Casual Fridays

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Reprint Risks

We’ve has some impressive spikes lately, and there’s two things that I want to keep an eye on when a card increases in price:

First, I want to see what the buylist price becomes. I respect the ability of people on eBay to get a price during a spike, but it’s been my experience that if you don’t ride that increase immediately, it’s very difficult to get the price you’re hoping for. When the buylist goes up, though, that means the vendors have sold out of a card and are incentivized to restock with the new price in mind, not the old price.

Second, I want to figure out if this new price is the plateau, or if the card is too likely to be reprinted for my comfort level. It’s true that nothing is safe, aside from the Reserved List. There are only so many reprints that can happen though, so I want to take it all into account before I get in on a card.

With these points in mind, let’s look at some recent jumps in price for a range of cards.

 

Thalia, Guardian of Thraben ($15): She was available in this form at sub-$10 at the beginning of summer, but she’s due for a price correction. Even the Humans deck that took down the SCG Open last weekend is just proving the point: This is a card to be reckoned with. She’s only got one toughness, but she is capable of slowing down the best strategies in both Modern and Legacy.

She’s buylisting for nearly $10, and that’s a good sign for her price. I am expecting her to break $20 before long, just off the growth of builds that deny your opponent the chance to do things on curve. Keep in mind that she’s a small-set rare from six years ago, and her only additional printing was the WMCQ qualifier promo, one of the more iconic images you can have on a card. There’s been few enough cards with this much face on them (Blood of the Martyr) and it lets this version really feel unique.

I think she’s going to get reprinted soon, though, and that’s going to kick the legs out from under her price. To be clear, I think ‘soon’ means that I don’t think she will avoid a reprint between the next Commander set or the first Core set next summer. You’re going to walk a fine line if you’re holding copies: You want to hold until she gets the price you desire, but you also have to not hold too long, else the reprint announcement will torpedo the value.

Corpse Harvester ($4): We’ve had some odd spikes in price lately, and this one is likely just due to the supply. This was an uncommon in Legions, and a one-of in the original set of Planechase decks. This means it hasn’t been printed in 8 years, and it’s a card that will take over a game if not dealt with rapidly. It’s a star in one of the most popular tribes (Zombies) and frankly, the reprint risk is through the roof here.

Couple thousand people have the right idea!

The buylist prices haven’t caught up to TCGplayer yet either, and so I don’t think this new price is going to hold for long. If you can sell these on eBay for $2, go for it, but I hate selling singles at such a low price, it’s just not worth the time involved.

Aura Shards ($17): This was about $10 until the GW Commander deck landed, and was one of the first cards people wanted to add to that deck. This is a tremendously powerful card in Commander, but has only had two printings, one from the first Commander release in 2011 and the original printing in 2000. Combine that low supply with the very solid demand, and you have a card that deserves its price.

The buylist is solid at $10-$12, but this is another card that wants a reprint desperately. A lot of cards want to be reprinted, but Wizards won’t get to all of them. I don’t think this gets reprinted soon, but the risk is real. I can’t imagine this being uncommon again, this feels like a Modern Masters 2019 rare.

Kitchen Finks ($14): This isn’t a spike but this is a card that comes to mind when I think of long-term risks and holds. It was a $10 uncommon, and then printed in the first Modern Masters, and that’s it, aside from being an FNM promo some time ago.

Wizards put this card into a set that had almost no other persist cards, indicating that they are winning to pop this into whatever set might need a strong midrange assist. I highly doubt that this would be put into Standard again, though. I would place this about a medium risk for a reprint–it’s one of the most commonly played creatures in Modern, in the sideboard if not the main.

Thought-Knot Seer ($8, but $35 foil): We’ve had the price of the foil go up recently, but the original hasn’t gone up much yet, and it’s due to correct upward. This is one of the best creatures in Modern, and as a small-set rare, the supply is relatively small. Keep in mind that sales of this set were during ‘Eldrazi Winter’ and a time of depressed Magic sales.

I am cautiously in on TKS. I think that the colorless mana symbol as a casting cost is going to require a lot of support, even in something like a Modern Masters. I suppose they could put this in on its own, but without help (Talismans, painlands, something!) it’s uncastable in a limited format. If you have some, I’d say hold. The correction to above $10 is coming soon, and I fully expect that when the price rises, it’ll get to $15/$45.

Scapeshift ($56): This was $20 a couple of years ago, but spiked around Oath of the Gatewatch’s release, and has come up from $40 around the time of Kaladesh. The deck is real, in Modern. Get to a critical mass of lands in play and then fire this off and end the game with Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle triggers.

This has been printed once, and the buylist is a solid $30-$35. It’s dodged reprinting so far, but sooner or later, it’ll be printed and the price will dive significantly. There’s no auxillary demand boosting the price, and being printed in modern numbers will saturate the market. I would get out of these if I were holding, as I just don’t like holding cards this expensive and this deperate for a reprint.

 

Cliff has been playing magic since late 1994 and writing about Magic: The Gathering finance since 2013. Cube has become his favorite format, but unusual decks of any format will always catch his eye. Follow him on Twitter @wordofcommander or catch his weekly column here on MTGPrice.

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: The Article You Never Thought I’d Write

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I’m sure this is going to come as a bit of a shock considering I have called advocating buying foils “intellectually lazy” from a content provider standpoint, but that’s exactly what I want to talk about today. I plan to go through why I feel that way, move on to why foils aren’t as bad as that condemnation makes it sound and end up with some hot spec tips on foils and a few classifications of cards that are safe foil buys.

Why I Use The Phrase “Intellectually Lazy”

From the standpoint of a content creator, I need to give good, actionable advice. I’m sure some people just scroll to the bottom of my articles and look for which cards I made graphs for and I have to be OK with that. I occasionally  put up a graph of a card I think is a bad buy to show a price trend I don’t like or discuss in depth why I think the card is a trap and it makes me smile to think of someone just noting which cards I brought up and not what I said about them, but if they get burned, they’re going to blame my advice and not their own laziness so even that little fun size Snickers of Schadenfreude isn’t worth it most days. I know for a fact some people analyze my picks through a lens of “I tweet card names to my 14 followers and if I disagree with your pick, you’re wrong and if I agree, you stole my ideas” and that’s OK with me, too. 99% of MTG Price readers are excellent and it behooves me to give you all good advice that you can take action and make money on.

Between the podcasts and the articles, I’m reaching tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people (or the same 100 people 1,000 times) and that means telling them to fight over 20 foil copies isn’t going to help more than one of them. True that benefits our Pro Traders most, but I like when I tell a reader to grab a card that 1,000 EDH players are a week from realizing they can’t live without so they have some real, organic demand to sell into rather than tricking a bunch of people into selling cards to each other.

There are more readers than foils, which is why I tend to avoid them. I don’t like the idea of making a card pop that shouldn’t have just because I created the artificial illusion of scarcity because there were 21 copies on TCG Player of a foil when I wrote the article and then a reader checks and sees only 20 copies left and thinks there’s a run. I give you all more credit than that, per se, but I still think that you can make any spec look smart by getting people to buy cards they didn’t want just by reminding them stock is low. I have been avoiding Reserved List picks lately for the same reason.

It’s tough to analyze the impact of an increasingly-nimble reprint ability from WotC vis-a-vis new products like Explorers of Ixalan, the tendency of WotC not to reprint cards over a certain price point, how long we have for a card to grow before a potential reprint can hurt its price growth. It has taken a lot of us years to get even passable at it. It’s my contention that a lot of the time, when someone tells you to buy a foil of a card that might be in Commander 2017 a few weeks before Commander 2017 is spoiled, they just don’t want to put thought into it. “It’s a kitty cat, buy kitty cats, they won’t reprint foil kitty cats, buy every pretty $hitty kitty.” They didn’t reprint foil White Sun’s Zenith, as predicted. And did what I said was going to happen happen to that price? Soon early speculators ran out of late speculators to sell them to and the late speculators just ate it.

I hold myself up to a certain Standard just because I want my column to be valuable and it’s not if I tell you things that are wrong or things that are obvious.

 

Do I Think Readers Are Lazy If They Buy Foils?

No.

If you discover low supply on a foil that’s about to become popular due to some event like showing up in a deck or sideboard, new EDH popularity or just people waking up to how good the card is (looking at you, Sunbird’s Invocation), then go to town. If you’re a person and you notice an irregularity on a foil card you think you can profit from, go for it. I don’t even care if the demand is organic, if the price goes up and you make money, good for you. But I can’t tell thousands of people to fight over 10 foil copies and pretend I’m good at this when the price moves. I hope this paragraph stops all the dumb “Hei jesson u say foilz r bad but why come i just selled a foil ur bad” tweets I have been getting lately.

Which Foils Are Good Bets?

It really depends on the format. Some cards sell to casual players and those foils are hit or miss. Do casual players foil their decks? Yeah, sometimes. But other times, cards that casual players need 20 copies of basically don’t move for like 5 years.

Ideally we want EDH foils that overlap with competitive formats or we need to be willing to sit on them until EDH demand (slowly) moves them up. Cross-format applicability is a big help, here.

This price didn’t fall as much as a lot of other cards printed at foil for the second time in Eternal Masters because it has Legacy use to cushion the fall. Being played in both formats has really been a big help.

Good bets for us are newish cards that emerge as all-stars. EDH demand will be slow but eventually, if the card is good enough and especially is good in the Competitive EDH decks that spikier players tend to foil out, I think even EDH cards could be good bets in foil.

I think cards that could get reprinted but can’t be reprinted in foil are a trap, personally. I like demand profiles that will increase over time and I think I found a few candidates this week.

I Feel OK Talking About These Foils

Temur Ascendancy

Multiplier – 6x

Until we add TCG Player prices, which is happening soon, the graphs make it very obvious when a card sells out basically everywhere we scrape. This card has sold out under $2 and its current multiplier pretty much indicates EDH is interested. Commander precons have shown a willingness to reprint cards like this, but this is exempt. Demand for this card will be organic – this is the 73rd-most-played card in decks scraped by EDHREC. Not many EDH players foil out their decks, but this goes in decks like Maelstrom Wanderer, Surrak and Animar. Would you believe this is actually in more decks than any of those cards, including Maelstrom Wanderer which belongs in 100% of Yidris decks?

I think this is a $5-$7 foil waiting to happen. NM copies are gone under $2 basically everywhere and a few damaged copies on TCGPlayer that are tough to even try to buy (stupid minimum order) can screw with averages but they can’t change the fact that foils of this are drying up, there is hella demand for the card and a low reprint risk (you think a lot of $2 cards are going in a future Commander’s Arsenal?) and while it’s sometimes lazy to wave your hands and say “foils can’t get reprinted” I think in this case, we built a real foundation based on its demand profile, foil multiplier and power level. There are a lot of Khans block cards and there are a lot of copies of cards Standard and Modern never wanted. I mean, compare the modest $5-$7 I have targeted for a year or two from now to what Standard can do to a card short-term.

And then look what reality does to a card long-term.

This is a smart buy and it has nothing to do with mitigating the reprint risk. These will sell much more briskly at $5 since it’s above the minimum TCG Player order threshold, which I think matters. I’ll likely delve more into this concept in a future article when I find some data.

Vandalblast

Multiplier – 5x

When a card is the 58th-most-played card scraped by EDHREC, has Vintage applications and has a 5x multiplier, you take notice. You notice things like the fact that it’s an uncommon printed within the last 6 years and has a Commander deck reprint and both copies are about $2. You notice that this foil price is ticking up steadily. Is this flashy enough for a set like Iconic Masters? Is it likely to be in an FTV or Commander’s Arsenal deck? This is a high-demand, sexy foil with Vintage applications (although maybe that helps Russian foils and Japanese foils and leaves English foils alone) and I’ve seen it flirt with Modern and Legacy play, though it’s not quite there, yet. 5 mana is a lot for Modern and maybe you just keep playing Ancient Grudge.

