Jason Alt, ProTrader, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Speculating on Speculation

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Nerds,

I was going to take a look at Jodah or something today and while that’s probably relevant at some point, I think there’s something else that is pretty important and it’s never too early to talk about it. I saw something curious and maybe I’m reading too much into it, but probably not. I mean, maybe. Maybe not. Not probably not, I don’t know the actual probability. That’s a good point, actually. Let’s address that point before I move on.

Have you even made a point yet?

Yes, I sure have. I said I don’t know the probability that I’m right or wrong about this thing I’m speculating about that I’ll tell you about later. We never really know the odds but since I know less than nothing; we’re talking our unknowns are unknown, I’m going to try and make my picks with some caveats, namely that I’m not going to diverge too far from my current speculation ethos for this column.

Currently I am using data, albeit small amounts sometimes, to make very safe picks based on what I know the near future to be. EDH allows us to do that with the lag time between online decklist adoption and actual paper decklist adoption. I’m not going to stray too far from that. While I’m forced to speculate about speculation, I am going to try and confine my picks to ones that won’t leave you holding the bag later if one or more of our assumptions turns out faulty. I sold a lot more copies of Squandered Resources than I did Didgeridoo. Didgeridid? Whatever. The point is, if I make a pick that wasn’t going to go up anyway, albeit probably slower, I’ll make a note that you’re assuming risk and should only do so if you can afford to lose the money and agree with all of our dumb assumptions.

Isn’t it funny that I’m like 4 years into writing this column and I’m only now telling you to only spec with money you can afford to lose? That’s how good EDH finance is, I never assume we won’t get there. Even our misses are just longer-term hits, baby! Bet it all on black!

OK, that out of the way, let’s talk about the assumptions we’re making. First, the piece of news upon which our assumptions are predicated.

The News

Someone in the EDHREC writers Slack channel alerted me to this press release. No, that wasn’t intended as a name drop. It’s an exclusive Slack channel, but not in that good a way. It’s exclusive like the club of people who turned themselves blue drinking colloidal silver is exclusive – yeah, you’re not in the group but that’s fine, trust me.  Let’s examine the thing.

Enhance

Enhance

Too far

Awww yisss. If this is what I think it is, it’s another Commander precon series with Planeswalkers at the helm. That’s assumption numero the first.

My next assumption is that planeswalkers will be legal as commanders from now on. It’s possible that it’s just all of us wanting it that makes us think it’s so but I said I wouldn’t hose you by making picks that won’t pan out if this assumption is wrong so let’s pretend we already know it’s true and save ourselves some equivocating.

 

When Do We Make Some Money?

I thought I’d never pretend you asked. Let’s do that now, shall we?

Our main assumptions, restated are

  1. Commander 2018 will have Planeswalkers as the commanders.
  2. Any Planeswalker will be a legal commander starting in late 2018.

From that, I can make a few sub-assumptions that can help us figure some things out.

  1. The decks are $40 MSRP which is more than normal. Either the walkers will be pushed in power level or they’re allowing themselves to reprint expensive cards they didn’t before (Doubling Season?)
  2. 4 decks means they won’t be all mono-colored. Commander 2017 showed they stress color balance over the set not over the decks and gave us a 5-color Dragon and 2-color cat and stuff in between.
  3. My Ajani Vengeant deck will make them regret the decision to allow older ‘walkers to be commanders.

I think hype alone is going to drive some prices if any of this information is confirmed, so we have a small window to act on it before everyone else comes to the conclusions we’re coming to today and scoops the cards. Better from us at a higher price than at current retail because we napped on this info.

The Chain Veil

Old Chainy veil is calming down a bit and my initial impression was that this is a likely reprint in the Commander decks or more likely one of them, but I got to thinking, is it? The Chain Veil is played in two types of decks with Planeswalkers; Superfriends, which is a deck with a lot of Planeswalkers and Chain Veil Teferi, a deck that uses exactly one Planeswalker in particular and rarely any others, although not always. The two reprint scenarios, then are either a Teferi reprint or a ‘Walker that is similarly good with The Chain Veil which won’t happen because you can’t put the stupid Chain Veil/Teferi infinite combo in a precon and only charge 5 extra dollars and expect the other decks to compete. You also can’t jam $300 worth of Planeswalkers in a $40 precon and call it a Superfriends deck, and you can put 4 Planeswalkers in a precon and call it a Superfriends deck. Since The Chain Veil isn’t great outside of those two scenarios, neither of which is appropriate for a precon (though fine to be built by the end user) I think reprint risk is mitigated. That gives us a declining, second-spike-ready artifact that can go in any Planeswalker deck that wants it. I think this goes up on hype as much as playability and you can always sell off before the full decklists are announced if you really are afraid of a reprint.

The foil is down, too. Hallelujah. A lot of this decrease is post-Atraxa hangover where the bad angel promised to make every card in any possible build $20 forever but there is a real chance for this to recover, especially with its reprint risk farther mitigated. This doesn’t even have to play nicely with the new cards to go up on hype, so be on the supply side of the coming wave.

Doubling Season

This is a bit of an obvious one, too, but I don’t know how good it would be outside of superfriends builds, necessarily. Also, people could always build that before and allowing a Planeswalker to helm the deck isn’t necessarily going to make that option more attractive. Unlike the Chain Veil, this only goes in green decks and if there is no new 5 color Walker (can you imagine? Yuck) I don’t know. Now that the two obvious ‘Walker cards are out of the way, it becomes a little tougher to figure out what we can make money off of. Let’s add to that the fact that all of the other cards in Superfriends seem to only be good at finding ‘Walkers in the deck.

Meh.

Ugh.

Oy vey.

We’re going to need to try a different approach, and that is to look at any cards in common between the 5 existing Planeswalker commanders. So… artifacts? Lands?

If I don’t say something smart pretty soon, this was a waste of an observation.

I’ll save like and hour on EDHREC – there’s nothing. There are no common cards between the 5 current Planeswalkers as Commanders and I doubt there’s anything in common with the new ones. That means we basically have to slide down a tier of certainty if we’re going to come up with anything worthwhile.

We’re Speccing For Real

I’ll finish this article by talking about the Planeswalkers I think would be the best Commanders and if there are any cards that pair nicely with them.

Tamiyo, Field Researcher

This would be nuts as a Commander, especially in green where you can cast her with Doubling Season and get the emblem right away on top of refilling your grip. This card isn’t super exciting outside of the odd Atraxa build right now but if this is in your command zone, your mana dorks draw cards, you can frost dudes all day and you can say goodbye to mana. Whaaa? There’s no interacting with that stupid emblem, either. Good luck.

Cards that pair well with this build – 

Doubling Season

Enter the Infinite

Every Eldrazi

Ajani Vengeant

This probably isn’t that good but I’m still going to build the stupid thing. Screw you and your lands in particular, scrub.

Cards that pair well with this build – I don’t even know, I regret bringing it up.

Kaya, Ghost Assassin 

I see people call this a good Stax commander, and I can’t disagree. This would be annoying as hell to play against.

Cards that pair well with this build – 

Stax cards.

I don’t know, Hokori?

Smokestacks probably? I think?

Let me google EDH stax cards.

Some dude wrote a whole crazy primer, but they all seem to want

So be apprised of that. Those cards are all probably good pickups anyway.

I feel like any of the decent commanders could get their own entire article. If we do it that way, we’ll want to wait until people start building the decks that way, so as much fun as I’m having here, there isn’t much point in continuing.

What I think we’ll do is revisit this when there is something more actionable and we may give any given commander the article treatment the way we would any new Legendary creature. For now, I think there are moves to make here and I am really feeling good about The Chain Veil because even an announcement is going to drive buying and we want to be holding copies when that happens.

I hope you got some value from this piece and we’ll try something a little more traditional next week. Until then!

Watchtower

PROTRADER: The Watchtower 3/26/18

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. And if you enjoy playing Magic, make sure to visit https://scry.land to find PPTQs, SCG Opens, and more events on an interactive map with worldwide coverage. Find Magic near you today.

With Dominaria around the corner and tax refunds burning a hole in everyone’s pocket, there’s been a lot of activity in the marketplace. Returning tribes with a long history in Magic — goblins, merfolk, etc. — are getting people excited (I guess that’s the right word) to look back at some forgotten gems of the past. Skirk Fire Marshal comes to mind, an amusing goblin that I’ve put to good use in Zada. Foils from Onslaught were bought out a few days ago. Will the return of goblins in Dominaria get people playing with that card all of the sudden? I’m dubious. When you’re paying $.50 for foil copies and listing them for $15 though, you only need to be right once.

 

Tireless Tracker

Price Today: $13
Possible Price: $25

Tireless Tracker is hardly an unknown quantity. She was Shadow Over Innistrad’s sleeper, and since having woken up, has been on a tear. She spread through Standard quickly, and then moved on to Modern and EDH. Today she’s impressively the 11th most played creature in Modern, and can be found in 6,000 decks on EDHREC.

I shouldn’t need to sell you on the utility of Tracker. Everyone in the Magic community seems to be aware of it. Less than they should be, in fact? Browsing results from GP Phoenix I see a Bant Knightfall list isn’t bothering with Tracker. That’s an odd choice to me. Knightfall is a deck looking to turbocharge landfall triggers. Wouldn’t that be excellent with Tracker? What do I know, I”m just a finance writer.

Non-foil copies of Tracker have made it to $13, which is a respectable price tag indeed. It’s not often that I find myself writing about nearly-legal Standard rares already in the double digits, but I’ve got to say, there’s room to grow. She’s widespread in Modern, and as a value creature (rather than a combo piece), likely entrenched. There’s plenty of players taking her up in EDH with more to come, and even cubes are finding room for her. Before long Tracker’s going to be a $20 or $25 rare, and eventually we could be looking at a $30 or $40 card without reprints. (Although that will take several years, and is unlikely to come to pass.)

Bring to Light (Foil)

Price Today: $3
Possible Price: $10

GP Phoenix saw an occasionally forgotten archetype show up again, which was Bring to Light Scapeshift. Rather than hope to draw one of four Scapeshifts, the build uses Bring to Light to act as Scapeshifts 5-8. Or in this case, 4-7, as there were more BTLs than Scapeshifts. Since BTL can fetch not just Scapeshift, it provides the deck with some flexibility. Maybe it’s not the right time to cast Scapeshift, but you desperately need a wrath? BTL can do that!

I’ll be clear that a few people showing up with BTL Scapeshift each weekend isn’t going to send prices soaring. I learned that lesson with Ad Nauseam. I picked up a pile a year or so ago when it was building in popularity, but even holding the format’s position as the best true combo deck couldn’t budge the non-foils enough to turn a meaningful profit. Of course, BTL does more than combo in Modern, and I’m talking foils.

Foils are a richer vein, since every combo deck has its die hard fans, and they’ll eat all the foils out of the market given enough time. There’s also much less risk of them showing up again at a later date, since we’re not getting foils in Archenemy or whatever product is on the horizon any given month. There’s also EDH, which BTL is remarkably strong in.

That BTL isn’t as or more popular than Demonic Tutor is probably an indictment against the player base at large. Green and Blue are the two best colors in EDH, and with the rules change allowing decks to generate any color of mana, so long as BTL is legal in your deck, you should probably be playing it. Even three colors is a deal, since you’re tutoring and casting a three drop for five mana. At four colors it’s way above curve, and at five mana it’s basically cheating. Sure it doesn’t let you go get your Avenger of Zendikar, but it lets you get basically anything else.

Anyways, between nascent Modern demand and continued EDH support, foils will keep climbing towards $10 or so.

Aetherflux Reservoir (Foil)

Price Today: $10
Possible Price: $20

I wasn’t expecting to be able to recommend this, as I figured the price would be too high already, but I didn’t expect what I found.

What I found was almost no supply. Prices on foils have been slowly climbing since release, and took a tick up from about $7 to $10 at the start of the month. There’s now only a handful of vendors for pack foils left. The promo supply is basically empty too.

Even if I am just overlooking a buyout that happened last night or something, the price is still in good shape regardless. $7 to $10 for foils are well positioned for a card that’s already in 10,000 EDH decks. That level of penetration that fast is remarkable. And given how popular lifegain strategies tend to be — Oloro remains one of the most popular generals ever, years later — I expect that popularity to remain strong.

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

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Masterpiece Awareness

Oh we are starting the Dominaria stuff slowly, with two great stories and some new frames. I like the slow release of information, it’s easier to process.

I don’t want to get distracted, though: Standard is four months from rotating, and that means it’s time to look at the supply of Kaladesh block vs. the demand of Modern/Legacy/other formats.

Specifically, today, I want to look at the Masterpieces from this set, the Inventions. The Amonkhet Invocations are more polarizing, some people LOVE them and other ABHOR them, but the Inventions were received well and have moved well. Supply on these is at their lowest (I’ve been giving them time to really trickle down) and now, before they move up, I want to look at a few of the lower-cost ones and see what’s worth it in the long term.

Champion’s Helm ($13 nonfoil/no pack foil/$27 masterpiece)

If you have a commander that needs to stay in play, this is a fantastic card. It is fighting with Lightning Greaves and Swiftfoot Boots, I’ll give you that, but the lack of a pack foil means that this is the only choice. I don’t think this is going to ever spike, but if you like cards on a slow growth curve, this is for you.

This is in really low supply, too. It was in the original Commander set, seven years ago, and now this printing is the only foil that exists. I won’t be shocked when it gets reprinted, but this is the only foil you’ll find until Eternal Masters 2: Eternal Harder.

Planar Bridge ($2.50/$5/$30)

The huge jump from pack foil to the Masterpiece is exactly the indicator I’m looking for. The casual appeal of a big mana card like this cannot be denied, and while it is restricted to permanents only, it’s still a very powerful card. This has kept the pack foil at a very reasonable price, and if you wanted to pick up something that undervalued I would understand. Just remember that the Masterpiece keeps the pack foil from getting too high in price. Why am I going to spend $15 on the pack foil if I can spend $30 on the Masterpiece?

Trinisphere ($38/$48/$52 Masterpiece/$17 FTV: Exiled)

This isn’t a casual pick, it’s based on the recent jump in Modern decks playing this. It’s gaining popularity in decks playing Simian Spirit Guide, as a way to wreck a lot of decks. Damping Sphere is on the horizon, but Trinisphere is a card that can really bring the game to a grind, especially in the Ponza decks which will then start destroying lands. The FTV is much less popular likely due to warping issues and being ugly.

Minds Eye ($10/$15 pack foil/$16 Commander’s Arsenal/$25 Masterpiece)

This is a hard card to draw lots of cards with, and that’s why it’s not super-popular. It’s not even 2x the price of the pack foil or the CA version, and those two foils are underpriced compared to the original. It’s a pretty unexciting card to add to a Commander precon, and that should keep the card from getting reprinted. Any of the shiny versions are good targets for slow growth.

Cloudstone Curio ($10/$19/$32)

It’s a niche card that enables all sorts of dumb combos in casual formats, but the appeal of these things cannot be overstated. The pack foil is underpriced, and that’s due to the Masterpiece. The Masterpiece has the price that I’d expect the pack foil to have, indicating the demand is there, pushing the pack foil down. I would like to think that the Masterpiece is rarer than an original Ravnica foil, but it’s got to be close.

I’d mention the other big-deal Gauntlet-related bit of media, but there’s copyright issues.

Gauntlet of Power ($20/$28/$43)

For a card that seems so narrow, it’s in nearly 9000 decks on EDHREC. That’s a lot of mono-color goodness, and this is begging for a reprint. I don’t like being in on the nonfoils, but the pack foils and the Masterpiece both sing to me of slow, steady growth. I’m not sure why the foil multiplier is so low on this card, to be honest. I’d expect that the Masterpiece is holding down the price of the pack foil, sure, but given a regular price of $20, this ought to be in the $50 range.

Paradox Engine ($13/$21/$55)

Now that’s a hefty foil multiplier, as befits a card in 9600 Commander decks. There’s a lot of ways to abuse this card. I don’t need to list them, just add your favorite combination of mana rocks and card draw. My personal favorite is chaining Sphinxes with Unesh, but you do what works for you. Go five-color and go wild with Prismatic Geoscope, for instance. Keep in mind that this is one of the Aether Revolt Inventions, and the supply on that subset of Masterpieces is significantly smaller.

Rings of Brighthearth ($33/$43/$67)

This card spiked, hard, when Atraxa, Praetors’ Voice was printed. Just crazy, the amount of triggers to be abused, planeswalker abilities to be copied, and so on. This is 100% a ‘win more’ card, and that’s what Commander players love the most. We don’t want to do something awesome. We want to do that twice.

Upward, slowly but surely!

Another member of the 9000-deck club, I realize I’m recommending a $70 card as a prime candidate to climb in price, but I think this will be $100 by the end of the year. If you want one, go ahead and get it. Don’t wait around.

 

Cliff is an avid Cuber and Commander player, and has a deep love for weird ways to play this amazing game, as well as being guest host on MTGFF when needed. His current project is a light-up sign for attracting Cubers at GPs, so get his attention @wordofcommander on Twitter if you’ve got ideas or designs.

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Meet the New Captain, Same as the Old Captain

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Everything old is new again and everything new seems to care about everything old. The Weatherlight has a new captain and while it’s not a Green/White creature, she is a creature a lot of people have been waiting on for a long time. We finally got the “Izzet-colored, arifacts matter” commander that people have been clamoring for and while she is sort of… linear, she also has a few surprises in that her card drawing triggers off of more than just artifacts. Let’s look at the card, shall we?

We can’t look at the card. Despite the fact that we have all of the information about the card, and it leaked because of a mistake Wizards made, they have decided that unveiling the art when they had planned to will still be exciting and it’s sort of hard to argue. Leaks like this are garbage. I saw someone compare it to sneaking downstairs the night before Christmas and peeking at all of your presents so you’re not surprised on Christmas morning and I’m not sure I agree. To me, it’s like finding out Santa Claus isn’t real and your parents got you socks. Also, I’m in my 30s and I was pissed off this year because no one got me socks. I had to buy my own socks like a peasant. I guess what I’m trying to say is that if I weren’t a financier, I wouldn’t have even looked at these stupid leaks and it’s a good thing I looked because this is the second commander I came across that is going to build a very linear, obvious way and that will bump a lot of cards.

Card Bumps, You Say?

Yeah, man, why you think we’re here if not to talk about the money we’re about to scoop up because we’re even farther ahead of the curve than normal? While it sucks that these leaks happened, the silver lining is that we have a few extra weeks to predict what EDH players are going to build when they finally get ahold of the cards. Normally there is a gap between cards coming out and people buying them in large enough quantities for prices to move but this time the gap will be even larger since we can start thinking about what to buy now. Let’s make the most of this time and look at what I expect to end up in Jhoira decks.

The first thing to remember is that Planeswalkers are now Legendary so they are eligible for the trigger and may get jammed into decks alongside Jhoira.

 

Dack Fayden

With no real impetus for an impending reprint and a lot of this card’s meteoric past rise being predicated on use in formats where people may want more than one copy, how well this pairs with Jhoira could see it gain a few bucks in the coming months. I don’t know what sort of adoption it would need to really go up based on being a one-of in one EDH deck and with so many Legendary creatures being printed in Dominaria and with Commander 2018 promising to be packed with value, we could see a logjam in new decks being built with no clear winner presenting itself, but with the amount of clamoring we’ve seen for Jhoira, I expect this to over-perform relative to other commanders. But there I go again, listening to what people say they want like an idiot.

Saheeli Rai

Currently made out of plutonium, people are dumping copies of this part of a banned combo as fast as they can. At their absolute floor, copies of this card are a steal and those abilities are all really nuts in an artifact-based EDH deck and, hey, playing Saheeli happens to draw you a card, too. Saheeli should be really cozy with Jhoira and their fates are intertwined, meaning if Jhoira is as popular as everyone claims they want it to be, we could see a nice price recovery for this card.

