Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Into The Ocean Part 2: October Bluegaloo

2 Comments

Did you read my article last week?

I realize it’s probably a good idea to make the articles evergreen so that someone can come along and read them and have them be relevant at any time but this week I’m literally predicting the future and if I’m right, seeing price increase predictions after they happen is useless and if I’m wrong, I don’t want someone coming around after the fact and pointing that out. I want to count my hits and ignore my misses like everyone else.

So, yeah, I’m going to link last week’s article and since this is part 2, you should really read it if you haven’t already so I don’t have to re-explain what I’m doing and can just jump into picks. I mean, leap- it’s going to be abrup

Lord Windgrace

Lord Windgrace is the most popular deck this week as people seem to have shaken off their initial disappointment at how bad the precon is and have moved on to how good the one card is. There are opportunities for foil buys here for sure.

Splendid Reclamation

$6 is way too cheap for this for a ton of reasons. First of all, and I hate to list this as a factor because I think saying this leads to really intellectually lazy thinking, but it’s insulated from some reprint risk given that it’s much tougher to reprint foils and EDH cards tend to end up in the precon decks where only the new commanders are foil. The fact that this is $3 on Card Kingdom means that people have identified it as an EDH card. However, typically when a card is identified as an EDH card, the multiplier is higher than 2x.

For perspective, while this is bumped out of the Top 100 Green cards, it’s the #1 most-played Green Sorcery not in the Top 100. This is in more decks than Natural Order, Primal Command and Primal Surge. 2x means either the foil is too cheap or the non-foil is too expensive and one of those numbers will equilibrate barring a reprint. If you think it’s unlikely that a card in more decks than Primal Surge is going to go down in price barring a reprint, maybe scoop those last 2 $6 copies off of Card Kingdom and wait for it to hit $10, $12 or even $15 in the next year. Seems like free money to me.

Ramunap Excavator

At $4.49, Card Kingdom wants the exact same amount for the non-foil as they do for the Gameday Promo. That points to a lot of supply and they list 8 for sale with potentially more in stock. Prices are dead even for all 3 version on TCG Player. Clearly there is a lot of supply. Do we expect a price divergence based on what we have seen with other cards that got a Gameday promo? Kiora’s follower is worth $0.50 more as a set foil. Promo Ghalta is worth $2 less than the set foil but the set foil is only $2 more than the non-foil. It seems like we have to go back a bit further. The set foil Wurmcoil Engine is worth twice the promo, a promo which is barely worth more than any non-foil copy of Wurmcoil despite multiple printings. Promo foils are pretty confusing. What I do know is that set foils are the most desirable and at $8, set foil Ramunap Excavator without the prerelease stamp is leading the pack but with the same art, I think $7 for the prerelease stamped Excavator is a good buy. Again, we have a 2x multiplier and while we expect that to diverge, we’re not seeing that even with a card that shrugged off multiple printings like Wurmcoil Engine. Curious. While foils are usually very desirable because when a 2x multiplier grows to 4x or so at the same time the base price doubles, you end up with an 8 fold increase in the difference between the prices which means it was four times as smart to buy the foil. The Gameday promo seems to confound that somewhat. I think Excavator will continue to be a player in EDH and likely gets a reprint in the next 5 years but I am not such a huge fan of anything but the set foil – leave the promos alone.

Horn of Greed

Conspiracy 2 is basically at peak supply and with boxes not moving at cost on eBay, it would take something like Leovold getting unbanned to move these. Meanwhile we have a pi x multiplier on a card that goes in every lands-matter deck built including Tatyova and whatever ends up coming out of Guilds of Ravnica with a bunch of Golgari junk filling our yards and letting us do powerful stuff with Crucible of Worlds. This seems like it has upside to me. $6ish is a high buy-in but I like this card a lot.

Yuriko

Obviously this isn’t as good as Ninja of Deep Hours but the thing about Ninja of Deep Hours is that while Mistbalde Shinobi should be in every deck Ninja of Deep Hours is in when it comes to EDH, outside of EDH, Ninja of Deep Hours is better. 5 times better if the price difference is to be believed. I think Mistblade Shinobi is as good in Yuriko decks and besides, you need every ninja you can get.  Mistblade has some room to go up whereas I am not excited about a $16 buy-in for Ninja of Deep Hours. If Yuriko continues to be a big deal, expect big things here.

Invisible Stalker

It’s funny to me that Invisible Stalker’s Hexproof may give it protection from reprints. Hexproof is a pretty annoying ability and I think they will use it very sparingly going forward in sets that will be played Limited and since we already returned to Innistrad and aren’t likely to again for 3 or 4 more years, I think outside of a core set, this is really safe and inside a core set, I don’t know if this get printed. I think we’re looking at a pretty decent insulation from reprinting and a card that enables Yuriko in a big way. Not much to say here other than that I think there is upside and not a lot of reprint risk.

I will caution you by saying this is a bit more narrow than most of the picks I am advocating last week and this week. This belongs in every Yuriko deck but it’s only in 2,758 decks as of today. That puts it way at the bottom of the Top 50 Blue creatures, wedged between Perplexing Chimera and Roil Elemental. I think there is upside but I like this less than, for example, my call of $2 Arcane Denial from last week.

Stolen Identity

There has been a bit more emphasis on tokens that are copies of creatures lately and this not only works well with Yuriko (you don’t have to copy the ciphered creature, you can copy anything) it also slots well into Brudiclad dekcs. It’s a card people know about, it’s nearly impossible to reprint in foil and people know about it already.

That’s more decks than Invisible Stalker and it has a 1.5x multiplier, which was a value we flagged last time we plotted all of the most popular EDH cards and tagged them with their multiplier. Not only is this in a lot of decks, but most of them are older.

I think the appeal only goes up from here. Older commander are the primary reason this is about to crest 5k decks and with a ton of new reasons to make copies of creatures  that are tokens, this card’s future is so bright it has to wear shades. At nearly the same price as the non-foil, this seems good to me.

Key to the City

There are approximately a million of these foils lying around but at $1, the risk couldn’t be lower and hitting people with creatures, drawing cards and having a discard outlet all in one card is very appealing. Look, I clearly don’t know much about foils, but I like stuff like Stolen Identity and Key to the City that surprised me by how much past demand it had because I estimated the balance of its demand to be more recent. If its price is predicated on past demand, ample though it may be, future demand is about to run smack into it and shake things up. That’s what we want.

That does it for me. If you want me to not do a part 3 next week, let me know now otherwise I’m inclined to. I had fun doing this and having to think about foils is forcing me to get better as a financier. My method takes it easy on my brain sometimes since everyone else is providing concrete numbers so I don’t have to rely on conjecture, so adding a new dimension to my game to keep me honed is important.

Disagree with me? Agree with me? Leave some comments, nerds. Thanks for reading and if you want me to write about something specific next week, speak in the comments or forever be sad about it. Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 9/3/18 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.

Wizards used PAX as a big jumping off point for Ravnica’s Return (or whatever), as they normally do, and we got a pile of spoilers. Shocklands are back, just in case anyone was nervous. Convoke is the only returning mechanic (making me unsure of what to do with my Chord of Callings and having very little time to decide), and there are some cool looking basics. Other than that it looks like a fairly standard Standard set so far. Oh yeah, and also, there’s a new Masterpieces set too. They’re part of a separate product which contains eight boosters and one of each of the planeswalkers. For the privilege, you’ll pay $250, only through the Hasbro Toy Shop website. You know that one that crashes every time the SDCC promos come out because it can’t handle more than forty concurrent buyers?

Carnage Tyrant

Price Today: $15
Possible Price: $30

We’ll begin by starting off this week with something I do rarely; talking about Standard cards. I know people are jazzed about the PAX spoilers though, and want to know what they mean for FNM’s favorite format. You probably didn’t see anything that made Carnage Tyrant look good, so let me explain.

Saffron made what I assume was a not-entirely-serious tweet regarding one of the newly spoiled cards, Quasiduplicate. It creates a token of a creature you control (ala Cackling Counterpart) for three mana. It also has Jump-start, the new Izzet keyword. Jump-start lets cast the spell from your graveyard by paying its mana cost, exiling it, and discarding a card. He pointed out that a strong line of play will be Carnage Tyrant on turn four (after ramping twice), then Quasiduplicate into Jump-start Quasiduplicate on turn five.

My suspicion is that this line of play is actually quite reasonable, and could in fact drive demand for Carnage Tyrant up significantly. Casting Tyrant on turn four means you need to ramp on turns two and three. That’s generally the play for a green ramp strategy; ramp for two turns, then start playing out nasty threats. Ramp strategies suffer a fatal flaw though. Most every card in the deck is either ramp or threat. A or B. Gas, or gas pedal. The issue lies in drawing too much gas, or too much pedal. Too much of one and not enough of the either means you’re not doing anything. And until they start printing modal spells that are either Rampant Growth or 8/8s, it will continue to be a structural problem with the strategy in general.

Where Quasiduplicate, and other spell-jack cards come in is bridging that gap. Spell-jack turns your ramp into late-game utility. Those Llanowar Elves and Rampant Growths that you draw on turn seven can now actually do something for you if you’ve got a Spell-jack card floating around. Allowing your ramp spells to play double duty may smooth enough of the rough spots of Go Big strategy to be a contender in Standard. Especially with a threat as potent as Carnage Tyrant. And what will the other Spell-jack spells look like? Something that draws cards with the ability would be fantastic. A four-mana divination isn’t good in most decks, but if you’re ramping on turn one or two, you can still play it on three, and then being able to run it back on turn six or seven by pitching a Rampant Growth is going to be big game.

Tyrant is a savage card, and popular to boot: he’s $15 to $17 as the 35th most popular creature in Standard. That’s awfully far down the list. Clearly there’s a lot of existing demand from casual level players keeping that price popped up. Add in any meaningful Standard relevance and we’ll see a meteoric rise.

Hallowed Fountain (MSP)

Price Today: $110
Possible Price: $200

With the return of shocklands, attention will be paid anew to the Expeditions series. Several years old now, these have had time to hit the market, pop, deflate, flatline, and bleed out of inventories again. To wit: all the shocks have climbed towards $100, and Bloodstained Mire, a fetch I picked up for about $85 to $90 three or four years ago, is now about $175. Across the board, this particular tide has lifted.

I went looking for an oddly under-priced shockland that I could recommend, preferably one that was 20 or 40% less than its peers. Unfortunately, there just isn’t any wiggle room. They’re all firmly at $90 or more, with no stragglers. So instead of picking out the one that’s under-priced relative to its peers, we’ll go the other direction. Assuming a relatively neutral starting position, which one is poised to jump the highest?

With Teferi reigning over Standard, Azorius is going to be the tribe to beat. Even if they aren’t in the initial slate of guilds, he alone will provide enough strength that other builds will warp to include him. With both Dimir and Izzet in the first set, I suspect we’ll see Teferi splashed into one of their shells. Either way, they’re going to want Fountain for the white.

If the shockland Expeditions can sit at $100 to $120 since January on Modern demand alone, they can easily push towards $200 with new and real demand. The biggest format in Magic suddenly making players care about them, now that they’re several years old, is going to drive a lot of players to consider picking them up. Even if only .001% of FNM players look into buying Expeditions, that’s still hundreds, if not thousands of players. There’s four copies on TCGPlayer right now.


Mina and Denn, Wildborn (Foil)

Price Today: $4
Possible Price: $15

While I wouldn’t have predicted it, this pair has become wildly popular in EDH. They’re in 6,000 EDH decks already, despite having basically a single relevant line of text. (And one that isn’t even all that impressive, honestly.) How often are you really giving something trample? It can’t be that often, right? That doesn’t really matter all that much in EDH, unless you’ve got some infinite/infinite shenanigans going on. I don’t know, I’ve never considered trample that significant in EDH. Maybe I’m foolish.

Regardless, the pair is certainly popular. And with Lord Windgrace’s arrival, they’ve only become moreso. At time of publication, we’re looking at 15 foil copies on TCG. One of which is already $10. Someone already bought out prerelease foils, so there isn’t anything left there. Why would you buy out prerelease foils and not the pack ones? I don’t know. But they did. This isn’t an unfounded play to make a $.50 foil $5 either. Pack foils have been hanging around $2 to $2.50 virtually since they were printed. Once Windgrace was printed, popularity picked up, as now there’s a legitimate tier one (popularity, not quality) EDH deck that wants a copy.

In any case, Windgrace shows no sign of slowing down. That’s on par with what we would expect, too. This year’s commanders should remain quite popular at least up through Christmas or so, especially so if they’re actually good and fun, which by all accounts they appear to be. So long as this steady flow of demand from the notoriously slow-to-move EDH crowd continues, these foils are going to keep disappearing.

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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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!

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY