PROTRADER: The Watchtower 2/12/18

February 12, 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.

Well. That comes as a bit of a surprise, doesn’t it? Jace, the Mind Sculptor, scourge of Standard, Modern ban list inaugural inductee, has at least one competently produced rap song written about him, is now legal in Modern. I’ve said for ages I think it’s a bad idea, and that even if they wanted to, the only way they could do it was with heavy reprint. We won’t know about the former for awhile, but with EMA last year and A25 (that’s Masters 25. What the hell, right?) a month away, Wizards decided the latter wasn’t a barrier any longer. Jaces were selling for $150 on the announcement and the cheapest copy is currently $130, so we’ll see about that.

Bloodbraid Elf was released too, which is great in its own right. I’ve never been so sure about anything in my life as I am about Wizards having screwed up banning BBE in the first place. It was clear as day that the problem with Jund back then was Deathrite Shaman, and that got the axe one announcement later. I heard several people even muse about DRS’ future in Legacy this weekend. It’s incomprehensible how many mistakes had to happen to let it out the door, and shameful that Wizards wouldn’t ban it in Modern since even though it was clearly way too good for the format, Return to Ravnica was new at the time and they figured it was easier to get rid of an innocent bystander. Man I’m still angry about all of that.

Temporal Mastery

Price Today: $4
Possible Price: $15

Adding Jace to Modern changes things in dramatic ways. When Golgari Grave-Troll was unbanned, you knew where to look. That card has a style. Jace though? If your deck makes blue mana, you’re going to find yourself considering it. And if it doesn’t add blue mana, you’ll consider adding blue so that you can add Jace. Think I’m kidding? Just wait. There are a million angles to consider, and I want to make sure some wild stuff ends up on your radar.

First up is Temporal Mastery. I’ve long had this one on my radar, and I was real bummed when it was reprinted in Modern Masters 2017 this past year. That takes a little of the wind out of the sails, but only the most crazy prices. A solid gain is still on the table.

You’ll remember that Temporal Mastery was a powerful card in Standard. It won Pro Tour Avacyn Restored, and it was floating around for awhile otherwise. (I particularly liked Reid Duke’s big temur list with four Primeval Titan.) It’s never made it into Modern though, outside of Taking Turns, because there isn’t a strong enough way to set it up. There isn’t even a sorcery-speed Brainstorm to work with. You had to do a lot of work to put this back on top of your library, and ultimately there was too much setup.

With Jace back to the party, you get to brainstorm every dang turn. Draw Temporal Mastery on turn two or three and you’re completely happy with that, because you get to play Jace a turn earlier (or on time, if one of your lands is a tap land). Find it in your hand, and you can use Jace to put it back on top of your library for next turn. Getting back-to-back Jace activations can be enough to completely swing a game when you’re against the wall and you’re trying wrest control the board and lock your opponent out.

Add in general casual appeal and the “it’s a time walk and they’re all popular” factor and it gets better. Don’t get me wrong, it’s the longest shot here today. That’s why it’s so spicy though. At $4, these will be easy to sneak out of trade binders if someone finds a way to work it and Jace into a list together. If that ends up being a real deck? $15 should be no problem.

Creeping Tar Pit

Price Today: $20
Possible Price: $55

In Standard and Extended (remember that format?) I think the card with the highest coefficient with Jace was Celestial Colonnade. You never saw one without the other. Colonnade was especially great because it could protect your Jace as well as threaten others, all while resisting Jace’s bounce itself. It was something else. And it will be again.

Of course, Colonnade is $60 today so uh, that ship has basically sailed. (I’m going to go look for mine, actually.) If it’s not in A25 (ugh) then the sky’s the limit I suppose, but we’ll hope that it is for now. If not Colonnade, what’s the next best land to explore? Creeping Tar Pit.

It may come to pass that Tar Pit is even better than Colonnade in Modern. While there were a lot of important white spells in old Jace decks, that isn’t necessarily true today. Black is a serious contender in Modern between Thoughtseize, Inquisition, Fatal Push, Collective Brutality, and Liliana of the Veil. Your opponent going Thoughtseize, Liliana of the Veil, Jace is going to be lights out for a good number of decks.you’ve also got the angle that Tar Pit is unblockable. Colonnade’s flying is great, but in a format with no shortage of Inkmoth Nexus’ and Lingering Souls tokens, it’s possibly less able to connect when necessary. There are no such worries with Tar Pit.

Will UB become the defacto Jace control build in Modern? I don’t know. I do know that Tar Pit is quite well positioned with Jace’s return though, and with a single Worldwake printing, no reprint in A25 would leave the ceiling wide open.

Kolaghan’s Command

Price Today: $20
Possible Price: $40

We should probably talk a little about Bloodbraid Elf, right? Alright, well, this heralds the return of Boom//Bust, whic- oh, right. Ok well now you can hit Beck//Call and cas- oh. Maybe Breaking//En- nope not that either. God damnit, Forsythe. God. Damnit.

It’s no secret that it didn’t really matter what you were cascading into with BBE. As long as your deck was full of good cards, things were going to work out well for you. That’s going to be mostly how this works out too. Hitting Liliana off their Bloodbraid is still going to be table-flipping maddening, but that’s not going to move the needle on Liliana.

BBE gimmick builds will probably focus on land destruction for a long while. You’ve got Fulminator Mage, as well as Stone Rain, Blood Moon, Blood Sun, and whatever other denial of service you want to sleeve up.

Excellent three mana spells are going to be better than they were though, and Kolaghan’s Command is poised to absorb much of that added demand. It’s a pretty loopy card, and even at its worst the value is excellent. It will be especially exciting when your opponent Thoughtseized an earlier BBE, and then you top deck a second BBE, cascade into Kommand, and return the first BBE. Eat it buddy.

There’s seven non-foil NM vendors on TCG right now. If Kolaghan’s Command isn’t in A25, how is this not a $35+ card?

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

PROTRADER: Ixalan Highs and Lows

February 9, 2018 Cliff Daigle

I like to plan ahead.

Figuring out the cards to pick up in anticipation of a rise in price is a combination of luck and experience. On MTGPrice, we try hard to present our ideas and our rationales behind those ideas.

When you’ve been at this for a while, you get a sense for what the predictors are for future demand. It’s not always a question of rules, it’s got to be a combination of things that will catch your attention and say, “Get this while it’s cheap!”

Today I want to review some of the cards that I want to get now, or in one case, that I’d wanted to get, and the historical examples.

Search for Azcanta">
Search for Azcanta ($17 regular, $32 foil, $40 buy-a-box promo)

I’m very high on this card, I have to be honest. It’s not often that I like picking up all available version of a card but I absolutely do, for a host of reasons.

Nonfoils: I think that this card is the backbone of a control deck in Standard, and it’s proven useful in any shell with blue. The only problem is that it’s not a four-of, more often a two- or three-of in such decks, and that might stop it from hitting $35.

Foils/Promos: This is popping up in both Modern and Legacy, in control and Miracles lists, and it’s going to stay a useful card there. Jeskai, UW, Esper…all the decks are playing at least one now, and some as many as three. It doesn’t give you an immediate advantage, but if you can live long enough to flip it, it’s acceleration or it’s finding the next answer. Let’s not rule out that this is a very strong card in Commander or Cube formats, and those are soaking up a certain amount of available copies.

If there’s a chance that you’re going to build a control deck in the next 18 months, get your copies now. The set after Dominaria is about when I’d expect this to pop up to at least $25 nonfoil, and $30 is reasonable.

The foils (and especially the promos) are a great pickup now too. Promo versions under $40 should be snapped up and set aside with the proper amount of patience. That will pay off.

Vraska’s Contempt ($12/$15)

I studiously avoided mentioning this card until we were done opening it, and unfortunately, the cat is out of the bag. I’d really been hoping that this made it all the way down to $5, but it’s recently doubled from its low of $5.50. I’ve used this card as an example of the rise and fall of prerelease pricing, as it could have been had at $4. Hero’s Downfall or Abrupt Decay have graphs worth looking at.

When it was in print, it was relatively cheap, but after it wasn’t being opened anymore, the popularity grew and the price doubled.

Vraska’s Contempt was going to be on this exact same track, with the price dropping and dropping until it wasn’t in print and then it would start climbing. The problem is, Contempt is a fantastic answer to two powerful and prevalent threats in Standard: Hazoret the Fervent and The Scarab God.

Let me contrast Contempt with another card that does 80% of the same work: Hour of Glory.

Be honest. Did you remember about this card? Oblivion Strike at rare!

That price graph tops out at fifty cents. Hour of Glory hasn’t even been a sideboard card in its lifetime. A big part of that is some unfortunate timing: Hour of Glory was released in Hour of Devastation in July 2017, where Vraska’s Contempt came out three months later. There’s a chance that these cards were planned to be in different blocks, with 18-month rotation or rotation every set, but the threats have never been severe enough to warrant playing Hour of Glory.

Contempt has popped since it’s become the go-to spell for removal, as it can answer a Planeswalker effectively. I really wish there was time for it to fall back down, but I imagine that the price will stick at around $10 for about the next 12 months.

Hostage Taker ($5)

Remember when this was $12? It wasn’t that long ago.

The Taker is seeing a fair amount of play in Standard, and popped up as a singleton in the sideboard of Traverse Shadow decks at the Modern Pro Tour. It hasn’t stopped being good against the cards that need exiling, and I have to admit that being able to exile their Death’s Shadow and then replay it yourself is an amazing 2-for-1.

