Corbin (@CHosler88), Jason (@jasonEalt), and DJ (@Rose0fThorns) welcome longtime patron of the cast Steve (@SteveMKestner) to discuss all the hype surrounding the new Ravnica Allegiance set, Commander and even the latest Modern Ban.
This is my favorite time of a set. The first weekend we can draft it in person, Standard is shaken up, new prices are flying left and right…and the old set is at its highest supply/lowest price.
This week, I want to look at Guilds of Ravnica and figure out what I’m buying and what my timeframe is. Remember, GRN rotates out of Standard in roughly 21 months, so we’ve got some delightful targets that have a good while to hit it big.
Before we get too deep, let’s look at my favorite recent example: Vraska’s Contempt.
Forgive my MS Paint skillz.
Yep, there was a time, right at Rivals of Ixalan being released, when you could buy this for about $6. Pretty soon after, people realized the card is super awesome and they should play a bunch. Teferi showed up not long after, and that shot the card up to $20 briefly.
That brief window is right now. So what’s got Standard legs, and what am I buying for the long term?
Foil Divine Visitation ($13)
The nonfoils perked up a little when Afterlife was previewed, and it’s true that they play nicely together. What I really love is the long-term Commander implications for this card, and $13 is low for a card that is going to be soaked up by players and not be allowed to circulate.
Look at it this way: at the time of this writing, there’s 38 foils on TCG. For comparison’s sake, there’s 70 foils of March of the Multitudes, 96 of Aurelia, but only 28 of Niv-Mizzet, Parun. Hmmmmm… yes, I’d pick that up too, though I’m less enthused. Visitation is a must-have for any white token commander, and Niv is difficult to cast even if he’s the general.
Expansion / Explosion ($1.50)
Ionize ($2)
There’s going to be a mostly-Izzet control deck at some point, and it’ll likely splash for Teferi, Hero of Dominaria. Maybe it’ll be Temur, splashing green for Wilderness Reclamation, but both these spells are at their low (EE has come back down from its brief time at $5) and they are going to get popular again before they rotate out.
Experimental Frenzy ($2.50 nonfoil/$9 foil)
Thousand-Year Storm ($2.50/$8)
Both of these cards have a high casting cost, it’s true, but they are a class of card that will get better with every set of spells printed. Birthing Pod was the same way; every creature printed gave that card a chance to be better, to be broken in new ways. These are two keystones, engines, whatever term you like to use. These aren’t going to light up Standard, but the time will come when they are going to be part of some disgusting turn in Modern and the foils zoom past $20.
Knight of Autumn ($3)
It’s too versatile, and I’m not just talking about the best-of-one craze sweeping Arena. Your worst case is that the card is a 4/3 for three mana. Lots and lots of people are going to try and break Wilderness Reclamation, and the GW decks are already running answers to that card at the same time they are running a 2/1 gain four life against the burn decks.
There’s going to be a point where this card is everywhere. I don’t know when it’ll be, but I know it’ll be before September 2020 and you’ll want to have your copies ready to sell into the hype.
Foil Chromatic Lantern ($9)
The Return to Ravnica foil is $15, but let’s look at where that price has been:
A must-play in decks that are 3+ colors.
Three times since 2012 it’s hit $25, and let’s not overlook the Kaladesh Invention version that landed in September of 2016 and didn’t budge this price much. You should definitely be picking up all the personal copies you’ll need right now, before this rises to meet the RTR version. The Masterpiece means that it’ll never go too crazy, and we’ll get this in a Commander reprint before long, but get all you need and an extra few to trade away when it’s back at $20 in a year.
If you like data, it’s the #15 artifact on EDHREC, with 56,000+ decks running it. There’s 150 foil copies between RTR and GRN on TCGPlayer right now. Make your move.
Risk Factor ($5/$10)
I’m a huge fan of this card. No one is combining it with Browbeat in Modern, but it’s showing up in a range of Modern strategies, my favorite being the ‘Phoenix Deck Wins’ archetype that has put up some MTGO results and won a SCG Classic in December. I’m higher on the foils, but I’m also in for a couple playsets of nonfoils. I underestimated how good this card is, because it can be cast twice. I won’t underestimate what it can do for my wallet.
Foil Beast Whisperer ($5)
This effect exists in a couple of forms, but they tend to cost more (Soul of the Harvest) or be conditional in some way (Beck/Call being two colors, Garruk’s Packleader & Elemental Bond for power 3+, and so on…) and this is even an Elf! The tribe most capable of having a long run of creatures off the top and finishing us all off!
The other giveaway is that this card, unassuming and not really played anywhere yet, has only 50 copies in foil on TCG, between the pack foil and the prerelease foils. I hope you’re able to get some before they are gone.
Cliff has been writing for MTGPrice for five years now, 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.
I wrote an article where I talked about what I thought, as a person who thinks he understands this format of EDH (you agree because you’re reading my article) people were going to play in Teysa Karlov decks. I was mostly right. I mean, I was right right. I didn’t say anything I didn’t see in multiple decklists online. However, now we have EDHREC data aggregating the data for us and I don’t even have to guess half as much as I did before. This is a very good thing for everyone involved. Let’s go back over the data now that we have it and see if there is anything else we can coax out. I mean, I do, what, 5 picks? We can find 5 picks I missed, let’s be honest. If not, I’ll do 3 picks, change the by-line to “Travis Allen” and no one will even notice. This is where you say “SHOTS FIRED.” I kid, obviously. He’s in our top 3 writers, and if you read his article twice it’s like you’re getting 6 picks, which is more than I do.
So what makes me want to look at Teysa Karlov rather than the more popular Vannifar?
Did no one build Vannifar this week? Of course not. We’re just not getting the data in, yet, and Teysa Karlov being more popular than Atraxa and Muldrotha is kind of a big deal. Teysa was the #1 submission this week and 50 decks is plenty of data to look at.
While we’re looking at a complete dearth of Vannifar decks in the database, let’s address some concerns surrounding using EDHREC as a data source. Yes, I think it’s less than ideal that we’re not getting every possible deck from every possible database. No I don’t think that skews our data. I think incomplete data sets are not ideal, but I think what we’re doing is using the database to identify cards we may not have thought of on our own as inclusions and looking at the percentage of decks playing those cards. We can also look at their synergy score to differentiate between Orzhov staples like Mortify and Teysa staples like Requiem Angel. Our data isn’t skewed by being incomplete unless we’re somehow missing an entire demographic of EDH players and even then, missing their data doesn’t mean our conclusions are wrong, just incomplete. Missing something isn’t that bad. It’s better not to miss things, but it’s not a problem if you’re hitting other cards. We can’t buy everything, so as long as we can identify buying opportunities from the data we have, opportunities we miss aren’t a problem. My hit rate for specs went way, way up when I started using EDHREC data, not down, so I feel comfortable making recommendations based on getting a glimpse into what the masses are doing.
If you think 50 decks isn’t enough, I would say don’t use the 50 decks to rule out something you think is good in the deck, then. Something being missing from a small sample size data set doesn’t mean that thing won’t be in a larger data set, but it’s unlikely something will be over-represented in a smaller set to the extent that the card will be a bad buy, especially since those errors have a mechanism to correct themselves in the form of people seeing the card in the REC list and saying “I guess that goes in the deck” and buying it. More data will continue to trickle in, but until then, we can absolutely learn about how people are building this deck by looking at what we have so far.
What About Synergy, Now?
I have talked about this before but some of you are new and all of us could benefit from a refresher. If you look at a card in a deck on EDHREC, you’ll see two numbers. By “in a deck” I mean on the page for that deck’s commander. This is 101 stuff but it’ll go fast, I promise.
Make sure you’re on “view as Commander” because that will show you the cards that are in an Atraxa deck. The cards you see are all average inclusions in Atraxa decks and they will have two numbers under them.
The first number is the raw percentage. Of the 5,369 Atraxa decks we’re analyzing, 42% of them run Biomancer. The +4% synergy score shows how unique to Atraxa decks Biomancer is. For most decks, Sol Ring will have a -1% or -2% score because it’s in almost every deck and isn’t an Atraxa staple. Cards very specific to Atraxa will have a higher number. The higher the number, the more it’s likely to only be in that deck.
2/3 of Atraxa decks run this card and the +10% synergy score indicates it’s more unique to Atraxa decks than Biomancer, which has more appeal in other decks outside of Atraxa than Cornucopia does. This is easy stuff but it’s worth defining and it will help us when we look at Teysa cards. Cards with a high synergy score are inclined to move just on the basis of that one new card and a high synergy score could indicate overlooked and underpriced cards that are inclined to move in price on the basis of not getting played much before. +10% isn’t a huge number, and the sheer variety of possible Atraxa decks makes it tough for anything to be an auto-include. Let’s look at something a little more “linear” to build.
Here is Ancestral Statue in Animar decks. Clicking on this card will take us to the card’s page where, unlike viewing a Legendary creature as a Commander to see the cards it’s in, we’ll look at a card to see the decks that have it included. Clicking the Statue takes us to a page that shows us that Statue is very much a Animar-specific card.
This is Statue’s Top 3. It’s 22 times as likely to be in an Animar deck than in its second-most-common deck, Rakdos. That 41% synergy tells us as much without us having to click on every card and check our work like this. Do I know how the synergy score is calculated? No, and it didn’t occur to me until right now that I didn’t. I can find out, but since we’re mostly using it as a “is this number bigger than that number?” right now, it isn’t that important for you or even me to know how the sausage is made to that big an extent. If you want me to write a primer article on EDHREC data calculation, let me know and I can try and get the info. But if you’re like me, you just want to know you can trust a metric and I trust this metric.
A high synergy score may be a tad misleading when we have a small number of decks, but there is always risk in speculation and since we can cross-reference the inclusion percentage to “rank” the high synergy cards, we can mitigate that a bit. One lunatic jamming Sorrow’s Path in Atraxa will give it a high synergy score but low inclusion score. 1 inclusion won’t show up on Atraxa’s page with it’s 5,300 decks, but for 49, we may have issues. A high synergy, high inclusion card is going to be something we can say is going to have its price pegged directly to the popularity of Teysa decks and the more those get built, the more than card goes up. I think we can find a few high synergy, high percentage picks.
83% inclusion
+72% synergy
Foils of this card as hard to price because no one is really listing them on TCG Player. It’s clear the price is up but it’s to the point where the only listings are people charging $6 and people charging $0.50 with $4 shipping. CK has foils for $3.50 and that’s about what the TCG average is, but TCG only has 4 listings. TCG Prices are great most of the time and since there are a lot of data points, it seems “fair” to trust their market price, but situations like this are weird. If this gets used a lot, it could hit $5. Also, foil Revel in Riches, a better card, is like $4 everywhere. Does that mean buy foil Revel in Riches? I don’t know, how do you interpret a scenario where foil Pitiless Plunder is $3.50 and foil Revel in Riches is $4? One of those prices is bound to move. Or both? Does Teysa reward us for playing both of those cards (yes).
Foil Plunder is near a historic high and foil Revel is near a historic low but is rebounding. I think we have an opportunity on both of these cards. For the record, the score on Revel is not high enough to show up on Teysa’s page, but we said we wouldn’t let that bog us down, right? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Now, Plunder triggers from YOUR creatures dying and Revel triggers from THEIR creatures dying but that doesn’t matter, Teysa doubles both. Grave Pact means it gets nuts. You sac a creature, Grave Pact triggers, Teysa triggers doubling Grave Pact, Plunder triggers, Teysa triggers doubling Plunder. Plunder resolves, giving you two treasure. Grave Pact resolves, two of their creatures die. Revel triggers, Teysa doubles Revel, Revel triggers again, Teysa triggers again doubling Revel. You add 4 treasures. You’re 6/10 of the way to winning the game. Revel will show up in Teysa lists. It already is. I wrote about it on Coolstuff this week and that gets a few eyeballs on it so people will see it in a list there, also. I think this is also a buy, and it probably has a higher ceiling than Plunder.
50% inclusion
+41% synergy.
Foil Drover is at its historic average. Those funky spikes are hard for me to explain and I won’t try, but I don’t like non-foil Drover due to the reprint. I also don’t like foils because I think EDH demand for foils is way overstated. That said, Drover is pretty damn good in Teysa decks. Sac a creature to Ashnod’s Altar and one to Phyrexian Altar. Teysa puts two counters on Drover. Use the mana to make 2 1/1 spirits and Drover is now a 2/2. Sac the spirits for mana, put two counters on Drover, use 1 to make spirits. Repeat until Grave Pact has wiped the board and Drover can 1-shot anyone at the table.
83% inclusion
+72% synergy
These numbers will shrink when we get more decks in the database but for now, WEEEEE.
Teysa is good in this deck, obviously, and I think having the option to get the “oops, I win” combo with Darkest Hour and Blasting Station but with the added benefit of having a better commander than Teysa, Orzhov Scion is. Stay away from the $39 foils, probably.
67% inclusion
+60% synergy
This is a pretty cheap foil. Non-foils got a reprint but I think given the foil is near a historic low and this card is pretty damn good in a Teysa deck (don’t forget, Teysa also gives token creatures Lifelink and Vigilance, because of course she does) I could see this getting a bump. When there isn’t much difference in price between foil and non-foil, sometimes people buy foil because why not, and the prices diverge a lot. Also, foils sell out faster and easier. This is 6 mana, but a deck with both Ashnod’s and Phyrexian Altars won’t mind. This is a good pick imo. Or not. What do I know about foils? I’m just using the metrics I set out for myself.
In conclusion, there is money to be made as a result of this deck and I wouldn’t have picked any of those 5 cards and in fact did not on the basis of what is “Intruder Alarm” obvious. This one could be controversial – argue with me in the comments if you want. Until next time!
In an effort to be more proactive, Wizards has seen fit to remove Krark-Clan Ironworks from Modern. Reviewing the precedent set with past combo bannings, such as Second Sunrise, this is certainly a decision made sooner than may have been anticipated. This could point to a desire to more quickly shuffle cumbersome combo decks out of the format in the future. We’ve no doubt that they came down on KCI much quicker than other decks that were more pervasive but less “tournament-unfriendly.” We’ll be wise to keep that in mind in the future should any other of these strategies arise.
Krav, the Unredeemed (Foil)
Price Today: $8 Possible Price: $17
I’d love to detail all sorts of Modern specs that have been given new life by KCI’s departure, but to be honest, there isn’t anything terribly clear or obvious. Other combo decks may show up in greater numbers again — Tron comes to mind — but any price activity is likely to be shallow enough to not represent a worthwhile investing opportunity. So instead we’ll think about Ravnica Allegiance today, and some of the new commanders that set has brought us. To begin, we’ll look at Teysa Karlov.
Teysa decks are in their infancy, but that doesn’t mean we can’t begin to see where the strategy is going to head. Athreos’ spike a week or two ago means other people are figuring it out already as well. There’s three basic levels to Teysa. Level one, cards that reward you for things dying. Level two, ways to sacrifice those creatures. Level three, card draw to make sure you can keep doing those two things, since by it’s nature the deck is going to cannibalize its own board. Krav sits comfortably in both levels two and three.
On-demand sacrifice effects are often underappreciated in EDH. Their utility extends to an untold number of corner cases. Drawing cards and gaining life are of course both great as well, and need no championing. If you’re building a Teysa deck, it’s tough to imagine Krav doesn’t make it in.
Krav is of course from Battlebond, which means a single foil printing. Supplies are mediumish, with less than 50 copies on TCG, and basically none in stock at sub-$12 prices at direct vendors. Should Teysa prove to be a popular commander, I expect the supply on Krav to run low quickly. We’re looking at a summer set, that didn’t have excess demand to drive multiple print runs, that’s been out of the public eye for awhile. Inventory is latent, but new demand will drain it quickly.
Lifeline
Price Today: $15 Possible Price: $40
Another Teysa hit, Lifeline is a very old rare, all the way back from Urza’s Saga. (One set before foils, unfortunately.) Lifeline’s text is a tad clunky, which may be why adoption rates to date have been relatively low. Basically, if any of your creatures die and there’s still A. Lifeline and B. another one of your creatures on the battlefield, the dead creature is reanimated at the end of the turn. What this means for you is that you can do things like use Yahenni’s ability to make him invincible, sacrifice your entire board to various value effects, and then return them all back to play at the end of the turn because you have A. Lifeline and B. indestructible Yahenni. You can certainly get blown out, but even still, it’s a powerful line. It’s even sillier with something like Grave Pact or Dictate of Erebos in play.
As I said, Lifeline hails from the time before foils, so that’s not an option in this case. We’ve got different assurance though, as Lifeline finds itself on the reserve list. Normally we like foils for EDH since they can’t show up in precons, but in the case of RL cards, that’s not an issue, so the foil isn’t quite as important.
Lifeline’s biggest issue is that to date it’s not a wildly popular EDH card. That’s a bit surprising, as I’d imagine there’s a series of commanders that could make good use of it, but litigating whether a card should or shouldn’t be good in EDH doesn’t mean anything for it’s price. If it’s not seeing play it’s not expensive, no matter how good we think the card is. (I’m looking at you, 200 copies of Marton Stromgald.)
Still, a new commander that specializes in death in a way no other commander really has could be just what Lifeline needs to go from virtually nonexistent to niche gem. That’s not a recipe for booming demand, but when we’re talking about a card that’s what, 21 years old, supply and the ravages of time are on our side. Like Krav, we’re not likely to see movement if Teysa isn’t popular, but if she is, this could be a major component of aggregate decklists.
Vizier of the Menagerie (Foil)
Price Today: $8 Possible Price: $20
We’ll wrap up by looking at a different Allegiance commander, Nikya of the Old Ways. Nikya wants you to play absolutely nothing but creatures, and rewards you by functioning as a walking Mirari’s Wake. How do you make the best use of this? By putting yourself in situations where you can cast hordes of creatures fast and hard. Lucky for you, Vizier does just that, as every creature on top of your deck is akin to drawing a card.
Unlike Lifeline an Krav, Vizier already has a base in EDH, with over 4k decks registered with a copy. That’s not remarkable in its own right, but it does give us an idea that there’s already a segment of players generating demand. A new commander that is definitely going to be after this effect stands to accelerate drain on a surprisingly limited supply.
Checking in on TCG, there’s roughly 30ish NM foil copies, starting at $8 and ramping to $10, and then $15 quickly. Other vendors are already out of stock, or are priced north of $15. Even without Nikya I’d like this as a spec, although admittedly it looks like it may be a slow burner. Hopefully Nikya drives a few people to to snag their copies and accelerates the drain on the existing supply, which would position you to turn a 12 to 24 month spec into a 3 to 4 month spec.
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.
[/hide]
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
