Watchtower

The Watchtower 12/3/18 for ProTraders – Plan Your Specs

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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.

Overall, we’ve had a relatively quiet week. SCG’s Modern Open was won by Ross Merriam, a like-minded fellow, with a full grip of Arclight Phoenixes. This is roughly the amount of success needed to at least include a card in the “won’t get you laughed out of the room for discussing” tier, and is the first step towards becoming “staple of at least tier two.” We saw a similar pathway for Humans and Spirits over the last year or so.

Other than that, GP Shizuoka wasn’t terribly thrilling. Legacy had little in the way of upsets, as is expected. Their Standard showing was heavy on the Golgari, with no meaningful innovation as far as we’re concerned, with one exception to that rule. The Ultimate Masters fervor has died down. Expect this trend to be repeated over the next few weeks, with much of everyone’s attention preoccupied with holiday parties, gift shopping, and getting colds.

March of the Multitudes

Price Today: $6
Possible Price: $13

Early in Guilds of Ravnica’s lifespan March of the Multitudes was a bit of a breakout card. Checking the price graph, you can see it from $10 to $5, then skyrocket to $20. Since then it’s dwindled, as shortly after GRN’s release it became apparent that Selesnya wasn’t one of the guilds to beat this time around. Turns out Voice of Resurgence did GW a big favor the last time we were in Ravnica.

GP Shizuoka wasn’t terribly exciting, although there was an appearance in the top 8 of a GW tokens build with a full grip of Marches. Given that Golgari Midrange is mostly a goodstuff deck as BG has been so many times before it, it is vulnerable to wide strategies just as its forefathers before. Ravenous Chupacabra is a lot less impressive one when of your cards creates four separate bodies.

March has fallen to about $6, which is a far cry from the $20 it hit during spoilers. While token strategies haven’t found their place in Standard yet, this success in Japan may herald a shift in the metagame, especially as Golgari is liable to continue to do well at non-Pro Tour tournaments worldwide. If GW token strategies, and March of the Multitudes along with them, become a prominent part of Standard, expect this archetype-defining 4x mythic to get a bit more expensive than six bucks.

Rest in Peace (Foil)

Price Today: $15
Possible Price: $25

Take a peek at the staple list of Modern and you’ll find that the 4th most played spell — ahead of Thoughtseize, Serum Visions, and Ancient Stirrings — is Rest in Peace. There’s no doubt Dredge is having a bit of a moment in Modern, which will eventually fade, as the format is cyclical, but even if Hollow One is banned, Rest in Peace will remain relevant. I heavily played Modern from the outset for years and years, and my RIPs rarely left a deck’s sleeves and ended up back in my collection binder. No matter what’s going on in the format, somebody is trying to abuse their graveyard, because the single second people stop running graveyard hate, some chucklehead with Worldfire, Flame Jab, and Spellweaver Helix is going to show up and crush an SCG Open.

You’ll find foils from Return to Ravnica at the $20 price point today, though supply is shallow for sure. There’s a playset around $20 to $21, another three around $25, and then that’s it. Masters 25 copies, the ones we’re looking at, start at $15 instead. There’s a whopping 11 NM copies on TCG at the time of publication. I’d expect the M25 copies to catch up to the $20 to $22 price point reasonably soon, and both copies will start pushing closer to $25 or $30 without an intervention on Wizards’ part.

Zendikar Resurgent(Foil)

Price Today: $6
Possible Price: $15

Independent of Modern and Standard, EDH keeps on chugging. Looking into Jodah, Archmage Eternal, Zendikar Resurgent jumped out at me. When Resurgent was printed it was one of those “oh this will be an awesome pickup for EDH in two or three years.” Here we are a little under three years later, and I’m starting to like it more and more.

Unsurprisingly, it’s wildly popular in the format. There are over 15,000 listings on EDHREC, ranking it as a true format staple. At the same time, foil supplies are getting shallow. We’re not talking RIP shallow, but still shallow. You’ll find a handful of singles in the $6 range, a few more under $10, and then the ladder to $15 and $20 is short and quick.

Zendikar Resurgent is highly popular, has one printing, and is most likely to see future reprints come in Commander product, which will be lacking in foils. Attrition should pull this up from $6 towards at least $10, and probably $12 to $15, or even $20 if we go another two years.

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.


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Casual Fridays

Buying up the Guilds

Here we are, the time that is often the doldrums of Magic news and sets. Thankfully, Ultimate Masters has been completely spoiled for a couple of weeks, the preorders are settling out, and I’m frothing at the mouth to get some drafts in.

What I don’t want to overlook is that we’re still in the first couple months of a new Standard, and specifically, Guilds of Ravnica cards have just short of two years to go up and down in price.

Generally speaking, cards from the big fall set tend to trickle downward in price for three to six months after their season ends. (Season meaning when it’s being opened at GPs and FNM drafts, etc.) That was with the Big Set-Small Set-Small Set model, though, when there was still a little of the big set being opened.

Now, with every set being its own block, the timeline appears to be accelerated. I don’t want to pick up cards that are rotating out next October, but GRN cards are in the sweet spot where the supply is nearly maxed (Ultimate Masters is going to suck the wind right out of those sails) and pretty soon we’ll all be ravenous for Ravnica Allegiance previews.

For example, Vraska’s Contempt:

The little removal spell that could.

This hit a low of about $5 at the end of Ixalan season and then bam, jumped up as a premier removal spell in the format.

I want to identify those cards now, instead of waiting. I especially love getting them now, as there’s nearly two years for a deck to hit big. To the cards!

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expensive cards

ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

 

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 (next up: Oakland in January!) and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

Brainstorm Brewery

Brainstorm Brewery #315 An Expanded Episode-lit

Jason (@jasonEalt), Corbin (@CHosler88) and DJ (@Rose0fThorns) are back to talk about the fully spoiled UMA, the artist boycott and answer your emails.

Make sure to check us out on Youtube for hidden easter eggs and facial reactions  https://www.youtube.com/user/BrainstormBrewery

 

Return info for TeeSpring: You can return the items to the following address:

 

Teespring

1201 Aviation Blvd

Dock Door 9

Hebron, KY 41048

 

Kindly leave a note with your order number/email address, or include the label from your original shipment.

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Better Bargain to Buy Before the Bottom

Readers!

I was going to make a huge deal out of the fact that I got a comment on my last article pointing out that they found it informative and helpful and I usually get fewer than three comments on an article (not just here, but on Coolstuff, also) and then I read Adrian Sullivan’s primer from when he won a GP and it had two comments and then I thought “three comments is a lot.” The thing about being a large percentage of the comments I get by virtue of bothering to comment is that I overreact to what can honestly be both construed as “an overwhelming percentage of my feedback” and also “literally two comments” and do what those people say. After all, they wrote in. Accordingly, I’m going to write something I hope is pretty similar to last week’s article and if you don’t like it, blame the people who commented.

Last week I talked about cards that were bound to increase by virtue of having been ruled out of Ultimate Masters before the full set was printed. It was more valuable to Pro Traders on Tuesday than the general public on Thursday but isn’t much good to anyone, now. While I still think “act fast” articles have value because you’re working with information not everyone has if they didn’t sit and think about it and rather than sit and think about it, you paid me to do it for you, which I’m happy to do. However, longer-term forecasts are good, too, because if you know what you want long-term before you crack your first booster, buying, selling and trading will be a lot easier since you don’t have to plan, I planned for you. Let’s talk about the cards in the EDHREC top 100 that are in Ultimate Masters, their rank, their likelihood for another future reprinting and how much we expect their price to recover given those factors. We nailed cards like Rune-Scarred Demon and Austere Command in Iconic Masters, so let’s work the same magic on a set with lower supply. This will make you the least sexy money you’ll ever make, but sexy doesn’t pay the rent, desperate men pay sexy’s rent for sexy. Let’s pay our own rent, shall we?

THE EDHREC TOP 100

I realize that EDHREC has a few limitations and I wish people realized I realized that. I’ve been using EDHREC data to crush it at predictions for like 5 years, there’s not much about the site that you’re going to tell me that is going to make me go “Oh man, I’ve been doing it wrong all these years” so let’s assume that until EDHREC starts making me lose people a bunch of money, the data has things we can learn from it. If I say something derived from data that you think is wrong, A) argue with me in the comments and B) you’re under no obligation to buy. The best specs in my opinion are the ones where I say something and it jives with something you already thought but weren’t quite sure of. That’s a spec based on consensus. The Top 100 cards are the most-used cards and they’re ranked 1-100 on the basis of percentage inclusion in eligible decks rather than raw inclusion. Of course Sol Ring is in more decks than Chromanticore, for lots of reasons. However, Blasphemous Act is in 30.705 decks and Solemn Simulacrum is in 281,775 decks but Blasphemous Act is ranked two spots higher. Why? Because more decks could be playing Solemn and aren’t than could be playing Blasphemous Act but aren’t. Capiche? It’s a simple concept but people think I don’t know it so I’m pointing it out. Raw number of decks is very important but it doesn’t tell the whole story, otherwise we’d buy nothing but artifacts. So what from the Top 100 made it into Ultimate Masters?

 

Demonic Tutor

Rank – 20/100

Demonic Tutor is in a lot of decks. It’s the #1 most-played Black card in terms of raw numbers at over 46,000 which is like… all the black decks. Well, it’s a third of them, but, still. No other card is played in more than a third and this is a card that was $45 on Card Kingdom recently and selling for that price. There weren’t too many judge promo or other versions of the card and with this new art, I expect this to be highly coveted. This is a pretty insane inclusion as a rare in a set with $6 mythics and we’re lucky Wizards wanted us to have such a good set. So how long do we expect to wait for the price to do its thing? Well, if you consider Vampiric Tutor a decent analogue, take a look.

This took between 8 and 12 months to decrease and then rose pretty steadily. There wasn’t a whole ton of money to be made, but if you were buying at buylist or trading cards that didn’t recover as well, you did fine. If we’re talking in at retail, out at retail, someone who played it perfectly bought in around $26 on TCG Player and got out at around $46 on TCG Player, which is nothing to sneeze at. AND it was predictable. When the card his $26 after a few months of sliding, people were happy to sell for $15 cash at the LGS or trade for $25 worth of Modern stuff (so… one Manamorphose?). If you want a Tutor to play with, wait until it bottoms out, note if it starts to rebound and buy double because you’ll pay more if you wait longer and when it doubles up, you can always sell the spare copy and you got the play copy for free. That’s how I roll, anyway. Sexy doesn’t pay my rent, but sexy goes in decks. I think Demonic Tutor follows a similar trajectory, but has a slightly different demand profile.

Also, this will have the most affordable foil copies of this card we’ve ever seen, potentially. All in all, it’s a good look.

Eternal Witness

Rank – 5/100

There isn’t much excuse for not playing this card in a green deck and 42% of all builders couldn’t find one. 56,000 decks is a lot of demand and this card, despite being uncommon and in a precon and printed a ton, manages to shrug off every reprinting. After 7 printings (counting Commander Anthologies 1 and 2) with Terese Nielsen’s art, we get a new take on it and foils of this will be the only foil copies of Eternal Witness with this art in case people like it better. It’s also a box topper promo so not all of the demand for the card will be satiated by older copies which won’t help this shrug off the reprint a ton, but clearly Eternal Witness doesn’t need the help. Printed at uncommon again, I expect this to tank pretty deeply, although this is likely one of the smallest printings of this card to date and there’s a lot of demand.

The cheapest the Fifth Dawn version ever got was the week Modern Masters 2017 came out, which was about a year and a half after the last time Eternal Witness got a reprint of any real size, in Commander 2015. It’s been a while but it didn’t take the price that long to climb back up to where it mostly equilibrated, although it peaked a bit, both times it wasn’t included in a set it probably should have been (Modern Masters 2 and Battlebond). This will be $8 again, and soon, and it will be dirt in the near term unless people overwhelmingly prefer the new art, which they might.

Kodama’s Reach

Rank 10/100

The third and final card from the Top 100 in Ultimate Masters also has brand new art and also shrugs off reprints.  Even at common, foils of this will be desirable and the new art could end up displacing copies in other decks (it will in mine) meaning existing demand could be a booster. At common, this is getting a lot of new copies, but it’s always at common and it seems to recover. It’s at least always a pick, you can ship foils to people who like the new art and in general, it’s worth knowing that this should never be left in draft chaff although it probably will. I seriously get free copies of cards like this all the time by digging through cards players just leave on tables. Grab the good stuff, put the rest in neat piles, start a donation box for new players and look like a good person.

I finished… uh…early. I expected 5 cards and was a little surprised to find only 3. That means to give Pro Traders their money’s worth, I’m doing a bonus section.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY