Casual Fridays

Dominaria at max supply

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The Core Set is in our hands, and so far it’s playing out like a Core Set should, not heavy on synergies and such but still relatively fun, at least in the beginning.

With the focus shifting away from Dominaria, it’s time to look at this awesome set and figure out what we are picking up now that supply is at its maximum. We might get a little more coming in, if people get burned out on drafting M19, but that wouldn’t be enough to move the needle.

I’m trying to keep the focus on non-Standard uses for cards, as the timeline for Standard spikes is kind of rough–you have to hit it big and get rid of it pretty fast.

To the cards!

 

Gilded Lotus ($3 regular/$9 foil): For the sake of comparisons, here’s the other prices of this card:

Set Regular Foil
Magic 2013 $6.50 $16
FTV: Twenty n/a $13
Mirrodin $9 $40

See a disconnect? I’ll give you that Dominaria was opened more than the other sets combined. I’ll also be happy to give Mirrodin the premium of being the first printing, or that FTV foils are ugly as sin.

My counterpoint is that the card is the #20 artifact on EDHREC, and is in nearly forty thousand listed decks. That doesn’t even cover the sheer number of people who put this into their casual decks, either.

Put it all together and you have a card that is underpriced in foil and nonfoil, and while I think foils are the safer bet, I wouldn’t take issue with you buying a stack of nonfoils and just being patient.

Weatherlight ($1.50/$8): With a foil multiplier that large, it’s a sign that people are buying up foils faster than they are the nonfoils. And why not, since it’s a mythic? I think what’s going on here is that people are using casual decks to tell the story of the Weatherlight (don’t ask me who the Commander is. Jodah? Has to be five-color.) and this is a necessary piece. The card is not very powerful, which is why it’s cheap, but a foil multiplier of six (as opposed to the 2-3x I’m expecting) means the demand is real.

The Antiquities War (75¢/$5): This is popping up in some artifact-based builds in Standard that are only good until rotation, but again, look at the foil multiplier here. People are snapping this up in foil a lot faster than the nonfoil.

Frankly, this is true for most of the Sagas, with Song of Freyalise almost the biggest at about 7x, and the rest at about 5x, with the exception of Standard-popular History of Benalia at only 2x.

Special mention: Foils of The Eldest Reborn have a multiplier of about THIRTY-SIX. Nonfoils are a quarter, foils go for $9. I don’t know how much growth is possible on that particular one, but the card is mega-sweet in Commander, and the art is ridiculous. So much so that I bought a huge print for my classroom!

More EDH decks than Mox Amber!

The data tell us to buy foil Sagas now. I’d stay away from History for now, but dive into the others gladly. They are niche, sure, but remember that niche decks can be among the most fun to build. There’s long-term money to be made here. Foil Sagas seem super-safe, as they are unlikely to be added to a Masters set soon.

Oath of Teferi (50¢/$4): Buy all the foils you can at this price. I’m not even kidding–this is a lock because it’s arguably better than The Chain Veil. It’s not a mythic, true, and the Veil is from a while ago, but this card is probably the one that the superfriends decks want most in the opener. You can even get this in the four for $10 range, and that’s just a gift to your future self. Doesn’t that delightful person deserve the gift of some $15 foils? Buy now, put away, and thank me later.

Karn’s Temporal Sundering (50¢/$5): The Legendary Sorceries are mostly unappealing, given their constraints, but extra turns cards are something that players are always going to want, especially because new ones tend to exile themselves. Picking up relatively cheap foils now is a winner, because this has a bright future.

Mox Amber ($10/$40): Six weeks ago, I said that I’d be in at $10/$30, and we are here. I am a fan of this at $10. I would like the foils to be a little more reasonably priced, but it turns out that a surprising number of people like playing this in Commander. I’m not among them, but I respect the effect that it’s having. You’re unlikely to have this hit in Standard, but Modern is eventually going to break this card.

It’s a unique ability, and thankfully decks will want four.

Lyra Dawnbringer ($13/$30): For a card that started out ridiculously strong and who tops an impressive tribal curve (Resplendent-Shalai-Lyra), she’s fallen quite a distance. There’s some risks here: She might never be good in Standard again, and the other Constructed formats are not homes for her. She might be in a Challenger deck in the spring. She’s only got a year till she rotates.

There is a world in which she spikes to $30 or $40 again, but it’s more likely that she stays in the $15 range and you never make any money. The worst feeling is buying at $15, seeing her bump to $20 and knowing that you’ll have a really hard time making that $5 a copy back. I would stay away from Lyra, even seeing what she’s fallen to.

 

 

Cliff has been writing for MTGPrice for five years now, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. He’s the official substitute teacher of MTG Fast Finance, and if you’re going to be at GP Sacramento, look for the guy under the giant flashing ‘Cube Draft’ sign and he’ll have you drafting in no time!

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Kitty Cats 2018

Hey guys. It’s National emoji day and if I knew how to make emojis I’d do a bunch of them right here. If I knew how to make the gray boxes that made it look like I tried to do a bunch of emojis and failed, I would do that, too. I sort of wish I knew how to do the kittycat emoki, though, because as soon as they announced the four themes for Commander 2018 decks, the internet found its kittycats for the year 2018, and that kittycat’s name is “Enchantress.”

What’s A “Good” Spike?

I think there are two major classifications of spikes – let’s call them simply “good” and “bad” so you know how you’re supposed to feel about them. A “bad” spike is one that feels forced – it’s a bunch of dudes on Reddit all getting together to buy Catacomb Dragon because it’s on the Reserved List. The justification for it is always ex post facto as if they thought about how to make the case for it after they bought it. You’ll notice them calling it an “EDH staple” and if you mention EDHREC, there’s always an excuse; EDHREC doesn’t get competitive EDH data, no one uses the site anymore (what does that even mean?), it’s good in their deck so that means it’s a staple. If the person making the case for the card seems allergic to data and has two anecdotes for every data point you come up with, stay away. “Forced” or “bad” spikes have a familiar graph shape.

A precipitous climb followed by a meteoric descent. Usually the price ends up somewhere between where it started and where it peaked, but lately these dumb spikes haven’t panned out very well and the card goes back down to where it started – usually because the people behind the buyouts are used to being able to buy out TCG Player and letting everyone else think they’re geniuses for buying out Cardshark.

So what characterizes a “good” spike? I think that a good one has two major components.

This Heading Break Is Where I’m Blocking Off The Rest Of The Article So Only Pro Traders Can Read It At First

I think the two characteristics of any good spike are sustainability and predictability. A good spike looks less like a spike and more like a plateau because the new price is agreed upon as the right price. This comes from organic demand. The card actually is an  EDH staple, spiking as the result of a new deck being viable and not the result of dickery and wishful thinking.

Notice how even though the price went down a bit, it went back up over time and the overall trend is in an upward direction? Do you think  Reparations will trend in a similar manner? Hard to say – Reserved List cards have nothing pushing their price down per se besides a race to the bottom as dealers who sell by being the lowest available price leapfrog each other trying to be the first to sell their copies of a useless card off. You didn’t have to dump your copies of The Chain Veil as soon as they spiked – you had time to try and get the best price and the card is now worth more than its initial spike price. In fact, current buylist is nearly at that amount. The sustainability of The Chain Veil is what makes it a “good” spike – Superfriends, Atraxa, the combo with Teferi and speculation that Commander 2018 will be Planeswalker-helmed decks because of one mention of the word “Planeswalker” in the Commander 2018 press release have all driven this card to where it is. Imagine that, a card that’s not even on the Reserved List going up in price! I didn’t even know we did those anymore.

The second aspect is predictability. Could we have possibly predicted that The Chain Veil would go up in price? Of course we could have – and we did.  We have mentioned that card several times over the past 4 years and every time it was more expensive than the last time we mentioned it. It was a solid albeit a niche card when it was printed but the Teferi combo and the prevalence of Atrxa Superfriends decks created the perfect environment for it to go up. Superfriends existing as a concept was enough for me to mention it was a spec and all we have to do was wait for conditions to exist for it to be indispensible in a deck everyone wanted. Atraxa gave us that. if it hadn’t been for Atraxa, The Chain Veil would be worth less than it is now but it still would be worth more than it was every time we talked about it in this column, and that’s the important thing. That’s a card that is both sustainable given its demand from a number of different decks as well as predictable given its unique and powerful effect. I like “good” spike candidates because there is no sense of urgency to dump them before people realize they shouldn’t be paying $9 for freaking Aelopile, no matter whether or not “no one is sitting on a stack of these, guise.”

We Saw The “Bad” Spikes

Commander 2018 is giving us another chance to shake our heads at Team Kittycat. Not all of their buys are as bad as Waiting in the Weeds but they are as obvious. I don’t think Serra’s Sanctum is going to go back down from over $100, for example but that’s because it’s a Reserved List card, had some Legacy and EDH demand before (I called it at $30 when the Daxos deck was printed and that didn’t do much for its price although a few people made some money). Idyllic Tutor, though, seems like a bit of a Kittycat to me. It’s in quite a few decks on EDHREC, mostly Voltron decks, but its recent interest seems as much predicated on its text box containing the word “Enchantment” than on an understanding of the format. Remember, Waiting in the Weeds was a stupid buy because it was bought out before we even knew what the decks would be like and it turns out none of the 3 commanders really benefit all that much from having a bunch of cat tokens. I’m not saying an Enchantress deck won’t benefit from a tutor, it will, I’m saying anything else we buy at this juncture is purely speculative, may look stupid later and isn’t quite the slam dunk we think it is. I mean, unless you think one of the 3 commanders in C18 is going to be “sacrifice your enchantments” themed, Femeref Enchantress is probably a bad pickup or a kittycat if you will. An “obvious” spec that doesn’t actually work with the deck is a kittycat and I think we’re about to see some more kittycats go up.

What Do We Like Instead?

I’m glad I pretended you asked.  I think there are some cards that haven’t gone up yet that could based on Commander 2018. We know it’s Bant Enchantress, so my approach for researching this was look at pages of cards rather than pages of commanders. I don’t know how much you use EDHREC, so I’m going to hold your hand a bit here if that’s OK. Since I already have Idyllic Tutor pulled up from checking how many decks it’s in, this is as good a place as any to start.

Here’s the page I’m on.

Its starts by giving us a list of Commanders and you can tell quite a bit about what kind of card Idyllic Tutor can be in EDH. Oloro decks use it, Uril decks use it and Zedruu decks use it. What are the odds Oloro decks are searching for Bear Umbra, Zedruu decks are searching for Phyrexian Arena or Uril decks are searching for Transcendence? The card is used for three different kinds of cards in those decks. Since we don’t know what any of the commanders do, it’s hard to know how we’ll use Idyllic Tutor but we can get a sense of what kinds of enchantments might be good with other Enchantments. This is where we weigh reprint risk versus power and make our decisions based on that.

Scroll down more, past the top Commanders, New Cards and Reprinted Cards. “Signature Cards” is what we want. Not all of them pair with Idyllic Tutor well (Path to Exile? What?) but they are correlated in that a deck with Idyllic Tutor is very, very likely to run them also (like Path to Exile). Idyllic Tutor has the highest synergy with Idyllic Tutor, appearing in 100% of decks that contain Idyllic Tutor (lol, I’m sure the way to fix this is so hard it’s not worth it and will break every time they invent a new kind of commander like the “pair with” ones from Battlebond which broke the site’s code for a long time) but we see Enlightened Tutor which probably won’t get reprinted and goes in the same decks. I bet Replenish isn’t reprinted and since it’s on the Reserved List it already went up – same as Academy Rector. Team obvious has already been through the list, starting as soon as they got the word about the archetypes. Sterling Grove, though, isn’t on the RL.

Sterling Grove

Reprint risk – Moderate

Power – High

Grove originally went up from a buck or two when it was announced that Theros would be enchantment-based. Grove didn’t really pan out as that good a pairing with… anything from Theros per se. It was vaguely good but Theros mostly made a lot of cards vaguely better rather than making one or two super good.

Grove is very useful in my current Bant Enchantress deck but I am trying to use data to make my evaluations rather than use anecdotes about my specific build. If this isn’t reprinted, it has a bunch of decks where it will be good. Whether you’re Voltron, Pillow fort or some weird hybrid (my deck uses Control Magic effects and the Enchantress triggers are to keep your hand full of answers), you’ll benefit from Grove and it hasn’t really moved much on the news but rather how good it is.

Scroll down to the “Enchantments” section to see the Enchantments that are used most often in decks with Idyllic Tutor.

Starfield of Nyx

Reprint risk – Moderate

Power level – High

This is another card that just shines in the deck. It’s a win condition, it nullifies some of their targeted removal (they have to deal with Greater Auramancy or Privileged Position before they can kill this and you just bring it back). I don’t know what else to say.  If this isn’t in the deck, I bet it goes up.

Copy Enchantment

Reprint Risk – Low

Power Level – High

They don’t tend to put this sort of card in the precons which could mean it’s mostly insulated from reprint risk on the basis of me not seeing them reprint cards like Sculpting Steel in the artifact deck, for example. Mirage Mirror seems more likely to be reprinted, for example. This is a narrow card and if it’s not in Commander 2018, it basically never gets reprinted. If you do buy these and it’s in the precon, just double down and buy as many copies as you can at the new price until your average cost is down to a non-embarrassing amount and then every copy will go back up. This has great growth numbers and it’s not like a Bant Enchantress deck running around will hurt that. I still think you are safe and I think even though an $8+ buy-in is high, I think the ceiling is pretty high, too. I still get these in bulk, also, so that’s a thing – people don’t know this is a card so its growth has been sneaky and secret and if that doesn’t reflect sustainability, I don’t know what does.

There are a few more pieces of higher-hanging fruit that Team Kittycat missed but I think my time next week will be better spent looking at one of the other 3 archetypes. Spoilers start Monday and that will give us a better idea of what we’re looking at. Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 7/16/18 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.

We’re in a lull this week, with Magic 2019’s official release behind us, and Commander 2018 spoilers next week. In the interim, we’re left with Mercadian Masques and Legends cards getting picked off a few copies at a time, with little guarantee to how quickly any will sell. People are arguing about the Reserved List (again), and Battlebond foils are still proving quite popular with speculators.

Without much to go on, this week I’ll be considering some of what we do know of Commander 2018 so far, which is the four general themes – ‘Top of library matters,’ ‘Lands matter,’ Artifacts, and ‘Enchantments matter.’.

Thassa, God of the Sea (Foil)

Price Today: $20
Possible Price: $50

Of the various themes coming this year, the Esper ‘Top of library matters’ deck is by far the most fascinating. It’s a theme we haven’t visited much previously. There was the Clash mechanic back in the Lorwyn era, in which players got bonuses for having a higher CMC card on top of their deck. There’s also been a few singletons here and there that stand out; Future Sight comes to mind. Overall the theme is under-explored relative to something like artifacts, and as such stands to generate a lot of excitement in previously low-interest cards.

Thassa is hardly a low-interest card today, but that’s sort of the point. You’ll find her in nearly 12,000 EDH decks, which puts her just outside of the top 30 most popular blue cards in the format. Scrying every turn is helpful, and making creatures unblockable is especially useful in EDH, where there’s no shortage of blockers and plenty of creatures that offer big payoffs if you can actually get them to deal damage.

It’s Thassa’s scry ability that has me interested here. With a ‘top of library’ theme, being able to get a free scry every upkeep could provide a lot of additional value. Of course we haven’t seen any actual card spoilers yet, so I don’t know what mechanics we may end up with, but I’d be surprised if they couldn’t make use of Thassa’s scrying.

With her already substantial appeal, the introduction of a new theme that’s been relatively unexplored up until now, dwindling supply of the foils, and almost no chance of a foil reprint in the next year or two, foil Thassa is sitting pretty heading into the C18 spoilers.


Titania, Protector of Argoth

Price Today: $5
Possible Price: $12

Over on the Jund ‘land matters’ front, I find Titania to be worth keeping an eye on. Returning a land from the graveyard to play is rarely not useful in EDH, even if your group doesn’t play targeted land destruction. Utility lands are likely to be milled away at some point, and recovering your Gaea’s Cradle is occasionally life-saving.

There’s a lot to be gained with that second ability, too. Titania can turn into a serious source of 5/3 token generation. Sacrificing your entire manabase to generate some advantage, getting a 5/3 for each land that you trashed, and then casting Splendid Reclamation to get your 10 to 20 lands back the same turn is a big play. (And don’t forget that Eternal Witness is green.)

It’s hard to envision a ‘land matters’ theme that doesn’t have room for Titania. That’s also the biggest concern here. Titania has so far only been in Commander 2014, and the much smaller rerun of Commander Anthology. Supply is low-ish, and a sudden surge of interest could drain the entire online inventory quick. That also means that she’s possibly on the slate to be reprinted. Wizards loves to reprint Commander-product cards in Commander, and since she’s so on theme, I’d put her reprint viability pretty high. However, if we get to the other side of the 99 and she doesn’t show up, I’d start watching inventory levels closely.


Exploration

Price Today: $20
Possible Price: $35

Even moreso than Titania, what type of ‘land matters’ deck wouldn’t want Exploration. What type of deck of any sort wouldn’t want Exploration? None of them. The card is awesome, and playing lands is awesome, and green is awesome.

Just before the Conspiracy reprint, Exploration ran up to $40. It’s wildly popular in EDH, and I think it would be even moreso were it not currently $20 or so. One needn’t be an EDH expert to understand why “play two lands a turn” is so appealing. Especially when it’s a format that’s easy to keep your hand stuffed with cards, which means you could be making two land drops a turn, every turn, for a solid 10 or 11 turns in a row, starting on turn one. God that sounds awesome.

Exploration carries a good price tag today, and is flirting with the soft ceiling for EDH staples. I’d say any EDH legal card that’s been printed within the last seven or eight years is roughly capped at $40 or so. Cards seem to stagnate near that price point, as any higher than that and players decide it isn’t worth buying in. They know at that price, Wizards will eventually reprint it, and then they can buy it at a much lower point.

I suspect Exploration could get close to that ‘soft ceiling’ later this year, assuming it doesn’t show up in Commander 2018. And I doubt it will, given the current price tag. That’s a lot of value to put into the precon. If they do, it will be one of, if not the banner card from that particular deck. Assuming it doesn’t make it in, it will be one of the first cards people will want to add to the strategy, and we could see it nearly double as a result.

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

Five for now, and five for later

Today is kind of momentous for me. Five years ago, almost to the day (was actually the 12th of July) I published my first piece on this site. It’s kind of embarrassing, not least because we didn’t even put my whole last name in there, but mostly because it details one of my worst trades ever, the details of which I cannot bear to restate.

In five years, Magic finance has come a very long way. We’ve seen several trading sites show up, we’ve gotten one of the biggest assets ever for Commander finance in EDHREC, and Twitter has taken over the earth.

Today, I want to share with you some predictions about Magic finance for the summer of 2023, and then some early returns on Core Set 2019.

Magic in 2023

#1: The Reserved List will still be around.

A softball. The RL is never going away, I’ve got that phrase muted on my Twitter timeline and I couldn’t be happier. Yes, it’s dumb, but that’s not the point. Wizards isn’t going to flinch on this, though an upgraded set of duals (something like ETB untapped if your life is 30+) is surely a possibility.

#2: A Revised, NM copy of Underground Sea will retail for two grand or more.

Travis said a few months ago that judge foil Gaea’s Cradle would hit $5k and I think I called him crazy. I’ve come around. There’s a lot of factors contributing to the rise in prices, and they will all still be having that effect in five years, when Legacy and 93-94 players are cackling. I am unwilling to predict what Alpha/Beta/Unlimited prices will be.

#3: Either Magic Arena or Magic Online will be gone or going.

Wizards is not a digital company, though they badly wish they were. Magic is, I think, too complex and too much fun socially for it to be as fun online as it is in person. They will be badly served to divide their digital resources, ending with one of the programs folding. I think MTGO would be more likely to be wound down, though there’s a lot of programming and a lot of shifting that’s going to go on.

#4: The Pro Tour will have taken one of two directions: It’ll be dead or the structure and payouts will have been overhauled and massively upgraded.

I’m not sure about this one either. Wizards wants to copy Hearthstone’s income and success, especially considering how much of Magic is in Hearthstone. But you can’t get there as an esport if you’re paying pennies like our current system does. If you want people to do well, on a regular basis, they need to spike tournaments AND have successful side gigs, be it coaching, streaming, or other content.

Let me give you a scenario: Before a Pro Tour, the high-level teams meet up a one to two weeks ahead of the event, to groupthink and practice and discuss gameplay. It’s useful and great, and I’d love to see that.

Elite League of Legends players will live in the same house for the whole season, getting sponsored enough to not need a day job, even to the point of having catering staff do meals for them.

#5: Judges will have unionized and be officially employed by WotC.

Being 25 years old, there’s a number of things Wizards got into early and is still capitalizing on, with the whole judge structure as one of them. Doesn’t it seem insane that the people responsible for ensuring enforcement of the game’s rules are, in 99% of cases, not employees of the company? Only a couple of the bigger names are, the big regional organizers and such. All the rest work for cards, as contractors. It’s a huge win for Wizards, who has to pay very little for this service. Judges work tirelessly and do so for not a lot of gain. They are doing it out of enthusiasm, but deserve actual compensation. Something will happen, most likely some event that goes bigger/longer than anticipated, and a group of judges will get organized.

 

Core Set 2019 Release!

Crucible of Worlds (now down in the $20 range): There’s not a huge market for the card, and while price memory is a thing, there’s about to be a whole lot more supply than demand. I don’t think I would even buy this at $10. Who’s going to buy them off of me?

Graveyard Marshal ($2.50): I think you should buy these now. A playset at $10 is a snap buy in my mind, as adding this to aggro decks seems pretty sweet. There’s going to be a window where you’ll be able to unload these at $5/per. Be ready.

Cleansing Nova ($2.50): See above, and this is especially true with Fumigate rotating out. This is the sweeper of choice in three months, and I want you to be able to lock in some profits right now. This is a strong candidate to spike up to $10 around Christmas.

Remorseful Cleric ($2/$5): I picked up a playset of these foils already, in case the Spirits deck gets real in Modern, or hatebears come back into vogue.

Sealed Product: Don’t you dare think of keeping boxes of this set around. It’s very top-heavy, with Nicol Bolas, the Ravager being the top end and a giant pack of bulk rares and mythics chasing him. Even Resplendent Archangel is not going to stay too high, because only the most dedicated Angel decks will want the card. Keeping boxes is only good if you have unlimited storage and a ready supply of people who want to win the lottery.

Here’s to five years, and five more to come!

Cliff has been writing for MTGPrice for five years now, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. He’s the official substitute teacher of MTG Fast Finance, and if you’re going to be at GP Sacramento, look for the guy under the giant flashing ‘Cube Draft’ sign and he’ll have you drafting in no time!

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