Casual Fridays

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Transform with Caution

Ixalan is going to be awesome, and while we are getting previews at a relatively glacial rate, there’s a few super-unique cards that I’m staring at and thinking about: the transforming lands.

I’m not thinking about if I should buy them (yes, totally in foil especially!) but I’m keeping an eye on something that’s two months out: From the Vault: Transform.

Today, I’m going to go over a few cards that have changed in price, and some that haven’t, to see if they need to be sold right the heck now, or if they are safe to pick up.

I hate making predictions about what Wizards will do, but there’s something else to note: We’ve been told in the past that transform cards are hard to add to a pack randomly, but if they want to they can. We’ve had Magic Origins, with a mythic cycle of transform cards, and now we are getting ten rare ones in Ixalan. (This number could be wrong, we don’t have the full set as of this writing.)

I want to explain my fear, with some illustrations. Being printed in an FTV: is bad for the long-term price of a card. Some cards do recover over time, but the pack foil generally takes a hit and trends downward. Let’s look at some examples.

Before being printed in FTV: 20 in August of 2013, pack foil Jace, the Mind Sculptor was more than a grand. I would have thought that this price would hold firm, given that the pool of people who want a foil Jace is relatively small…but there’s the chart. There was a minor bump after, as people thought the price was falling too far, but the downward trend was beginning. Eternal Masters in June 2016 gave this price another hit, but the FTV did a lot of the damage.

Let’s look at a more recent card, and more recent FTV.

Aurelia, the Warleader, is a powerhouse in Boros Commander decks. You’d have to work hard to convince me to run someone else as the commander. She was in FTV: Angels, and that was the beginning of a downward trend that has continued for the pack foil. The FTV release for her was August 2015, and it took a couple of months for the decreased demand to set in, but you see how the buylist price dropped in November of that year.

Now, onto some new prices for old cards.

Bloodline Keeper ($14, up from $6) – This is the card that inspired me to write this article. If you need a copy for your new Vampire deck, understand that this is very very likely to be in the FTV that’s on the way, and it’ll cost you $5 or less. I would be selling every copy of this that I had, and I’d be giving serious thought to selling copies in decks now, and rebuying it after the FTV lands. If you have to have it right now, do so with the knowledge that you’re paying for the immediacy.

Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy ($24 now) – If he’s reprinted in this set, then I’d expect the nonfoil to take a bigger hit. ‘Infant Jace’ already has a promo from SDCC to be an upper-limit to the foil versions, so I don’t think those would lose value at all.

Nissa, Vastwood Seer ($7) – I’m not sure that this will get reprinted, but it’d drop by at least half if it did. However, if she dodges the reprint, I really like her as a long-term hold.

Garruk Relentless ($6) – He feels like a lock, and this is going to hit his price hard. There’s two transforming Planeswalkers, and Arilinn was very recent. I’d be surprised if his price stayed over $3.

Archangel Avacyn – ($6/$20) – Her price has been falling for the duration of her time in Standard, and I don’t think rotation would have lowered her price much more. I would expect the FTV version of her to end up about $8, and the original nonfoil about $4.

Westvale Abbey ($6/$9) – As a transform land, it’s one of a kind, and rotation is going to hit this card like a hammer. This will be $3 without the FTV, and might push down to $2 if it’s in this special set.

Startled Awake ($4/$8) – This has come down from the crazy height Fraying Sanity pushed it to, but it’s a unique effect that casual players love. I’m hoping some version of this can be picked up in the $2 range, and that’s a great price point for buying in.

Thing in the Ice ($4/$10) – Being a fun one-of in some Modern and Legacy sideboards is just barely enough to keep this price solid past rotation, but if it’s in the FTV, expect that value to drop by half.

Elbrus, the Binding Blade ($4/$12) – Sorry, big guy, but your price is completely a factor of your scarcity. It’s even possible that there will be more copies of you as an FTV card than there were of originals, considering that Dark Ascension was early 2012.

Duskwatch Recruiter ($1/$6) – Being in the FTV won’t make a dent in the pack foil, though the original might go down to fifty cents. It’s a bonkers card in heavy creature decks, and an outlet for infinite mana from Devoted Druid and Vizier of Remedies.

Mayor of Avabruck ($2.50/$6/$3 release promo) – There’s already a special version of this card, but I put nothing past Wizards at this point. Oddly, I doubt being in the FTV Would the price of any of these much. It’s a four-of in the niche Humans decks that pop up in Modern from time to time, too, and it’s funny that you rarely want this card to flip.