What makes this extra appealing is the timeframe. It’s got a whole year, several big sets to work with. I can’t imagine that there’s a better enabler of this effect than Panharmonicon, but who knows? It’s a Pirate, a tribe that’s unlikely to be better with these other sets, but the color combination has always been excellent when it comes to control decks. I don’t think this is going to be a big player when it comes to casual play, but seeing the price it was at before, this seems like a very strong candidate for popping back up to $10 anytime in the next year. Snagging these at $5 or less right now is pretty amazing.

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: Crossover 2: The Crossovering

February 6, 2018 Jason Alt 2 Comments

Last week I wrote an article.

Nobody made a snide or condescending comment which means I wrote a perfect article. It’s good to know that what I wrote was perfect and helpful to people. That’s excellent. Accordingly, I decided to make it a two-parter by, you know, writing a second part. Unlike a lot of unplanned sequels, this is going to go great. It’s going to be a lot more Godfather 2 than Highlander 2, you dig? If you aren’t familiar with or don’t remember what I did last week, go read it now for free and then we’ll hit the ground running. Less talk, more rock – let’s do this.

Gush

Pauper deck – Delver, other Delver, Inside Out combo

2,425 is hardly the largest number of EDH decks a card has ever been in where we later referenced its “demand” but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Gush is played a non-zero amount in EDH and is bannably-good in Pauper.

It’s a stupid-good card in Pauper and if it’s banned, a lot of people are going to eat it. For now, though, with so few printings, the first one being so long ago and with it being banned all of these years meaning there was no real impetus to dig these out of nooks and crannies, Gush’s price, well, gushed.

If you have these, I think you ship them. I don’t think pauper-mania can sustain its current fever pitch and regardless of if it does, I think Gush is one the watchlist. Could this hit $20? It’s possible but I think you just out these.

Distant Melody

Pauper Deck – Elves

Sooner or later, someone else will break some other tribe. In the mean time, Elves is basically the one viable tribal deck and with the use of Birchlore Rangers it can cast Mob Justice or Distant Melody pretty reliably (not bad for a deck with only 9 lands).

If you’ll notice, the interest in this card came way back when Wizards announced that Commander 2017 would be tribal decks. Before anyone even knew what the tribes would be, everyone decided that they knew there would be a blue. They were kind of right. While I don’t think the EDH demand quite justifies this price increase, I don’t think it can maintain its current price either with the new interest from Pauper. If Pauper is for real, expect to see this head upward and if this card survived a reprinting in Commander 2017 (it did; I should have probably said “since” and not “if” but I was doing a literary thing where I mirrored the previous statement… you know what? I don’t owe you an explanation) I expect a reprinting isn’t on the horizon and we could see some real growth from this card. There’s enough supply out there for current demand but as it rises, remember, second spikes are hard because there aren’t cheap, loose copies out there to backfill demand. This hits $3 or maybe even $4 pretty easily.

Having flirted with $15, the set foil is a mere $5 and that could have something to do with there being a competing foil. However, that foil is from a rare premium deck (the Slivers one) and the foiling is ugly. Anyone serious about foiling their pauper deck will get the good one and supply is pretty low.

Fog Frog

Pauper Deck – Abzan Control

Tortured Existence is the MVP of this deck and with its price already at $3 (not bad for a common from Stronghold) and its EDH inclusion being less-than-impressive, I opted to talk about Fog Frog, a card whose stock can only rise. Rare in the traditional sense of the word because it’s from an old, bad set, Foggity Froggity is nuts in a deck with Tortured Existence.

Pauper fever is catching up. This could easily hit $3 or $4 with sustained demand and the non-zero amount of EDH play it gets will only drag on supply and bolster its growth potential. Lots of people don’t even know this is a pick so be sure to paw through Prophecy bulk if you hit up older shops that have more boxes than customers; there are a lot of them out there.

I wouldn’t worry about getting a foil copy under $40, though. If you do, SHIP.

Gemhide Sliver

Pauper Deck – SLIVERS!

OK, so somehow Muscle Sliver, Sinew Sliver and Predatory Sliver are all common on Magic Online. That means you have a deck with all common creatures that has 12 lords in it. That seems good.

Lucky for us, Gemhide Sliver is going to be in all of the EDH Sliver decks because of course it is. That means if Meathooks gets popular (it’s a cheap deck if you already own Ash Barrens) the demand from the two formats puts a lot of pressure on a card with two printings, one of which was a terribly-foiled premium deck. Oh, and Fog Frog goes in the sideboard of this deck, usually, because despite every creature being a Sliver most of the time, people just call it “GW” because of stuff like Standard Bearer in the board. Maybe if more people knew there was a Slivers deck, they might give Pauper a chance. I mean, I doubt it, but a man can dream. I don’t think you understand how important to me it is that there are Slivers.

I think this should be enough to whet your appetite. It’s a good idea to just look at Pauper decklists to see what is getting played. Anything with cross-format applicability obviously has some upside to it and EDHREC has all of the info you need about how many and which decks jam these paper pauper picks. That does it for me, nerds. Until next time!

Watchtower

UNLOCKED: The Watchtower 2/5/17

February 5, 2018 Travis Allen

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Heck of a weekend, wasn’t it? We started off Sunday morning with the bad guys winning (Lantern Control, not-Gerry), and finished off the day with the good guys winning (not-Patriots). And while they didn’t riot as hard in Bilbao as they did in Philadelphia, people enjoyed the return of the Modern Pro Tour just the same.

Before the top 8 even started, there were plenty taking to social media to express a desire to see something from Lantern banned, and that sentiment only increased with each successive round. Calls to do are are shortsighted, I assure you. While it doesn’t have the most ideal play pattern, the games are (typically) quicker than Eggs, and there’s plenty of reasonable interaction you can be playing. Especially when you consider how few people are even going to bother sleeving it up and showing up with it.

Collective Brutality (Foil)

Price Today: $35
Possible Price: $60

It’s sort of wild that it’s come to this, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion. Collective Brutality rapidly established itself in the Modern scene, and its popularity there has only grown. Looking through the PT IXR results, this much is clear. Of the top 8 lists, five are playing Brutality. The three that aren’t are UR Pyromancer, Humans, and Humans. Across the top performing decks, roughly 50% are running some number of the card. Did you catch that? Half of the best decks at PT IXR had Collective Brutality.

Calling $35 foils as having an upward trajectory is never a position I’m eager to find myself in, but there’s no denying it. The card is too popular in the format not to see continued gains. It was released in Eldritch Moon, the summer 2016 set. Don’t forget that summer sets are consistently the least opened sets in Magic. And when do you think you’re going to see it again? It’s highly suspect it shows up in Masters 25, and if it isn’t there, then what are the other options? We don’t have any other reprint sets on the horizon. That’s good reprint positioning for the eight most popular card in Modern.

Supply is low, it’s been popular for awhile, so there isn’t a glut of copies looking to hit the market if the price rises, and it’s used in all sorts of strategies, from midrange to control to combo. It’s likely Collective Brutality continues to rise, and could climb as high as $60 or more within 2018.

Mantis Rider (Foil)

Price Today: $7.50
Possible Price: $20

It’s been a wild ride for Humans, having started out the year as a “what deck won the tournament?” early in the year to being the most popular deck this weekend. I’ve been following it the whole way, discussing which cards I liked at which point of the deck’s run, starting with the easiest and scarcest cards. Now we’re here, and I’m talking about a Khans of Tarkir rare.

Humans was the most popular deck of the event, but it wasn’t the hottest performer. While it did manage to put two copies into the top 8, it didn’t have unreal conversion rates or anything. (Props to Hollow One for that. 100% for 13 decks I think?) An average conversion rate isn’t going to stop players from picking up Humans to play at their local store. It’s clearly a solid strategy, fun to play, and has game in most metas. Add in that most of it is quite affordable, and you’ve got a great onramp deck.

I was suspect that Mantis Rider would be an integral part of the strategy, as it seemed like a sort of filler card that was there as a serviceable human that could get kills, but would flex into a more useful, more technical slot once it was clear what the deck needed. Apparently that’s wrong, as Mantis Rider has been a four of in basically every humans list I’ve seen.

Foils haven’t moved much from their perch at $7 to $8 for a few months now. This is Khans of Tarkir, so we’re not going to see $70 or anything, but with Humans having proved themselves as a strategy, the deck is here to stay. Foil Mantis Riders will begin being eaten up, and a price tag closer to $20 won’t be far behind.

Utter End (Promo)

Price Today: $3
Possible Price: $15

Even with all the excitement of the Pro Tour, we can’t forget about our old friend EDH. It was the MTG finance engine of 2017, and we’ve got no reason to expect any different this year. Today I stumbled upon Utter End, a removal spell found in over 17,000 EDHREC lists (which makes it the 13th most popular multicolored card in the format).

I probably don’t need to go on for long here. 17k decks says a great deal. The rest of this comes from the fact that I’m talking about a Game Day promo, which is a promo type we’ve never seen reprinted with their full art treatment in, like, 10 years? Admittedly the art isn’t as cool as it could be, but you can’t have it all.

Copies are $3, which is pretty dang cheap for a such a popular card. Especially so when you notice how few vendors there are. 18 as of this writing. That’s a combination for explosive growth – a low buy in and not a lot of sellers. Probably won’t be like this for long.

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