Now is what we’ve all been waiting for. War of the Spark was a fun diversion, what with the story culmination and pile of planeswalkers, but we all knew that was the appetizer. WAR was for cosplayers and kitchen table games. Modern Horizons is the entree, the real meat and potatoes. 254 cards are about to get dumped into Modern, and what sets this apart from every Standard set is that those 254 cards are specifically for Modern. Not “we crafted this Standard set and also the cards are legal elsewhere,” but “here are 254 new tools chosen exactly for this specific format.” Modern is in for an upheaval, and it’s going to be fun. (Especially if they reprint Upheaval.)
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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 2012. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.
Corbin (@CHosler88), DJ (@Rose0fThorns) and Jason (@jasonEalt) are back from GP Madison and here to talk about the Mythic Edition gifts, Magic Pro League changes, and answer all your emails!
We’ve had War of the Spark in our hands for a couple of weeks, and while a lot of attention is rightfully on the ME3 fiasco, uncut apology sheets, and alternate art, we would be remiss not to take a look at what is making waves in assorted formats.
Unbelievably, we start Modern Horizons spoilers on Sunday, so prepare for two weeks of absolute madness and rushing to buy things before other people realize what’s going on.
Just so we’re clear: I don’t want you to get caught up in buying hype. It’s very difficult to buy a card while it’s in the process of spiking and still make money on the transaction. If you find some cards at your LGS before they can catch up, that’s fine, but the Internet is about to become a wild-ass place with each previewed Modern Horizons card.
Your best bet is to stock up on staples of Modern now, and make sure your collection is organized enough that you can raid it as needed.
Teferi, Time Raveler ($13)
Teferi’s newest incarnation has been just the super-irritating thing that a lot of control decks want: an early way to ensure they get to do what they want. It breaks the mirror open quite well, and has a great game against Nexus of Fate decks, which aspire to abuse the end step.
The price is on the rise from his low of $9, but considering that the price at the start of the format was $20, there’s a lot of room left for him to move. I’m definitely going to want to have some of these before they go back up to $20.
Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God ($22)
Someone else with a whole bunch of cards named after him, Nicol Bolas’s (hopefully-but-I-doubt-it) final form is tough on the mana but is awesome on the field. His price is going down, though there’s a Grixis control deck that’s stubbornly playing the full four copies. The choices are many for the other planeswalkers you can have in play, and you get to pick the flavor(s) that you like best.
The ‘have all the abilities’ clause is pretty amazing. Note that he’s currently legal with Jace, Cunning Castaway, so if you really want to go hog wild, you have my blessing. The Commander demand would be higher if he could fit into Atraxa Superfriends decks, but really, there’s a lot of ways to tackle this. The price of the Dragon-God ought to stabilize right around $20, so no buying quite yet unless you want to play the deck a bunch.
That deck is also playing four copies of the M19 version, Nicol Bolas, the Ravager, and with that card hitting $35 you need to sell, sell, sell. I even went so far as to take copies out of Commander decks and ship them off. At worst, I’ll rebuy them in October (at rotation) for $15-$20 ish, and have an extra $20 in store credit per copy.
Ral, Storm Conduit (now $2.50)
Given that there’s an infinite combo in Standard with Ral, Expansion // Explosion, and some other spell, you’d think this would be higher. Problem is, countermagic is everywhere, and if you’re not playing Negate or Dovin’s Veto, you’re likely playing a red or white aggro decks and killing the poor durdler.
I’ve got Ral pegged as someone to buy once we’re all buying Modern Horizons. Ideally, I can get in under $2 and just be patient. At a price that low, I don’t need him to win games on stream (nice as that would be) because I’m very unlikely to lose out. Almost no planeswalkers are $1, but that doesn’t account for their presence at rare and uncommon.
Narset, Parter of Veils (up to $2.50, foils $30, and the JP alternate art foil is $250-$500 on eBay)
I think this is going to be one of the first new cards in Oathbreaker to get banned, as Narset + Windfall (or some variation thereof) is disgusting. Leovold is extremely powerful in Legacy, and now we have this easier-to-cast version!
Narset’s price has gone crazy in these two weeks, as Modern and Legacy and Cube and Commander players try her out and find that it’s just plain silly. Spirit of the Labyrinth is symmetrical and that’s why it’s not busted. Narset plainly is, and is even in the color with the most versions of a ‘we all draw’ effect.
You can imagine that I’m trying very hard to build some form of Narset/Notion Thief deck, playing all the Vision Skeins. Heck, in Standard, we have Emergency Powers and that’s super tasty indeed.
God-Eternal Oketra ($14)
You may or may not have seen it, but two weeks ago, the first streamed SCG Open had two Bant Aggro decks, nearly the same 75 but both with three copies of this card. Oketra is pretty bonkers, even one more creature gives you an extra 4/4 and that tussles with just about everything in the format currently. For extra spice, pair with Vivien, Champion of the Wilds and get bananas at instant speed.
It’s hard to feel like this isn’t a buy right now, but I’m being patient. Yes, it’s $2 more than it was a couple of weeks ago, but it’s an all-star in Commander and if you made me choose between this and Lyra Dawnbringer at the five-spot for White Weenie decks…I don’t know where I’d land.
One more good on-camera performance and this is a $20 card. The casual market is soaking up spare copies and preventing a lot of them from going into the greater market, a force we can’t quantify but we can notice by observing how the price doesn’t go down.
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.
Like, you’re welcome. Sincerely. That’s a phrase I find myself saying a lot lately, unprompted. My daughter has excellent manners 50% of the time and 0 manners 50% of the time which averages out to having OK manners all of the time and on a good day, her manners with strangers are good and with me are suspect which makes me look like a good parent to strangers. You don’t know I did the equivalent of getting you your paints from a shelf you can’t reach, rinsing your brushes and tearing a page out of your Peppa Pig painting book because you can’t quite handle perforation, but I promise I’m doing all that for you and more. I mean, I feel like new formats are a pain and I hate to learn new things and I did that for you. Is Oathbreakers Brawl or is it Tiny Leaders? It’s hard to tell how many months it will last before it disappears under the weight of the collective apathy of an entire community. It’s also possible Oathbreaker catches on and is around forever. Anything is possible. 2016 taught me that.
Oathbreaker is a 60 card, singleton format with 2 commanders – a Planeswalker and a “signature spell” that both start out in the Command Zone. The spell must be an Instant or Sorcery. Your deck is bound by typical color identity rules like in EDH so new Teferi can only have Blue and White cards. You can’t cast your signature spell unless your “Oathbreaker” is in play and you have to pay the commander tax every time you cast either one, so the spell keeps getting more and more costly. It’s unsanctioned and I’ve never witnessed a game of it being played. Why should we care?
As near as I can figure, Oathbreaker did this because Terferi is disgusting in that format. I don’t know which delightful Canadian with a name like Whackity Smackelberry is responsible for this format or who keeps the banlist updated but for now, Teferi is teferrorizing people. I don’t know much but I know if it can make a card like this double, maybe other ‘walkers have some upside and maybe some signature spells do, too. Certainly Chain Veil combo is easier in a deck that starts the game with 51 cards in it when you’re a Blue deck whose signature spell could very well be Fabricate.
Is there anything else we can look at for potential?
Jace + Tunnel Vision
This would be kind of funny and kind of brutal. Since the games are multiplayer, you need to do this trick more than once, probably, but it’s still pretty brutal and you can cough up the mana to recast Tunnel Vision for.. 8 mana? Jesus, OK. Still, Blue is good and Tunnel Vision… already went up? How did no one notice this?
The timing is too coincidental not to be related to Oathbreaker.
I think there is room for Tunnel Vision to go up, though. It’s the same rarity as Doubling Season and has fewer printings. Just ‘saying. It’s an $8 foil, also. I think that’s easy money on easy mode. I think this is a $30 foil waiting to happen.
Narset + Windfall
New Narset is gnarly and nasty and this seems like a great way to slam Day’s Undoing, Windfall, Teferi’s Puzzle Box and other goodies in a deck where you draw your win conditions and they go down from a 3 mana Identity Crisis harder than Tim Drake’s Dad.
Despite hella printings, this is the only foil version of this card. Is Oathbreaker going to be a thing (I would say no, but look at Tunnel Vision) and if it is, will people who bought Windfall foils get a windfall of their own? Is there a chance they go up for some other reason? Is there a chance Windfall is in Modern Horizons? (nope). I think there is money to be made here, poisonally. But I like my blue foil cards ever since I said $1 was too cheap for Dramatic Reversal.
This has nothing to do with Oathbreaker, but checking in on Dramatic Reversal makes me want to check in on another card I feel just as strongly about – Arcane Denial. The art sucks but it’s in a lot of EDH decks and there is one foil printing. Denial is still under $4, up from the $1- $2 where I called it, but with potential to get to… $11 apparently. Just get that free money. There are enough copies for all of you Pro Traders with enough left over for me to actually buy some since I only bought like 4 Dramatic Reversal because I get squeamish about buying specs I write about. I give you the good stuff and leave myself with… well, collections which have a guaranteed return and are much more stable than specs. Still, though. Coulda dectupled up. You’re welcome. Lol, that’s a callback to earlier but it sounds pretty aggressive. I’m leaving it.
There is an entire Oathbreaker subreddit but it’s really tough to figure out what is durdly and what is concensus good. The subreddit is extremely hard to parse, there are no even results anywhere and EDHREC isn’t compiling Oathbreaker stuff (I’m not sure we should, BrawlREC was a lot of work, no one went to it and now Brawl seems dead). If anything else around this format pops up, I’ll let you all know, but for now, it seems like Blue tryhard cards are the best bets and most of them were already good. A few signature spells I have seen that aren’t good in EDH were
Argent Mutation with Dace Fayden.
Sorin’s Vengeance with Sorin Markov, and
Inspiring Call with Jiang Yanggu. Will any of this pan out? I don’t know. I feel good about all of that blue stuff I said earlier, and I’ll give Pro Traders a crack at Tunnel Vision before I think about if I should buy some. I probably won’t but only because it would look bad if I did. Until next time!
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