Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Into the Ocean

I feel like 5 or 6 years ago I wrote an article called “Foiled” with a bunch of Blue October references in it and the biggest difference between now and then isn’t that back then I would argue if someone said Blue October sucked and now I won’t and it’s less that I don’t think they suck (they probably suck) but now I am not going to bat for bands I like that apparently I’m not supposed to (Can you imagine if I took time out of my day to engage every person who said 311 sucks? Whatever, I like 311 for some reason and I’m too old to care what some 23-year-old hipster with a tattoo of Jeff Magnum lyrics or some other pretentious BS thinks) and it’s more that I just don’t have the energy to try to fit a bunch of Blue October references that no one is going to catch into an article.

I wrote an article about Mairsil on Gathering Magic (sorry, Coolstuffinc) a year ago where I jammed like 25 references to Pretenders songs into it and no one caught on and that felt like a huge waste of time, so screw it. You don’t read my articles because you find me clever, and that’s the second biggest difference between me now and me 5 years ago. I used to think people read my articles because they thought I was smart and good at finance and now I realize you just want me to think thoughts so you don’t have to and you’re paying me a small portion of the money you make using your time more wisely and I’m actually super OK with that. So, yeah. No song lyric references (I mean, not that you’d try to catch them either way), just cards I think this year’s crop of EDH decks could nudge in the right direction. This will go quickly and I’ll probably cover more than one commander but I think there’s value here which is how I get away with how I structure my articles.

I normally am not a huge fan of foils because I think the demand for EDH foils is overstated but when there is a large multiplier already, I think it’s fair to assume that there is room to grow. Let’s look at some I like predicated on C18.

Aminatou

Oath of Teferi

I catch a lot of heat for referencing Card Kingdom prices and I do it for several reasons.

  1. If a card sells out on Card Kingdom, I don’t care if it sold for more than it sold for on TCG Player. There is a segment of the population that only knows about Card Kingdom and their demand matters, too, and this is a way to study it in isolation.
  2. EDHREC uses Card Kingdom prices and has an affiliate linking deal. Everyone who browses EDHREC sees a Card Kingdom price on every card and those numbers get embedded in their unconscious mind and are used as a reference. Also, they click the links on the cards and are taken right to the sales portal which is convenient and a non-trivial number of people do this daily. Again, not everyone knows about TCG Player.
  3. If a card sells out on Card Kingdom, it doesn’t matter if it was cheaper on SCG or TCG Player or freaking Card Shark, Card Kingdom now needs to restock which means they’re raising their buylist price. Card Kingdom has a very competitive buylist and almost always pays the most PLUS they have a high trade-in bonus and are generous with grading (though that may be changing).  I like to know what they’re low on stock of.

Card Kingdom isn’t TCG Player but they’re down to their last $4 copy of a card that goes in Atraxa, which should be enough. The fact that it’s a good fit in Aminatou, also is great news. Nearly 2/3 of the decks registered run it.

Now a bulk, non-mythic rare in the best-selling Magic set of all time isn’t super exciting, but there are significantly fewer foils and this has a 16x multiplier already and is still selling out. I predict this could hit $10 in a year or two and $4 seems like a pretty reasonable entry point to me. I don’t know foils as well as James does so I’m not going to tell you what I think of Combustible Gearhulk Masterpieces (Actually, no, I will tell you. Combustible is in a mere 800 decks fewer than Noxius Gearhulk’s 6,350 decks [just under Massacre Wurm and just above Painful Quandary in the EDHREC Top 100 Black cards] and Noxius Masterpieces popped already, so I guess I do have an opinion) but I will tell you Oath of Teferi is in 685 decks between Aminatou and Atraxa and that’s not bad for a card that was printed AFTER Atraxa. This has legs.

Gonti, Lord of Luxury

This is a double threat given its efficacy as a standalone commander as well as an inclusion in many decks.

I like the underlying metrics here, I don’t think Gonti is particularly reprintable and even less so in foil and I think $4 is pretty cheap for something like this. Again, it’s a 16x multiplier but we’ve seen wider divergences than that and I think this has real legs. If I’m totally off base, I’m sure I’ll hear about it but despite my relative inexperience with EDH foils, I think this is pretty solid.

Arcane Denial

Can you try to guess how many decks this card is it? It’s a Counterspell you have to pay mana for and it draws your opponent  cards. Probably not too many, right?

It turns out a lot of people like this card. It’s the 12th-highest-played Blue CARD on EDHREC. Not Instant, CARD. At $2 for a foil from a set that’s at peak supply currently that was the first time to print this card in foil despite there being 5 other versions of it, I think we could see a 2.5x increase pretty trivially. I am surprised it’s this low. I know it’s common but this is also the only foil version of an insanely popular spell from a set with expensive boosters.

I know I am dogging my abilities a tad here, but I made a call at around a buck based on its combo potential with Isochron Scepter in competitive decks a while back and it was pretty controversial and I figured I whiffed and forgot about it. Then I checked today.

Guess this method has some legs. Speaking of legs, we saw Dramatic Reversal go from $1 to $4 in under a year, how many decks is Reversal in compared to 20k for Arcane Denial?

Lol. Ok, then. So we have confirmed 400% growth on a card in a fifth as many decks? That would seem to indicate $8-$10 for Arcane Denial in about a year is pretty reasonable but I don’t really know what foils do. I do think there is a 0% chance you don’t make money buying foil Arcane Denial at $2 and I don’t care that there’s a foil in every M25 pack. I don’t think you can lose at all here. I’m inclined to throw a couple hundred  bucks at this just because I always forget to buy my own specs. If my articles had the power to spike cards on their own, Seance would be $10 and I could afford to retire.

Let’s look at another commander.

Tuvasa

Plea for Guidance

This isn’t all that likely to get a reprint in foil and I don’t even know about a non-foil reprint either. All of this could get nerfed by them deciding that there is no good reason not to do a Commander’s Arsenal every year at Christmas but until they come to their senses, this seems safe, it’s in both Estrid and Tuvasa, tutors for Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood in decks with access to Black and White and generally does work.

That’s not exactly 20K, but it is pretty close to what we saw for Dramatic Reversal and that showed some nice gains. CK has 1 copy left and as much as I want to buy it, I’ll leave it for one of you. They can only increase their buylist so much before it becomes possible to arbitrage from TCG Player and if it gets even close, the price will adjust. This seems like an obvious buy at $3.

Cleansing Meditation

This used to be more than a 2x multiplier but with more people playing Enchanted Evening (which spiked to $35 based on its status as a kittycat more than anything else) the non-foil went up so much the multiplier is 2x. One of those prices will correct. Let’s try and guess which one.

This is old, low supply, powerful, part of a try-hard combo played by people more likely to do shenanigans like this and also foil their decks and in general, seems underpriced at 2x. Card Kingdom’s last copy being EX rather than NM may be the only thing keeping the price from changing already – TCG Player has one seller trying to get $25 from a NM foil. If you can get there around $10 in good shape, which may not be possible anymore, I would.

Starfield of Nyx

This is pricey a bit but it’s also barely a 2x and with the reprint risk of this being very low, I think this climbs. I don’t know how much – I can’t imagine someone shelling out $50 for this, but I sold a Ydwen Efreet for $100 this week so I don’t even know what to think anymore.

Foils. They’re harder to reprint, WAY harder to sell and really hard to predict. I can pick boxes of commons and uncommons all the way down to a nickel without having to refer to the sheet more than a few times a minute and I look up every. Single. Foil. Good stuff is usually worth a lot in foil, but it’s the stuff I had no idea about that really gets me. Foil Sea’s Claim is worth more than foil Thirst for Knowledge? OK, then. Until I learn a bit more about foils, I’m going to continue to challenge myself to find these picks using my traditional method. In the mean time, hitting on a 3x gain on 15 copies of Arcane Denial will pay for a year of Pro Trader and I think it’s a really low risk scenario. Thanks for reading and I’ll be back next week with some Jund and Izzet picks. Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 8/27/18 for ProTraders – Plan Your Specs

1 Comment

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.

If Grand Prix Prague accomplished anything, it was letting us all know that Modern is still a vibrant format ripe for disruption. Hardened Scales Affinity did well last weekend, and it secured another top 8 in Prague, which is roughly the amount of success you need before the deck is worth considering beyond a statistical aberration. I can’t promise you that it will gain mainstream traction, but it’s cool to consider at least.

UW Control was all over the top 32 slots, with Jace and Teferi teaming up in something I imagine DeviantArt will reimagine as a hunky buddy cop duo. While they couldn’t crack the final tables, 8 of the 9th to 32nd place decks were some form of the UW control deck featuring the pair. Control decks by their very nature need to shift and evolve to meet the threats of the weekend, though there’s typically a core of cards that gives the deck its power. Jace and Teferi may be that core, and this may be the vehicle which delivers unto Modern the JtMS deck it’s been waiting for.

Jace, the Mind Sculptor (Masters 25 Foil)

Price Today: $140
Possible Price: $200

As I mentioned in the intro, UW control had a big weekend. At the helm of every instance of the deck was Jace and Teferi. The pair were what enabled pilots to gain a stranglehold on the game and lock opponents out of coming back. Jace has been dancing in and out of Modern since he was unbanned, and this may be the deck that cements him as a pillar.

Worldwake foils have been infinity dollars since forever, and the Masters 25 and Eternal Masters printings didn’t change that. EMA hit the scene at around $300, and after dropping off towards $140, jumped hard ahead of M25 (lol) and has settled right around $200. M25 copies, meanwhile, started just over $160 and have dropped as low as $140 in some places. This means that today, right now, there’s about a $50 price difference between the M25 foils and the EMA foils. Can you think of any reason why the M25 copies are less desirable than the EMA oens? Because I can’t.

The elephant in the room on this is the FTV: Twenty copies at $75. The thing is, we can pretty much put that to bed now. Those copies are awful. They warp easier, look bad, aren’t as cool, whatever. Take your pick as to why they aren’t good. Those will sit closer in price to non-foils, while pack foils (from any set) will sit well higher.

Regardless of what happens in Modern, we should see this gap close, likely upwards. Additionally, I’d expect the foil prices in general on EMA and M25 copies to float north of $200, especially if we see UW control continue to perform well on the GP circuit.

Imprisoned in the Moon

Price Today: $2
Possible Price: $8

No, this isn’t a Modern UW Control pick. If you take a look at the most popular EDH commanders this week, you’ll see both Estrid and Tuvix. Sorry, Tuvasa. (Estrid and Tuvasa together were 91 deck lists this week, one behind Aminatou and Yuriko.) Bant Enchantments was apparently a market that needed another serving, given how popular these two have been. This popularity is in spite of those two, since as commanders, they’re just completely flat and unexciting. Like, seriously. Tuvasa is just an absolute snoozefest.

Imprison in the Moon has been relatively popular in EDH since it was released in Eldritch Moon, with nearly 7,000 decks packing a copy. That’s strong adoption for a relatively new card. It’s going to keep increasing too, as it seems that there will be a surge in enchantment players over the next two to four months with more casual players taking their time to pick up the deck.

What I specifically like in Imprison the Moon that’s different from any other random enchantment card is that it’s blue. Many of the enchantment-matters commanders have been Selesnya or otherwise not-blue. Adding two Bant commanders that care about enchantments, and are good at caring about enchantments (albeit boring) means that enchantments going to be cemented in EDH as a more than just GWx. Anyone that was playing a GWx enchantment deck may find themselves migrating to Bant.

NM English copies are about $2 to $2.50 right now, with enough supply for a few months, but probably not much longer. Depending on how strong demand remains between now and January, I suspect we’ll see non-foi copies at somewhere between $5 and $8 by the spring. Foils are solid too, where you can find them at $5 to $7, but that well is much more shallow.


Oath of Teferi (Foil)

Price Today: $3
Possible Price: $15

It’s not enough that Teferi has to take over Standard and begin positioning himself as a pillar of control in Modern, he’s got to find a way into EDH as well. His planeswalker card may not be positioned to manage that, but his Oath certainly looks like it will.

There are a few things EDH players love doing, and blinking permanents is one of them. Many of the best cards in the format are such because of their absurd ETB triggers, and blinking them lets you relive that excitement time and time again. Enter (heh) Oath of Teferi, which blinks one of your permanents on its way in. It’s a delayed blink too, which lets you blink, for instance, your Sun Titan, cast a wrath, then have the Sun Titan return at the end of turn. (Which then returns something you destroyed in the wrath, which then returns…)

That’s only half of it of course, with the rest of the text letting you go wild with planeswalker activations. Most planeswalkers are a touch underpowered in EDH, but when you start triggering them twice a turn, they make up for that quick. Add in additional support, like Hardened Scales, and you can find yourself putting four to six loyalty counters on a Planeswalker in one turn. It’s a build-your-own Doubling Season!

A reader brought it to my attention that Hardened Scales doesn’t work with planeswalkers. First of all, a reminder that it’s illegal to correct my article. Second, even if Hardened Scales doesn’t work in this way, there’s other effects that certainly do, and they will also compound with multiple activations each turn.

Oath is very new, so supply is still fairly deep, and EDHREC doesn’t yet reflect what I suspect is the true popularity. Give it a few months, and as players are slotting them into their Estrid, or Tuvasa, or Aminatou, or Brago, or whatever decks, you’ll see fewer and fewer at $3.

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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Brainstorm Brewery

Brainstorm Brewery #301 Chipgate

 

Corbin (@Chosler88), Jason (@jasonEalt) and DJ (@Rose0fThorns) have recovered from the one chip challenge (except the milkman never really suffered #Chipgate) and are here to cover all the MtG drama from the week.

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

TeeSpring to get merch https://tspr.ng/c/BrainstormBreweryLS

Casual Fridays

Leaving Kaladesh

Hello everyone! We are likely two weeks away from previews for Guilds of Ravnica, and while I enjoy the experience of ‘will they really do a Ravnica sans shocklands?’ threads, that’s not the main thing on my mind.

Today, I’m thinking about the things that are about to rotate out of Standard, and I’m looking for the cards which have appeal in Modern, Legacy, Commander or Cube.

There’s no shortage of these cards, and that bodes quite well for opportunities. Some cards are already pretty high, due to extensive use (Fatal Push, for example) and while there might be some money made there it’ll either be too slow or too small.

Let’s talk about some cards!

Kaladesh

Spirebluff Canal ($7 regular/$15 foil)

Trending down, until it’ll begin trending up again!

The enemy fastlands are a terrific investment, but I’m only going to mention the top two. Spirebluff is the #33 most played land in Modern, appearing in about 8% of decks. It’s popular in explosive decks who need two colors right away, like Storm, and this price is low for both versions. I can easily see this being $10/$30, or even higher depending. I hope the price drops down a little, as people liquidate their current Standard decks, but this one and Blooming Marsh (#41 on that list, in roughly 5% of decks) are the ones I really want to stock up on. I prefer foils too, but given how common this can be, nonfoils appeal too. I find it unlikely we will get this in a booster pack again for a while–we haven’t gotten a reprint of the allied fastlands, and that was in late 2010!

Metallurgic Summonings ($1.30/$4)

Ponder with a 1/1 attached is just absurd right?

This seems woefully underpriced for a mythic, but it’s seen so little play. Considering how common ‘no creature’ decks are in Commander, this card is ridiculous. One of my other favorite interactions is that this plays extremely well with the new Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer, making artifact tokens that can be copied into other things, or be the source for other token copies. It’s in 5000 decks on EDHREC, so it’s not like this card is a secret. It’s going to be super solid for growth going forward.

Ceremonious Rejection (50¢/$5)

This is currently one of the most popular sideboard cards in Modern, given the utility against Tron, Affinity, KCI, and Eldrazi. If you play Modern, get your playset now of nonfoils, and feel free to get some foils when you can. There’s only about 100 on TCG right now, and given the large number of decks that are playing this as at least a two-of, I won’t be shocked when they jump to at least $15, uncommon or not.

Paradoxical Outcome (50¢/$6!)

It’s been a while since I saw a foil multiplier at 12, and this is due to the popularity of this card in Vintage. As you can imagine, this card plus a Mox or two, perhaps a Grim Monolith, means you draw a lot of cards very very fast. I was surprised to find that the foils are this cheap, considering that this deck has quickly become one of the most commonly played decks in that format.

I’ll give you that Vintage isn’t a big scene in paper, at least as compared to online, but when there’s only 32 copies on TCG and a handful on other big sites, it feels like a solid choice for a future buyout.

Dubious Challenge (bulk/$1)

The last card I’m targeting from Kaladesh is this crappy, terrible, no-good card. You don’t have to tell me that it’s not great. It’s actively bad, but there’s a deck waiting to break out. We already have Flickerwisp and Glimmerpoint Stag to flicker the Griselbrand or Emrakul, so there’s a base. One more flickering creature might put this over the top, though it’s a four-mana sorcery that is easily countered. The price for getting in is so low, though, that I don’t mind picking up a few foils and just being patient. I don’t know when it’ll blow up, but it’s unique and has great potential.

Aether Revolt

Paradox Engine ($17/$34/$120 for the Masterpiece Invention)

This card of a thousand combos is the perfect mythic, in that you don’t ever want to open it in Limited events. It’s a super-popular card in Commander: in print for about 20 months, already listed in more than 11,000 decks. That’s a lot of combos and shenanigans, and it’s why the Invention is so pricey.

Oh it stings, I knew better, why didn’t I buy any?

I can’t advocate picking up these Inventions as a value investment. They’re going to go up, but they’ve already spiked pretty hard and any further growth is going to be quite slow. Pack foils are a super-tasty target, as they ought to be about $45, considering the usual foil multiplier. The Invention presents a price ceiling, but know that the pack foil is below where it’s expected to be, and that means it’ll correct itself by $15-$20 before too long.

Mechanized Production ($3/$6)

Alternate win conditions are already something I pay attention to, but the assortment of cards that can make this amazing really put this over the top. Yes, it’s another awesome Brudiclad card, but it’s also great with other artifacts you’d be playing anyway. Churn out some mana rocks, or if you really want to get wild, Coveted Jewel. This is a small-set mythic that is niche so far but it’s got great potential to blow up in the right setting.

Planar Bridge ($3/$6/$60)

That’s not a typo. The Invention version is 20x the regular, and 10x the pack foil price. I love inventions, I do, but this is out of alignment. There’s 4500 people who’ve already put this into decks online, and the best thing about seeing this card on the other side of the table in a Commander game is the sure and certain knowledge that my suffering won’t last long. Hopefully.

Foil Scrap Trawler ($2-$4)

First of all, this was the Buy-a-Box card for Aether Revolt. There’s a lot of extra foils out there, so be aware that this might not hit the heights you’re hoping for.

That being said, this card enables all sorts of silly and grindy and annoying decks. It’s a staple of the Krark-Clan Ironworks deck, and there’s also an incredible Grinding Station deck (found here if you want) that abuses the interactions in order to win with Sword/Thopter, because dumping cards into the yard in such a deck is basically drawing them.

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.

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