Welcome to the first part of my one part series entitled “Combos you should know about”; a series where I will write about combos about which you should know about and if I ever want to do it again in the future, I’ll have to call the article something else because I already said it was a one part series and now that’s canon. I’m writing about this topic because I tried like hell to find financial opportunities for a Gishath deck and couldn’t. Let’s look at why Gishath is terrible for my typical “Rising tide lifts all boats” approach to EDH deckbuilding.

The Story of Gishath

This is about the story of the card and its price, not the story of actual Gishath the Dinosaur because I feel silly even typing the phrase “Gishath the Dinosaur” and Vorthos is for nerds. The story of the card is one we should know as financiers. First, Gishath was a deck that had to play cards like Looming Altisaur and Fungusaur (yes, THAT Fungusaur – the one with the silly precursor to Enrage) to have enough creatures. Now that we have another set full of Dinosaurs, including some pretty good ones, there are more than enough creatures to field an EDH deck which basically runs about 20 creatures max on a good day.

There are two real types of cards in the Gishath deck.

Cards that are already really expensive.

And cards that never will be.

That being the case, I don’t think there is much opportunity here. I think Standard will be far more important when determining the fate of Dinosaurs than will EDH and I also think a tribe like this suffers from the cards either being too new or too generic. All of the stuff that’s not from Ixalan block that’s in a Dinosaur deck is generic tribal stuff that’s good in all tribal decks. There’s no Swarmyard or Sliver Hive that suddenly got activated by new printings, it’s just “Hey, I might want to run Descendants’ Path in this” and no $&#*, of course you want to do that. I don’t think this is going to make enough of a splash to push Path of Ancestry up in price and it’s certainly not going to cause a run on Magmasaur. What do we talk about? I talked about Kumena. Azor seems like an inclusion rather than a commander. Elenda doesn’t really want to be built around when Karlov and Oloro exist. The other Dinosaurs are mono-colored. It’s possible there is nothing else to really talk about in terms of new decks based on that set, and if that’s the case, GOOD. let people catch up. They released 49 sets this year and they all had good Legendary creatures.

 

What We’ll Do Instead

Instead of worrying about a new card that’s going to make archetypes happen, let’s talk about some interactions that you may want to sell into the hype surrounding and some interactions that are underrated.

Polyraptor/Pyrohemia

This is a doofy combo. Do you want to do this? Maybe. Probably not. Be advise that Pyrohemia was a card before this and despite being reprinted in a Commander deck, it’s still going up in price. While Pestilence does the same thing with approximately a million printings, Pyrohemia is in Gishath colors and that matters a ton. This is a bad combo but being a bad combo has never stopped anyone before. Pyrohemia eventually kills the dinosaurs off so you’re going to max out on the number of copies you can make per turn, or you can just run Aether Flash and Impact Tremors to kill them. I think if this combo takes off, there are other cards to buy but I think this won’t take off. I’ll still list the cards. Whatever. People buy stuff in bad combos all the time, just not the cards that they need to buy to actually build the deck. Most of the time they’re panic buying from someone like me and I’m happy to sell to them. Speaking of which.

Keep or Sell? – Sell! Sell those Pyrohemias, and don’t forget it was printed two times so pick all of your bulk and the bulk at your LGS while you’re at it. This combo is bad and no one will build the deck.

What if they build the deck? – I think there are a few cards that go in the deck if it gets built.

Aether Flash

Impact Tremors

Pandemonium

Warmonger

Subterranean Spirit

But let’s be honest, the deck probably isn’t happening and it wouldn’t be an EDH deck if it did happen.

Famished Paladin/Resplendent Mentor

This combo is less good but also less ridiculous than the above one and therefore somehow seems more plausible. Mentor at least is non-useless outside of the combo (though I guess Pyrohemia isn’t really useless and is a decent Enrage enabler for the rest of the Dinosaurs you’re likely not playing because the Enrage ones suck compared to the ones like Alpha Regisaur and Etali that you’ll actually put in the deck) despite being in a modest 136 decks on EDHREC mostly, you  guessed it, Karlov and Oloro. Being able to gain infinite life isn’t great in a “die to 21 commander damage” format and I can’t get people as excited about Test of Endurance as I am. Still, mentor is an uncommon in Shadowmoor and those are all picks, all of them, so you likely can’t find this in bulk and if you have them, you’re lucky you didn’t sell them a long time ago.

Buy or Sell? – I think you sell into hype. This combo isn’t great in EDH. I think maybe it gets there in 60 card casual, but we can’t predict what lunatics are going to do and will people who don’t read articles and discover which cards are in a set by opening boosters at Walmart and reading cards they’ve never seen before ever get on the same page enough to drive prices? I think sell while the selling’s good.

What if they build this deck?

I think there are other cards that are impacted, some of which I always talk about.

Test of Endurance

Karlov, Ghost Council

Sanguine Bond/Exquisite Blood

Why am I mentally brewing a deck I don’t think will exist?

Blood Sun/Bad Cards

Blood Sun is Solemnity 2.0. Remember all of those sick combos that were going to be enabled by Solemnity?

They sort of didn’t pan out. Like, at all.

You think competitive players really want a Blood Moon that shuts off like 1/3 of the lands Blood Moon shuts off? I don’t know. Meanwhile, people are buying Lotus Vale and other stuff.

I’m realizing this article sounds increasingly hostile to these combos but, come on, EDH players are out to build decks, not play cutesy two-card combos that don’t win the game. If you’re tutoring for a combo, it better be worth it. You go get Kiki-Jiki and Zealous Conscripts. No one is going to Tooth and Nail for Resplendent Mentor.

Buy or Sell? – Sell your Lotus Vales, Scorched Ruins, etc. This is not a particularly good combination, Blood Sun seems unlikely to enable cute combos so much as just be a sort of Blood Moon variant that Tron players can use to shut off Ghost Quarter and keep their lands switched on (I guess?). But hey, buy Forbidden Orchard because MTG Salvation is predictably worked into a lather about bad interactions, I guess.

Are there any good combos?

Yes,

Etali, Primal Storm/Cheating

Attacking with Etali early and often is brutal. Sneak and Show Legacy players are already toying with the idea of using him with Sneak Attack because you can Brainstorm Emrakul on top and just be done with the game then and there.  Cheating this out with anything from Reanimate to Elvish Piper is going to really get there. Hell, ramp to it. EDH is a ramp format. I expect Etali to very much impact the format of EDH and with this set looking like there is nothing that stands out, SOMETHING has to be worth money and it might as well be Etali. I don’t hate preordering it and taking a risk. I haven’t felt this strongly about a card since Ishkanah and look what happened there.

Timestream Navigator/Copying

It should be easy to get City’s Blessing if you’re making a lot of copies and once you can make a copy every turn, go ahead and take every turn. People were nuts about Wanderwine Prophets but haven’t even brought up Timestream Navigator. Will it be super hard to get City’s Blessing? Play Spell Swindle if you don’t think so. Play some ramp in your deck that has Progenitor Mimic and is therefore at least Simic. This is the best combo I have seen and no one cares. I guess that’s what happens when you let Reddit decide which cards should go up in price. Kick a Rite of Replication on this and you basically can’t lose the game.

That does it for me this week. I think you sell into hype, buy ahead of real, actual decks that will be built and don’t be afraid to risk $100 preordering a $4 dragon. If that hits $20 you’ll be able to build your next deck for free. Until next time!

It’s rare that I don’t wait for an entire set to be spoiled before I start talking about how a deck is going to be built, but I’m going to talk about how a deck is going to be built because, great googily moogily.

Now, I usually don’t like to do what I’m about to do and that’s speculate with no data. I got into EDH finance because I like to make my plays based on what people have been doing for 6 months because it used to take a year for stuff to move. Life is coming at as a lot faster than it used to and I think getting ahead of some price increases is prudent the second we recognize interactions because cards are beginning to go up the second they are identified as a potential combo irrespective of whether people actually play them.

Sub 1,000 decks and holding steady at just below $10? K.

It wasn’t EDH players who got excited about Wanderwine Prophets in Inalla decks, it was speculators and that’s because Commander 2017 being tribal made it so even people who have no idea what EDH is about could speculate on EDH cards. I don’t know if a merfolk commander from Rivals of Ixalan is inclined to make a Lorwyn Merfolk hit $10 the way this did. I’m inclined to say no for a few reasons.

1. A random creature out of rivals is less of an impetus to build a new deck than is a precon. A precon is a deck ready to be modified, a new card is a card. You need a lot of other things and that costs money and is more difficult than buying a precon.
2. People who don’t play EDH won’t speculate on random merfolk based on this. Only I and my readers do that.
3. We’re not talking about an infinite turn combo, something which is overrated at first if Sage of Hours is any indication.

So while realizing 1,000 growth is unlikely, we’re still likely to see some growth and that’s all we need. I think there are plenty of bulk uncommons that go up based on this new printing as well, and those are practically free to pick up right now. You have a few weeks before people even start building, so let’s try and anticipate what could matter and get ahead of the curve.

 

The Card

So this is a card. There are a few ways to build this deck, ranging from Voltron to Merfolk tribal and all seem pretty good. Tishana was pretty disappointing and the EDHREC metrics bear that out – there’s no good reason to play Tishana when Zegana exists.

However, I think Kumena is a card worth trifling with and I think it has the capacity to push some prices around. Let’s look at what likely goes in a majority of Kumena decks, which could be a decent amount and therefore impact prices.

The Rest of the Deck

Surgespanner

This is my pick #1 with a bullet. It’s trending up a little bit but with the ability to tap it at will with your commander, this goes up for sure. We’ve seen the ceiling on a Lorwyn rare merfolk that gets used just in EDH at $10 and while I don’t think this will hit that just because it’s me telling you it’s good instead of someone on reddit, I think it still goes up. $7.50 isn’t out of the question, and $5 seems all but guaranteed. If you don’t think that’s spicy enough, check out the foil.

That’s a mere 2x multiplier, which is common for non-played cards. The great thing about a foil mutliplier on a non-played card is you make a ton of money when it goes to a played card. The multiplier for a played card isn’t unreasonable at 4x so if the price of the non-foil doubles as people begin to play with it, the multiplier should also double meaning you get a huge price correction. The $2 non-foil shoots up to $5 and the multiplier doubles to 4x and all of a sudden your $4 foil is $20. I’m not saying necessarily buy this card in foil, but I’m not saying necessarily don’t, either. The foils are way easier to trigger the market so if anyone buys, everyone notices and that’s the unfortunate nature of MTG Finance these days. I can’t sanction that kind of BS but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out it can happen and if we can be poised to take advantage of someone else’s buffoonery, then we’re doing it right.

Wake Thrasher

Goblins versus Merfolk hasn’t quite caught up to this guy but it will, likely pulling the price down to around $0.50 retail. I don’t know if I love that as a point of entry but I will say that Wake Thrasher is very good in a deck where you’re rewarded for tapping your Merfolk. I think the deck benefits a ton from ways to untap your Merfolk and tap them again and growing Wake Thrasher as you do it is solid. Pre-combat you grow all of your merfolk, make your commander unblockable and grow your Thrasher, making it possible to threaten multiple players with lethal damage at once. You need a big board for that, but I think blue and green can handle that if any color combination can.

The 3x multiplier on the foil and stagnant growth chart seem to indicate this a card people know is a card but which hasn’t taken off yet. I think there’s opportunity here, but less so than with  Surgespanner. Still, I showed you the foil copy and you can make up your own mind.

Grimoire Thief

Around $2 for a merfolk that does something when it becomes tapped? You’re going to do some work with this card in that deck. Also, you’re going to randomly pants someone when you counter a spell that you exiled from one player’s deck. No one expects that second ability in a 1-of format and it’s going to be hilarious when you get someone with it. This card goes in the deck for sure – it’s too obvious not to. A 4x foil multiplier tells me we could see some gains, but again, returns diminish the higher a multiplier is to begin with.

Thada Adel, Acquisitor

This doesn’t specifically interact with the commander but it almost certainly goes in the deck. If you’re playing Merfolk, you’re making their lands into Islands and therefore helping this card get even better. I think this is pretty reprintable but I’m not sure where they’d do it exactly, so maybe I’m being paranoid somewhat. I do know I like this card a ton and I put it in most of the 75% decks I brew on Gathering Magic and people have to eventually notice.

And speaking of turning their lands into Islands

This card does some serious work.

BULK

I promised there were a few bulk picks I liked, so here we are.

 

Also, check out my Gathering Magic article a week from this Thursday. I’m going to be brewing a deck with this card and the cards that make the cut are all probably worth looking at. There are too many to name here- Benefactor’s Draught, Thrasios, Paradox Engine, Umbral Mantle, Vitalize – a lot can go in the deck as well as the new Merfolk we’ll be spoiling the rest of the week, some of which are already spoiled and are fantastic.

Hope you enjoyed this read. Until next time!