Bruna, the Fading Light ($1/$8) and Gisela, the Broken Blade ($7/$17) – I expect there will be a Meld pairing in the set, and these are cheap enough to merit inclusion. Plus they are thematic and awesome. I think it’s more likely that Wizards goes cheap and gives us Hanweir, the Writhing Township or Chittering Host. At that point, I will like these ladies as a long-term buy and hold.

Delver of Secrets ($1.50/$9), Perfected Form ($0.25/$0.50), and Docent of Perfection ($.50/$6) – I think this an excellent inclusion in the FTV, due to the flavor text and the amazing Nils Hamm art. It’s also a pair of Wizards, including Docent which is just amazing when put into the Wizards deck that they just happened to start selling last week. Delver wouldn’t flinch in price at all, and I’m not sure about Docent. There’s a tiny number of foils for sale, and much is going to depend on the demand going forward. The assorted Wizards are popular commanders out of the gate, so these seem like a good idea, but the price might not pick up for a couple of years.

Bonus section! My picks for the set, with the caveat that I’ve been super terrible at predicting what WotC will do.

Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy
Nissa, Vastwood Seer
Bloodline Keeper
Delver of Secrets
Aberrant Researcher
Docent of Perfection
Rusted Heirloom
Duskwatch Recruiter
Garruk Relentless
Hanweir Garrison
Hanweir Battlements
Startled Awake
Ludevic’s Test Subject
Westvale Abbey
Nezumi Graverobber (That’s right, I think they pick a flip card from Kamigawa and make it a transform card. I’d also believe Nezumi Shortfang or Rune-Tail, Kitsune Ascendant.)

Jason Alt

Unlocked Pro Trader: Back to Basics

4 Comments

Man, “Back to Basics” would have been a sweet title for an article where I talked about lands, wouldn’t it? Maybe a bunch of the many lands and spells that search for basic lands in EDH, perhaps? Or maybe a focus on Back to Basics, Blood Moon and other land-lock enchantments like it to highlight the fact that Mana Vortex and Land Equilibrium are both spiking. Instead, I am wasting this title on an article about how last week’s tirade (I give all of you enough credit to notice how sarcastic it was) led to a lot of feedback from readers on Twitter, Facebook, Discord and in the comments section of the piece itself telling me to stick with my formula. That was gratifying. I sometimes worry that I do a disservice by pointing out that potential cards are terrible because people seem to have no trouble selling the terrible cards in the the hype surrounding events in EDH. I’m not going to tell you not to buy cards anymore, but I will continue to suggest cards I think have upside based on the same analysis and logic I have been using.

Commander 2017 Is Unique

Not everyone plays EDH or understands it and years ago when the format wasn’t as popular or understood as it is now, this article was breaking off a lot of great advice for people. I still think the advice is very good, but in 2017 specifically, I think this article felt less necessary. Commander 2017 gave us tribes and people who don’t understand EDH can at least grok that you want to buy tribal stuff. The average armchair speculator doesn’t need to read analysis to tell them to buy kittycats before the kittycat deck comes out. The average armchair speculator isn’t necessarily going to identify Squandered Resources as a card with upside when The Gitrog Monster gets printed, though, and that’s why I think the method I’ve developed over the past few years is still very valuable to readers and I plan to stick with it.

Things aren’t going to be as obvious moving forward. While it was obvious to people to buy cats for the cat deck (they were about 20% right, also, which is impressive for a crowd of complete lunatics with no discernible strategy) it isn’t quite as obvious what to buy for the Wizards decks now that we’ve actually seen the cards. How’s that stack of Patron Wizard look now that we have one deck where you copy the activated abilities of creatures and artifacts, one deck where you have a Mega Snapcaster and one deck where you can temporarily make a copy of a Wizard? Maybe it still looks good because you want to live the dream of having a huge pile of Wizards on the board and you can use Inalla to kill them and keep Patron Wizard up to counter the deluge of board wipes that are coming. But for the most part, we’re going to have to start looking at what the decks actually play. Patron Wizard isn’t in Kess or Mairsil decks and since those are the majority of decks being built from the Commander 2017 precon, it makes sense to see what’s going to sell on merit rather than hype in the coming months. In some ways, 2017 isn’t so different since we’re doing what we did last year – looking at what people actually build and buying before those cards go up, something we have weeks or even months to do safely. There were a lot of distractions but when the dust clears, if you have any money left, you can buy cards that are being granted upside by how the new decks are actually being built.

What We Would Have Done Anyway

So let’s pretend this year wasn’t ridiculous, a bunch of Reserved List cards didn’t spike because the people on the YouTube or a podcast told us to buy them, cards didn’t go up slightly based on leaked cards that indicated that Planeswalkers would be Legendary and then spike again later by a lot based on the exact same information and that everyone didn’t become an EDH deckbuilding expert based on learning that there would be a cat deck. Let’s look instead at what people are actually jamming in Mairsil, the Pretender.

I wish I could jam like 100 references to The Pretenders songs in this article, but I did that bit yesterday in my Gathering Magic article. This is a serious times article full of serious finance picks. Go elsewhere if you want tomfoolery and shenanigans.

Here are my totally serious financial picks based on Mairsil, a card I realize I might as well post here in case some of you don’t know what it does.

To make this card good, we want to maximize the number of times he enters the battlefield, maximize the number of effects we get, mitigate the “only once each turn” requirement and try to double any and all triggers. This is standard EDH stuff for a lot of it. There are two different ways to build Mairsil in my opinion and the way the deck builds are diverging shows that other people agree.

Shilling Time, Unwillingly Mine*

It’s shill o’clock now because I’m going to teach you about a new feature on EDHREC because it is going to be very helpful at deciphering the different card choices and the predominance of each. You may not want to target cards for an artifact-based combo build if you know it’s only 20% of total Mairsil builds and we finally have an algorithm to help us determine that. This is stuff you want to know, trust me.

First, access the page for a commander and make sure you’re displaying “view as commander” rather than “view as card”

Once you’re on the correct screen (I mean, I linked it but I’m trying to teach you nerds to fish so I’m trying to anticipate any mistakes that might throw you off so you know how to fix them without having to ask) scroll or glance over to the right.

The “theme selection” menu is new and it does some of the analytical work that can be very difficult otherwise. If it’s clear that certain builds are emerging, you can separate just the cards from those builds specifically. If you click on of those links, it takes you to a new page. Clicking “Artifact” takes you to a brand new page. Open both the general Mairsil page and also open the “artifact build” page and compare how the top and signature cards are different. Some of those artifact-based cards got buried because there was too much noise and not enough signal, but if you begin to isolate the cards that are specific to that build, a deck takes shape a lot better. This is more useful as a builder than as a financier, but it’s not entirely useless as a financier because Artifact combo-based builds (you generate infinite mana with Basalt Monolith and Staff of Domination after you use Quicksilver Elemental to give Mairsil the ability to have all of the activated abilities of itself to circumvent the “once per turn” clause of his own ability) are still a minority and therefore are less likely to spike card values than the basic, meat-and-potatoes “card advantage from lots of abilities” build. Also, any cards in common between both builds have as much upside as all Mairsil decks so you can invest like you did before when you just assumed that was the case for any card listed on the page ( we assumed that because we had to and now we don’t, so that’s better).

That said, I’m not going to isolate any particular build since the Artifact builds are currently so much in the minority that their signal gets lost in the noise already and any overlap cards won’t be missed. I think overlap cards are the most important, so let’s look at those in particular.

Quicksilver Elemental

This is pretty key in Mairsil builds because it allows you to circumvent the “only once per turn” clause on using abilities of cards with Cage counters on them. You give Mairsil all of the abilities he himself has and then he can use them with impunity. This doesn’t have much appeal outside of Mairsil decks but this will be in nearly every competent Mairsil build and I expect that to be a lot of decks. If the conventional wisdom is true that there are so many new EDH players that every foil Yomiji and White Sun’s Zenith is going to get snapped up, surely there are enough new EDH players to push a 14-year-old, pre-mythic rare above bulk. This is going to get played more than Patron Wizard and is just about as old. But, hey, this is going up based on what EDH players are actually playing and not what people who don’t play EDH think EDH players are going to play, so don’t expect this to hit the $18 Patron Wizard is at. I still think you scoop these at bulk, and do it soon since supply is beginning to quietly disappear. I bet this is $5 in a month or two, if not more. It’s actually good and actually super necessary.

Chainer, Dementia Master

I think other than Quicksilver Elemental, Shauku, Endbringer is the best thing to copy with Mairsil, but Shauku already went from 50 pennies to 50 dimes this week so that ship has already sailed and transformed into a treasure map or whatever stupid crap ships do these days. Chainer, though, is no slouch and you want your Mairsil to have this ability for sure. If something happens to Mairsil, you keep the Nightmares, which is pretty amazing. This is old enough that I think the increased use and the fact that Chainer is a pretty solid general in his own right that there is upside here. This has demonstrated an ability to flirt with the idea of $5 and a second spike could make that price stick, making people glad they bought in at $1.

Morphling

This is a Reserved List card that must have gotten missed. If this goes up, I can’t wait for a bunch of tweets about how RL cards are going up for no reason despite this likely to go up due to being good in a deck that is good and also being pretty near a historic low. It’s trending back up anyway and I think of the three “lings” this is the only one I like. Aetherling and Torchling have lower buy-ins but I think there is too much supply for the demand from Mairsil to soak. This, meanwhile, is a reasonably-priced, playable, iconic Reserved List card. Iconic Masters wants to print this so bad and can’t. I think buy this and stay away from the cheaper ones that look like better targets and probably aren’t.

Wait, I said I wasn’t going to talk people out of cards so I don’t look dumb later when they get bought out anyway. Umm, OK. Here’s my new paragraph.

Jeepers! Morphling sure is expensive!!!1 That’s why you should buy Aetherling instead! It’s the same card almost but way cheaper! Buy foils because foils can’t get reprinted or something. Plus it’s good in Atraxa decks.

Tree of Perdition

This is about to rotate which means it could go down. Since rotation (September 28th) comes sooner than “Mairsil pushes playable cards up” (months from now) I would say to wait and see how much this falls at rotation, if at all. It’s a casual favorite and is pretty unfair as far as cards go so I expect this to regain value. Mairsil alone won’t be enough to push this back up if it falls at rotation, but casual appeal, its relative rarity, the fact that 60 card casual soaks up more than one copy and similar factors make this a good candidate for maintaining value and climbing over time. This isn’t quite a “dectuple overnight” like Shauku, but this was a good stand-in card for me to talk about rotation and you can use our logic here to apply to any card from Mairsil about to rotate, provided it’s a good casual card and at mythic. $3-$5 means this has room to fall but it has room to grow, also.

That does it for me. I think Mairsil is a great commander, good decks will be built with it and I think EDHREC’s commitment to continuing to make the data easier to parse will be a big help to us in the future. If you’re sick of hearing about EDHREC, include in the comments where you go to get EDH data and let us know how you analyze that data – if there are alternatives, it would be good to know that. Until then, keep selling into hype and buying into organic growth. I’m proud of you nerds. See you next week.

 

 

 

 

*if you can’t fill your article with The Pretenders references, at least reference Echo and the Bunnymen to make people born after 1990 feel cool if they get it

Watchtower

PROTRADER: The Watchtower 9/4/17

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 spoilers have been trickling in at a fair clip so far, and we’ll be getting far more in the very new future. Most recently we saw Huatli, Warrior Poet, joining Jace, Cunning Castaway as two of the three planeswalkers of the set. Huatli strikes me as sub-par, with a rough pairing of a five mana converted mana cost and three starting loyalty, and a poor plus ability next to a reasonable zero activation. Her “ultimate” isn’t bad though, as it lets you either clear up problem creatures, or alpha strike unblocked. Maybe there’s a dino deck that can leverage her well, but excepting that, she’s not doing much for me.

Over on the EDH side of things Wizards keep trickling in. Supreme Inquisitor is showing up on spike lists today, although that’s most certainly people reaching. Other wizard cards, such as Sigil Tracer continue to sell through at a strong clip, and they’re not the only tribe to see a bump, with Scourge of the Thrones another popular seller this week.

The bulk of “easy money” from Commander 2017 has been made, but there will certainly be sustained demand over the coming months. Remember that these decks only just hit shelves, and for many players, it isn’t until they get them in their hands, play a game or two, and then start to evaluate what to do differently that they start making their purchases.

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Bristling Hydra (Foil)

Price Today: $1.50
Possible Price: $8

Two more Standard GPs, and two more strong results for Temur Energy. I spoke about this deck a few weeks ago through the lens of Glorybringer, and now I’m returning to it because I think Bristling Hydra is worth keeping tabs on at this point as well.

Over in Turin two lists made top eight, and DC saw one as well. One thing has been consistent in every single Temur Energy list I think I’ve looked at in the last three months, and that’s the full four-of Bristling Hydra. It’s the lynchpin of the deck, and showing up with less than four at this point is looking like a fool’s errand.

What makes this really worth watching is that nothing rotates in October. Like, nothing. The main deck loses a whopping two lands. Other than that, it’s Kaladesh and Amonkhet all the way down. Compare this to any other tier deck out there and you’ll see they don’t have the same luxury. With Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, all the Eldrazi, and most of the zombies hailing from Battle for Zendikar and Shadows Over Innistrad, every other list is leaving a lot of meat behind this fall.

Plenty of copies exist out there, of course, but with such impressive results week after week and the fact that it’s going to be the unquestionable best deck on day zero, we could see a great deal of that supply dry up fast. If Temur Energy becomes the deck to beat, it’s not hard to imagine Hydra at over $5 a copy.

Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle (Release Promo)

Price Today: $11
Possible Price: $30

If you’ve been watching MTGO results for the past few months, you’d notice the amusing and tenacious presence of Valakut combo. So much so, in fact, that mtgtop8 is now showing Valakut Combo as the most represented combo deck in the format. That happened quietly, right? Did you realize that? I certainly didn’t. I knew it was being played, but the most popular combo deck in Modern? Huh.

Players seem to have settled squarely on a RG build, using full playsets of Primeval Titan and Scapeshift to deliver the dirt. A couple of Summoner’s Pacts act as Titans five and six, making sure this deck is always ready to deliver the damage on turn four. One or two Chandra, Torch of Defiances round out the heavy hitters in main, and other than that, there’s a familiar mixture of Sakura-Tribe Elders, Farseeks, Lightning Bolts, and Search for Tomorrows. All in all, not an especially clever build, but clearly an effective one.

The core of the deck, the card from which the deck derives its name, is of course Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle. There’s still been only one printing so far, which has pushed non-foils into the $10 range. Pack foils hang out around $15 at the moment, and release promos are available at $11 to $12.

Those release promos are the ones I’m interested in. With Masters 25 next spring apparently focusing on Pro Tour-winning cards from the last 25 years, there’s a reasonable chance we’d see Valakut make an appearance. It was the only deck that could realistically hang with Caw Blade back in the day, which is quite an honorific to wear. A reprint in a masters set is likely to come with the pack art, which isn’t particularly impressive or interesting. Meanwhile the release promo art is darker, foreboding, and dangerous. It’s got a real Mordor thing going on. It’s the preferred art for sure, and it’s likely that the only place you’re ever going to get it is on these promos.

Working under that expectation, promos at $11 are appealing. There aren’t many left out there, and with Valakut’s growing strength and popularity online, it won’t be long before it begins to transition in earnest to paper. Once that happens, these promos will be well positioned.

Aura Shards

Price Today: $9
Possible Price: $25

Everyone that pays any attention to EDH whatsoever knows this is a majorly important card in the format. If your deck produces both green and white mana, there’s a very good chance you’re in for aura shards. It allows you to basically cast a merged Purify/In Garruk’s Wake in a single turn if you’ve got the ability to generate tokens. Persistent enchantment and artifact removal is excellent, and the fact that it’s one-sided is icing on the cake.

Somehow there are still only two printings of this; Invasion and the original Commander. As such, there is not exactly a bountiful supply. Over on TCGPlayer right now there are 38 total sellers across both copies, and that includes every condition and language. Filtering down to NM English, there’s far fewer. The story is similar on most major vendors.

As alluded to, this card is popular. How popular? According to EDHREC, it’s in 23% of 45,084 decks. That’s a lot of Aura Shards. With supply as low as it is and the card as popular as it is, I wouldn’t be surprised to see inventories dry up any day now. Once that happens, it will be a $20+ card until Wizards deigns to pop out some more.

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: First Look at Ixalan

I love nothing more than preview season, though I really don’t like the giant dump of cards we got at the beginning of the week. That’s too much all at once for me to process and I suppose that means I’ve completely come around to like Wizards’ method of revealing the new set.

At the same time, thought, we have dinosaurs! Pirates! All kinds of tribal goodies!

Most relevant to us is that preorder season has begun. I know that usually, preodering is a really terrible idea, but recent sets have gotten better about preorder prices. It’s gotten to the point that so many stay away, and wait, and then some cards went up.

Today I want to look at some of the preorder prices and see if anything is worth getting in on.

Walk the Plank ($.50 preorder) – The flavor is amazing, and it’s a good card for just two black. It’s a sorcery, though, so this is not Fatal Push. It’s a bit worse than you think it is, being a sorcery. Very fairly priced.

Old-Growth Dryads ($3) – If you weren’t playing a basic before, then it’s time to do so. I think this has potential to grow, especially in foil. The presence of Path to Exile in Modern and Ghost Quarter have pushed people to include a couple of basics (even Tron with a miser’s Wastes, so this isn’t the slam dunk you want it to be. Best friends with Leonin Arbiter. There’s a very good chance that given the manabases possible in Standard, we’d skip out on basics when we want multicolor lands. This is the penalty for that strategy, and might be a more popular sideboard card than maindeck. In either case, this isn’t worth the $3…yet.

Revel in Riches ($0.79) – First of all, yes, this works with Anointed Procession. Alternate win conditions. Doubling token creation! I want this to be good, I really do, and it is going to be good in some sort of black control deck. I don’t think I like it as much as Approach of the Second Sun, though, so I don’t see this budging.

Herald of Secret Streams ($1) – This is pretty great in the strategies that want it. Thankfully, Nissa, Voice of Zendikar just rotated out and so people are going to have to go back to Verdurous Gearhulk/Rishkar, Peema Renegade for their counter needs. The downside is that you won’t want lots of this in your deck, as they don’t stack. I think it’ll have a good showing and make $2, but that might not be right away. Foils are a different matter, and given the appeal in Commander, I love foils of this at $5 or less. I wonder if this is a seed for a future set, given how +1/+1 counters aren’t a strong theme in this set.

Sanguine Sacrament ($0.50) – Pure lifegain is bad, but this is going to rise from the bulk in a few years. I have trouble seeing it as more than bulk while it’s Standard legal, though.

Tocatli Honor Guard ($2) – Torpor Orb is a very powerful Commander card if your opponents are addicted to value creatures, but having this effect in Standard is terribly intriguing. This dies to every removal spell being played, though, including a non-revolted Fatal Push. I think this price is spot-on for now, and in a couple months when it’s fifty cents, I’ll want to have a few tucked away.

River’s Rebuke ($1.50) – I despise this card, but at least it’s a sorcery, and not an instant as Cyclonic Rift is. I’m going to be picking up every foil I can at $3-$5 right away, though.

Sunbird’s Invocation ($0.50) – I love what this does, and I think there’s both some really strong long-term potential and yet there’s also a very high reprint risk. This is exactly the type of card that will be in Commander 2019. I will be picking some of these up for the casual appeal, especially in foil.

Settle the Wreckage ($1.50) – Too high a price. Commander won’t run this, and other formats likely won’t either. You’d need an absurd ratio, something like exiling three creatures and them getting just one land.

Carnage Tyrant ($8) – Not as good as Thrun, the Last Troll in Modern, so that outlet is gone. We have had a few giant hexproofers printed before, and Plated Crusher is about to rotate out. Same card, one less mana and can’t be countered. This is a trap. Don’t buy this unless you’re hellbent on doing this deck in week one. This might well be a good sideboard card, but those don’t tend to be this expensive. Some have said it’s a mythic for Limited, and it’ll end up pretty cheap.

Kopala, Warden of Waves ($2) – We are going to need to see more Merfolk to know if this is good in Standard. I’ll let you decide if you’d rather play this or play Kira, Great Glass-Spinner in your Modern Merfolk deck. I don’t want nonfoils yet, but I’ll be listening if the foils have a reasonable price, around $5.

Gishath, Sun’s Avatar ($7) – Makes Mayael good and Mayael’s Aria amazing. If there’s going to be a Dinosaur Commander deck, here’s the commander and just for fun, here’s the graph on the Aria:

The foil of the Aria can be had for $7-$8 right now, and that price isn’t going to last. I think $7 is a touch too high for Gishath, but I also think the casual appeal is through the roof on this.

Deeproot Champion ($1) – This is underpriced, to my mind. There are a lot of decks where this is better than Tarmogoyf, though the Champion has vulnerability early on. This can be thought of as permanent Prowess. So if that ability is decent in a deck, this card is bonkers. I especially am hoping to get foils for $3 or less early on.

Arcane Adaptation ($2) – Ah, combo pieces. Where would we be without you? I think this is a fair price for the card, but I want foils pretty badly. It’s a cheaper Conspiracy, a cheaper and better Xenograft. Neither of those has moved much, but this is the new one, and backup copies to combo decks are useful. Turntimber Ranger has a new buddy!

Vanquisher’s Banner ($2) – Travis and I talked about this on MTG Fast Finance, and it’s because this preorder price is too low. This should be $4 or $5. It’s total gas for the tribal decks that Wizards is pushing, and while it is expensive at five mana, it makes all of your creatures cantrips. That’s pretty outstanding, and I look forward to playing both this and Lifecrafter’s Bestiary at every opportunity.

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY