This week the cast responds to the large Monday news dump, covering new spoilers, planeswalker rule changes, and how WOTC is handling leaks. DJ makes plans to purchase Jason an amazing costume. Listener emails cover invocations, standard cards values, and the reserved list. Pick of the week and breaking bulk cover cards that might move due to new rule changes with a side discussion about buylist spreads.
Douglas Johnson is our regular guest (@Rose0fthorns)
Hello everyone! In my last article I talked about the first steps to getting into older formats. If you found yourself wanting to elevate your Magic experiences as well as level up your game, you’ve come to the right place. There are countless resources out there to find decklists and new tech for formats like Modern, Legacy, and Commander. But how is one to acquire the cards for these decks? That’s what I will be discussing today!
There are some general philosophies for picking up cards, like what type of cards to pick up first, but those sometimes operate under the assumption that you are going to be changing decks/playing more than one deck at once. Some decks have a high concentration of expensive cards among 4-8 cards only. Others have a more even distribution of expenses throughout the deck.
Generally, your landbase will be the -most important thing. This means picking up ABU dual lands, Ravnica shocklands, and Onslaught/Zendikar fetchlands. Your manabase, along with major format staples should be priority number one.
Budgeting will always be a personal matter. It varies from person to person how much money they have at their disposal. Do you have more money up front to get started? Do you have a little money able to be set aside each week or month? This all depends on you and your specific situation. Just adjust the advice in this article to fit your exact needs and financial situation.
MODERN
There are a few excellent selling points to Modern:
It is cheaper than Legacy and Vintage
It has no reserved list cards in it
It has more frequent needed reprints
There are more Modern tournaments than Legacy and Vintage
You can build a very strong deck relatively cheaper than Legacy and Vintage
For Modern, there are dozens of decks, and many of them can be quite strong. Select the deck that you want to play, not based on its price, but based on how much you like the deck. Borrow the deck and proxy it up first to get a feel for it. You certainly don’t want to spend time and money assembling it only to find out you’ve made a mistake.
Most top tier decks in Modern have expensive staples in them. Rather than dismiss these cards for budget alternatives or looking at another deck, work towards acquiring them first.
Affinty needs a playset of Mox Opal and Arcbound Ravager
Jund needs a playset of Tarmogoyf and Liliana of the Veil
Grixis Death’s Shadow needs a playset of Scalding Tarn and Snapcaster Mage
Eldrazi Tron needs a playset of Chalice of the Void along with two Cavern of Souls and two Karn Liberated
Merfolk needs a playset of Cavern of Souls
Counters Company needs a playset of Verdant Catacombs
TitanShift needs a playset of Scapeshift and sometimes Through the Breach
The list goes on and on. If you want to be as competitive as possible and find pleasure in winning games, do not look for budget alternatives. As cliché as it sounds, nothing good in life comes easy, and most players can find a way to obtain these staples. It’s all a matter of how serious you are about obtaining them.
Start by obtaining the expensive cards first.
It may be difficult to front the cash to buy these cards on TCGplayer.com or Ebay.com but there are other ways to get the cards. You can try trading for them. If your local LGS doesn’t have a good trade-in system or local players don’t have the cards you need, scour on Facebook. It’s free! Join several groups, local and not, and start setting up some trades. Chances are great that you have some extra cards lying around that other players want. Note that if you are picking up expensive format staples you may have to trade up a little, which is fine. Generally speaking, a $100 card is better than 10 $10 cards. Don’t be afraid to take small hits if it’s for cards you know you will use. Especially if the alternative is paying cash for them.
Look for deals online.
Ebay has sales all the time, usually in the form of $15 off of $75 or $10 off of $50 coupons. These sales are a great way to expend your wallet further in exchange for a little patience. If you have more than one PayPal account, you can even reap the benefits from these coupons more than once per cycle. It’s like free money if you use it on cards you had to buy anyways.
Additionally, TCGplayer.com offers the option to sort cards by condition. This is great because you don’t necessarily need Near Mint copies of a card. If a card is priced at $20 for a NM copy, but $16 for a MP version, just go for that one. When it comes to Modern staples, I am certainly not an advocate of condition mattering. Your goal isn’t to flip them to a dealer or store or anything. Your goal is to play with them. Sure, let them be a little messy, nobody is going to care if its a shuffle creased Ugin or a $110 Ugin’s Fate Ugin that wipes their board.
Have a little Clairvoyance.
Oh, if only it were that easy. What I mean by this is look to the near future for the possibilities for reprints. With From the Vault: Transform coming out, right now is the last time I would be purchasing cards like Huntmaster of the Fells or Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy. Also look for cards that are severely undervalued at the moment or that you think may increase in price sharply. This pertains more to Reserved List cards as they are prone to the occasion price spike, but this can also mean cards that seem way too cheap for their supply/demand.
Once you have picked up the expensive staples for your deck, all that’s left is to flesh out the remainder. Trade for cards that you run across or save up something like $10 a week. You should have the mid and low value cards knocked out in no time. LGS usually have a good supply of cards in the $1-$10 range, so don’t be afraid to check them out for singles (as long as they are well priced). If they are priced above TCG mid, spend your money online instead. There is no reason to overpay if you are on a budget.
Jumping into Legacy
OUCH. Legacy prices are pretty crazy. There is no way around it, Legacy is expensive and takes a serious commitment and a determined mind to jump into. Luckily, there is very little volatility in Legacy, and your cards should always retain their value. If anything, your cards will only go up over time, and for that reason, it is one of my favorite formats to invest in.
Let’s take a look at the recently banned miracles deck. If you had purchased all the cards for this deck a year ago, only to have it banned earlier in 2017, you would surely be frustrated. By how many of those cards lost value? Counterbalance’s price has been slashed and Sensei’s Divining Top’s price has barely diminished due to its popularity in Commander. That’s it. Predict has doubled in price. Tundra has gone up 15%. The rest of the cards have been unaffected and see play widely across the format. If you don’t want to play with the cards from the miracles deck anymore, just trade them for other staples that you need for a different Legacy deck. Just don’t run to a dealer booth in disgust and haste.
Start with Reserved List cards.
I don’t want to start a discussion on the Reserved List as they tend to go nowhere fast and have little merit when the time comes to spend your money.As an investing Legacy player, you should work under the assumption that the Reserved List is here to stay. Work around it by acquiring the cards you need from it sooner than later.
When it comes to Legacy, there’s no way around it. Completing your manabase will be your most expensive and daunting task. Should you pick a deck that has fewer dual lands in it…
Well if you read my last article you know the answer depends on other factors. Don’t take the easy way out and play a deck that you feel will suit your wallet. You wallet is an inanimate object, don’t let it speak for you. Pick the deck that will suit you best. One that you won’t outgrow or get frustrated at when it doesn’t place well in tournaments.
Because dual lands are so expensive and sought after, you may have a hard time trading for them online. In the instance where you need to purchase them I suggest scouring online stores, TCGplayer.com, and Ebay for deals on played versions of them. Other than purchasing them, you can also get lucky if your LGS picks them up. In this case, you can trade in cards towards them and slowly build the store credit to buy the card. Most store owners are happy to work with you in this regard, as it would be in their interest to have their customers able to play more events there.
Once you pick up dual lands, if your deck requires them, pick up your Force of Wills and Wastelands. These cards see play in dozens of decks and if your goal is to become a long-term Legacy player, chances are good that you will need to have access to a playset of these at some point. Get them as soon as you can.
Sacrifice.
For the majority of Magic players, entering a new format will mean one thing. Sacrifices must be made. That will vary from individual to individual, but I can give my best general advice.
Skip a draft or two. Drafting at the shop is always a blast. But sometimes you need to save up a little for a constructed format. If you aren’t confident in your ability to turn a profit drafting (which is hard to do at most LGS), the maybe postpone your drafting. Save the $10-$15 towards getting a few staples for your deck.
Sell that awesome Masterpiece. Did you open a sweet Masterpiece card from a booster pack? Got lucky on a prize pack did a trade with a friend? Get rid of it! I don’t care if it looks nice in your EDH deck, if you need the funds to get into another format, that’s a perfect, and quite liquid, access to turn into cash. I’m of the belief that these lottery cards were inserted into Standard booster packs specifically to help newer players hit it big, and perhaps trade it into something to help them on their deckbuilding journey. Open an Invocation Force of Will? Congratulations, that can fund almost an entire Standard deck. Or three Tarmogoyfs. Or a Bayou. Get to work!
Spend time looking for deals and trading. This isn’t necessarily the most fun thing in the world to do, I will admit. But if money is tight, then use the next best thing, your time. Make the time to look online for deals. Take the time to do some trades at your LGS and even offer it slightly in the other person’s favor if you are trading up. As a general tip, try to trade up.
That about wraps it up. There are obviously dozens of other tips and tricks when it comes to finding cheap cards, but that is best saved for an article of its own. Just remember, older formats are a huge investment. You will need to make sacrifices. This isn’t for everyone. If you’ve assessed that you want to take your game to the next level, then these tips should help immensely on your journey. Are you fired up? What has helped you delve into older formats? Let me know in the comments and thanks so much for reading!
Rachel Agnes is a VSL Competitor, Phyrexian Princess, Collector of all things shiny and a Cube, Vintage, Legacy, and EDH enthusiast. Catch on Twitch and Twitter via Baetog_.
I don’t know what “Shotgun bullets” are but this came up when I googled “Obviously Bad”
I’ve been really overthinking things, I think.
When I assess new cards and their impact on the format, there are a lot of factors I take into consideration.
How many decks currently run cards like this?
Does this create a new archetype?
Does this prop up an existing archetype?
If it creates a new archetype, how much do we expect that to get played?
If it supports an existing archetype, do we expect the new support to make more people play the existing archetype?
If so, how much? Do we expect it to see enough new play to expose the cards played in that deck to upside?
Is there enough demand in the format to expose in-print, non-mythics to upside?
Could this get played in multiple different commanders’ decks and would the combined influence be enough to push the prices up?
There is a lot of thought that goes into each and every pick. Sometimes I’m wrong because a lot of factors have to come together for a pick to pan out. If we misjudge demand, misjudge how a deck will get built (Remember all of those Clerics we bought when Ayli was spoiled? People say they want a Cleric lord, but when they get one, they leave us all high and dry. Never again!) or misjudge how much room we have in an existing deck for new cards, we can end up losing out. But we’re taking risks when we speculate on Magic cards, right? This is supposed to be hard and if it were easy to hit on 100% of our specs, everyone would be doing it!
It’s Not 2014 Anymore
The sad truth is that really, you CAN hit on 100% of your specs these days. If someone says the name of a card on their YouTube video, there’s a run on it. The card disappears. It seems to matter less to people whether a card is good or not because you’re not always necessarily selling to players, you’re selling into a feeding frenzy that starts when someone realizes “Oh man, you know what would go great in a kitty cat deck? White Sun’s Zenith! I mean, I assume, I haven’t actually seen any cards from the cat deck so I don’t know if there are any cards that grant a power and toughness bonus to cats (there is exactly 1, it’s a reprint and it costs 7 mana)” and ends when you sell all of the White Sun’s Zeniths I told you not to buy and call me an idiot on Twitter.
There are 4 foil copies of White Sun’s Zenith left on TCG Player, so obviously someone made some money. Even if they aren’t selling at $12 (they aren’t) there are few enough that whoever wants a foil copy basically has to pay $12 (unless they buy the SP copy from Star City for $3.50). What choice do they have? TCG Player is the site that determines the price of a card, and when all 3 copies under $50 sell, what other choice do we have for determining what the new price is? I’m not even really sure who I’m upset at here, because I bet some doofus pays $12 for Cape Fear’s LP copy before someone buys SCG’s copy for $3.50. You want to know what else is great?
Zenith got reprinted because of course it did and the people who gambled on it before the lists were announced with the “Well, it can’t go down from bulk, what do I have to lose?” attitude I had in 2010 when I was terrible at this are holding the bag right now (they’re holding something else, really, but I’m trying to maintain a modicum of decorum right now). 1st level thinking is “I bet kitty cat card is good with kitty cats!” and 1st level thinking leaves you with cards you can’t move for $0.34. Second level thinking tells you “I bet kitty cat card is good in kitty cat deck AND foils can’t be reprinted, and if you bought foils, I’m sure you think I’m an idiot for calling you intellectually lazy because is it lazy two play 2 dimensional chess and buy foils that can’t get blown out by a reprint? IS IT?
I guess what I’m saying is that I’m getting worn out. I’m telling people not to buy bad cards and I’m putting a ton of work into figuring out whether a card is actually bad. Despite being in the cat deck, White Sun’s Zenith doesn’t really play well with the rest of the deck, except for Mirri, and the deck as is doesn’t really give you any bonuses to cats. You have to do a complete overhaul to make White Sun’s Zenith worth it, which is fine. Oh, also, you have to be a complete lunatic to buy a kitty cat precon and then build it a token build that isn’t supported by like 95 cards in the precon you bought and also start foiling it out. Do people buy EDH foils? Sure, obviously, or the foil multiplier would be like 1x but if you want to buy and sell more than like 4 copies of a card, you need to have enough demand to take those copies off of your hands and you can’t rely on a lot of doofuses to come along and buy you out at $8 so they can try and list them at $12 (at least historically, you couldn’t, I’m not so sure that’s not a legit tactic anymore). So either you buy 4 foil White Sun’s Zenith for like a buck each and then turn around and sell them for $6 later and you make $14 after fees, or you weren’t really right. I know it’s not easy to nail a spec. I only buy in deeply if I have a very, very good feeling about a spec (I’m talking Dictate of Erebos at $0.50 good feeling) and I buy in deep enough that I don’t waste it if I was right. If I had $14 for every time I nailed a spec, I’d have to start speccing on Yu Gi Oh, too or I wouldn’t be able to make my car payment every month. So all of that made me call people who bought mediocre cards with high reprint risk in foil to eliminate the reprint risk “lazy” because I don’t think you’re telling anyone anything useful if you’re advocating making $14. After all, I’m the tortured genius over here playing 3D chess. You know why I don’t care about that anymore? There’s no money in 3D chess.
Buy Everything
It barely matters at this point. There are so many greater fools ready to snatch up your cards, and so many people ready to build EDH decks that even if a combo is bad and only 2% of players will be bad enough to include it, that’s still thousands of people, way more than enough to soak up the supply.
Remember when I said bad interactions wouldn’t matter so don’t buy terrible cards part of terrible combos?
Here’s the TCG data for Bounty Hunter, a card that combines with the worst commander (Mathas) from the worst deck (the Vampires deck) to form a two card combination that could best be described as “the tap ability on Avatar of Woe.” Is that combo good? Of course not. Am I wrong for telling people not to buy Bounty Hunter because it was part of a terrible combo and it wouldn’t matter since no one wants to play bad cards part of bad combos? I guess so!
You know what caption goes here
So I’m not going to tell you not to buy bad cards from bad combos. The price goes up because there are enough actors in the market now that everything that gets breathed on will go up. You probably won’t have any trouble selling foil Turntimber Rangers in a week to the thousands of people lined up to build Turntimber combo in EDH and Modern because everyone knows EDH players love to foil their decks out. Buy as many foil Ranger as you can, you know why?
I straight jacked this image from /u/magictheblathering on reddit. Do I owe him money or something?
Wow, infinite wolves. Is it good? I don’t know! Who cares? I said Wanderwine Prophets was a bad combo, or at least it wasn’t any better than Sage of Hours plus Ezuri and people lined up 5 deep to tell me I was wrong. No one who isn’t holding onto a bunch of bad cards from a bad combo is ever going to thank me for steering them away from danger, so why pee on people’s parades? If I’m right, no one cares and if I’m wrong, everyone brings it up two years later in an unrelated debate. Even though Conspiracy and Xenograft have been around for literal years and no one ever built this combo with those cards, I have a good feeling about this combo’s ability to make Turntimber Ranger’s price go through the roof, because Magic players weren’t playing 2D chess in 2011 and didn’t know a good thing when they saw Xenograft get printed (In the same Standard format as Turntimber Ranger) but they’re way smarter now. Buy the foily Rangers.
I Mean, Or Don’t
This brings us to the main topic of discussion this week, how to handle the stuff that’s inevitably going to be affected by the Planeswalkers becoming Legendary permanents. I’ve been a real pessimist since the start of Commander 2017 spoiler season.
Months ago, a bunch of Ixalan cards leaked and people have been speculating that the Planeswalker rules change would be retroactive to older Planeswalkers and months ago speculators bought cards like Captain Sisay and Empress Galina. This happened months ago. We were in Vegas for the GP when this happened. You’ll have to pardon my surprise when all of those cards came into focus again and players started talking about all of this like it was new, and the cards all went up again, based on the exact same information.
I’ve seen cards go up again based on the same thing happening again, but I’m not used to seeing it happen again based on the same information months later. I was taken aback. Naturally the internet exploded with people talking about this stuff like it was new.
K.
Captain Sisay is already at the helm of her own deck that people have been playing for like a decade in EDH and now players are already talking about slotting her into Atraxa. Doesn’t this make you want to build Sisay? Before you could grab Gaea’s Cradle or Genesis with Sisay’s ability, but now you can grab AJANI, MENTOR OF HEROES. I mean, if I’m actually being fair, you can grab Karn which is non-trivial, especially if you can use Cradle to play it right away, but for the most part, Sisay just got access to a bunch of bad planeswalkers and 4 good ones and Sisay is likely relegated to the 99 of Atraxa rather than her own deck which gained limited upside. But I’m not making judgments about whether things are good anymore, so here are some cards that everyone else thinks are good and therefore are going to sell out and if I say they’re bad cards that won’t get played in bad decks, I’ll be proven wrong, doubly so if I don’t think the foils are a good place to stash money. It’s perfectly reasonable for a person with a $4,000 foil Atraxa deck to play Yomiji, Who Bars the Way because EDH players don’t care about playing the best cards in their decks, only the most expensive versions.
Is this card getting played in Sisay and Atraxa decks? I really tend to doubt it, but it scarcely matters because all of the $5 foils are gone 24 hours after the announcement (which came months after people already knew this information but didn’t really act on it).
Saffron Olive called this card a “Sol Ring for Planeswalkers” on Twitter today, 24 hours after I called it “A situational Temple of the False God,” Jim Casale called it “Worse than the Ancient Tomb I’m already not playing” and I did a Twitter poll where 2/3 of respondants said they wouldn’t play this in anything other than Reki, the History of Kamigawa because why would you want a land that sometimes lets you pay 2 life for 2 colorless but can’t tap for 1 colorless in a 4 color Atraxa deck? I screwed up. While I was too busy wasting a whole day figuring out that this card was bad and even the Reki players in my EDHREC Slack group wouldn’t play this card, everyone was scooping these for a buck and listing them for $12 on eBay. If you listened to me, you missed out on the chance to make money on just a real piece of dog$%&* of a bulk rare that people who don’t play any EDH are excited about. It’s a Sol Ring for Planeswalkers, guys. I steered you wrong.
Is there anything that hasn’t popped that could go up, still? Probably.
Thalia’s Lancers
The promo foil of this hurts the foil’s upside, slightly, but you can now use this to tutor for Planeswalkers, something you couldn’t do before. I liked this card when it couldn’t do that so I can’t pretend I don’t like it now just because the non-foil has a 0% chance of going up.
Myojin of Cleansing Fire
If people build more Sisay decks like they swear they’re going to, this is a shoo-in inclusion in those decks. It’s not a Planeswalker which means being able to use Sisay to get this isn’t new, but couple the new Sisay decks that are going to be built with the face that there is a card called Kindred Boon that can put Divinity counters on permanents and you have two chances for this card to go up. I’m not saying this card is good, I’m saying it’s like a $6 foil right now and it probably goes up if I tell you not to buy it.
Myojin of Life’s Web
Ditto on foils of this card, which were already on their way up. $13ish is a high buy-in price but this had upside before and has even more now if people build Sisay.
Every Pirate
With the spoiling of a new Grixis Pirate Lord, every Ramirez DiPetro and Skeleton Ship deck gets access to red cards, something I’m not sure it wants or needs but is getting. Every pirate card is popping off right now, so if there is a card with the creature type pirate, but it. Kukemasa Pirates, Rishadan Brigand, Mistform Ultimus – buy them.
I honestly need your feedback. Do you want me to keep trying to figure out of cards or combos are bad? Do you want me to do what I had been doing for years and being cautious and waiting to see if something had legs before advocating it? Or do you want me to be fast so you can buy the obvious specs everyone else is going to buy before they’re all gone? Maybe you don’t need help with obvious, but it’s clear I’m not doing anyone any favors by spending all day determining a card is bad and won’t get played only for it to sell out anyway. Tell me what you want from me and from this series in the comments section.
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.
With no non-limited events this weekend, I don’t have much to draw from on that front. No exciting Standard or Modern decks materialized that we get to go over with a fine tooth comb. There is a Banned and Restricted List update today, but A. I’m not expecting any changes, and B. even if there are, the buyouts will be so fast that waiting to write about them in this article would be pointless. If you’re reading this before the B&R list update goes live, just remember to buy from reputable vendors.
EDH activity has been a flurry lately with the Commander 2017 decks finally on shelves. I’ve personally seen a lot of Bloodline Keepers moving, and Scourge of the Throne has picked up considerably within the last week or so two, with what appears to be a buyout under $20 having occurred over the last 24 hours. Urza’s Incubators and Cryptic Gateway similarly went last week. The immediate well of C17 picks is drying up, but the longer-term stuff is certainly still on the table.
Since there’s no recent decklists to go over and EDH is coming down off a high at the moment, I’m going to flip through some Modern results from smaller events to see what’s hiding out.
The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.
