So here we are, neck-deep in Core Set 2019 previews and I’m trying to recover from Vegas.
Hopefully you saw me, my sign, and my love for Cube Draft.
What I also did was some serious work on upgrading the manabase of my favorite Commander deck: The Ur-Dragon.
700 decks! We will talk about this.
Happily, Wizards decided to reward me, by giving us a Core Set with lots of draconic goodies. Dragons have to be one of the most popular tribes in Magic, and today I want to look at the previewed goodies and the effects on some older cards.
New Cards
Sarkhan, Fireblood (preselling for $16)
This is, in a lot of ways, an upgrade to Dragonspeaker Shaman, a card I already love dearly. I rarely get to cast two Dragons off the Shaman, and a planeswalker tends to be much more resilient than a lowly 2/2.
I doubt I’ll replace the Shaman with Sarkhan, but more immediate is that this price is garbage. Standard doesn’t need this for Glorybringer or other five-drop Dragons, though you’re going to see builds where he’s a four-of and enabling all the Dragons of all the colors. He’ll be lucky to maintain a $7 price tag, being so niche, but the foils are going to top $25 and stay there.
Is this good? Absolutely. I’ll let you do the math and the decisions about your deck.
Lathliss, Dragon Queen ($3)
This won’t be bulk–she’ll be a terrifying Commander in her own right–and the foils are worth stocking up on. Do be aware that this is the definition of a win-more card, as you’ve got a big Dragon in play, and you have to cast more Dragons to get even more Dragons! Utvara Hellkite can at least come down and give you some Dragons when you move all-in.
The New Elder Dragons (wide assortment)
Crap: Chromium and Arcades: These two do unique things but they aren’t lining up well with what Dragon decks want to do. I’m not going to play them, but I can see Chromium being a Standard finisher.
Meh: Palladia-Mors: Interesting, but not powerful. The hexproof loss is permanent, and triggers even if you’re just blocking or using it in a fight.
Auto-Include: Nicol Bolas and Vaevictis the Dire: Nicky v.5 is just a huge beating. Yes, you can respond to his ability with removal, and yes the walker version of him costs 11 mana to get to. Holy crap is he powerful and worth all the problems. I strongly suspect that we’ll see many EDH decks devoted to him. Vaevictis is Chaos Warp for each player, and that’s an effect I love. Do you enjoy it as I do? Likely not, but play with it for a while and see.
Nicol Bolas the Ravager is already $30 and is likely to hold a lot of that price. The casual appeal will be quite high, and that’s a market which will drink up supply and not circulate copies. I think $20 is the reasonable ending.
Dragon’s Hoard ($2 right now, but going to be bulk and a $6 foil): I couldn’t ask for a better combination of abilities. This is so damn fantastic, a tribal enabler that every other tribe will be jealous of. I hope foils have a chance to get cheap but I doubt they will.
Old cards that are due
Sarkhan Unbroken (currently $10): Dealers had posted this on their buylists for $8 by the end of GP Vegas and I suspect it’ll be $10 this weekend. Small supply, a lot of Dragon players already have theirs, and he’s just awesome in this sort of deck. He’ll be doubling to a $20 retail pretty soon, and please keep in mind that the reprint risk is real. Foils at $24 are a prime target, and given that there’s less than 40 on TCG, that supply could vanish real fast.
Dragonlord Silumgar ($6/$17): Cube-worthy, really awesome, requires a Dragon deck with these colors. About 60 copies on TCG for the foils, a card I want to have a few of in stock when they spike.
Steady upward growth, has spiked…oh yeah.
Temur Ascendancy ($3 in foil, for now): Look, just go buy one right now. There’s 27 on TCG, and this is in 5000 decks on EDHREC, and it’s the card I want most in my deck, with the possible exception of Dragon Tempest. The combination of playability and low supply means that someone is going to spend about $100 (plus the kickback!) to sweep these up. Get yours first.
Kindred Discovery ($8): You know this is a good card in any tribal deck which has blue. It’s an incredible source of cards, it was in one Commander 2017 deck. Get yours now.
Scourge of the Throne ($20): Get yours before they hit $30 in nonfoil and the foil is pushed up to $100.
Just follow my lead, okay? I bought one at the GP.
The Ur-Dragon ($4): I’m pretty stunned that this is so cheap, and only the head of 700 decks on EDHREC. I get that it’s nine mana, but it makes everyone else cheaper! I strongly suspect this is about to pop to $10, and that’s going to be very good for the value of the sealed deck.
Dragging in their hungover corpses from GP Vegas, Corbin (@Chosler88), DJ (@Rose0fThorns), and Jason (@jasonEalt ) bring you some extremely exciting news! Also MtG related stuff like Battle Bond, Dual Land, Beta Drafts and much more.
Brainstorm Brewery is proudly sponsored by Squatty Potty. Let the number #1 MtG Finance podcast help you go #2. Visit www.squattypotty.com/BSB to get yours today!
I have a different article (that still would have been late, sorry) half-written because Las Vegas required a lot of post-con recovery time and I didn’t really get it. The good thing is, since my article was late, I was privvy to a card being spoiled and decided to audible into writing about it. Some of the cards are disappearing so it’s best we think about these picks, stat before it’s too late. Sometimes EDH prices move slowly and sometimes they’re obvious and obvious means people who don’t know anything about EDH are going to buy them. I bet a lot of these panic picks don’t pan out so sell as fast as possible but if you can get some of these for cheap, you almost certainly profit even if the cards do what they usually do and plateau halfway between the pre- and post-spike price.
I think there is still a little bit of time if you are a Pro Trader and get in on this stuff now and I think some of the other stuff will need a big nudge and will only get there if the deck materializes.
My “EDH Guy” Analysis
This deck is going to suck. Have you ever played a deck where you can’t really do much if your commander is dead? Well, literally 2 minutes ago, Jim had the same thought.
You are incentivized to run really bad cards and they’re only useful if your general is out. Drawing cards is cool but I draw a lot of cards with my Enchantress deck and that deck eats other decks’ dust like it’s its job. If Arcades is out, congratulations, you’re now allowed to win an EDH game the slowest and stupidest way possible, by attacking with creatures. Big, stupid creatures, most of whom have no useful abilities because they were designed to have a good casting cost to power and toughness ratio and a lot of their abilities trigger when they block.
What this deck has going for it is that it’s fast. Arcades comes down early and if he dies, it’s only 6 to resurrect him and Alpha Strike early. Unfortunately, you’re not killing anyone so you’re just going to beat fair decks. You’re going to beat basically tribal decks unless those tribes have some sort of synergy, in which case you’re boned. You do have a mostly full grip and an incredibly good rate on your creatures. a 5/5 flying dragon costs like 6 mana whereas a 0/5 flying wall costs like 2. Wall of Blossoms and Wall of Omens, normally playable cards, are doubly good. Wall of Junk and Quicksilver Wall suddenly are draw machines. The good news is that I bet this deck gets built a lot because it’s obvious and whether or not it gets played at all is irrelevant. This is splashy and where there is a splash, there are ripples and we’re all about ripples here. So let’s look at the ripples and ignore whether this deck has any long-term chops. You don’t write Emergency Articles for decks with long-term chops, anyway.
It’s Probably Too Late For These, But…
Very low supply and very obvious, foil Rolling Stones from 7th and 8th are basically dried up, You’ll find them on obscure sites but a lot of obscures sites are on TCG Player so even then they’ll probably get sold on TCG Player and you’ll get an email saying they’re out of stock. It’s probably true some of the time – who expects to sit on foil Rolling Stones for 10 years then sell 12 of them in an hour? If you can grab these, sell into hype. It’s hyperbolic to say that no one foils their EDH decks but it’s also intellectually lazy to pretend foils are a good play at all, especially on goofy cards that are only good in one deck. People target foils because they’re lower supply and therefore they can buy them out and say “see, the card’s moving!” and get people to buy the non-foils. Finance people buy foils, EDH players buy non-foils. I mean, unless you simultaneously think this deck is bad but that’s OK because casual players buy cards and you also think those same people are going to not only build a deck that does nothing when your commander is dead, but they’re also going to foil it out. That said, the foils selling out will get people talking about the card and if you get foils at their current price, you can probably sell them, to another financier, later.
This is in the same boat but it doesn’t have the benefit of having trended up over time like Rolling Stones had. You can snag a few of these foil if you’re lucky. The non-foil is in Khans and Iconic Masters and that’s a lot of copies that the demand from this goofy deck can’t provide. I imagine the non-foil copies may have some upside but that’s probably driven as much by speculative buying as it is actual demand which, again, can’t touch supply. I think the foils of this will disappear quickly, maybe too quickly for an article written within hours of Arcades being spoiled. I also don’t think it matters, particularly. I think these will be hard to sell.
This card is not on the Reserved List and that confuses a lot of people. Does anyone even know what rarity this is? Anyway, people want to live in a world where they get a 2 mana 6/6 that cantrips when your controllers is out. This isn’t Brawl, folks. A 2 mana 6/6 is a slightly better Woolly Thoctar, you know, sometimes. I just can’t get excited about this deck. I’m really trying, but I think people are excited because Shield Sphere is obvious and it makes them feel smart. Shield Sphere is Waiting in the Weeds 2018 edition.
These You Have A Chance At
This is a second spike in the making. Buy these right away if at all. The price is creeping up because this hits their creatures and like none of yours (Even Arcades), this is on the Reserved List and it spiked once already (if you’ve been a Pro Trader long enough, you made money on this card when I called it ahead of time last time and you could have a second chance to make money on the same card). I think these are drying up and they’re pretty good in the deck, if there’s a deck.
This was just reprinted and the price came way down, but I think it’s actually going to get played in the deck if there is one. However, it’s less obvious than Shield Sphere and that coupled with the high supply could mean this is a slow mover and any growth will be predicated on more demand than I think the deck is capable of. However, lots of people are telling me on Twitter I’m grossly underestimating the demand of Wall Tribal so if that’s true, here’s a spec that won’t get bought out in the first wave of obvious stuff and has some long-term chops.
This got a reprint but that was all the way back in Commander 2013 so I think supply on this is lower than a lot of the other cards in play. It’s no Shield Sphere, which has the same number of printings as Alliances Force of Will, but the supply is reasonable compared with more recent cards. I think this would be good in the deck and I think it’s a little less obvious than some of the other cards people are all over. This could be gone by now, but it could also make you some money. TCG Player will sell out first, so go deep, Check sites like Miniature Market, Card Shark and ABU.
This already spiked. I don’t remember why but it did and now it could spike a second time. Copies were rooted out of their hiding places when the buylist price of this card hit $2, it’s all-time high. I’m not sold on this deck but this card is in it if it’s a deck and despite being an uncommon, it’s from Coldsnap, an old, terrible set whose booster boxes aren’t worth opening.
With Arcades out, this makes a 1/1 attacker that cantrips every turn. Cool? I mean, this goes in the deck so go through your giant pile of Homelands stuff you don’t want to bulk out but isn’t worth anything, yank these out and throw them up on a selling platform, or just buylist them in a week and let the dealer who buys these from you for $0.50 deal with them never selling. This is an old card but it’s also garbage outside this deck. If Arcades is the next Nekusar, there’s money here, so only bet on these picks if you think that’s happening.
If I were Josh Lee Kwai, I would play this on Game Knights and it would end up $15. Luckily (for Josh) I’m not him and what I think is good in a given deck doesn’t really matter. This is the reason I tend to wait for data on EDHREC. Usually we have time to see for sure what other people are playing and buy smart and I don’t want to turn into some old curmudgeon shaking my fist at the heavens because people won’t play this sick new tech I figured out but no one found out about. This should get played if the deck is a deck. Will it? I don’t know. I am giving you lots of caveats on picks like this when I think they should get played but might not. There is time to buy these because no one is running out to do it, so if you think the deck has real demand, here’s a riskier pick that there’s still time to buy.
Think about how people might actually build the deck. Besides flashy walls, what else is good?
Check out Doran’s page, first. While Doran’s creatures don’t have defender, usually, spells like Solidarity, Retribution of the Meek, Tower Defense and others are findable. I would build the entire deck on paper if you think it will be a deck and look at some of the utility stuff that goes in every build. Not everyone may pack Doorkeeper but I bet every deck that is built around Arcades runs Stalwart Shield-Bearers.
I am not excited about this card moving tons of stuff that won’t be back down in a year, but if you’re fast you can snag some stuff and sell to greater fools later this week. I got out of that game but that doesn’t mean I still don’t know the moves. Thanks for reading – we’ll have a more Jason Alt-esque article next week. Until next time!
I’m going to give you a semi-scorching take, that you may or may not agree with:
I think the Main Events at Grand Prix are not worth the time and cost, generally speaking.
That being said, you’ll easily be able to find me at GP Vegas this weekend, under this sign:
For a spur-of-the-moment idea, not too bad.
Oh, no, oops, that’s GP Santa Clara’s sign back in January. Nine inches square, and not terribly good at getting attention.
Vegas, on the other hand, inspired me to greatness:
VEGAS BABY!
Oh yeah. That’s the size of a playmat and a total beast to pack for a flight.
Why do I do all this work, though? Because I don’t like the value that we get for most events, and Cube Draft is super fun and also totally free! Let me explain…
Remeber, everyone, EV (Expected Value) is an attempt to quantify how much monetary value you get out of an event, as compared to the value you put in. The EV on a pack of Dominaria is pretty low, considering that only about 1 in 4 packs will get you a rare with $4 of retail value.
EV is not the same as fun, and I’m not trying to rain on your parade. I love some events with terrible EV, but I’m also bringing Cubes that maximize the fun for zero cost. You have a good time, doing what you like, just be aware of the costs.
The Main Event
Dear heaven above, we’re now paying $70 for a Modern Main Event and $85 for the Limited ones. If you’re telling me that I have the option of buying a box at $100 or six packs for $85, even with Dominaria being above the value of other recent sets, well, I’m under no illusions about my skill in Limited.
I am pretty good at drafting, but I’ve never liked Sealed and for me, the value isn’t there.
Allow me to paint a picture, and this applies to any GP Main Event:
It’s the end of round five. You’ve been at this for 6-7 hours already (depends on the format, but early rounds ALWAYS go to time in Sealed and in a huge event there’s always going to be drawn out games in Modern) and you’re hungry, tired, and your friends all lost twice in the first three.
You’re 3-2. If you stick it out, you MIGHT make day two, if you won your next three. You’re still alive for it, you’d feel bad if you dropped, but all there is to eat is the $15 hamburger in the lobby, whereas your pals are headed to a Vegas buffet for maybe $30-$40 a head.
I’ve been there, and that feeling sucks.
It’s not that Dominaria is a bad set, or that Modern is a bad format, but for me, I don’t want to play one deck for nine hours and have no chance to go eat, talk, relax, trade, or browse vendors.
If your skill is high enough, or you take that much joy in your deck, then by all means. Allow me to link you to a story of me at 4-1 and doing dumb things starring Owen Turtenwald. That might have been the end of non-team Main Events for me.
I’d really like to make Day 2 of a Limited GP, and yes, that means I’ll have to enter those events. I won’t get infinite chances to do so, but especially in Vegas, side events and freebies will be my jam.
The Prize Wall
If you’re a regular consumer of MTG Fast Finance, you may remember that I ranted about this topic on the show back in January. I loathe the prize wall as a method of paying off victors. I understand that the events need a currency, and booster packs are either the best thing ever or terrible EV, but the execution by ChannelFireball was terrible in January and I’m hoping for better things in Vegas and in Sacramento.
My issues with the Prize Wall are as follows:
Inconsistent Pack Pricing – Dominaria will be 10 tickets, that’s pretty straightforward and you’ve got a 22% chance of opening a card worth $3 or more. All the Standard sets should be 10 tickets per pack, but then things get wonky. At GP Toronto, for instance, Modern Masters 2013 packs were 150 tickets, but those can be had for $25 on TCG. That’s a multiplier of 15, when the price is only about six times more. I understand you’re about to get at me for worth and cost and all those things, but I simply don’t like how the prices are so hit and miss.
Timing – The prize wall is a feast for the senses on the first day and maybe the second. People are eagerly trying to save up 1500 tickets for a foil uncut sheet, or draft enough to snag a Revised dual land. Know what they aren’t doing? Using their tickets early! The people who get a lot of tickets early on have a massive advantage over the people who saved till Sunday afternoon and are now down to the dregs of what’s left. I freely admit that if CFB restocked better/faster than I’ve seen (again, I’m hopeful but realistic) then I’d have less of an issue here.
Closed Currency – I wrote a lot about PucaTrade in the heyday, and I’ve written a bunch about Cardsphere, which is just better, because Cardsphere uses actual dollars and PucaTrade used only their own currency of PucaPoints. The closed currency means that at the end of the GP, when you go home, your prize tickets are worth nothing at all. You HAVE to shop from the prize wall to get anything at all. There’s not even a way to convert it to vendor credit, though I suspect that will come, or allow vendors to trade for tickets. There’s a real market for trading tickets, even if you’re not supposed to it’s quite common.
The Side Events
First off, here’s the schedule. Let’s address the on-demand events.
Twenty bucks for a draft, a little higher than most LGS but you can do as many as you want. I prefer paying less and having less prizes, but this is not outlandish.
They’ve upped the price of Chaos Drafts to $35 and now you get to draft the packs before you draft the cards. This is godawful EV, but as I mentioned, EV is not the same as fun, and I am going to do this at least once. Note that the payout is the same as a Dominaria draft. Yuck but I love randomness! I’m so logical, except when I’m not.
If you do a Masters 25 draft for $35 you’re kind of nuts, from an EV perspective. You’ve got a 17% chance to open a rare or mythic that’s even $10, or a 6% chance to open a card that has the same retail price as the draft. Go have fun, but like myself and the Chaos Drafts, know that you’re paying a steep price for your fun.
The lands are sweet, but not crazy valuable.
Turbo Town Constructed has the best ratio of money to tickets that I can find. Both players pay a combined total of $10, and 40 tickets are given out. That 1:4 ratio is better than all the others, considering that the Dominaria drafts are $160 paid and 440 tickets are given, a ratio of 4:11 (Turbo Town is 4:16, for the comparison) and now we’re doing more math than I want to. If you want to grind tickets, that’s your play, and it’s got the benefit of being fast, so you can take breaks as needed without being stuck in a five-round slog.
The scheduled events are more about your enjoyment of the format in question and how many rounds you want to play of that format. The EV in terms of tickets is really not good for some of these and average for others. For instance, the RTR block throwback draft at $20 has a 4:9 ratio of tickets at max players. Even the double-up Sealed, if I presume there’s 256 players, will have $12,800 paid and 42,240 in tickets given out, which comes out to 1:3.3 as a ratio.
I think the Beta draft is a brilliant promotion and it’s something I’d never ever participate in. The chance that these are unsearched Beta packs is zero, to my mind. It’s free money for them, and Beta packs are 100% searchable. Observe this video of it being done with a Fallen Empires pack. Given the enormous prices of Beta Power and Duals, someone went through and with infinite patience, checked the cards in the packs. As a result, if there’s no Power, no duals, you just shrug and say, “That’s Beta!” and sigh because basic Island is on the rare sheet.
Pure Value
There’s some really great things to do at the GP which will cost you little or even turn you a profit:
Vendors – This is an excellent opportunity to gather up a bunch of cards, bring them to vendors, and turn a lot of little things into one big thing. Myself, I’m hoping to turn a stack of recent picks and hits into a dual or two, and even if you don’t like the hunt for value, you can lose hours just admiring all the super-awesome things for sale.
Artists – TWENTY-SIX different Magic artists will be present at this event, and you need to understand that they mostly weren’t paid to be there. If you get cards signed, leave about a buck per signed card at a minimum. Read Noah Bradley’s words. Be professional and courteous. Gush freely, don’t put your drinks or other stuff on their tables. Buy a print, and get it framed.
Cosplay – People are going to dress up as Magic characters, and that’s awesome. Making costumes like this is great fun for all involved. Talk to folks, spellsling with them, follow them on social media, contribute to their Patreon, etc. Do not be an asshole about what they are choosing to do or how they look. If someone wants to dress up a little or a lot, that’s a choice that increases their enjoyment, and you’ve no right to diminish that at all. Don’t ogle, don’t grab, don’t touch someone. Putting on a costume isn’t asking for anything.
Commander – If you dig competitive Commander, by all means play those games or join those events. Not my bag, but you do you. I can highly recommend gathering a pod of you and friends and adding the spice of tickets as a reward for playing, that’s a way to keep games moving at a lively pace instead of endless politics. I love playing Commander with new people, and if some have more tuned decks than mine, well, the games didn’t last long and I can move on.
Trading – As someone who does a lot of trading, and loves to hunt through binders, please, I beg you, take the stuff you won’t trade and have some way to let me know. Upside down, the last page of the binder, special sleeves, etc. Stay away from any solo trader who says the word ‘buylist’ and look askance at someone who says ‘value’.
Cube Draft – I 100% saved the best for last here. I love Cubing. I think it’s the highest form of Magic, and it’s a way to give people a new and awesome experience. I’m bringing my Busted Uncommons cube and my Silver Borders cube, both of which are fun experiences. I haven’t built an expensive cube yet, so I’m comfortable playing with strangers. If you don’t want to bring your pricey cube, I totally understand. Every Cube Draft I am part of–and I’m hoping to attract other Cubers–is free and time very well spent. Just look for me all weekend, I’m not going to be hard to find.
Cliff has been writing for MTGPrice for nearly 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 Vegas, look for the guy under the giant flashing ‘Cube Draft’ sign and he’ll have you drafting in no time!
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
