to speculators who don’t pay attention to EDH and that’s why they pay me the big bucks.

That does it for me. Let’s all be on the lookout for the next Massacre Wurm. Until next time!

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY