Watchtower

The Watchtower 2/18/19 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.

GP (MF) Memphis was this weekend. You wouldn’t really know by checking DailyMTG; they got rid of the coverage section it seems. The ‘Events’ header is still there, but not the coverage subheader. I’m sure if you went looking for all the old coverages they’re in there somewhere, but importantly, if you land on the site, you’d mostly have no idea that a large event occurred this weekend. In order to get the deets on the decklists (and winner), I had to check CFB’s site. Which, by the way, also isn’t really set up to display this sort of information. The GP coverage is in with the articles, and already pushed below the fold by Monday morning’s crop. Which is all a shame, really, since the top lists had some great variety. Sure there was a Nexus build, but there was also Mono-Blue Tempo, Gruul Midrange, Rakdos Midrange, Sultai Midrange…ok, maybe it was fairly midrange heavy. Still, a lot less people are going to know what happened at each GP. Not only is that a bummer, it means a lot less people are going to know when a cool card shows up and performs well. Which then means that even if it’s a good spec, it still might not go anywhere, because the data may not be there for people to look at and realize they should be sleeving copies. Maybe.

Altar of Dementia (Foil)

Price Today: $13
Possible Price: $25

In case you’ve forgotten, Altar of Dementia was in Conspiracy. It’s a useful card with a low cost. Milling your opponents out is a choice, especially if you’ve got a way to generate humongous or arbitrarily large creatures. You can target yourself, digging for specific cards in your graveyard, or looking for triggers, such as Sidisi may want you to. You’re also provided a free , instant-speed tool to remove creatures you control from the board, which has all sorts of uses: eating creatures you temporarily stole, killing them in response to animation triggers, exile effects, threatens, etc. While raw power level of milling a few cards is questionable, the utility of being able to sacrifice creatures on demand is secretly quite useful.

Conspiracy was nearly five years ago now, believe it or not. This summer’s product is also slated to be “Modern relevant,” or something similar to that. As best as I can tell, that Modern product is in the same slot that would be Conspiracy, Battlebond, etc. Conspiracy may return next year, but that’s, well, next year. Until then, where else are you going to see foil Altar of Dementias appear?

Foils are about $13 right now, but chances are you’ll pay closer to $15 unless you’re the first person to read this. Still, with how low supply is looking, I don’t think that’s bad news for you. With the card’s popularity in EDH (8.5k+ decks), the new demand coming from Teysa, and how unlikely we are to see this again anytime soon, prices should keep rising on foils.

Splendid Reclamation (Foil)

Price Today: $6
Possible Price: $13

While it hasn’t been on anyone’s lips in the general Magic community lately, Lord Windgrace has been a consistent performer on EDHREC. He’s 3rd or 4th on the most-built month after month, and frankly, that isn’t going to change. People love lands-matter as an EDH theme, and with so many new tools printed over the last few years, and more coming each set, that draw is only getting stronger. Gitrog Monster really kicked it off, and Windgrace has opened the door to a third color. Splendid Reclamation is now in just under 8k decks, which for a card only a few years old is fairly impressive.

As an EDH card, Reclamation has proven powerful and useful in strategies that can leverage it. We know that isn’t going to change. Reclamation also gets eyeballed in Modern every now and then as a potential combo piece. If you can dump 20 cards into your graveyard in a turn or two and then Reclamation, you’re generating a great deal of mana that you can then use to do something else cool with all the stuff you left behind. Maybe a deck never materializes, but it’s worth being aware of the potential.

Could this show up again somewhere? Yeah, probably. Realistically, just about anywhere. The name isn’t domain specific, and the ability is mechanically universal, so there’s nothing restricting its printing. The same could be said of most cards though, right? Many cards are technically reprint candidates every set, but they aren’t, because there’s only ~40 rares a set and WotC doesn’t want to and doesn’t need to reprint everything anyone may want to buy.

Foils at $6 are appealing, since every couple of Windgrace players are going to go looking for one, and the outside Modern combo shot is valid. This is basically on Oracle of Mul Daya trajectory, assuming nothing interferes. There’s one guy with 33 copies, which is a speedbump, but other than that, there’s not a lot out there.

Deepglow Skate

Price Today: $7.50
Possible Price: $20

If you’ve been listening to MTG Fast Finance the last week or two, you’ll know that we’ve got a read (and we’re hardly unique in this regard) that War of the Spark, the final Ravnica set, is going to be planeswalker themed. I won’t explain why here, listen to the cast for that. It’s the presumption we’re operating on though.

From that starting point, we want to look at cards that support planeswalker strategies, since a deluge of planeswalkers is going to draw attention to those types. There’s no shortage of options out there, and we’ve discussed some of them before. Today, we’re looking at Skate. It’s hard to imagine a better tool than Deepglow Skate in a planeswalker deck. It doubles the number of counters not on one permanent, but any number. Any number! Have four walkers in play? There’s a good chance you probably just got the ultimate them all after playing Skate. That is so absurd. And as a creature, there’s infinite ways to rebuy that Skate trigger, so that you can keep doing it. Winning a game with six or seven emblems is awfully cool.

Supply is available, but not deep. There’s 50 or 60 on TCG, and then roughly that many on SCG too. That’s a fair bit, for sure, but when you consider how many people may start building walker decks after a set with 7, or 15, or 30 hits shelves, you can see how 100 copies of Skate could go out the window right quick.

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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.

Casual Fridays

The Rivals of Summer

It’s a Pro Tour, no, a paper Pro Tour, no, wait, a tabletop Mythic Championship #1 2019 next weekend.

If you follow the same sorts of folks I do on Twitter, you’re familiar with the jokes about names and awful branding and why does the 2019 MagicFest shirt have a design that echoes genitalia and so on but really, the change in the event names is the biggest fail of all. I could handle “Pro Tour Nagasaki 2017” pretty well but that failed to convey what the Standard metagame was like. In contrast, Pro Tour Dominaria will immediately call to mind how Teferi, Hero of Dominaria came roaring onto the scene. I will miss naming PTs after sets.

Last week I brought up some Ixalan cards that are buys or holds going into this summer and the rotation in the fall. There’s one subset of cards I wanted to mention, and then we’re into the Rivals of Ixalan cards I’ll be watching, plus a touch of PT spec.

I was remiss in not bringing up my favorite speculative pick of Ixalan: The buy-a-box/treasure chest promo versions of the Ixalan flip cards, which Travis Allen taught me to call Mapsterpieces, are fantastic pickups, especially the cheap ones. Search is about $60 and that’s a good price for a card seeing the Legacy and Modern play that this one is, Rites at $20 is a solid pickup as a budget Gaea’s Cradle, and the rest are super cheap, relatively niche, and a wonderful set to have put away for their inevitable spike. I have a soft spot for Conqueror’s Galleon, mainly because the flipped side is everything you ever wanted in Commander.

Rivals of Ixalan, as the last small set we’re going to have until they decide to bring back small sets, is in a smaller circulation than every other set that’s Standard-legal. This has not translated to a lot of expensive cards, but there are some sweet ones to look for.

The Immortal Sun ($16 nonfoil/$30 foil): Buy

I love this card in both versions but I’d so much rather have the foils. This is a card that goes in just about any Commander deck, is very one-sided, and shuts down all planeswalkers. Yes, that’s yours too, but that’s the price for the many other benefits you get. I think this is a very strong candidate to get reprinted in a future Commander deck, and so I advocate foils.

This saw a bump about the time that Guilds of Ravnica came out:

It’s seen some play in Standard, only 2000 decks over on EDHREC, and that’s why it’s $15 to pick up and not $10 or even $7. Still, I’m hoping it’ll come down in price, but I’m not holding my breath. If the price falls that means a good amount are still circulating, but my main thought is that most of the copies out there have been picked up and put into decks, never to come out unless they add more planeswalkers.

Jadelight Ranger ($9/$14): Sell

This is going to be a dollar by Thanksgiving, if it’s not bulk. It’s seen zero Modern play, it’s in less than 400 decks, the foil is 1.5x the nonfoil, instead of the two-to-three multiplier we’d prefer. It all adds up to a card that has no chance once it rotates. Please don’t keep a single one a moment longer than you have to. I respect if you have been playing with it for 18 months, and you want to hang on to the end, but even if this does well at the PT, I want no part of it.

Hadana’s Climb ($6/$11): Sell, then buy after it drops

Frankly, this applies to all five of the enemy-color flip cards from Rivals, as they are mostly very very powerful when flipped and run a wide gamut before then. I like cards with a low buy-in and low chance of reprint, and you’ll be able to get these dirt cheap. Again, I like foils a lot more and they won’t cost you that much more to get.

Azor’s Gateway ($5/$15): Sell

There was a point that this was a $15 card:

And that ship has sailed, friends. Yes, the land is amazing and a half, and if they ever print a card that allows you to transform target permanent this will be among the first to take off, but for now, I just can’t recommend it. I want to love this card, given that it’s two to play and just one to loot, but we can do better in Commander and the big payoff takes forever. I’m just not in on this card unless it drops to near-bulk prices, and then I’ll listen.

Now, as for the Pro Tour, and what to buy ahead of time, I’ve got some quick hits.

Kaya’s Wrath is going to have a good showing. River of Soot had a chance, I thought, but with both Cry of the Carnarium and Kaya’s Wrath, the control decks are pretty set. I don’t think it’ll win it all, but we’ll see a lot of boardwipe effects.

I really like having a few Venerated Loxodon at cheap prices. Don’t bother with the foils, but we’re going to see some impressive games on camera for this card, pumping a team before something else pumps the team.

I’m also a fan of picking up Expansion/Explosion before someone reminds us that it’s an instant and does sick things with Wilderness Reclamation. It’s $2 now, but it was $5 not long ago and that’s when it was being opened. Now that it’s at peak supply and lowest price, is there a bigger instant to cast?

Finally, if you’ve been holding Vivien Reid, I’m previewing myself a bit here but I think the best time to sell will be during the PT weekend. I foresee a spike for her, as she answers so many of Standard’s current problems quite effectively. I’m not buying her, not at this price with only two sets till she rotates, but if you’ve got spares, get ready.

Brainstorm Brewery

Brainstorm Brewery #326 Your Wish is Wrong!

DJ (@Rose0fThorns) gave Canada a gift over the weekend, Corbin (@CHosler88) is debating suing someone and Jason’s (@jasonEalt) wishes are wrong but they are here this week to help you navigate the waters of MTG Finance and the TCG Player changes.

Make sure to check us out on Youtube because everything is better with video. https://www.youtube.com/user/BrainstormBrewery

Jason Alt, ProTrader

Pro Trader: Identifying Blind Spots

5 Comments

Readers! 

I don’t have to do another article where I talk about how great I am at this because we can learn a lot from our failures, sometimes moreso than from our successes and while I don’t care about missing stuff per se as long as there are plenty of hits out there to identify, we don’t want to miss anyone who would have wanted to buy those cards for themselves. 

So while I didn’t really initially see cards I ignored as cards I was missing, I think it’s important to identify our blind spots and take a look at how we can avoid missing those cards in the future. I’m specifically talking about expensive foils that have spiked as a result of very competitive decks like Vannifar and how we can make sure we correctly identify future Vannifars and identify which classes of cards from those decks to buy specifically. 

So what went wrong with Vannifar, first of all?

Who Was Into It?

At first, it seemed like Vannifar was a very exciting, if not obvious commander. My twitter feed is full of both EDH and finance people and every finance person was talking about Intruder Alarm and Thornbite Staff and every EDH person was talking about Teysa. EDHREC data back up my assertion that the EDH community as a whole just wasn’t that excited by Vannifar. I was pretty secure in my assessment that it was going to be really tough to sell non-obvious cards to non-speculators, and it was a very specific buyout that made me realize something different was going on here. So what went wrong? My assessment was that Vannifar was a boring, obvious, linear deck with a pretty unsatisfying pod chain, and the general EDH community’s apparent rejection of Vannifar in favor of Teysa (and even Nikya) seemed to bear that out. EDH players, in general, don’t want boring, linear obvious decks and you need to sell a lot of copies of recent cards to move prices. I forgot to consider one thing I knew, and by the time I saw the card that had spiked and realized what it meant, it was basically too late.

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