Readers,

It’s no secret that Prime Speaker Zannifar is going to impact prices. It’s a dumb, linear, obvious deck and the fact that there are obvious, slam-dunk cards for it that people who don’t even play EDH saw them a mile away means that the obvious stuff gets bought out and gets bought out hard.

Hard.

HARD.

GREEK UNDERGROUND… you know the rest

The ship has sailed on a lot of “Staples” for the deck and there’s not much point of making like a greater fool and buying an Intruder Alarm now. Fortunately, readers of mine who don’t pay attention much to EDH, preferring that I pay attention to it and they pay me to pay attention may not know that there is a secret to EDH deck building.

Vannifar decks still have to include 96 more cards. The less obvious they are to people who don’t play EDH, the more money you can make.

“But Jason,” I am pretending that you are asking “surely the people who DO play and understand EDH have already purchased those cards that are not obvious to pure speculators but which have occurred to them.” Well, here’s another secret about EDH. No, they haven’t. They will put their decklist on TappedOut (don’t put your decklists on TappedOut, by the way, use Goldfish or DeckStats) or DeckStats, they’ll debate which color sleeves to put the deck in but the one thing they won’t do is buy the cards and build the deck until they have Vannifar in their hands. I don’t know why this is, but I sure appreciate it. It allows us to figure out what they’re going to build and buy it before they do.  Let’s look at the other 96 cards that aren’t obvious. Oh, and 40 of them are lands. Let’s look at the other 56 cards that aren’t obvious. Sol Ring. Let’s look at the other 55 cards that aren’t obvious.

I’m not going to show you 55 cards. Sorry, there aren’t 55 cards bound to go up, but I will show you some I think have promise.

EDHREC doesn’t have enough data to publish findings yet but googling Vannifar lists will show you that some people are already thinking pretty hard about how to make a dumb, linear combo deck with a Pod chain. I like a toolbox build but other people don’t so let’s look at the cards that are in almost every build I found.

Pod isn’t at a historic low but it’s climbing up mostly irrespective of specific demand. If this gets unbanned in Modern and you have a pile of these, you’ll look like a genius. These will go in every Vannifar deck and while far fewer Zannifar decks are going to be built than team “$20 Intruder Alarm” thinks, there will be some and you’ll move these. It looks like it’s midway through a climb anyway so smart money is betting on a graph shape like this where you know you’re getting some demand and the only question is whether you’ll get exactly as much as Vannifar gives us or more from another source. Seems low-risk to me.

This has a bit more reprint risk than I like, but I think we’re talking a short-term play here if there’s one to be made at all. This also has shrugged off a reprint in the past because it turns out it’s a very good card in EDH and does two jobs that are both important and does them in any deck due to its lack of a color identity. All of those things are pretty powerful. 11,127 is above my “magical arbitrary but meaningful to me” threshold of 10,000 decks on EDHREC and while that’s not astronomical for an artifact, there’s demand on top of Vannifar and the overall trend of the card is up.

That goes for the Commander 2013 copy as well, which celebrated its 5th birthday a few months ago and marked the occasion by tripling in value over its life.

This is better than Thornbite Staff in more decks, goes in the Vannifar deck also and there’s no reason this will ever be worth less money than Thornbite Staff. That’s all I have to say about that.

This won’t double but it will be in the decks and that’s significant. It’s not exactly doing a ton of business elsewhere and the spread continues to grow as the bottom drops out of dealer confidence in the form of lowering buylist prices. This is just used a lot, I don’t know how strongly I feel about the current metrics, but you may feel differently.

This seems to be in every list I come across and it also appears to be ticking up slowly. It’s not super likely to get a reprint and it’s a mythic from a set that there was no real pressure on anyone to buy so for those reasons alone, even irrespective of Vannifar, I like this. Vannifar makes me like it Vannifar more.

This card is also in a lot of Vannifar lists I see online and it’s likely EDHREC data will bear that out soon. This can’t get much lower as a mythic and the $1.50 foils seem awfully inviting and somewhat rare. If Thornbite Staff can flirt with $15, I don’t think $1.50 on these is out of the question, but I also don’t think you have any possibility of this going up for any reason other than Vannifar which makes me hesitate.

This was $50 once. It was also $10 once. Which one do you think it will be again first? Remember, this is the top of most pod chains when you turn your 6 drop into Avenger of Zendikar then hit this. Of course this doesn’t give your creatures haste, but if you need haste, there’s a card you should take a look at.

So this is on its way out of control and while it’s not on the Reserved List per se, reprint likelihood feels low to me and people are buying the Legends version like it IS one the Reserved List. Chronicles copies seem like endangered species and Chronicles hasn’t just been around for longer than most Magic players have played Magic, Chronicles came out before a lot of them were born. This is a $30-$40 card waiting to happen. You already have to pay in excess of $20 for a Near Mint copy on TCG Player so while the damaged copies no one wants are confounding metrics, you can safely pick off the Near Mint copies, clean out Card Shark and other peripheral sites no one does a good job of keeping an eye on and try not to trigger an avalanche.

Check yourself. There are a lot of cards I didn’t mention but some of them might be cards you personally think are worth looking at. Do you think the supply of Quirion Ranger is at a tipping point? Want to make some ballsy buys of Reserved List cards like Palinchron? Found a mispriced Staff of Domination? There are more cards that can go in the deck and I didn’t cover them all, so do some research, wait for EDHREC to give you the answers, ask around, build your own list. Do anything but gripe about how you missed the boat on cheap Intruder Alarms. You should have bought them at $2 when I said to in a QS article 6 years ago like I did. We all make mistakes. Until next time!

Readers,

I don’t want to do a 2018 Retrospective. Sorry. I was going to go back and reread every article I wrote in 2018 and select my best picks but, nah. You want to do that? That’s a pretty good idea. I was very insightful this year. I predicted a lot of things not because I am especially smart but because I spent 7 years of trial and error honing a strategy for predicting things and it’s working out because I use an analytical, data-driven approach. You are smart enough to have done it. You easily could have. You didn’t because it’s easier to pay me to do it for you. I don’t change my own oil. I know how. I think I learned in the Cub Scouts or something. The Boy Scouts you learn to do stuff but the Cub Scouts are when you’re like 9 and you get an award for watching your Dad change the oil or your grandfather or your Mom or whoever taught you to do man stuff. I feel like I changed my own oil a few times after that and said “I don’t want to do this myself” so I don’t. I pay some dude at Uncle Ed’s to change my oil. I’m not better than him, I just don’t want to do a dirty job in my garage when I can pay a dude in dirty clothes in a dirty garage to do it. So that’s my approach to finance- I’m just a dude changing your oil. You want to change your own oil? Go look it up on Youtube and then go buy the pan and the oil and rags and lava soap for when your hands are all oily afterward and junk and, oh, look at that, you spent as much as an oil change costs and your wife is pissed off that there’s oil residue on her guest towels.

What was I even talking about? 2018 has been incredibly taxing on me and we’re about to have another kid in the middle of 2019 and I will probably never sleep again. That’s good, though, because any inefficiencies in my method are about to get ironed out because I won’t have like 4 hours to blow writing an article, I’ll be dealing with a 3 year old and an infant. With 2018 officially over, why not look to 2019? Go read my old articles from 2018 if you want – there’s good stuff in there. but let’s talk about something else from 2018 instead. Let’s talk about a set that’s basically peaking right now.

B A T T L E B O N D

Battlebond was a smashing success and married everything I want in Magic. I write about EDH, 2HG is my favorite format and I dabble in finance and Battlebond checks all of those boxes, making the Conspiracy set the first 2 Conspiracy sets wish they were. So what’s peaking right now? Let’s take a look.

With very few exceptions, EDH is where these cards are being played, which is a huge plus for EDH players since no one is fighting them for the cards to a large extent. Other EDH players are, though, so it’s time to get some of the stuff that’s showing signs of twitching. When you sort by most-used on EDHREC, it’s predictable at first. I bet you can guess the first 5 cards. Also, saying it’s 5 cards is a hint. Also, your peripheral vision is probably picking up the answer because I’m displaying the pic below. I’ll just link it now, you know the answer, it’s the lands, I didn’t trick you at any point.

Blue, White, Green, Black, Red, in that order. Of course the two Blue lands are played the most, that’s obvious. What wasn’t obvious was how much play Spellseeker was seeing.

At 1,174 decks, this isn’t EXACTLY a staple but if you compare that to the number of copies of Luxury Suite, 1,344, and you realize that all of the numbers are pretty low. Remember, the numbers in ratio to each other is more important than a raw number. A raw number can’t tell you much but the fact that Spellseeker is in half as many decks as Morphic Pool and almost as many as Luxury Suite tells you all you need to know. This is $4 on TCG Player which is high for a rare, except not the highest it could be. Besides the 5 Battlebond lands, Seedborn Muse and Diabolic Intent are worth more. Spellseeker has strong EDH metrics, has a non-zero amount of Legacy play (3 results on MTGTop8, which isn’t nothing. There were 89 results for it in Competitive EDH events). This is half the price of Morphic Pools and played half as much. Do you think the price of Luxury Suite will stay the same? If it goes up, I expect this to go up just as much. I’d peg its price to .5x Morphic Pools or 1x Bountiful Promenade and buy accordingly. Oh, and this is a $32 foil, so it’s pretty clear people are aware of how powerful this is. It’s not going to spike as easily as, say, Archfiend of Despair, but considering that already happened, this a better play considering there is still time to buy in. Also, Archfiend is played less – half as much per EDHREC.

Speaking of cards whose prices will likely rise and fall together, let’s look at another pair of cards.

I don’t think there is a 10:1 ratio between mythics and non-mythics and as little play as both seem to be seeing in an absolute sense, Pir’s Whim sees play in half as many decks as Spellseeker and made a lot of EDH writers’ Top 10 lists this year. Pir’s Whim is under the radar and like it or not, short of it getting played on The Command Zone, it likely will be for a while. That’s too bad because the card is actually bananas. It says land card, not basic land card. You could blow up 3 Sol Rings and go get a Gaea’s Cradle with this. Bramble Sovereign is good but it’s demonstrably not much more popular than Whim but it’s perceived to be more popular. Another great thing about Pir’s Whim is that at $7 or so for foil, there is room for growth. It debuted at around $15 and has been sinking since, but if it ever starts to rebound, it’s going places. We got less Battlebond than we wanted and it’s unlikely a card called Pir’s Whim will get a reprint anytime soon, so that $7 foil could be $15 again before you know it.

Even more popular than the Lannister twins, these foils are $10 each and not as common as you may think. The buylist market price on Pir is the same as the retail price, which may be a fluke but may also indicate a price change is incoming.

Interestingly enough, these are actually cheaper on Card Kingdom than on TCG Player, which means the market is moving the price faster than a retailer can keep up with. It also means their buylist, usually the gold standard, is only about $4. I don’t know what the disparity means, but I do know that most people tend to get their signals from TCG Player so you may be able to get a near arbitrage going with the $7 foils on Card Kingdom. The price of these toofy bois is going up, I can feel it deep in my molars.

Last Pair

These are both pretty underrated cards in terms of what people say they like from the set but when you look at what people are actually playing versus what they say they would play, you get cards like this, cards I called in past set reviews and took heat for, overperforming expectations. At 550ish, these are just below Archfiend and above Bramble Sovereign. Should these be worth more than a buck or two right now? Hard to say they should given that they see a 5th as much play as Morphic Pool.  Would it surprise you to know Bonus Round is sold out at $8 in foil and Stolen Strategy is almost sold out at $12? Bonus Round has been flat around $8 for a minute but if it’s beginning to sell out, take notice. Strategy is on the downswing and $12 might not be the floor, but considering the demand here is identical almost except for the possibility of play in other formats (couldn’t find any evidence of that on Top8) I think these prices will eventually be the same. Whether they’re the same at $6 or the same at $15, that’s your call. I will say after Najeela and the lands, Bonus Round is the 5th-most-played card and Strategy 6th and it’s tough to argue with data and apologize to me for telling me I was dumb to say a do-nothing red Enchantment was worth playing at the same time.

 

That does it for me this week. Battlebond is beginning to ripen and with no supply on the horizon, those lands are prime to hit the $10 I know they can be. Buy the other stuff accordingly and keep reading my dumb ideas in 2019. A blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. Until next time!