This probably gets reprinted in non-foil like 2 more times in the next 5 years and it’s always a pick out of bulk. I love getting cards like this in bulk right when they’re reprinted and go to nothing because they always rebound. When you notice a card is shrugging off reprints, ask yourself how likely a foil reprinting is and how likely it is to shrug that off, too. If Eternal Witness is in Iconic Masters, for example, it will be obvious to buy those when they tank, but don’t sleep on the foils. It will be reverse-J graph time and you’re going to feel like a dummy when you see it go U-shaped.

Explosive Vegetation

Multiplier – Between 6 and 7x

Here’s a card with multiple foil printings and twice as many non-foil printings with a 7x multiplier. That’s the kind of demand profile we want. This could get reprinted in foil again, but I think if you target Onslaught foils, which look the best, you have the most growth potential. This is a card that just goes in all of the decks and if even 0.1% of EDH players want this in foil, demand will still outpace supply. If this does get reprinted in foil, it’s going to be very cheap at first, and it’s inevitably going to approach 6 times the non-foil price, a price that also has upside after a reprinting. This card is reprintable, but it’s fascinating to watch its ability to shake them off for the most part. If this had never been reprinted in foil, we could be talking like 10x.

Want to see what a 10x looks like?

I was checking cards to try and find a good example of a 10x and this was literally the first price I checked. A mere 2 printings, one from an old block with expensive booster packs that predates the format and is the 57th-most-played card in EDH? This screams “high multiplier” despite only two printings of the non-foil. These are easy to sniff out. That’s why I always go through boxes of foils when a store has them, and after a while, you don’t even need to look stuff up – you’ll just notice when a price is very wrong. This is a reminder to shop crawl more.

I might do another installment of this. I found 3 pretty solid candidates in the Top 100 EDH cards on EDHREC, but I feel like when I drill down more, I’ll find more cards like Temur Ascendancy, which was my favorite find. Hard to buy out due to it being below $5, hard to reprint, played a ton and still cheap due to the high volume of current supply and dearth of cross-format “noise” that would distort the graph. I love finds like this and I’ll try to find more later. Until next time!

Watchtower

UNLOCKED: The Watchtower 10/23/17

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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.

Standard mostly took the week off after last week’s bout of nationals. All we got was the Standard Classic, and there wasn’t too much exciting in there. Four energy decks, some Ramunap Red, and the whole thing rounded out with a Mardu Vehicles and an Abzan Tokens list. Wizards is hoping that delaying the Pro Tour means that Standard won’t be solved as quickly in the rotation, but it’s looking like that’s going to backfire, and rather than the Pro Tour solving Standard too fast, the rest of the world is going to solve Standard and the Pro Tour is just going to be an SCG Classic with more well-known players.

Sitting down at my computer, I was planning on telling you to take a look at foil copies of Kumena’s Speaker and Merfolk Branchwalker, since while supply would be on the higher side, I’d expect them to slowly move, given that UG seems to be the future of Merfolk. Imagine my surprise when I found zero copies of Speaker left and only four or five of Branchwalker. Oh well. Find them at your LGS maybe?

Harbinger of the Tides (Foil)

Price Today: $3
Possible Price: $13

While those Merfolk uncommon foils sold out, there’s still some other juice to be found in the list. Harbinger of the Tides showed up in Magic Origins two years ago, and was fairly quickly well-received by Merfolk players. While it’s not a lord, it does all sorts of useful things. You can play it as an instant natively, it flips blockers or otherwise problematic threats, and you get to cheat on mana with Aether Vial, similar to Silvergill Adept. Just yesterday we saw the UG Merfolk player use Merrow Reejery to tap a Fiend Hunter, then Harbinger the Hunter back to its owner’s hand in order to get back a lord he needed.

Harbinger looks to fill an important role in Merfolk, that is, it’s a threat with an a spell stapled to him. These dual-purpose creatures are extremely important for the deck, since a bunch of 2 mana 4/4’s probably wouldn’t be good enough on their own. Add in some “draw a card” and “Vapor Snag” onto the bodies though, and you’re in business.

Harbinger recently got a reprint in Commander 2017, but that’s fine by us, since we’re more interested in foils anyways. Supply is relatively deep, with 50 separate vendors on TCG right now for pack foils. Prices start at $3, and climb from there. We’re not expecting an overnight flip here or anything, but as a strategy that’s got an established fanbase, new Standard support, and recent tournament success, there’s a lot of ingredients in the pot for a strong growth pattern.

Ancient Ziggurat (Foil)

Price Today: $5
Possible Price: $12

UG Merfolk didn’t actually win this weekend, that honor goes to 5c Humans. It’s not called 5c, but between Mantis Rider, Mayor of Avabruck, and Xathrid Necromancer, well, it’s 5c. It’s a fun list to watch, and probably feels solid and agile at the table. I was particularly impressed with Mantis Rider in the few games I caught, as a Hierarch trigger and then a Thalia’s Lieutenant counter made it a serious threat in the air while still being able to play solid defense when the time came.

There’s lots of nifty cards in this list, and some of them I’ve written about before. I’m more interested in Ancient Ziggurat this week though, for a few reasons. First and foremost is that it’s a land, and lands are always good. Second, it’s basically mandatory for any 5c, or even 4c tribal deck. You’re going to want four every time you sleeve a deck like this up. Third, it’s got cross-deck appeal. Today it’s Humans. Tomorrow it may be Slivers. Then perhaps 4c Vampires. You get the idea. Regardless of what tribe you’re bringing to the table, Ancient Ziggurat is going to be a go-to.

There are roughly 35 pack foils on TCG right now, which is on the lower end of things. You’ll find plenty of those Duel Deck foils but holy moly those are terrible. Ugly, warpy, etc. Ziggurat had an FNM promo as well, and is already at $8.50 or $9 today, with maybe ten copies available. Both pack foils and FNM copies are posed to keep moving upwards with Humans’ recent success, and pack foils are certainly the cheaper ride up.

Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder

 

Price Today: $3.50
Possible Price: $10

Do you know what the sixth most built commander on EDHREC is? You probably know the first; it’s Atraxa. You also may know second and third belong to Meren and Breya, respectively. Not many will know sixth though. I didn’t before I looked today. Turns out, it’s Yidris. I was surprised by that, especially by how badly my own Yidris list went down in flames.

There’s not a lot of arithmetic necessary on this one. Atraxa has 4,000 decks on EDHREC, and the cheapest copy is $17. Yidris has 2,100 decks and the cheapest copy is $3.50. Why does the sixth most used general, with half the decks of the most built, have a price tag that’s one quarter of the price of Atraxa? It is, as they say, a mystery.

Yidris is an awesome looking commander, his popularity is obvious, he’s in great colors, and this is likely to be the only foil printing available for quite some time. I’d be shocked if picking these up sub-$4 didn’t result in some pleasant returns somewhere down the road.

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: What did we miss?

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We are two weeks from Pro Tour Ixalan, and that’s going to offer some very interesting price changes. At least, that’s my hope. I really want something to dethrone Temur Energy, but the deck is consistent and powerful. Silver bullets are few and far between in Magic.

Before we get to the PT, though, I want to take a moment and acknowledge some lessons that we’ve all had to learn in terms of the prices of Ixalan cards. There’s a handful of cards that preordered for low prices and have spiked, hard, into two or three times the value.

What should we have learned from these cards? Why didn’t we see this coming? How can we apply these ideas to future sets?

 

Vraska’s Contempt ($4 preorder, now up to $10) – First of all, let me quote myself, from about a month ago:

Vraska’s Contempt is good, but at four mana, it might be too much. Hero’s Downfall was super powerful, and the Contempt will see play as an answer to the indestructible/recurring Gods, but oh it stings. I don’t think Contempt will be a four-of, and that’ll keep the price reasonable.

What I predicted was true in terms of the numbers: Very few decks have the full four as part of the 75, and they are tending to start with three in the main. What I was wrong about was the popularity of control decks, even though there were a lot of Approach of the Second Sun decks running around. I simply underestimated the prevalence of control, a theme we will return to.

I have to admit, this one hurts the most. I knew that The Scarab God and Hazoret the Fervent are two cards helping define this format, and this card deals with both at instant speed. I should have seen this as a more expensive card. I made money off of Hero’s Downfall being positioned well!

Legion’s Landing ($2 up to $6) – It kills me that I could have gotten these for $2 and buylist them right now for $4. It stings, because I looked at this card and said, “It wins long games but it’s hard for a token for five mana to be worth it.”

I missed out on the confluence of casual demand for lands that make tokens, and Anointed Procession decks in Standard. I knew that Procession was a strategy, and had a lot of enablers, but I didn’t give enough credit. It’s not like this card spiked all the way to $10 or $15, but it does have enough interest to be worth a lot more than its preorder price.

Hostage Taker ($5 to $15) – When a rare is preordering for a few bucks, my thought is often “Well, we are going to open a lot of these packs and that price should hold.” For most rares, that’s true. For this Pirate, though, I just overlooked the smell of pure value. How amazingly powerful it is to remove a creature by playing a creature of your own. This card allows you to get even more value by getting the creature for myself! It requires an answer immediately or it’ll get to cast the stolen card! It’s also a fantastic answer to the two Gods mentioned before, especially if you get to steal it!

I thought of this as a Cast Out/Oblivion Ring sort of card, which was a gross understatement of the card’s power. Mea culpa.

Search for Azcanta ($4.50 to $14) – Remember how I said I underestimated control decks? Here’s the other card I just whiffed on. It’s a terrifying way to fuel the control player’s hand, but there’s layers on top of that.

The card is only two mana to get going. Legion’s Landing is the same way, being cheap to come down and flip relatively quickly. That’s important, because these legendary enchantments are low-impact when they come down. The card also is a form of ramp spell, because about turn four or five it’s going to become an extra land. This means Fumigate or Approach happens a turn earlier, a payoff that’s worth striving for.

I truly underestimated how well it plays with Approach, digging you to the win a lot sooner, and also how you can have a Search for Azcanta in play and choose not to flip it!

Deathgorge Scavenger ($2 to $6): We are really short on effective ways to deal with stuff in the graveyard in Standard, and that’s a big part of why The Scarab God is tearing up the format. Until this dinosaur came along, we needed to exile creatures immediately, because the graveyard was a pretty safe space, difficult to interact with. Answers like Scarab Feast or Sentinel Totem are too focused, but this creature gives you an immediate effect, and a bonus couple of life, depending on what you wanted to exile.

I didn’t give proper credit to the dire need that decks and for an efficient and effective way to interact with the graveyard, perhaps it had just been so long since I saw one printed. This also fits nicely into one of the more popular decks in the format, the Energy lists.

Hopefully, now that I’ve looked at why I missed on these, I’ll be able to keep an eye on things that will play very nicely with Approach of the Second Sun, or deals with indestructible/recursive threats effectively. I’ll also be keeping an eye out for stuff that plays well with the legendary enchantments. For instance, how good is Thought Scour in combination with Approach and Search?

 

Cliff has been playing since Christmas 1994 and the gift of three booster packs in a stocking. Since then, he’s spent a lot of money on cards and made even more, with the goal of always being able to trade for cards instead of buying them. Follow him on Twitter @WordOfCommander or tune in every Friday here at MTGPrice.

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