Watchtower

PROTRADER: The Watchtower 9/25/17

5 Comments

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.

Rawr. Ixalan’s prerelease was this weekend, and if the anecdotal evidence is to be believed, it was a smashing success. After a prolonged, miserable Standard that dragged on for nearly two years and saw how many? cards banned, players are ready for a reset, which is perhaps the most exciting part of Ixalan.

Set prices are wonky for a few reasons. First, there’s no masterpieces, which is certainly going to have an impact on singles. I don’t have the numbers handy, but they accounted for somewhere in the neighborhood of 5% to 15% of a box’s value. Without them, that value is going to be distributed back amongst the normal cards. And since commons aren’t likely to really see a 15% increase in price, it basically means that the moderate to best rares and mythics are going to pick up that slack.

In conjunction with that, because there’s a small set of flip cards in this set, mythics have increased in rarity. Rather than finding a mythic in 1/8 packs, which is typical of past sets, they’ll instead show up in 1/7 packs. This means they’re about 12% more rare than they have been in the past. Between the lack of masterpieces and this particular mythic distribution, we could see the return of the $50 Standard mythic if one of them is truly the best card in Standard.

Of course, right now all the mythics look underwhelming for the most part. It’s not unreasonable to imagine Wizards did this on purpose.

This week we’re mostly going to discuss EDH, since we don’t really know enough about Standard to know what’s going on yet. That will come next weekend.

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Deathmist Raptor (Foil)

Price Today: $6
Possible Price: $15

If you listen to James and I on MTG Fast Finance, you know that we’re both real big on Commander specs this year. It’s been the most consistently profitable market segment, with its massive playerbase that’s happy to buy into niche cards. With Ixalan’s release and the arrival of Dinosaur Tribal, there’s fresh opportunity to capitalize on this. Most of the tribal staples — Cryptic Gateway, Urza’s Incubator, etc. — already spiked months and months ago on the news of Commander 2017, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still some room in the dino-specific field.

Deathmist Raptor is one of the creatures that got updated with the Dinosaur creature type update a few weeks ago, and is no longer just a lizard beast. He’s a full fledge dinosaur, and as such is prime fodder for dinosaur EDH decks. Of course, it doesn’t take an EDH scholar to recognize that Deathmist Raptor isn’t actually that great. A 3/3 deathtouch is…fine? He’s good at carrying swords or triggering your Nature’s Will, since people won’t want to block and he doesn’t hit that hard, and he plays a good defense, but he’s certainly not thrilling. The recursion is a nice addition, but not especially relevant. Still, he’s a dinosaur, which is the most important thing here. You’ve also got your outside shot at Modern play, where he could conceivably show up as some part of dredge strategy. Green decks already want to dump Vengevine, so adding Raptor isn’t a far cry.

There’s way too many non-foils of Raptor for me to be interested. Foils, on the other hand, are sparse. We’re talking about foil mythics from Dragons of Tarkir, a relatively under-opened set. You can score foils for around $6 right now, and there’s maybe three playsets on TCG. With 50 dino decks on EDHREC this week, it’s not hard to imagine a couple hundred people nationwide deciding they want a foil copy and emptying the market.  

Fungusaur (Foil)

Price Today: $1
Possible Price: $5

Fungusaur, also a newly appointed dinosaur, has a surprising eight printings to his name. Most players have probably never even seen Fungusaur. Well it’s your time to shine now, buddy.

I’m not sure if Wizards lifted the enrage mechanic from Fungusaur. They probably did. In any case, he basically says “Enrage – put a +1/+1 counter on Fungusaur.” Since the dino deck is already interested in zapping their own dudes, he fits right in. He goes “infinite” — so long as you have the mana — with a Pyrohemia, or other repeatable damage source. That’s pretty nifty, since you can turn him into a 6/6 or 7/7 the turn you cast him, and potentially much larger.

Even though there’s eight printings of Fungusaur, there’s only one foil printing, which, coincidentally enough, is found in 8th Edition. There’s almost none left, so I’m not sure how successful you’ll be, but foils at $1 are an easy buy. You can flip them for $5 or $6 (or $10?) on TCG to people foiling out their new dino deck, since he’ll fit right in and be relatively cheap. This is small ball, but it’s easy if you can find them.


Metallic Mimic (Foil)

Price Today: $10
Possible Price: $20

As far as foil multipliers go, Metallic Mimic’s is far too low. The cheapest non-foil copy is $8, and the cheapest foil is only $10. That type of discrepancy means something should be changing soon, and in this case, I think it’s the foil that’s going to be experiencing a price correction.

Mimic is reasonably popular in EDH, with over 3,000 decks listed with him on EDHREC. That’s about the point at which I start considering EDH specs. Add in the price discrepancy and I’m a lot more interested. Add in that we’ve back-to-backed a tribal Commander set and a tribal Standard environment and I’m a lot more interested. Really, how do you build a tribal deck without this card? A permanent increase in power to every single creature you play is A+, especially when you consider that many decks can find ways to use those counters to great effect.

I picked up on Mimic from looking at the dinosaur deck, but really, it fits in everywhere. It’s obviously wildly popular in multiple formats, as one would expect an $8 Standard rare that’s not really that popular in Standard to be. Pair that with a surge in tribal demand and a wonky foil multiplier and you’ve got all the markings of a card that’s looking to move soon.

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: Preorders and Prerelease Prices

Hello and welcome to the first weekend of Ixalan! I hope you’re going to have a great time at your local Prerelease, and every three months, I have the same advice: Trade it all!

These prices are at their highest for 95% of cards, and I will just play it safe and trade them all away. I’m going to be highlighting one or two things that I think have potential to rise, but I expect almost all of these to fall.

I’m going to start with the preorder prices, which have been really active for some of these cards.

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Jason Alt

Unlocked Pro Trader: Dragon My Feet

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As usual, I am letting what is actually getting built dictate what I talk about which is why I haven’t talked about cats in a while and why I talked about Edgar Markov last week despite not really wanting to. Edgar Markov is popular this week, though. It’s the most popular deck built on sites scraped by EDHREC, more popular than the second and third (new) most popular decks combined. That said, there isn’t much money to be made from Edgar Markov decks, I don’t think. Someone asked on Twitter about Necropolis Regent and that is a card I didn’t but probably should have talked about last week. I don’t want people to think I don’t read their comments so let’s take a look at it before I launch into this week’s article.

 

Regent was priming for a jump last week and I missed it. I think BBB is tough for a vampire deck, but I also advocated Vampire Nocturnus which is BBB and has a larger supply than Regent. Regent is in about half of the new Edgar decks being built and since it’s the most popular commander of the week, supply is going to continue to dry up. I found some very cheap (sub $2) copies online but for the most part, the major retailers are seeing copies disappear. It would have been nice to have warned you a week ago, but Pro Traders can scoop those cheap copies before this is a $10 card. Credit to Steven Kestner for noticing I neglected to mention this sauce monster. If I’d checked the graph I would have likely noticed that this was going in a very positive direction but I don’t always check the graph of every single card on EDHREC. Maybe I should start.

I mean, you’re allowed to, too. I’m not saying I’m not good at this, I think I have a good track record, especially since I switched over to EDH finance full-time. I will say that there are cards I’m going to miss just out of neglect. Telling you not to buy a card is one thing, but seeming not to endorse a card by omission could mean I deemed the card unworthy of discussion or it could just mean I missed it. You can use the tools I use, too, so make sure and follow up on hunches you have. I’m teaching you all to fish with this column, after all.

Let’s apply the same, (apparently flawed) process that we used last week to a new deck and see if we can’t tease out a few cards that are on their way to getting there.

While Edgar Markov continues to top the charts, The Ur-Dragon. With as many decks built this week as Atraxa, a perennial juggernaut, Ur-Dragon’s numbers seem robust enough to give it a second look, although I feel that just looking at old Scion of the Ur-Dragon builds was enough to mostly predict what was going to happen. Ur-Dragon doesn’t seem better than Scion in absolute terms and that leads me to believe the bulk of new people building the deck are people who didn’t have a Scion deck before and are therefore going to be popping and modifying the precon deck. This was something I dismissed earlier when Scion was first spoiled (what feels like a year ago) but which could actually bear some fruit. I only need to find four or five buying opportunities, really, to make you all some money and with decks getting built 100 cards at a time, there should be quite a bit to discuss. Let’s try and avoid discussing anything in the precon, which limits us a bit but if we look at Scion decks as well, we can see which staples didn’t get reprinted and therefore what the precon buyers may upgrade to later.

EDHREC is currently working on a filter that will remove cards that are in precons from the results which will be a big help for undertakings like this. Until then, let’s brute force our way through this.

Dragonlord Silumgar

I think the price trends on this are promising. This isn’t Dromoka money and never will be, but it will be more than it is now. I think these Dragonlords are like the gods of their set in that there will be a tendency for some to collect them as a set and the playable ones will have quite a bit of upside and potentially pull up the less playable ones. Since Kolaghan is useless in EDH, this is basically a cycle of 4 (or 9 if you count the non-Dragonlord versions of these dragons) for EDH consideration. Silumgar is good in a deck like this and even fine at the helm of (I read somewhere they’re female) her own deck so I think while Dromoka popped first, that just meant we have more time to see Silumgar’s spike coming.

Dragonlord Atarka

While we’re on the subject, Atarka’s graph is showing a lot of the same tendencies as Silumgar’s, but the increase is a little smoother and therefore hasn’t tripped anyone’s “If the price goes up by more than 9%, highlight the price in green” algorithms. Silumgar was on interests pages but this wasn’t and it’s likely got the same or better upside and its graph looks almost identical. The crazy thing is, if you’re playing a 5-color Dragon deck, Silumgar’s ability scales way better for 40 life multiplayer but Atarka seems to have equal upside based on historical data (which was predicated on a different format so it’s misleading). I don’t think Atarka is near as good as Silumgar but since this can go in decks like Xenagos and Mayael, I think the extra demand could be more relevant than playability*. Atarka is in over 3,000 decks on EDHREC and Silumgar is in fewer than 2,500. The numbers aren’t as important as the ratio – Atarka is in 20% more decks and all things being equal, should have 20% more upside if those trends continue. I don’t think that as many Mayael decks will get built in the next few months as, say, Scarab God which prefers Silumgar, but I think all that does is equalize these cards. If you like Silumgar, you should feel the exact same way about Atarka.

*As an aside, I want to address something I addressed in the comments a few weeks ago on the Mairsil article. People were asking why I advocated Morphling as the pickup when Aetherling seemingly had better abilities. It doesn’t matter. People aren’t picking the best ‘ling of the bunch, they’re playing all of them. When there is the potential for redundancy, most EDH players will go for it if the effect matters. You don’t see a disparity between the three ‘lings, they all are in roughly the same number of decks. That means Morphling has more upside because supply is lower and demand is the same. I think playability matters in terms of “this is playable” or “this is unplayable” but I think “this is a better card than that one” doesn’t always matter in EDH so watch out you don’t logic yourself out of a good spec by assuming playability matters more than supply.

Hellkite Tyrant

You know how I like those reverse-J-shaped graphs? Tyrant is at a historic low but is beginning to tail up and I think there is an opportunity to make some money. It’s a card that does very powerful things in EDH, stealing their stuff and winning the game (it’s happened a non-zero number of times, including once to me) sometimes, so it’s a very EDH card. The spiking of the foils was easy to predict and the recovery of the non-foils is similar. I like this card a lot right now. Even after a reprinting, the price hasn’t gone down all that much. This seems ripe.

Utvara Hellkite

Another card starting its “beginning of the U-shaped graph” plunge, I like these at their bottom. I am not sure what the bottom will be, but with a printing in the precon, this is likely to tank a lot. Everyone building a Dragon deck this year likely uses the copy from the precon meaning new demand will have to emerge. That said, there were always dragon decks being built before. We run a real risk with reprints like this that mostly go in the deck they’re printed in as opposed to a reprint like Crypt Ghast, so I’m cautioning you not to treat this card like most reprinted staples – it’s not like them. However, this is a real card, it’s a bulk mythic that ascended to a high of $8 before being reprinted and it’s a card that likely doesn’t get reprinted again for a good long time. If this craters at like $1, I think you go for it.

There are a few cards I think will be specific to Ur-Dragon decks because you will be more focused on attacking and less-so on the selection criteria for a deck like Scion. Creatures played in Ur-Dragon decks that don’t appear in Scion decks feel more aggressive.

Thudermaw Hellkite

Gettable at around $5, this has demonstrated an ability to be $10-$15ish with some demand and $40 with lots of demand. This also got really cheap before Lingering Souls being everywhere spiked it. This is an aggressive creature and it makes sure your fliers get in there, which means you draw hella cards with your Commander and get free perms. I think this has some upside although the recent price behavior has been weird with the price fluctuating a lot and currently being on a downswing. It’s possible that it was bought out and spiked temporarily due to speculation about its inclusion in a Dargons deck but I think there is real demand for this card. At 18% total inclusion, it’s far from a staple, but there is a medium between “This is $35 now!” and “Just kidding, this is $5 now.”

Dragonlord Kolaghan

Ok, hear me out.

I wasn’t going to mention this before because this belongs in the special “Scion doesn’t want this but Ur-Dragon does” section because this card is very aggro-oriented. Would you play this card in EDH?

You might in Ur-Dragon because it has haste, it grants haste and it’s a Dragon, 3 things you want. The other ability seems to make it useless in EDH, but it’s sort of gravy and just because you ask for no gravy doesn’t mean that the rest of your dry, gravy-less meal isn’t perfectly – NO! I can’t do this. Just get the gravy. Learn to like the gravy. Who doesn’t want gravy? My metaphor has fallen apart entirely, much like your bland, gravy-less meal is going to fall apart when you’re drinking a half gallon of that garbage Riesling with the kangaroo on the bottle that your Mother-in-law buys in bulk at Costco just so you can choke down forkfulls of dessicated stuffing with no lubricant because otherwise you sound like a cat with a hairball and then you get on twitter drunk and start retweeting a bunch of gamergate people and lose your job and for what? Just play the stupid haste Dragon.  It even has haste itself, unlike that new Dinosaur I thought I liked until I realized it wasn’t Bloodbraid Elf because it only gives other dinosaurs haste.

The Dragonlords are all in a pretty good spot and if the worst one has upside based on being in 30% of the new Ur-Dragon lists then you probably want to be about all of them. Dromoka set the absolute best case scenario bar high, but there’s no reason that the others can’t approach it. I think if there’s anything I learned today it’s that I should look at more graphs more often. If you learned anything today, I’m not surprised.

Join me next week where our topic will be a different one. Until next time!

Watchtower

PROTRADER: The Watchtower 9/18/17

1 Comment

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.

Ixalan’s prerelease bears down on us rapidly, and with the full set spoiled, players are hard at work grinding out decklists to find the hidden gems. Those that pay close attention and apply a critical lens (or are otherwise in touch with pros, or just lucky) stand to be rewarded. Will Gisath, Sun’s Avatar replace Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger as Standard’s go-to big body? Will tribal synergies be enough to become the dominant archetype in Standard? Will people stop buying non-foil Zendikar copies of Spell Pierce?

Meanwhile Modern looks to be in excellent shape, with a dynamic, wide range of top-tier decks. It certainly looks like anything can win, and while that possibly isn’t true, the belief that it is is good enough. Commander 2017 also continues to drive the market, and for the first time in awhile the most-built deck isn’t Atraxa. Exciting!

Spell Queller (Foil)

Price Today: $12
Possible Price: $25

Modern has a lot of strong strategies, most of which can win on any given weekend. That doesn’t mean there aren’t standouts though, and Jeskai and UW Control have been mainstays for months now. It’s a welcome change for some, given that control has at times been almost entirely absent from the format. Along with the growth of the archetype, we’re seeing an increased presence of Spell Queller.

Spell Queller is an above-rate threat that does everything control in Modern wants to do. It comes down early, gets around “can’t be countered” effects, and applies evasive pressure to help close out a game before an opponent can restabilize with multitude of powerful spells available to them in the format. Even if Queller dies several turns later and gives an opponent their spell back, there’s a chance it could now be blank (e.g. removal), or considerably less useful (e.g. a Collected Company while the control player is now holding Supreme Verdict.)

Foils are on the market at $12 to $13, and while supply is decent, it’s not massive. As a growing Modern staple in an archetype that’s beloved by established players, and a constant regardless of how strong it actually is in a metagame. In other words, this is no flavor of the week combo piece. I suspect the foil supply will drain over the next three to nine months, and we’ll be looking at $20 to $30 foils in a year or so, so long as there’s no reprint, which really would only come in Masters 25, and I don’t think that’s a reasonable expectation.

Reality Smasher

Price Today: $3
Possible Price: $10

If you’re not playing Modern or Legacy regularly, you may not fully appreciate how omnipresence the Eldrazi threat remains. Both formats, Modern especially, continue to see Eldrazi rampage through top places. Modern especially sees a lot of Eldrazi action, and they see it in various stripes. Eldrazi Taxes, Eldrazi Tron, Bant Eldrazi, etc. There’s two mainstays amongst all of these variations: Thought-Knot Seer and, of course, Reality Smasher.

TKS is certainly appealing, but with a higher buy-in, we’re not looking at him today. Instead we’re talking about Reality Smasher, which is the enforcer in the “brain and muscle” pairing. Smasher is truly a marriage of name and form — he hits very hard, immediately, and is absolutely miserable to answer. If he doesn’t score a hit the turn he comes down your opponent probably spent two cards getting rid of him, which means the next one is basically guaranteed to have free run of your opponent’s face. There’s a single-digit number of threats in Modern as efficient and nightmarish as Reality Smasher, and so long as Eldrazi Temple is legal, the two are going to show up hand-in-hand, because once you’re in the market for the latter, you’d be foolish not to bring the former.

While TKS is already $6, Reality Smasher is half of that (or less) today. Normally I wouldn’t advocate buying in at $3 in order to ride it to $6, so there’s got to be more room ahead, and I believe that there is. Thought-Knot Seer is the second (!) most played card in Modern, and Reality Smasher is 10th, and the gap between them is fairly narrow. $2.50 for a top 10 Modern creature that was single-printed in the middle of a chilled Standard is going to look silly a year from now.

Malakir Bloodwitch (Foil)

Price Today: $1.50
Possible Price: $15

As I mentioned in the intro, Commander 2017 continues to drive prices, and Atraxa has finally lost her throne. This week it’s been taken over by Edgar Markov, the Mardu Vampire Lord. I’ll be the first to tell you that I don’t find him interesting or remarkable as a commander in any capacity, but apparently others do, and that’s what matters. Twilight is apparently still popular I guess? Probably in the midwest; it’s like 2002 over there still.

Looking through EDHREC at the signature cards for Edgar is pretty funny; two of fifteen were printed in the precon. One of those two is an uncommon from SOI, and the other is Bloodline Keeper, which already tripled awhile ago. That leaves us looking to make money on vampires in a different way. If we can’t buy any more non-foils (because they reprinted all the damn things), then let’s chase foils.

My first choice was going to be Anowon, the Ruin Sage, since I can’t fathom a Vampire deck without them, but he’s already like $15 now so never mind. I was pleasantly surprised to find Malakir Bloodwitch foils at $1.50 though. I was further pleasantly surprised to see that her damage trigger is all opponents, not one, and the life gain is equal to the total life lost, which means you get to triple dip. Compare her trigger to something like Palace Siege and you can see how much stronger this is. Add in the fact that Edgar’s whole shtick is to poop out vampires and you can see how a single Malakir Bloodwitch trigger could do 20+ damage.

Supply isn’t what I’d consider sparse but at $1.50 for pack foils I don’t care. I’d be shocked if this wasn’t a $10 foil by the spring.

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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