I mean, this is more like it. I still think Tatyova is the truth and I’m definitely brewing a Tatyova deck and I’m way more exicted about it than I am Jodah or Jhoira or even Muldrotha. If I do build another EDH deck from Dominaria, it will be Slimefoot which I think is interesting. The mythics and rares are powerful but kind of boring and the grindier uncommon generals are more appealing to me. Tatyova can get boring if you’re not careful since drawing massive amounts of cards tends to homogenize your game experience, but overall, I think the uncommons appeal to me more. That said, I’m not everyone and that’s fine. I don’t make money off of how I build, that loses me money, so I’m always way more interested in how other people are building.

Boring is Good. It’s the BEST (plus a tangent)

Boring is code for linear when I talk about EDH deckbuilding and linear means obvious usually. Muldrotha seems like it has infinite possibilities but you’ll find that there is quickly a consensus and with that comes predictability finance-wise. Once the combo with Command Beacon was discovered, people made Command Beacon cost as much as the deck it’s in, which has pushed the price of that deck to $55, which is still basically OK.

 

The cards over $5 are Ezuri, Eternal Witness, Arachnogenesis, Thought Vessel and Command Beacon. The cards that will be worth more soon than they are now are Bane of Progress, Verdant Confluence, Beastmaster Ascension, High Market, Chameleon Colossus and Skullwinder. I don’t think it’s worth paying $55, but if you do for that quick Beacon flip, hold onto some of the stuff that will get more expensive if you sit on it because it’s basically a free card. For reference, Wade into Battle is $115 and only has 2 cards over $5.

Where was I? Oh, right, linearity is boring and that’s why I threw a valuable tangent at you. I think I made my point and also probably made you some money. Would you rather I had kept talking about linearity for that whole paragraph? No, of course not, because deviating from a linear track is exciting. However, let’s talk about when linearity is a good thing, and that’s when it makes you as much money as a well-placed tangent.

Linearity leads to consensus and that leads to people vying for the same cards. If you have those cards, and they have to get them from you, you can charge more because there’s more demand. Simple. So while I want to build Tatyova, I sure want to know what Muldrotha players are going to buy. That’s why I was encouraged to see Jodah separate itself from Tatyova so much and the typical, get-built-every-week-regardless commanders like Atraxa and Edgar Markov enter the fray again. Last week we had “data” but this week, we have fewer surprises.  We want to be able to predict the future here, so let’s take a second to see if consensus is reflected in EDHREC data and if we can develop a metric, or even a vague “financier sense” based on % inclusion in decks.

My Financier Sense Is Tingling

This is in a lot of Atraxa decks (the page from which I cribbed this image) and that is reflected in its price for a few reasons. First of all, it’s in a popular deck which means lots of people will play it which means lots of people will need to buy it which means it will be worth, say, $11. Secondly, it’s ONLY available in a popular deck which means the only loose copies came from people busting the Atraxa deck since 3 out of every 4 people who buy the Atraxa deck build it and keep Skate in it. 72% adoption is great and 16% synergy means it’s not exactly a format staple. Cyclonic Rift has 1% synergy with Atraxa decks because it’s a format staple. Birds of Paradise as a -6% synergy. How it’s calculated doesn’t matter – Atraxa doesn’t have a single card with a synergy score higher than 16%. Skate was made for this deck. Even Oath of Ajani and The Chain Veil have 10% and 7% respectively.

Unless a deck is popular and the card in question is only in that precon, a low synergy score combined with a high adoption rate means it’s a format staple. Something like this in a Atraxa deck, for example –

31% adoption isn’t super high but the 2% synergy shows that it’s a format staple and that’s good for its price. Teferi’s Protection has established itself and its place in the format over the last year, but what about brand new cards? Can we looks at cards in the few Jodah decks and glean anything from their adoption and synergy scores? Slimefoot we expect high adoption and high synergy – cards like Saproling Infestation will have high scores for both. Given Slimefoot has about as many decks built ever as Atraxa did this week, though, we can’t always tell ahead of time if narrow cards like that are great buys (though old ones like Saproling Infestation have already proven to be decent buys – thanks linearity!).

This isn’t necessarily a new metric to look at cards per se, but I think it may help us separate wheat from chaff a bit better than we had in the past. Cards with a small amount of data from the new set are suspect and this will help.

Finally, Jodah

With fewer than 80 decks to look at, we have a small sample size, but % adoption should scale unless these particular 80 people are lunatics. Is these 80 are representative of Jodah builders as a whole, we’ll still see in the percentages what’s going to be a Jodah staple. I’m glad we brought up percentages before diving in. Here’s what I think will matter.

Dream Halls

Conspicuously absent from Jodah decks seems to be this way in particular to cheat stuff into play. People seem happy with having to pay mana, which I don’t know I agree with. Dream Halls seems like a no-brainer to me and Muldrotha players are on-board but Jodah players don’t seem to think they need this card. The reason you play this is that you’re a 5-color deck and can pitch a lot of your multicolored spells you don’t need later in the game to play basically anything not an Eldrazi. This not helping with Eldrazi sucks, but you can do the trick where you pitch anything to cast Conflux and then fill your hand with goodies and use half of them to cast the rest or just have a full grip. That trick is better in Legacy when you have a really explosive 4th turn but that deck sucks.

Why am I bringing this card up that isn’t in enough Jodah decks to register? It’s played in Muldrotha, it’s on the Reserved List and it’s available for under $30 right now. If you think Jodah will ever play this, that’s even more demand for a low supply. I think Dream Halls is a $75 card when the dust settles. I think it’s about to pop and I think it’s good in this deck.

Crystal Quarry

This article is turning into “Things I think Jodah decks should play” but at least this one showed up.  In every 5 new Jodah builders knows about this card. When Jodah was spoiled, I got multiple tweets asking if I thought Cascading Cataracts was going to go up. I mentioned this card and everyone asking me about Cataracts didn’t even know this card existed. I forget not everyone has played Magic since 1996. I used 4 copies of this in a mono-black deck to cast Last Stand – those were the days. I can’t find that deck anywhere and considering it has 4 of these, 4 Composite Golems and 4 Cabal Coffers, I hope it turns up in an old box somewhere.

Anyway, this article was supposed to be about what people were playing (Jodah) and not what I thought they should be playing (Tatyova) but this is literally a card not being played more because people building Jodah decks haven’t been playing Magic for long enough to know it exists. That’s ridiculous.

Over twice as many people are playing Cataracts. By the way? 43% is not correct, either. It should be 100%  for both cards. I think it will happen eventually. For reference, only 66% of the decks are running Sol Ring so something’s up and maybe 100% isn’t the goal. Still, once people figure out Crystal Quarry is a thing, why would you not run it in Jodah? What possible reason is there? People are asking about the finance potential of a bulk rare from a recent set that’s still in Standard and there are a trillion copies of and they don’t even know about a $4 card that there are like 12 of on the whole internet and one person could snatch up for like $200. OK, there are 83 listings for Crystal Quarry on TCG Player, but still, come on.  This is free money. Low supply, high potential synergy with Jodah and you have time to acquire copies before everyone figures out that the card hasn’t spiked already simply because the card is 17 years old and people literally don’t know it exists. These are like $4 some places. Just slam dunk this and when people somehow figure out what this card does, you should double up.

Enter the Infinite

I write about this card like every week. Buy it.

Rise of the Dark Realms

This goes up a couple of bucks every year. It needs to be reprinted, but a lot of things need to be reprinted. In the mean time, this is a sicko Jodah spell and if you can cast this for WUBRG on turn 5… congrats, you didn’t get any value. Seriously, I don’t know if it’s worth cheating this spell out, but… this spell is dumb and 16% of Jodah decks are running it. Not enough Jodah decks are running Insurrection but I said I would write about what people were playing not what they should be playing and this is turning into a maddening exercise for me. You know what has more than the 16% synergy ROTDR has?

This might be an even better target and it’s less likely to get reprinted. It’s also expensive but it has a 20% synergy rating with Jodah so its fate could correlate directly with Jodah’s – it’s $18 on Card Kingdom with its current demand profile and any increase in that could increase the price.

Thicc Bois

Bringers were left out of a lot of “cheat this into play” decks because of their mana symbols and I think Bringers have a lot of upside. All of these creatures are worth cheating out and will get you a ton of advantage and I think basically anything with above a 25% adoption rate is what we now deem acceptable.

I don’t want to write anymore. I found you some good picks, we talked about a new way to look at EDHREC data and we had some laughs. That’s enough value for you, I hope. If you’re a Pro Trader, consider acting early on some of these tips even though the data hasn’t really fully materialized. Get the most out of that subscription. Anyway, that’s all for now. Until next time!

 

You can’t see this very well but it contains a pictographic representation of week one popularity of EDH archetypes based on data scraped by EDHREC. I predicted Muldrotha would be the most popular, Slimefoot would be second or third and Firesong and Sunspeaker would be second or third. I knew Jhoira would be Top 5, I expected Jodah to be Top 5. All of this is basically backed up by the fact that those are the commanders I wrote about. I would have covered Muldrotha but I was having a hard time finding anything actionable. Muldrotha seemed really good for making Lion’s Eye Diamond pretend go up (it was going up anyway) and it made Command Beacon spike right before it got a Judge foil printing but what else? Strip Mine? Believe me, I opened every individual Muldrotha list and dug deep, looking for cards with upside and it was tough. It’s half cards that have been printed into powder and half stuff that’s way expensive. I was going to cover Muldrotha today, finally, now that we have data because I was stumped before we had it. I thought maybe others had found something I hadn’t and I’d see that revealed today. Instead, I got a surprise that I think is more important to write about than Muldrotha. Did you spot it? I’ll zoom in.

Did I overlook Tatyova because it’s uncommon rather than rare or mythic? Was it a lack of hype before the set? I don’t know what it was but while I expected this to be popular initially, I didn’t expect it to be Top 5. I expected Muldrotha, Firesong, Jhoira, Slimefoot, Jodah. A surprise is worth noting because since I wasn’t pre-preparing for this to be this popular and stocking up on goodies for it, it’s possible other people overlooked it and didn’t, either. While stupid cards like Elvish Farmer are popping off because they say Saproling on them (Saproling is the new Kitty-cat) and obvious trumps “We better wait for data, guys,” other people blowing their money on Elvish Farmer (and wisely investing it in Saproling Infestation – enjoy that quadruple up, readers) we’ll be snagging Tatyova staples while everyone else is distracted. This is why we wait for data! Crowd-sourcing our ideas  will always give us better outcomes and every collective brain of every Magic player, aggregated and analyzed is always better than one head, even if that one head is mine and EDH finance is all I think about. Some people think about EDH Finance to last longer in bed, I think about EDH Finance to wrap things up so I can get back to thinking about EDH Finance. Here’s what I think about Tatyova, the Russian-princess-sounding Merfolk Monster.

How To Ruin EDH

Sheldon wakes up with a pounding headache and stumbles into his bathroom. He opens his mouth and checks his teeth. Yep. Purple. He was into the red wine again last night. He checks his phone. 90 messages. He opens Twitter. “What did I do last night?” he thinks. Slowly, it dawns on him. Bottle after bottle of red wine. His EDH playgroup. An escalating game of Truth or Dare. “Dare” he remembers saying, then he remembers someone saying “I dare you to issue errata saying Tatyova has partner.” After that it got a little hazy but now every single deck being brewed is Tatyova and Thrasios. Thrasios has spiked to $200 and an angry mob is gathering outside his house. “I’m never mixing Commander and Cabernet again.”

How Do We Make Moneys?

Let’s look at this card again.

We develop our board as we were already going to do in Simic and we get to benefit every time we do? Great googily moogily. What doesn’t go in this deck? Here are the potential movers, as I see it.

Ghost Town

Ghost Town seems like a pretty low-risk low-supply card that should be included in more decks. The EDHRECast podcast discussed this as an inclusion in Angry Omnath, a very popular deck, and they made a great point to what is currently a pretty limited audience. This card needs to get popular to get bought and that will have to happen organically. The simple fact is most people don’t know about Ghost Town and they should, but they don’t. This is an uncommon from Tempest, the ceiling for which is Reanimate’s $17. More likely, it ends up around $5 max if it does anything. We can compare this to something like Squandered Resources which was a rare, hit $15 and settled around $5. This isn’t rare and it’s not as obvious and splashy but this still does some work and in two popular decks now, and counting. Copies of Ghost Town are old enough to drink legally, so that could be a factor as well. I don’t think this goes down, but I don’t know what it would take to make it go up. TCG Player selling out couldn’t hurt, but I wouldn’t advocate that. This could be a 1-year hold but I think Tatyova and Omnath are enough to juice this to at least double.

Burgeoning

Burgeoning has managed to grow by 50% in the last year despite there not being any impetus on it besides just general EDH playablity. I don’t see another reprint coming soon – I think that will likely be reserved for Exploration with the MSRP of the Commander decks getting juiced by $5, hopefully to justify more valuable reprints in the decks. With Burgeoning likely safe to grow, I think the rate continues, probably at a higher slope given how insane Burgeoning is in the Tatyova deck. Dealer confidence is at an all-time high and that’s why I graph price with buylist price, always. See those prices converging? That means dealers think the current retail price is a fine buylist price. I really can’t imagine you can’t double $100 or so in under a year. This isn’t sexy but it does seem likely unless we get a third reprinting in as many years, which I’m betting against. Nothing is guaranteed, but I like my odds.

Patron of the Moon

Patron of the Moon has been on a  tear for the better part of 3 years and none of that was due to this new card, at all. That’s encouraging. We’re 3 years farther away from this card having been printed, it’s expensive enough that people are grabbing these out of bulk and redeeming them for store credit or whatever people to do get $3 rares into the market and Tatyova is going to create even more demand for a card that can fart lands onto the battlefield. I like this as a “float mana, play Sunder, laugh” sort of play, and I think the Amulet of Vigor I held onto is on-board with that plan as well.

The foil already popped off but with the retail and buylist prices converging kind of like on the non-foil, this is in play too, it would seem. I’m not advocatin’, just sayin’.

Thrasios, Triton Hero

Absent a judge foil, I can’t figure out how to reprint this. That’s bad news given the somewhat low supply of Commander 2016 out there. It’s drying up and the stores that do have the Yidris deck still want $50 for it if they’re savvy so even copies in the wild are hard to come by. This card is bonkers partnered with just about anyone, it’s bannably-good in whatever nonsense competitive variants are out there and there’s no way current supply can keep up with current demand, let alone more demand with the printing of Tatyova. If we continue to see her be among the top few decks brewed our of Dominaria, which I expect, I think Thrasios will experience a profound price movement and people are going to be upset and they’re going to act like there was no warning. Poppycock. This is your warning. Thrasios is very likely going to jump up pretty hard and there are a lot of factors involved, not the least of which is a new commander which looks insanely fun to play.

Courser of Kruphix

Had things been allowed to progress naturally, after the A25 reprint, Courser probably would have reversed course and added some value eventually. It probably wouldn’t have been done going down and if it ever flirted with like $1.50-$2, I would have snapped. However, the printing of Tatyova comes too soon on the heels of the reprint. I think we’re basically done seeing it go down. Do you like a $3.50 buy-in? I think it’s kind of gross, personally, and copies are everywhere, but this is going to be played in that deck, obviously, and you should at least get a personal copy, now.

Lotus Cobra

There’s a real incongruity that the market can’t figure out how to deal with, and that’s the fact that Lotus Cobra is stupid bonkers, has “Lotus” in the name and makes all of the mana as well as encourages you to play lands, which you will do and it can’t reconcile all that with the fact that we just got a bunch dumped in our laps with the Iconic Masters printing. I think Iconic Masters experienced a very small grace period and hit peak supply very quickly. No one wanted to draft it for $30 a pop. No one wants to pay $10 for a booster pack with Lord of the Pit as the rare. Iconic Masters cards are probably done tanking and I think Cobra recovers nicely, due in no small part to new EDH demand. This card is gettable for like $4 and you had a chance to arbitrage these stupid things a few weeks ago. Buy Inconic Masters stuff sooner rather than later, and get Cobra or I will.

That’s enough picks for you greedy little readers. Tatyova’s page on EDHREC is an interesting read and it doesn’t even incorporate dumb tech that the masses haven’t figure out yet like Scapeshift and Gilt-Leaf Archdruid. Can you imagine casting Urban Burgeoning with Tatoyva in play? Mercy. Anyway, I’m done for now. This was a good article and you’re going to make money if you take the advice from this article and you should share it with your friends who don’t normally read this article. Don’t worry about sharing the link with your Mom, she already reads my articles. Until next time!