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!

Last week was a nice break from the norm, wasn’t it? I enjoyed it so much that I think this week we’re going to take a break from the norm. Whereas last week we were concerned with Explorers of Ixalan (a great idea and a great avenue for reprints and if you buy this and play with it, give yourself a wedgie) and how this could affect not only the prices of the cards printed in it but how it could impact future confidence in our picks for the role of “this will go way up if it’s not in the Commander set” like we saw this year with cards like Patriarch’s Bidding, Cover of Darkness and Mana Echoes.

I noticed something else worth talking about this week, and it ties in a bit with a question a Brainstorm Brewery listener asked on the podcast this week. If you’re reading this on Thursday, the episode will be out tomorrow.

What Was The Question?

A listener (I don’t remember who but I sort of feel like I should because I remember recognizing the name and now I feel kind of bad but only to the extent that it’s on brand for me to care about stuff like that, which is to say “not much”) asked about the limitations of using EDHREC as a metric for speculation targets. Wouldn’t the decklists seem to skew toward older cards? Would new cards that affected older archetypes even be counted since people aren’t likely to re-register their deck just because one new card was printed? In short, aren’t we missing a bunch of stuff?

What Was My Response?

At first I barely wanted to answer the question. It’s a mixed bag of things we’ve addressed, things that don’t matter and things that are impossible to quantify. The point most worth going into, that people aren’t going to re-register their decks just because of a new card being printed. That’s a huge blind spot for EDHREC. If our premise that new cards affect the prices of older cards, how will we ever know that? It’s a gigantic flaw in my model of using EDHREC to try and predict coming price spikes.

I think that would be a gigantic flaw if that were true. I think, though, that we’re seeing the opposite. I also think that’s not a problem.

 

Why Wouldn’t It Be A Problem?

Well, if we are not going to get people registering new lists for old decks predicated on new cards, we’re going to miss cards. Missing cards sucks, but it happens. Missing a spec feels bad and that’s about it. You’re not harmed by missing a spec. You didn’t get to make money but you didn’t lose any actual money. If people are looking at Growing Rites of Itlimoc and deciding that they’re going to update their Meren of Clan Nel Toth deck. So? They’re not building a brand new deck so they’re not going to move the prices on any other cards. If they build a new deck, they’ll buy new cards and that means they’re more likely to register a new list on one of the sites EDHREC scrapes and we’ll see movement. So either something happens and we don’t notice it unless we notice it a different way, or something happens that we’ll notice or nothing happens. All of this is fine.

Is The Opposite A Problem?

If someone decides that Growing Rites of Itlimoc means they want to update their Meren deck and they make a new list, or update the old list on a site that re-registers the original deck and the update as two decks on EDHREC, or if EDHREC is just garbage at accounting for that (that’s something I don’t know and should maybe look into), then it’s possible we’ll get false positives. False positives are actually probably bad. Missing a spec feels bad but buying a busted spec IS bad AND feels bad. You’re out actual money, not theoretical money, and while getting nipped by fees when you buy and when you sell is usually OK on a good spec since that just takes a tiny nip out of your profit sammich, getting slapped in the ass coming and going on a busted spec that you end up putting in a box of shame forever or buylisting or forgetting about is worse. Buying a card that never goes up because you saw a signal that was really just noise is bad. I think the opposite of the bias our listener (I mean, based on how I interpreted the question he asked – he could have been asking about this and not the opposite and I just didn’t get it) was asking about is potentially a problem, but it’s not really a huge one. Even if people aren’t building more Meren decks, them registering new lists can put Meren back on the front page and that gets eyeballs on Meren. Some of the noise develops into signal just based on visibility. Can I quantify that effect? I mean, no, but that’s not anything that’s plagued us.

It’s not as though we’ve been whiffing when we base our specs on what people are registering. Wheels are in a bunch of The Locust God decks, wheels went up. Stuff like Morphling and Hateflayer are in Mairsil decks, they went up. EDHREC is probably bad at two things.

1. Cards under like 18 months to 2 years old that could go up based on new decks
2. Weeding out fake lists, or placeholder lists, or duplicate lists of the same deck (I mean, maybe. I don’t know for sure).

I think we’re probably OK with both of those things.

What Our Model Is Good At

By “our model” I don’t necessarily mean EDHREC’s because while I contribute in some modest capacity to the site, I don’t do any of the coding because nobody wants that. “Our model” refers to the one we have adopted for this series, namely that we see what people are building when a new commander comes out, or when a new card significantly shakes up old archetypes. That second one is more rare – we’re talking Panharmonicon, Paradox Engine, Anointed Procession-tier non-general cards.

The Gitrog Monster comes out and I say “I bet Squandered Resources goes up” because I understand EDH pretty well and I feel like every other speculation model I developed relied either one waiting for published decklists from tournaments which made us buy at the same time as everyone else or trying to stay ahead of formats I would have had to understand better than pro players to speculate in/on.  Since I’m one guy, I usually nail a few cards because this is what I think about all day long while you think about how handy it is not to have to think about that stuff. Then, I check EDHREC and holy $%#&, I guess one guy isn’t ever as good as every guy and gal because I notice that Constant Mists, Groundskeeper (get foils), Life From the Loam and lots of other cards are impacted. This is hypothetical by the way, I remember knowing Constant Mists and Life From the Loam would go up, I just don’t remember which cards I only got because I saw them on EDHREC and this is a hypothetical example. The point is, a new deck is like a bunch of blind people trying to describe an elephant based on just the part they’re touching or whatever that dumb example they used to use in Six Sigma meetings. No one person gets the full picture but EDHREC crowdsources for us.

What Are We Seeing This Week?

I’m glad I pretended you asked. I might have written about a topic kind of like this based on that podcast listener question because I felt like it was too much material for the episode and I told the guy “I write about this, just go read my articles” and now there’s something that specifically addresses his points, as I understood them.

It was equally likely that I would have just found a popular commander and done a normal article based on that. Instead, I found something curious.

Meren? Shu Yun? The Scarab God is less curious considering it’s tearing up Standard. Kaalia just got a bunch of new Dragons. Atraxa is always popular. But Meren and Shu Yun?

Yisan? Is this because he was just unbanned in 1V1? Do we even scrape those lists or did a bunch of people mis-register? Ezuri? Hapatra? Why are older cards showing up in the most popular decks of the week but not the month? What happened recently that didn’t happen a month ago? Oh, I don’t know, maybe players getting their hands on cards from Ixalan. Let’s click on Yisan.

This is the only new card. That’s curious. What’s also curious is the text underneath that you may have missed or failed to interpret. It says “100% of 10 decks” which doesn’t mean 10 people ever have registered a Yisan, the Wanderer Bard deck. It means that of the 10 decks registered since Ixalan cards were tagged in the database, all of them play this card. That means 10 people made new decklists. Is this people with existing decks making a new list to incorporate Rites? Is it people making new decks? We don’t know, and that’s the problem my listener had with using EDHREC as a metric. Here’s where I’m going to get infuriating.

I don’t think it matters.

We use EDHREC deck inclusion numbers as a ratio, basically. We can say that the demand for a card that went up is half of what it is for another card and predict that other card will go up and we’re almost always right. We can use inclusion numbers to establish arbitrary thresholds below which we don’t think that the demand can soak supply. If the numbers don’t need to be absolute numbers, and they don’t, then it doesn’t matter if 10 people made a duplicate deck based on one new card or made new decks. It’s not going to shift the numbers enough to throw off our ratios. We’re not going to make bad decisions based on 10 decks. We’re not going to speculate on Growing Rites under any circumstances because the card is new and we like new archetypes to push up old cards with low supply and high growth potential.

Compare the 100% inclusion of Rites in the Yisan deck with the numbers we got for the only new card in the Meren decks.

Totes different. Meren is just getting built a lot because it’s in the Top 3 decks of all time and lots of people want to build it. Rites helps, but in fewer than half of the new decks.

 

It doesn’t take much drilling down to figure out what means new decks are getting made and what means decks are getting updated. I think I’ve managed to establish that my methodology for selection is sound and if we continue to let new archetypes identify older cards for us like we have been, we’re going to be able to continue to use EDHREC despite any limitations it might have (since we’re using EDHREC not at ALL the way it was intended to be used, so the fact that we are getting any usable data is pretty lucky).

I’ll now presume you’re all on board still/again/for the first time and use my last little bit of word count to use our old method to try and identify stuff with upside based on people building the 6th-most popular deck of the week, The Scarab God.

Scaraby got lots of new toys. The cool thing about the intersection of Commander 2017 and Ixalan is that while it was predicated on giving us strong Vampires with lots of overlap to make Standard players care about EDH and vice versa, there is a lot of “splash damage” and unintended tribes are getting sick goodies. Zombies got a tribal banner, a non-zombie that nonetheless swipes stuff so well we do it in Standard alongside Scaraby-face, a card that makes all of your cards zombies no matter what and the second tribe-matters land that taps for multiple colors in literally two sets. No wonder people are back to building Scarab decks.

Rooftop Storm – Is the first card I want to talk about. Ric Amundson wrote an EDHREC article about using Zur to grab Arcane Adaptation to make every creature in your deck a Zombie to make Rooftop Storm ridiculous. I think that’s cute, but since we’re playing Adaptation and Zombies, Rooftop Storm features heavily. I think the reprint risk of this card is pretty high and I might grab foils, as lazy as that seems to me since they’re harder to move and harder to buy large quantities of. Luckily the price isn’t that high so there’s no huge impetus to reprint other than “it might work in this goofy precon” although they may stay away from Zombies for a while. I like this pickup more and more as people build old tribes and Zombies continues to be one of the most popular.

Phenax, God of Deception – Everyone is holding their breath on the Gods after the reprinting of… the Boros one (I am bad with names) in a precon last year. They’ll reprint Thassa for EDH before they reprint Phenax. In fact, where DO they want to reprint a dedicated Mill God? He’s awkward in any product you put him in and that mitigates his reprint risk so much that I’m in below $10 on this guy.

Door of Destinies – This is another card I think they’ll leave alone for a while. With no dedicated tribal stuff coming in the forseeable future (except for when they bring core set back, I guess), you have a while for these to grow. But at the floor and get out as quickly as you can even if you leave some money for the next guy. These are risky long-medium-term but super juicy in the short term.

That’s all for me this week. I’m sorry for the wall of text. If this was boring, I’ll remind you that it’s sometimes important for me to defend the fundamental thesis of my entire series occasionally lest all of my advice be suspect all at once. I think we’ve developed a pretty good track record using the new method and I think weaknesses in the model don’t matter. If you think they matter or I missed something, let’s argue in the comments section. Thanks for reading. Until next time!