UNLOCKED: The Watchtower 1/29/18

January 29, 2018 Travis Allen

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.

If you’re watching social media, you’ll notice most of the pro community arriving in Spain. Players begin battling this Friday. Spain is six hours ahead of the east coast, which means by the time you’re watching at 9am on Friday, they’re done with draft and starting Modern. That works out well honestly; nobody cares about the draft anyways, so tuning in around the start of Modern is great.

On the Modern front, you’ve also got SCG who just announced a No Banned List Modern event at their “SCGCON” in June. That piqued interest immediately, as it’s not something that’s visited often, and it’s fun to see how things shake out in what’s essentially a new format. Fan favorites tend to be Hypergenesis, Infect, Storm, and Dredge.

Reflector Mage (Foil)

Price Today: $5
Possible Price: $15

When Humans first debuted as a Modern deck a few months ago, I laid out a few cards I liked, but advised caution. Spiking an event is possible for any strategy, and sustained results are needed before lasting price changes occur. Well, Humans has kept up its end of the bargain, with a slew of results since that first trip out. Just this weekend it was the Modern selection for the winning team in SCG’s team trios.

I want to tell you that Aether Vial is a good choice, since it’s always going to be a four-of and it’s great in other strategies too, namely Merfolk, which is also having a renaissance of its own, but it’s simply not worth it. The price to get in is too high, and the probability of future reprints is only slightly behind basic island.

Instead, I’ll talk about foil Reflector Mages. He’s been floating around in a variety of formats since having gotten kicked out of Standard awhile ago. He’s in several thousand EDH decks, a popular cube selection, and floats around Modern even without the Humans strategy. With Humans as a tier one aggro strategy, that means Reflector Mage is now a four-of in a tier one Modern deck on top of his other uses.

You’ll pay about $5 for foils right now on the low end of the market. With the upcoming Modern Pro Tour possibly putting the spotlight on a strategy that so far hasn’t hit the big stage yet, and continued popularity from other places, I suspect we’ll see foils above $10 before too long.

Merrow Harbinger (Foil)

Price Today: $2
Possible Price: $8

It’s been a few weeks since Rivals of Ixalan hit shelves, and Kumena continues to be a popular general over on EDHREC. I don’t anticipate that he’ll be a long-standing top ten general, but he’s popular enough right now that merfolk prices are swimming upstream.

Merrow Harbinger is going to be nuts in any Kumena deck, if only because it fetches what I imagine is the best card in the deck, Merrow Commerce. (Thanks, tribal!) If fetching in 60 card decks is good, then fetching one-ofs in 99 card decks is insane. Of course, you can also go get another lord to pump up your team, or any other merfolk that would be helpful at the moment. Master of Waves probably won’t be a bad choice often either.

Foils are about two bucks at the moment. I’m a big fan of scooping these up at that price anywhere you find them. You’ll at least be able to get $5 or $6 out of them soon, and possibly even more, depending on how popular Kumena remains.

Birthing Pod

Price Today: $7.50
Possible Price: $20

With SCG’s No Banned List Modern announcement, people are gassed up to see what could spike. The obvious answer is Hypergenesis, for several reasons. It’s ancient, has one printing, is an entire archetype to its own, is only $2, etc. It’s not bad, honestly. I know you’ll see it elsewhere though, so I looked around to see what else was an option.

Aside from the obvious Hypergenesis, Infect, Storm, Dredge, and Caw-Blade, where else might people go? Birthing Pod was always popular when it was legal, and while it definitely needed to go, the people who ran those decks found them fun and interesting. It also may have the power to keep up with some of those other strategies (although no promises there). This could certainly send a few people in Pod’s direction.

It’s not just this event that has me noticing it, though. More importantly than this event, I see that it’s in over 13,000 EDH decks. That makes it one of the most popular green cards in the format. Add in that it’s only got a single printing, and low (but not non-existent) supply, and the ingredients are there for a healthy rise. At $7.50, you may be able to ride this right up to $20.

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.

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Casual Fridays

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Streamer Influence

January 26, 2018 Cliff Daigle

I love watching Magic content. I can devour an awful lot of content, especially with Cubes, unusual decks, and high-level play. YouTube is a fantastic resoucrce for me to learn about new innovations, to see how cards get played correctly, and other ways to move a beat ahead of the market.

We are living in a time where some people are capable of influencing card prices just based on ideas they have had and they don’t even need to win a tournament. The phenomenon of ‘net-decking’ is nowhere as evil now as it was before, and ignoring data is a flaw in your approach to the metagame.

What I want to look at today is a few ways that individuals online have swayed prices significantly. The decks played don’t even need to do well, because all it takes is the attention and the cards begin to spike.

Let’s look at some recent examples.

The Professor and Pauper

In case you weren’t aware, there’s a YouTube personality called The Professor, and he’s in charge of the Tolarian Community College. You might not think it’s important, but he’s got almost as many subscribers as the official Magic: the Gathering video page (295,000 to 315,000, if you want to know the specifics). The Professor has had a quest for a while now, one that’s recently bore fruit: To take the online format of commons-only called Pauper and translate it to the paper world.

GP Santa Clara was the first time it happened, and they drew a hair over 200 people. GP Indy had a similar experience, and Pauper events are going to be at most GPs going forward, since the same company is in charge of all the GP-level events.

As a result, a lot of people are taking up Pauper in paper events. Stores are starting to hold Pauper events, and with the growth in interest comes the growth in prices.

I freely admit that I don’t know enough about Pauper’s best decks or the metagame. There’s some awesome interactions, such as Grapeshot and Storm the Warrens being banned but Storm lives on with things like Thermo-Alchemist as the win condition. With that in mind, some prices are really fascinating.

Hear them screech and bring their friends!

Battle Screech is now $6, but it jumped from bulk to $4 back in January of 2016. It popped again recently when it was shifted to common in Vintage Masters online, because paper events all use that same banlist.

As a result of all this, pauper cards have gone absolutely mad. If the appeal of the format is that the cards are all common, and therefore cheap, there’s some $8 Ash Barrens that would like to have a word with you. Even if it’s cheap now, it won’t be for long.

It’s a format with an interesting (and non-rotating!) card pool, which means it’s likely to stay around. MTGO has been incubating the format for a while and that means it’s probably not going to get newly broken as a new pool of players takes it up, and event accessibility is probably still an issue for many stores, but I think it’s here to stay.

What this also means for us from a financial standpoint is that your bulk just got a bit more valuable. Every new set is going to offer a stack of new cards to add to the format, and new chances for old cards to become worth a lot more.

SaffronOlive and MTGGoldfish

With 125,000 subscribers, this is not one of the top channels in terms of numbers, but what this channel does offer is a continuous stream of oddball decks trying to play weird cards in new ways. Most of the time, that means a card or two gets highlighted, the deck does badly but has one or two really epic games, and we move on with our lives.

Occasionally, though, Seth (better known as SaffronOlive) hits upon a deck that is unexpectedly powerful, and a few cards can really take off. The most recent example of this is a B/R deck featuring Hollow One, Flameblade Adept, and a couple of commons that allow for mega-discarding: Burning Inquiry and Goblin Lore.

Yup, this is $3 now. Go dig out your old boxes!

Those commons have gone from pure bulk to selling from $3 each. Buylists haven’t caught up yet, as stores have a lot of bulk to sell off and I’m not sure how many people are actually buying at this price, but the effect is real. This deck has had some staying power, putting up good results on MTGO Modern events, so these particular cards are not going to go down in price for a while yet.

To be clear, there are a lot of streamers out there, making a lot of content, but a lot of them aren’t trying new things every single week. LSV isn’t going to show his newest deck that will break the Pro Tour, he’s going to show you how to play a deck more effectively than you’ve been doing. Streamers using new cards in new ways offer a new avenue for us to gain value in our collections.

Cliff is an avid Cuber and Commander player, and has a deep love for weird ways to play this game. His next project will be 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: Getting Intellectually Lazy

January 23, 2018 Jason Alt 3 Comments

I think it can be pretty tough to predict which cards are going to go up on merit. I’ve shifted my articles to being about that solely for the past few years and it’s gone pretty well for me. I have had to work hard to get good at this but I feel like it was worth it. The problem is, my focus is on sustainability and that’s not really doing me any favors. I’ve discussed in the past how it’s intellectually lazy to target foils of cards that could get reprinted in future Commander products because you want to save yourself the extra mental steps of analyzing reprint risk. I’ve talked about how it’s lazy to target Reserved List cards for the same reason. That said, I found a pretty juicy target this week and if I’m going to be lazy and write about a Reserved List card, I might as well write about any Reserved List card I think is a good target. I’ll get it out of my system in one article.

What is the Reserved List?

You know what the Reserved List is. Everyone does. That said, I’ve found the more loud and vocal someone is in opposition to the Reserved List, the less they actually know in general, but I am done arguing about it. Buncha Sea Lions on Twitter anyhow. The only thing you really need to know is that there are some cards that are never, ever getting reprinted and that’s never going to change. It’s not. Don’t @ me. The Reserved List is never going away and I promise you don’t have a better argument than I’ve already heard. Deal with it. Instead of whining that you’ve been playing Magic for 6 months and you think Vintage looks kinda cool but you can’t play it, which is total BS, let’s focus on how we can use the Reserved List to our advantage.

What I’m NOT Advocating

I’m not advocating a targeted buyout. You won’t get that advice from an article – you’ll need to hit up YouTube if you want advice on that. Picking a card with low supply and getting a ton of money or a ton of people together to try and corner the market on something that can’t be reprinted is not something I advocate. I realize you and I are greedy speculators out here manipulating the market or whatever but I think there’s money to be made sustainably. I make 90% of the money I make in MTG Finance from flipping collections anyway, so there’s no need to sell my soul to make that 10% of my business a little better. If you advocate or participate in a targeted buyout, I hope you develop tinnitus that’s so bad you need to sleep with a fan on to drown out the noise from your tinnitus and then you’re cold all night from the fan and it makes you have bad dreams.

What I AM Advocating

Don’t wait on stuff you want, and if you notice something start to get a little bit better, buy now. Don’t panic, but take that pile of crap on your desk you’ll never use, send it to Card Kingdom, get that trade-in bonus and get copies of these Reserved List cards if you think you’ll need them. Buy extra so you have copies to play with and look like a genius when you can trade them back out after they go up. Do I think anything is getting more play now than it used to? I doooo.

How I Stumbled Upon This Card

I was at a loss for what to write about and almost settled on writing about Etali. Now, I think Etali is amazing. I think it’s stupid good and should go in every EDH deck that can reasonably ramp to it or cheat it out, no questions asked. However, I’m not super psyched to run it as my Commander. That puts you in Mono-Red and it’s difficult to ramp in Mono-Red. You have stuff like Braid of Fire but beyond that, you’re using one-shot spells like Seething Song to ramp. I wasn’t convinced, but then I remembered artifacts were a thing. THEN I remembered EDHREC had updated for the new cards and someone has probably already solved this problem. They have. All ingenious-like.

Do you see it?

METALWORKER.

There’s no reason not to run mostly artifacts in your Etali deck because Mono-Red sis both sort of trash in EDH but also sort of great as a support color for Artifact decks. If you’re mostly brown with a splash of red like the well-done steaks with ketchup the worst person on the planet eats, Metalworker is WORKWORKER doing all kinds of work in your deck and ramping you to Etali on like turn 3. Get some.

Down from a historic high predicated on it being unbanned in everything, there is no better time to get this card. It’s doing work in EDH, where it’s legal somehow, and it’s good in Vintage and it’s unplayed in Legacy, where it’s legal somehow.

If you think you’ll want Metalworker anytime soon, it’s demonstrated an ability to hit $50 on hype, and hype did us all a favor. It cleaned all of the sub-$30 copies out from all of the easy-to-reach places. If movement starts in again, the second spike will be harder because there will be no cheap copies to backfill demand. I think this makes a case for itself. What else do I like? I’m so glad you asked.

Lake of the Dead

Apart from a few cheap eBay copies, this is basically $30 everywhere or it’s sold out. The Gitrog Monster made this go up but it’s never going back down. This taps for a ton of mana in EDH and if your deck either doesn’t care about your dead swamps or it thrives off of them, you’re going to get a ton of use from this. I made a convincing case for this like 8 months ago or whenever the Gitrog Monster came out and since then it’s gone from $10 most places to $30 most places. I hope you bought in at the time. If not, I think the $20 copies on eBay are pretty tempting and apart from that, you’re stuck paying $30. This seems obvious, even though it just tripled.

Retribution of the Meek

A lot of stuff went up on principle a while back and while this is cooling off a bit, second spikes happen fast and supply of this card id drying up again. With EDH so often being such a dumb, durdly format and everyone building dinosaur decks, Retribution is a great choice for wide strategies than have a lot of lower-powered creatures and want to clear a bunch of big blockers out of the way or just be the only one with creatures. This is on my radar right now with all of the Dinosaur decks I see being built.

Mana Web

Either I’m running out of steam or these cards just really speak for themselves. This is a good card, it’s going to get more expensive. Buy it now if you need to.

Deranged Hermit

The amount of overlap with EDH and casual is kind of small, but this bears mentioning because we just got new squirrel tokens with Unstable and with the foil tokens going for $7 online, SOMEONE is playing with Squirrels. This is an OG Squirrel master and it’s never getting reprinted. Take a look at Judge foils while you’re at it. They’re half the price of the $100 set foil and supply is dwindling as well.

That does it for me this week. If you have some Reserved List picks you think I should have discussed, hit me in the comments.* See you next time!

*Try to imagine what I wrote in the half a paragraph I just deleted. It involves opinions about the Reserved List and what readers can do with those opinions.

Watchtower

UNLOCKED: The Watchtower 1/22/18

January 22, 2018 Travis Allen

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Between Rivals of Ixalan’s arrival and the ban list update, Standard got quite a shakeup. This is no more apparent than in the top 8 in the SCG Standard Classic, which saw two copies of Mono Red (obviously), the return of Mardu Vehicles, two different takes on dinosaurs/big monsters, and in a callback to Theros, WU Auras. Tenth place even had a full set of Favorable Winds(!?). Standard certainly looks promising, as any week one event that ends with two red decks in the top two slots means that nobody has figured out the actual best deck yet. Given how many Ghalta, Primal Hungers were floating around in the top 16, I have high hopes.

Meanwhile there’s a Modern Pro Tour in like, two weeks. First one in awhile. That should be fun. It’s the first Pro Tour I’m likely to watch, since uh, probably the last Modern Pro Tour. The format may be terrible for Wizards’ bottom line, but it sure is fun to watch!

Desperate Ritual (Foil)

Price Today: $5-6
Possible Price: $12

One of the decks that seems to have gained the most ground in the last few months in Modern is Baral Storm. Whether you’re playing the Gifts version or not, it’s definitely been gaining metagame percentage for awhile, and is now one of the top ranked combo decks in Modern. Things are only looking better for the deck with Blood Sun, which allows it to play main deck pseudo-Blood Moon without disrupting it’s own mana base, while also cantripping in matches where it isn’t useful. Will Blood Sun actually make the deck? Got me, but it’s a new tool at their disposal.

A Modern Pro Tour is coming up, we know that. We also know Storm has been targeted by bans like eight times or something silly in Modern’s history, yet still exists as a tier one list. We also know that it’s a favorite of HoF-caliber players. Finkel has shown up with UR Storm at like every Modern Pro Tour? Or close to it. Having the best players in the world on an archetype is going to make it look good, even if it’s not.

Between the rise in the strength of the deck since Baral’s printing, and a few conditions on the immediate horizon that could trigger price spikes, I wanted to find somewhere the money could go. Right now I’m liking foil Desperate Ritual. It’s the best fast mana in the deck, and we haven’t seen any copies since 2013. Depending on whether you’re looking at MMA or COK, prices are in the $5 to $7 range. If Storm does well at PT ROI — especially with Blood Sun, which will get people more jazzed to try the deck than if it didn’t have a cool new card — we could see foils empty out, and I’d expect prices to land in the $12 to $20 range if that happens.

Meddling Mage (Judge)

Price Today: $35
Possible Price: $80

Modern certainly looks different than when I was playing regularly. Humans has become a legitimate tier one deck, and is possibly the second-most popular aggro deck in the format. I remember reading Sam Black’s theoretical article on the topic way back when Mana Confluence was released. Wild.

Anyways, it’s looking like the consensus list has four Chris Pikula’s main these days. It’s not surprising, as the card is a kick in the teeth for any combo deck and some amount of irritating for everyone else. Add in that it’s on theme with the tribal component, and you can lead into it with Kitesail Freebooter to see what’s in their hand, I understand why it’s a mainstay in the deck.

Non-foil copies from Alara and Planeshift have hit about $20, which is certainly a change. I remember the ALA copies costing $3 or something. Foil PLS copies haven’t been cheap in forever, but ALA copies have hung around $20 for some time. They’re still just above that, but with non-foils starting at $17, that gap is going to widen soon. We’ve seen this trend before. A card grows in popularity as part of a good deck, and demand is based on people playing the card in tournaments. Non-foil prices move first, and eventually catch the foils. Players start buying foils because why not, and then the foil price jumps out ahead by 25 to 100 percent.

Meanwhile, the Judge foils are sitting over there at maybe $35. With ALA pack foils at $22 to $25 and primed to move hard, Judge copies are tempting. Especially because A. they’re fairly old (a single run in 2006), and B. they look cool. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to see the Judge copies hit $75+, especially if Humans has a good run at the Pro Tour.

Deepchannel Mentor (Foil)

Price Today: $2
Possible Price: $9

I’ve always got to check in with EDH for at least one card. One of the hot decks right now is Merfolk, helmed by ROI release Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca. Sounds like a friendly guy. Normally I wouldn’t expect a UG creature to be a tyrant, but hey, that’s why I’m not on the Wizards flavor team.

Kumena and his new slew of merfolk is driving people to the tribe in 99 card decks. The community has flirted with merfolk a few times, but the commanders have never been strong enough to stick. Kumena may change that. He makes commander damage easy, he’s a card drawing engine built in, and even permanently powers up your squad. Pair him with Merrow Commerce to completely take over a game.

If you’ve been listening to MTG Fast Finance (and why haven’t you? We just had @ToddStevensMTG on to talk ROI) you’ll know that a few merfolk cards have jumped since Kumena was spoiled. One hasn’t so far that I think is a good choice, and that’s Deepchannel Mentor. He’s a little pricey at six, but essentially makes your entire team unblockable. Considering that Kumena’s third ability is all about powering up your squad, and every Kumena build is going to be running as many Seedborn Muse effects as possible to abuse this, you’ll be able to turn your 12 dorky merfolk into a serious threat awfully quick. If you’ve got ten or fifteen guys on the field and drop a Commerce or Seedborn, tap your team twice a turn for three turns, then cast Deepchannel Mentor, everyone is going to be dead on the spot.

Deepchannel is another old merfolk, and foil copies were sparse before Kumena showed up. If you can catch them under $3, which is still possible, they should be good for $10 before long.