Tamiyo, The Moon Sage

I don’t want to spend too much of my verbal budget on Planeswalkers since this was supposed to just be a bullet point in the larger point I was making, but I found more good planeswalkers than I expected. Tamiyo isn’t really going anywhere but it sure equilibrated higher than anyone would have thought. This is good alongside Jhoira and it’s also an expensive, powerful planeswalker and its current malaise might be snapped by renewed interest. I also have the least confidence in this of every ‘walker I suggested.

Tezzeret, the Seeker

Modern Masters 2015 was a while ago and while this hasn’t begun to recover yet, I don’t think another reprinting is imminent and I think as good as this is, it’s going to tick back up. It probably has some unknown amount of competition from unprinted Planeswalkers. It seems like every time I get a handle on what Planeswalkers are supposed to do, they print another 30 in a a 12 month period and it throws everything off. This is a better than average planeswalker and it is blue and it deals with artifacts and that has to be enough.

What Else?

Well, it isn’t just Planeswalkers that trigger her ability and I think she is going to be a good either eggs or storm commander. I am excited.

Aetherflux Reservoir

The non-foil is on a downward trend approaching rotation…

As is the foil. I think both are good picksups then, I think reprint risk is pretty low and I think this is a solid EDH finisher in Oloro, which is a Top 3 deck of all time in popularity as well as a great inclusion in a lot of storm and spellslinger decks. Its EDHREC profile shows some pretty robust inclusion and speaks to its versatility and ubiquity. More lifelink or lifegain-focused decks coming along only adds new interest in this card and that’s particularly good for a foil that has demonstrated the ability to flirt with $8 while still in-print. I don’t know how much lower foils of this get but this is a no-brainer pickup.

Helm of Awakening

Helping your opponents isn’t always great, but 3,005 people on EDHREC have decided they’d rather play a card that they can really abuse and allow opponents get some tangential benefit from than not play it and here we are. Cheaper and more accessible than Stone Calendar and cheaper mana-wise, too, this is a card I keep seeing pop up in Jhoira lists and I expect that to continue. This makes eggs even better as you get to play them for cheap or free and use their mana to freewheel the activation on the next egg, letting you chaing them. Combine that with the double draw trigger and you will always have a full mitt. This also turns cards like Sensei’s Top into free cantrips and generally makes it easier to go off early in the game. We’ve seen rares from this block hit $10 with less provocation.

Semblance Anvil

This is looking pretty healthy. It’s fluctuating but the overall trend is upward and with a set-specific keyword, its reprint options are somewhat limited (though set-specific keywords have never stopped them from jamming the card in a Commander precon which is the worst case scenario). I honestly think this card has been secretly way better than people give it credit for and I have no idea why it doesn’t get more play. If you name artifacts, you just dump your hand and if you have a Vedalken Archmage in your command zone ready to go at all times, you fill your hand as fast as you can dump it.

Unwinding Clock

Whereas here, I can’t find any possible way to balance this ability against anything in the other precon decks, so anything with an artifact focus would be too good with this and any deck with this but no apparent artifact focus couldn’t really justify the slot. Therefore, I think this would be a very unlikely reprint in a Commander precon. I don’t know if that further limits its reprintability compared with something like Semblance Anvil but I do think it’s unlikely to be in a Commander precon. They invent 5 new sealed products a year, so never say never, but I bet this grows for years and I bet you feel silly for not getting these a few years ago when EDH proved what a driving force it was. I was celebrating with the triple up I got on Caged Sun (meaning I sold them way too early) and I missed an even more obvious card in hindsight.

I think there are a few more cards that have upside and maybe I’ll cover them next week, maybe I’ll tweet about them, maybe they’ll be in the Gathering Magic piece I wrote this week, maybe I’ll podcast about them, maybe I’ll write an EDHREC article for no reason or maybe I’ll be a guest on someone else’s podcast and talk about them. Follow me all over, I have so many insights I can’t hold them all and they fall out of my grasp like hilarious, errant citrus fruit. All of these finance tips will be lost. Like limes in the rain. Until next time.

Image result for limes are hilarious

 

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY