The Newest Rules

July 6, 2018 Cliff Daigle

Last week I wrote about preordering Core Set 2019, and that’s a departure for me. I’ve come around on preorders, as opposed to the years I spent never preordering anything ever.

And that got me thinking: What else has changed since I got into this?

There’s more than a few things I used to take for granted, that are now obsolete concepts, and since I’m a big fan of a level playing field, I’m going to share them with you now.

New Rule #1: There’s money to be made in preorders.

Granted, I’ve tried to document my shifting perspective on this. Ixalan was a real eye-opener for me, especially with Vraska’s Contempt and Search for Azcanta. Those could have been had much much cheaper, and I’ve tried to be aware of flexible removal (other cases include Hero’s Downfall and Abrupt Decay) as well as just raw power, like Search or more recently, Karn.

I was skeptical of Karn, Scion of Urza, but I’m pretty sure now is the time to buy a playset if you’re going to be playing Standard in the next year. We are at the max for supply, and the only outlet for more copies is going to be the Challenger decks of next spring.

Karn has dropped to about $40 as his initial rush of $60 has passed, but now that we’re done opening Dominaria, all it’s going to take is a new adoption in Modern, or spiking a tournament, or just being one of the top Standard cards. Mono-red is going to lose a lot at rotation in three months, and while I can’t recommend this as a spec for flipping, Karn is going to go back up in price, so get yours now if you need him. Teferi, Hero of Dominaria is in the same boat.

New Rule #2: TCG Mid is out, TCG Market is the new metric.

For years upon years, TCG Mid was the standard price. We didn’t want to deal with those who underpriced their cards, or overpriced them. Now we are using something much more robust: the actual selling price!

To be clear, this was data TCG always had, but didn’t make it available. The other big shift here was TCG allowing individuals to list their cards, which means that those who are motivated to sell are able to race to the bottom. Another way to look at TCG Market price is to think of it as a list of what eBay’s completed sales are for a card. (If you’re not doing this already, start doing so. Doesn’t matter what’s it’s listed for–look at the sold listings!)

New Rule #3: PucaTrade is over, get thyself to CardSphere.

Looking back, I’ve done a lot of online trading. I moved a ton on Deckbox, including trading for an iPad. I wrote a series of articles for several months titled ‘PucaPicks’ because I was that deep in PucaTrade, including acquiring a Gaea’s Cradle there for some silly number of points. I’m sad to see Puca decline, they even invited me over for EDH once, but the closed system and the inability to have a stable value of points ended up causing a spiral. There’s one user who’s amassed more than two million points…out of optimism?

Now I’m on CardSphere, the best of them all. If you need some convincing, we’ve done podcast interviews with them, I’ve written about them at least twice, and most important, I’m sending and receiving cards as fast as I can. The ability to set your price, and set price limits, has proven incredibly powerful. If you don’t want to mess with sending cards, just add some cash, and pick up cards at 60-70% of retail.

New Rule #4: Transform cards can be printed whenever they want.

When double-faced cards first came along In Innistrad, there was one per pack. It was that way for Dark Ascension as well, and at the time, we were told that the difficulties of printing cards in large quantities meant that DFCs were going to be in every pack or in none.

Oh do I want an uncut foil sheet of anything Magic!

Fast forward to Magic Origins, and we get five transforming cards out of the whole set. This was done by printing sheets of the five ‘walkers in all the languages side by side, then reallocating them somehow. Then in Ixalan, we got ten transforming cards, which were in there as regular rares. Not one-per-pack. Now in Core 2019, we get a single transforming card in Nicol Bolas, the Ravager.

I haven’t been able to find an article detailing how these changes have come about, but I know I’ve bought DFCs before with confidence that they can’t be reprinted easily, and clearly that’s no longer the case.

New Rule #5: Prerelease foils are worth just as much as regular foils.

This is one that took me quite a while to realize, and it irks me greatly that I was so slow to get there. If you started playing during or since Khans of Tarkir in late 2014, this is not a shock to you. Let me explain, and you may find this link helpful.

Notice the big gap in price from Prerelease Promo to NPH foil?

Prereleases, starting in 1998, gave every player the same card just for showing up, and you weren’t allowed to use that card in your prerelease deck. Seems dumb and counterintuitive now, but that’s where we were. It wasn’t until Return to Ravnica in 2013 that we got the first set of ‘yeah, you can play with this’ prerelease cards, as you’d pick a guild and you’d get a card for that guild. So five promos for those sets, a pattern repeated in Theros block when you’d pick a color and get a known card of that color.

Then in Khans of Tarkir, you’d pick a clan and get a promo from that clan, which could be any of the mythics or rares of that clan but would use all three colors. Finally, in Magic Origins, they gave up and said ‘Anything could be the promo, use it or not, it’s a seventh rare/mythic for your pool!’

I have had a bias against prerelease foils for far too long, because now they are all the same price. Here’s Karn:

Yup, the pack foil and the prerelease promo going for the same price. Notable now is that we might begin to see the prerelease version become more expensive, because that’s the rarest version of a card these days. That correction hasn’t happened yet, but if it starts leaning that way, well, that’s the new rules.

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 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: The M19 Cards That Matter (To Me)

July 3, 2018 Jason Alt

I think we’re going to keep it simple this week. I don’t typically do set reviews because I like to wait until the dust settles but this week I don’t really have a topic I am burning to talk about and I figured it’s worth just talking about the stuff in M19 that I expect to impact EDH and therefore be financially relevant for readers like you who are, I hope, adherents of my system. Adherents to? People who use my method. Here’s what I think matters and why.

Nicol Bolas

Nicol Bolas is easily the best Nicol Bolas ever. Easy to cast, makes an immediate impact and flips into a really brutal planeswalker. I think that not only will we see new Nicol Bolas decks pop up on the basis of this card, we’ll see people dust off their old Nicol Bolas decks. This is better at the helm than any other Nicol Bolas ever because it’s easy to rebuy with commander tax whereas an 8 mana Bolas really isn’t, especially in Grixis colors, which historically don’t ramp well.

EDHREC Page for Nicol Bolas

I think the increased popularity of Nicol Bolas decks, probably with new Bolas at the helm and Legends Bolas relegated to the 99, will put some non-zero amount of pressure on Bolas staples. There are some cards that have some upside already and this will only push them over the edge.

This card really grew. I’ve been watching it and I think this could get to $8 pretty easily within a year if it’s not reprinted, which would be pretty tricky. Torment is used in a lot of decks ranging from Kess to Scarab God to Gitrog Monster so upside from Bolas isn’t the only thing buoying this card but it certainly won’t hurt. Check out the page for other Bolas staples you think have some upside since I’m not doing a deep dive on Bolas per se.

Crucible of Worlds

That nearly 12,000 decks figure it a lot more meaningful when you consider that it was an $80 card at one point.

If buylist gets to like $11 or $12 on these I am going to get real aggressive and go in on these. It will be a long time before they’re $80 again, if ever, but they won’t be $20 for long. This is an example of “discovered demand” which is a term I’m inventing. The mere act of reprinting a card that was priced out of the realm of possibility for people creates more demand because it’s now affordable enough to put into decks, now. This will help the price recover faster since the demand is now higher. Add to that how aggressive I will be about snatching these up because this is a $40 card in a year and you have a recipe for a great financial opportunity when supply peaks.

The one knock against this card is that it’s not a huge power player in anything recent.

That said, it wouldn’t take much for a new card to be printed that put lands in the yard. I think Tatyova decks could make great use of Crucible a lot more than they are – if you’re enabling yourself to play 4 extra lands in a turn, which is better; playing a few basics or playing a Strip Mine out of your yard 5 times? I rest my case. Crucible is playable in a lot of formats and I don’t think its price is mostly predicated on scarcity. Real demand exists and new demand is about to be created. Underestimate this card at your peril.

Arcades, The Strategist

This card already got its own entire article but I think it’s worth mentioning that there are already decklists out there if you know where to look. They aren’t aggregated yet which will help a lot, but you can get a jump on paying attention, although I covered everything I think matters until we get more data. I expect this to be the number one M19 deck built for a while if not forever and whether or not you like it, that’s probably the case. I think M19 has better choices but I learned long ago what I think affects prices less than what everyone thinks.

Omniscience

This isn’t in quite as many decks as Crucible, because it’s not an artifact for one, but I think it has as much Legacy demand and I think discovered demand could be a factor here as well. I expect prices to recover as people who weren’t enfranchised before can get a cheap copy in a trade or bust one in a pack, something that wasn’t possible before.

Chromium, The Mutable

I think this is sneakily one of the best cards in the set. I listened to the EDHRECast so you don’t have to (but you should) and they seemed a little baffled by this card. I’m not baffled at all – this is going to murder people very quickly and easily. The 6 power you lose transmuting Chromium into an unstoppable murder machine will be mitigated by stuff like Battle Mastery and Swords. You’re going to 1-hit KO people with this card and they won’t be able to stop you. Zur may be a “better” deck but that perception is waning a bit. I still like that Zur can grab Necropotence but if you’re trying to go Voltron, this is legit. I am not sure what to put in the deck, but I’ll do a deep dive on it if the data supports that necessity.

Chaos Wand

Chaos Wand can cast every instant and sorcery in their deck with Paradox Engine and a few mana rocks. I am going to do that in every deck I currently have that runs Paradox Engine.

It’s been a minute since we looked at Engine and this is as good a time as any.

It’s been months since I said that this was a pretty good buy at $10 because the only way you lose is if this is banned (it wasn’t) it got reprinted (I can’t imagine it will be soon) or it gets cheaper for some reason (its price doubled). I don’t know if I like this as a buy at $20 as much as I did at $10 and this hasn’t rotated out of Standard yet so I’m going to watch to see if it dips at all then, but my gut tells me this is a $25-$30 card in a year and I don’t think it is fair enough to jam in an EDH precon, the right flavor for a Core Set or broken enough to ban. This is powerful but it’s also fragile, expensive and depends on a board of mana rocks to do anything. I think it’s absurdly good but I don’t think it’s bannable since its power comes from synergy. I still like buyback spells with Engine a lot and using Reiterate to untap all of your mana rocks and double the spells you’re getting yourself until you can find your Chaos Wand seems fun. I don’t think Chaos Wand’s price will matter but if someone plays Wand with Engine on Game Knights or something, a lot of stuff will pop off. If you’re not watching Game Knights, you should if you care about being 24 hours ahead of a run on stuff like Shadowborn Apostle and you may even want to become a Patron to be 48 hours ahead.

Goblin Trashmaster

This card is absolutely insane in EDH. Lords are good, but usually Lords are like “All elves get +1/+1 and Snow-Covered Wasteswalk.” Turning a pile of Krenko tokens into murdering their entire board is insane. If this were Legendary, it would be bannable. Artifacts are incredibly important in this format. True, basically only Krenko decks will run this and maybe a few others, but this is going to be really tough to beat. Let’s look at some decks I bet it impacts.

Since I’m in a teaching mood, I’ll share my thought process for how I’ll go about finding which decks this likely goes in.

Krenko is obvious because it is the goblin token producer extraordinaire but there have to be other commanders that this card pairs well with. I’ll look at Krenko first.

Not the most popular commander and not the least. But hang on. this menu makes me think of something. If Krenko isn’t the commander, it might still be useful in the 99 of any goblin deck. If I view as a card, it will tell me which other commanders would use Krenko.

And just like that, we have 8 examples of decks that run Krenko. It doesn’t mean Trashmaster will get played in all of these decks, but I think there is a good case for correlation. Any deck with Trashmaster will want Krenko even if it’s not the other way around. Wort seems like an excellent home for Trashmaster and it only took a few seconds playing with EDHREC to find a bunch of potential homes for Trashmaster. It’s a good resource and I don’t get paid for pageviews so I don’t care if you use the site or not but you should.

Liliana’s Contract

With the resurgence in popularity of Shadowborn Apostle decks because of Game Knights and the resurgence in ripple decks in general with the printing of Rat Colony, I think the ripple infrastructure deserves another look. It’s probably about to really pop and if a win condition like this makes Apostle (because you tutor for demons) more attractive than Rat Colony, people could build both decks (probably not) or build the older Shadowborn Apostle build which has upside if there are older cards in it. Although the ship has probably sailed. Here is the graph of Thrumming Stone from the article I wrote in April.

Here’s the graph today.

Hope you got your copies in April.

This splits the “ripple” vote a bit since demons don’t synergize with the rats at all, but Shadowborn Apostle builds will want this card and that’s good enough for some extra demand if people don’t have the deck built yet. A $23 stone isn’t a huge impediment to a deck with 40 copies of a $4 apostle but maybe a $45 stone would be. I still don’t hate it at its post-first-spike price but I really hope you listened back in April.

Anyway, I’ll dive deeper on individual cards and their implications when I have a little data to back it up with, probably next week. In the mean time, go into the prerelease thinking about which cards in M19 could spawn decks, what go in those decks and prioritize cards like Scapeshift, Omniscience and Crucible that will be good forever over stuff like Resplendent Angel that may or may not be good ever and are super hyped right now. Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 7/2/18 for ProTraders – Plan Your Specs

July 2, 2018 Travis Allen

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.

With today’s B&R update, Deathrite Shaman and Gitaxian Probe are gone from Legacy, while Standard remains, well, not fully intact, but intact as it was before today. DRS’ departure is certainly the biggest news here, if only for the sheer volume of the change. It feels like half the people playing Legacy have to go find four new cards to slot into their decks. Of course the change is more impactful than that; this isn’t just about downgrading to a less-effective version of DRS, as one may see moreso with Gitaxian Probe. DRS shaped the format considerably, with easy access to four colors, maindeck incidental graveyard hate, and reach against control decks who had otherwise locked up the red zone.

It’s tough to know what the greater implications of the DRS ban are, because it’s going to reverberate across the format several times. We do know one thing though, and that’s that the Legacy being played at the Pro Tour in August is going to be the most interesting that format’s been in years.

Lion’s Eye Diamond

Price Today: $230
Possible Price: $400

Most immediately, I suspect Dredge is positioned for a resurgence in popularity. Removing DRS from the format is obviously a huge win for the deck. When something like half the room was packing a playset of one-drops that attacked the graveyard, it made your life a lot more miserable. Were those games unwinnable? I doubt it. But if the Dredge player had to choose between seeing DRS on turn one and not, I’m sure they’d prefer not.

Should Dredge really show up in greater numbers following this, or even if people consider it, Lion’s Eye Diamond has the biggest, fattest target on it. First of all, it’s a stupidly powerful card. In fact, I don’t think you can make the argument that it isn’t the most powerful card in Legacy in the abstract. Second, it’s going to be core to just about every Legacy Dredge build. Like yeah, I’m sure there are Dredge builds that don’t incorporate it, but is that just because it’s expensive? And speaking of expensive, it’s on the reserve list. We all know how that’s been going recently.

$230 is certainly a tough buy-in, but look at the facts. LED is absurdly powerful. Dredge, the deck where LED does the most work, has been under pressure by DRS for something like six years, and it’s only been getting worse. That predator is now gone from the ecosystem. Nobody has been paying much attention to Dredge or LED because of all of this, but now they will. Oh also it’s good in Storm and other combo decks. And other playable RL cards are $400, $500, and more.

Bridge from Below (Foil)

Price Today: $10
Possible Price: $25

If LED is your go-all-out purchase based on this news, this is the more subdued choice. Like LED, I can (kind of) imagine Dredge decks that don’t run four Bridges, but I don’t know what universe that’s correct. Almost the entire reason to run Dredge strategies is the ability to flood the board with a bunch of zombie tokens on turn one or two, and Bridge is what enables that.

Bridge got a reprint, but that was all the way back in 2013, in the first Modern Masters. Remember that the original MMA had a much smaller print run than the following Masters sets. So while we’re not just looking at the original Future Sight copies, the additional supply from MMA is much less than if it were in MM2 or MM3. Also, Future Sight foils are something like $55, while MMA foils are a whole $10. That’s an appealing gap.

There’s maybe forty or fifty copies on TCG of the MMA Bridge foils right now, and I’m sure some more scattered about. These are a strict playset though, so forty copies is only ten players. Add in that the price ramps up to north of $15 after about three playsets, and it’s clear that there’s a strong possibility of growth on Bridges.

Pir, Imaginative Rascal (Foil)

Price Today: $13
Possible Price: $35

Legacy is the hot news of the day, but realistically, the DRS ban will matter to far fewer people than will sit down to play EDH at some point today, so we can’t forget about that format entirely. While I try to focus on new commanders, and the cards those new commanders shine a bright spotlight on, it’s important to remember that popular generals continue to be popular. Atraxa, for instance, is still the most built commander this month. All the staples of that deck are going to have been picked clean by now, but new cards to the strategy will present opportunities. And since the deck continues to be built on a weekly and monthly basis, new players to the strategy are implementing those new cards.

Battlebond brought Pir to the table for Atraxa. He’s a personal Hardened Scales, except that he works for all permanents. Which hey, means your planeswalkers get an additional counter every time you place a counter on them, which is the most popular build of Atraxa. And since Atraxa is all about populating counters, and each of those is a trigger, one turn with Pir in play does a lot of work.

Battlebond foils have been on fire recently, and I suspect any of them that are popular are going to end up fairly pricey, ala Conspiracy 2. Pir is going to be up there, since he slots so well into Atraxa, as well as does other things, like fetch Toothy. There aren’t that many pack foils on the market right now, and I expect there will be fewer, and they’ll be more expensive, in a few months.

Travis Allen has been playing Magic: The Gathering since 1994, mostly in upstate New York. Ever since his first FNM he’s been trying to make playing Magic cheaper, and he first brought his perspective to MTGPrice in 2012. You can find his articles there weekly, as well as on the podcast MTG Fast Finance.

Casual Fridays

Preordering Core Set 2019

June 29, 2018 Cliff Daigle

Where do we even begin this week?

First of all, Stoneforge Mystic is spiking pretty hard, due to pure speculation that it’ll be next to be unbanned. The play here is clearly the Grand Prix foils, because if it does get unbanned it’ll also get reprinted (as they did with Jace, the Mind Sculptor) so you want to have the more unique version and the pack foils are already super pricey.

More immediately relevant is that we got the list for Core Set 2019 several weeks earlier than usual, for reasons that aren’t 100% clear to me. The prerelease is next weekend, but we got the full list last Friday, an unusual move. Is it because they wanted all eyes on the underwhelming Silver Showdown announcement?

Having more time with the cards also means we’ve got more time to figure out what to preorder, if anything. As I’ve said, I usually stay away from preorders, but there have been some BIG opportunities for preorders lately. Karn preordered for $30, and his retail hit $70. Teferi could have been had at $15, and he’s buylisting at $22 right now. Search for Azcanta was a $4 preorder!

So let’s get into this set and see what we can see, especially with today’s eBay coupon tempting me…

Crucible of Worlds (preselling at $25): This is not the play at all, and much like Scapeshift, this is a dagger to the eventual price. This sees a little bit of Modern play, and yes it’s in 11,000 EDH decks over on EDHREC, but there’s been the original, and the Tenth Edition, and the Invention, and now this. It’s going to stay right around $25 because there won’t be any new demand for the card, much like what’s happened to the price of Rishadan Port. Stay away.

Infernal Reckoning ($4): Now this I can get into. It’s not going to be maindeck in Modern, but there’s a couple of commonly played, super spicy targets in Standard right now: Heart of Kiraan and Scrapheap Scrounger. I don’t think this price is low enough, but I do see it jumping to $6 right away. If you want to get your set right now in the $10-$12 range, I think that’s solid if you’re going to play it. Saves you a few bucks.

Runic Armasaur ($3): I dearly love this card for Commander play, as there’s no end of annoying things that you can draw cards from. I want it to be good in Standard but there’s not a whole lot of creature abilities going off. This is excellent against a transformed Azcanta, yes, but they aren’t going to let this card stay in play. I don’t think someone else would activate Arch of Orazca with this on the field.

Cleansing Nova ($3): Here’s a pretty safe play: get four or eight of these right now, or in a couple of weeks. It’s worse than Fumigate in control decks, but when that card rotates in late September, this is now the default five-mana board wipe. It’ll jump to $6 or $7 then, and that’s why I don’t want to go too deep. It’ll buylist for a couple bucks more than what you paid, but this is a pickup for trading. I love buying cards at $3 that I’m going to trade away like mad at $7.

Nexus of Fate ($34): Holy crap I didn’t know this had gone so high. The EV here is pretty kooky. You get a box from from your LGS at $120ish, and immediately you can eBay this for a fourth of the cost? Pretty tempting. I’m terrified of this being a two-of in the next iteration of control decks, but what is really going to get me is the amount of Commander play it’ll see. This is a long-term hold if you’re a buyer right now, because if the price goes too much higher there’s going to be some unethical stores/employees that will just sell theirs. The price on this might hit $60 in a couple of years, though, because there isn’t going to be that much supply out there.

Leonin Warleader ($3): White Weenie is back everyone! It’s got tokens, a range of anthems and lords, and this is a top end that ends the game very very quickly if not answered. I’m calling this as a card that will spike at some point in the next two months, as a deck featuring four of these will push it up to $6, and it’ll bring Benalish Marshal along, which should hit $4-$5 again. That’s a deck I’d love to play, especially if I splash a little green for a set of Heroic Intervention or play a few of the new reprint Make a Stand.

It’s a buck and that defines speculation!

Death Baron ($5): We are being pushed to Zombie tribal pretty hard, but we do have this and Lord of the Accursed as lords to make the push worthwhile. I don’t remember the Baron being Standard-playable, but I like living in this world. The price on this is going to 100% be dependent on being good in Standard, because we also have a promo version to chase and there’s not an overwhelming number of Zombie decks in Commander.

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