Casual Fridays

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Will These Prices Hold?

Welcome back from the Red Menace! It’s an aggro world, and we’re all just living in it.

The Pro Tour win by Ramunap Red (albeit with a very big oopsie in the quarterfinals by his opponent) meant that several cards have spiked and spiked hard and some of them we saw coming.

The time for picking up cards for a big profit has passed, and it remains to be seen how many of these cards are going to keep their new price levels. This week, I want to look at how such gainers have done after previous PT success, and see how that bodes for the cards which has seen such impressive gains in value.

Before I get into the cards that spiked this weekend, I want to step backwards a couple of Pro Tours and see what patterns might exist.

Pro Tour Amonkhet had Zombies rising (couldn’t help myself) and Aetherworks Marvel all over the place, along with a healthy dose of Mardu Vehicles. Fatal Push cemented its status as a $7 uncommon, though its playability in Eternal formats is a big contributor there. There weren’t a lot of Amonkhet cards in these top decks. Lord of the Accursed was a four-of uncommon, and Dread Wanderer went from $2 up to $6 and has trailed back down to $2 now.

Pro Tour Aether Revolt had six Mardu Vehicles decks in the top 8. Notably, Heart of Kiran jumped to above $20 and has since been trickling downwards in price ever so slowly, as other decks have become more popular. It’s now $11 or so, and having only put two copies of the top 16 at PT Amonkhet, it didn’t bump up even a little.

Pro Tour Kaladesh has eight different decks listed in the top 8, and this was before the triple bannings. Torrential Gearhulk was in two decks, and it’s seeing enough play to stay in the $15-$20 range, but the graph here is truly fascinating:


I wrote the dates on the graph because I’ve never seen a card spike this many times in just a year. Will it keep doing so? Will it go up with each of the four Pro Tours left in its Standard lifespan? There’s even a minor bump for this recent PT, even though Gearhulk decks weren’t really a factor.

It’s also the outlier. Most cards that jump up in price at a big tournament have prices go back down, whether fast like the Gearhulk does, or slow, like Liliana, the Last Hope has.

Now that history has given us some clues, let’s look at the specific cards that have done well this past week and where they will likely be going:

Ramunap Ruins (Now $1.25, was $0.25, foils now $6): I can buy that this is a $1.50-$2 uncommon, as a four-of in the most popular deck. I do not understand this foil price at all. That level of foil multiplier is usually indicative of wild demand in casual or Eternal formats, and it’s just not popular. Commander doesn’t want this. Shivan Gorge will do half the damage but not lose you lands (and a specific land type at that). The Gitrog Monster decks can’t play this. Are people speculating that it’ll be good enough in Modern? I find that unlikely as hell. Please, enlighten me as to why this is such a pricey foil, and if you have a foil, I’d get rid of it ASAP.

I expect the nonfoils will end up at about $1, but if this deck spikes an event around Christmas, when the set is no longer being opened, it’ll hit $2 again.

Abrade (Now $3, was $0.75, foils $10): Again, I like this to stay as a pricey uncommon, even with the large amount of Game Day versions about to enter circulation, and if you think $10 is too much for a foil uncommon, the multiplier is with normal tolerances. I do love the flexibility in Cubes and Commander, as these are both effects you want access to. I think this set of prices will stay consistent for some time, and keep in mind that this will rotate out of Standard at the same time as the Vehicles block, so there will always be a good level of demand for the card.

Falkenrath Gorger (Now $2.50, was $0.50, foils $3.50): The price graph here is going to be a sad one. People are racing to the bottom on this card, as fast as they can. TCG has seven available for under $1, and a very large number under $2. It’s about to rotate, people have dug this out of bulk boxes, and it’ll crash back at bulk by rotation.

Hazoret the Fervent (Now $16, was $6, foils $25): I don’t agree with Travis that the time to sell is already past. Yes, there was a moment where it listed for $20, but if you got in at $7 or less you’re still making a fine profit. It’s in the process of trickling downward, yes, but if you have your copies, don’t panic-list them at $10 each or something. If Ixalan offers us one or two good cheap red creatures the deck will remain a strong part of the metagame. Gorger is rotating, as is Village Messenger, but I don’t think this goes below $12. I doubt we’re going to see the bouncing price of Torrential Gearhulk, but right now people are planning for the deck. We will have a period where the meta adjusts, and people stop playing it, and then the red menace comes back to prey on all the slower decks.

If the price goes below $10 again, I’ll have to think about picking more up. It’s got a limited time to be good, but we’ve already seen what it’s capable of.
 

Cliff is an avid watcher of just the draft part of the Pro Tour, but the games themselves are far less enthralling. He has been playing this game since late 1994, and making money off of it for far less time. You can find his insights on Twitter @wordofcommander or here on MTGPrice every Friday morning.

Brainstorm Brewery

Brainstorm Brewery #250: A New Mayor In Town

This week Corbin returns and Jason finds himself in his first political office.  Doug tries to remain awake through a pro-tour recap, and then wakes up with two red-hot breaking bulk picks.  Listener emails cover the impact of finance “thought-leaders” on the market and how to adjust your EDH buying habits in light of more speculation on that format.  Pick of the week covers an invocation that can be targeted.

Douglas Johnson is our guest (@Rose0fthorns)

Contact Us!

Brainstorm Brewery – Website – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook – RSS – iTunes – Stitcher

Corbin Hosler – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook – TCGPlayer

Jason E Alt – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook – MTGPrice

Douglas Johnson is and will forever be merely a guest.

Rachel Agnes, The Collector

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Rarest of them All

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Magic cards comes in different rarities. There are commons, uncommons, rares, and mythic rares. So what comes after mythic rare? What could be more rare than that? Today, I will be going over some of the rarest, and subsequently most expensive, Magic the Gathering cards to ever exist. Some of these were created to be unique or rare from the onset, and others have incredibly small supplies left in the world. Others were created by accident altogether. Let’s check them out.

These two cards are known as Richard Garfield event cards, and are some of the rarest cards in the game. They are not tournament legal, for obvious reasons, and were never released in an official set. Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic the Gathering, gave these our to family, friends, and Wizards of the Coast employees to celebrate the birth of his first two children. There is estimate to be no more than 100-200 of these in existence, and because of that, they go for around $7,000-$10,000 each.

Richard Garfield commissioned the old school Magic artist Drew Tucker to create this one-of-a-kind card for his new fiance. Created in 2014, there is only one copy of this card in the world.

Try and say that five times fast. Shichifukujin Dragon was created in 2003 to celebrate the opening of the DCI Tournament Center in Japan. There is only one copy of this card in existence, and as a result, nobody will reasonably own one. The name is derived from Japanese mythology and relates to the Seven Deities of Good Fortune. Like the good fortune of the store that owns this beauty.

On the topic of one-of-a-kind cards, there is 1996 World Champion. Well, I’m sure you can guess what this was given out for. There is only one copy of this card in existence so good luck! In 2001, it was sold to a private collector for $17,500. By today’s standards, that was a steal. This and the Dragon above are both in the Guinness Book of World Records for rarest trading cards.

These are test prints. There are dozens of different cards, each with different variations, foil and non-foil. Test prints range from a few hundred dollars to over $1000. There are many types of test prints over the years, mostly done by Wizards to figure which foiling process and borders looked aesthetically pleasing. How they ended on today’s post-8th Edition foiling, I don’t know, but can we just go back to 7th Edition foiling?

Sadly, these test prints aren’t tournament legal, but cmon, you know you want to play with this Parallax Tide/Mountain hybrid. I know I do!

Did you know Exodus came in foil? Well… tricky question. It didn’t! These are test prints of cards getting the foil treatment before foil cards were ever released. Because of the limited supply and high playability of these cards, foil test print City of Traitors and Survival of the Fittest fetch thousands of dollars each. Talk about a nice way to upgrade a deck or cube.

Do I know what this uncut sheet of test prints would go for? No, and I am not even going to try and guess.

At first glance, this may just look like an ordinary foil Vedalken Shackles. But once you look closely, you will see it’s anything but normal. This is a Fifth Dawn test print, and it is extremely rare. There are also other rares from Fifth Dawn like this, Engineered Explosives, Rude Awakening, Staff of Domination, and Hoverguard Sweepers. I could see these easily being worth over $5,000 each.

Way back in 1994, there was another game being created called Wyvern. It was manufactured by the same company that did Magic, Carta Mundi. Well, there was a printing error, and as a result there were some commons from Fallen Empires were released with this Wyvern back. The cards look normal from the front, but have this back. Depending on the card, they can range from a few hundred to $1000, but most of Fallen Empires was a bunch of awful cards. Most players just look to try and complete a set (121) cards, but even that could take a lifetime of collecting.

Check out these sweet test cards from M15. I would killll for that Gilded Lotus. I love how when you breeze past them at a glace, they look like normal cards, but nothing like showing your opponent your Door to Nothingness and it saying “Test card to Nothingness enters the card tapped.”

I will talk about Summer cards shortly, but here is a textless Summer Island test print. I have no idea the value of something like this, but when any of us pick something as rare as this up, we can worry about price then. Deal?

Which would you prefer, Pokemon backed Magic cards, or Magic backed Pokemon cards? How about this, if you come across any you just give them to me? I like the sound of that.

Straight from eBay, here is a BGS graded 10 Beta Black Lotus. There are certainly way fewer of this card, in this condition than even the Richard Garfield event cards or Exodus test prints. And this came from a booster pack!

So what’s the asking price? Just a smooth $125,000. Got that lying around? Well, if you come up a little short, you can always make an offer on it. Here is the link if you are curious.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/MTG-MAGIC-THE-GATHERING-BETA-BLACK-LOTUS-BGS-10-THE-HIGHEST-GRADED-/310327005845

Well, I’ve died and gone to heaven. This textless foil Gaea’s Cradle came from an uncut sheet where all the cards had no text. You can also find other cards like this, including the tournament staple Duress. But, yeah, I want this more than any other promo in the world, just because I absolutely LOVE Gaea’s Cradle in so many formats, and this is just beautiful to look at. I would price this in the ballpark of $5,000.

Lastly, I want to talk about Summer Magic. I will reference MTG Librarities here to best describe this set for those who don’t know.

“When the Revised Edition was in production in 1994, a number of problems with the set became apparent. The colors were washed out, the picture for Serendib Efreet was wrong, and there was a growing concern with the Satanic images on some of the cards. The solution was to print a fixed version of the Revised Edition, code named “Edgar”, which has since come to be known as Summer Magic because it was printed in the summer of 1994. The cards were distributed in regular Revised Edition boosters… Hurricane was printed as a blue card and thereby became the most famous and most desired Summer Magic card of all… The artist name for Plateau was not corrected as well. Because of all these flaws, the entire print run was recalled and destroyed… However, a few booster boxes survived. About four cases (40 display boxes) accidentally made it to circulation… Estimation of the Summer population is at least, 130 to 150 Commons, 40 to 60 Uncommons, 30 to 50 Rares, 400 to 500 Lands… Summer Magic cards can best be recognized by their 1994 copyright date.” (Found on www.magiclibrarities.net)

Well that is a lot to take in, but just know that the cards from the Summer edition are extremely rare and sought after. Many people think that at some point they may have run into a Summer card just because it looks so similar to a Revised/Unlimited card to someone not specifically looking for it. However, due to the rarity of these cards, I wouldn’t worry much, chances are you didn’t run into one. Although, I will admit that the thought always lingers in the back of my mind.

The most famous and sought after Summer card is Hurricane. Also known as the “Blue Hurricane” due to its incorrect printing color. Personally, I think it’s cool, but I would much rather own a few Summer dual lands or a stack of basics as opposed to this. Beggars can’t be choosers, though, and I would absolutely not complain if this rained down onto my lap one day.

I hope you enjoyed taking a look at some of the rarest Magic cards ever printed. There is an incredibly small chance that anyone reading this, myself included, will acquire these one day, but it is still quite easy to appreciate the history. Magic has been around for 25 years strong, and there may be new rarities down the line that will drop our jaws just like these amazing cards from years gone. What are your favorite Magic rarities? Do you own any of them? Let me know in the comments, and thanks 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_.

Jason Alt

Unlocked Pro Trader: Check. The. Rec.

It happened! Some wacky Japanese magazine article confirmed the colors and tribal affiliations of the Commander 2017 decks.

The internet responded by going kittycat 2.0. That was to be expected, but not admired or replicated. Make no mistake, buying anything right now is a mistake outside of a few reprint-proof cards but that’s not what I see happening. It’s a feeding frenzy out there and the people who get blown out by reprints will lose and probably learn nothing but the real losers are EDH players who will pay more for bad cards in the future. EDH players who can’t navigate the finance markets and financiers who don’t understand EDH? Sounds like a bad time for everyone involved.

It’s not all bleak and hopeless, though, because there is money to be made and more importantly, savvy EDH players can avoid a blowout by knowing when to buy at the right time. Luckily, knowing when to buy is the easy part of MTG Finance (I still feel like I don’t know when to sell cards and I’ve been at this for like 6 years) and that’s what I want to talk about today.

I have seen a lot of posts on places like the MTG Finance subreddit and Twitter just lousy with people guessing. They’re guessing. What are they guessing about? Well, they want to try and figure out which Wizards they should buy to sell to EDH players who are going to buy the Grixis Wizards deck and try to build Wizard tribal. Why are they guessing? That’s a good question. Literally why guess when you already know what people are playing in Wizard decks?

I’m not suggesting we use EDHREC to find a bunch of Wizards cards and buy them before we see a full decklist, I think that’s moronic. Besides, that’s level one thinking and we need to be thinking a few levels above that if we’re going to avoid the goat rodeo of a bunch of dumbdumbs buying foil Riptide Directors and selling them to each other for the next two weeks. You want to avoid chasing your tail? Come along with me and let’s think a few levels above whether you want to buy Patron Wizard or Ertai. Let’s make some money.

First Stop – Azami

Azami, Lady of Scrolls is not a very popular commander on EDHREC, probably because it’s boring and linear to play “Draw my whole deck then win with Lab Maniac.dec” and as a result, we have a sample size of 736 decks, which isn’t enormous.

Azami suffers from being mono-blue which means there are two other colors in the Grixis Wizards deck that aren’t represented here but since we’re not trying to pick out Wizards to buy that may or may not be reprinted but rather look at the kinds of things Wizards players are doing to win and what they need to do that, I’m not worried about it.

Azami decks mostly seem to win by decking, which is boring. I don’t know how inclined Grixis Wizards builders will be to win the same way, but it’s worth talking about what that shows us regardless.

Laboratory Maniac

I’ve been about this card for a while and its growth chart should show you why. I think a non-zero number of new Wizards decks will include the Lab Man and it seems fairly obvious that new upside gives us new chances for this to continue its growth. Also, cards that say “You win the game” don’t tend to make it into pre-constructed decks, forcing me to peg the reprint risk of this card pretty low. I have thought this was going to go up anyway and new attention from Wizard builders won’t suck. I’m paying cash on these at this point.

Mind Over Matter

This may be the best Azami enabler card ever printed but it’s also super narrow, relegated almost entirely to Azami decks. It’s on the Reserved List but is that enough to balance out how narrow it is? If Wizards is the best deck in Commander 2017 and that translates into it being the most built deck like Atraxa is and that translates to people winning with Azami and using other Wizards with tap abilities so much that they jam a spell with 4 blue pips into a Grixis-colored deck (or just buy the deck for the blue Wizards and throw the rest out), then I guess this card gets there. However, that’s a lot of ifs. Right now there are about 750 Azami decks versus 3,300 Atraxa decks, so a 5-fold spike in popularity does big things for a Reserved List card like Mind Over Matter if the conditions are exactly right. But is anything guaranteed? And if we don’t feel all that confident about a card like this, which is basically uniquely poised to benefit from Wizards being built a ton in the months to come, what DOES have upside?

Maybe we need to look at another Wizards build to see what people are playing in EDH since Azami is mono-blue and not that popular.

Luckily, EDHREC has a new feature that I can show you. No, this is not a commercial for EDHREC. I actually hope you don’t use EDHREC as financiers. It reduces the chances of one of you getting good enough at this to write your own competing article series. In an ideal Universe, I have a small number of readers and they and I laugh and laugh at the people blindly fumbling around buying foil Sage of Fables and Stonybrook Bannerets. But since I’d be remiss if I didn’t show you how to do some basic research, let’s just get on with it.

The new feature basically replaces the advanced filters and instead presupposes that we can predict what you wanted to search for.

Check out the “themes” dropdown in the top bar. Click on it to open the dropdown menu. A list will pop up and you will click “more tribes” to bring up a screen with all of the tribes listed and then you’ll click on Wizards. It will take you to this screen, should that explanation have proven too complicated.  You will see the Wizard tribal commanders arranged by popularity as well as the cards played in those decks, arranged in the same way. If 75% of the creatures in a deck are the same tribe, we consider it tribal, which we (Don did all the work, let’s be honest, I literally wasn’t even consulted on this so I’m going to stop saying “we”) think is a fair way to determine someone’s intention to build a tribal deck. Before, there were some pretty complicated steps using the advanced filters which have been eliminated and appear more as pages than reports. That’s better for everyone, especially if all we want to do is see how many Wizard tribal decks there are and how they’re being built.

There are a lot more commanders for these decks than I had anticipated, but the common cards seem to be mostly the same. You play card, counters and then do some commander-specific stuff like kill them with Niv-Mizzet and Curiosity or Azami and Lab Maniac. Boring. But winning isn’t boring and that seems like a pretty good way to win a lot, so maybe they’re on to something.

I expected Wizards to be one of the least popular tribal decks given how few Azami decks there were but actually only six tribes were more popular. Let’s ignore the fact that two of the six are Dragons and Vampires, decks we have known about for longer but which haven’t ignited the same dumbdumb fever as Cats and Wizards seem to have and let’s focus on how popularish Wizards are as a tribe and how new cards in these colors can make the other existing decks better. I can’t say exactly how because we haven’t seen a single card from the Wizards deck. What else do we like the look of based on what people are playing right now? What does the Wizards page tell us?

Where’s Riptide Laboratory?

You look at the top 21 lands played in all Wizards decks and Riptide Laboratory is not among them. It’s in about 3,600 decks, spread out among various Wizards, but cards like Minamo and Nykthos show up on the report. The report isn’t perfect, so don’t let it be your be-all, end-all, but it’s still useful. Riptide Lab seems like a pretty obvious Wizards inclusion and could be in the deck so a lot of people are targeting foils and I’m not about gambling that people who build a Wizards deck because of a precon but who don’t have the deck already are going to foil the deck. I don’t like Riptide Lab as a spec not knowing whether it’s getting reprinted so mentioning its exclusion is more of a “watch out, this report could miss some stuff” than a “oh noes muh spex” sort of a comment. I would wager both that Riptide Laboratory is reprinted in the Wizards deck and also that you’re going to end up selling the foils to other speculators. They’re mostly gone anyway and there’s so much money elsewhere, why chase it?

This report is literally just blue cards 

While other colors are represented in the commanders for Wizards tribal decks, the common theme is blue and that means most of the cards that overlap (or all in this case) are blue. The other decks are just different flavors of the same core kind of deck and since no one is trying to get there with Wizard beatdown (except the guy who I profiled last week on Gathering Magic, I guess) most of the cards will overlap a lot. This tells us what people are building now but can’t really help us predict what they will be doing when they have new cards.

That said, there are a few cards I like that are general Wizards-adjacent cards that will likely be useful no matter what Commander 2017 gives us.

Training Grounds

File this under “If this isn’t reprinted, you know what to do” because at $12, this is teetering right on the precipice of unreprintability. If it’s not reprinted, Wizards decks could easily start jamming this and then this is $20. The harder this gets to reprint, the more ridiculous its price will be. This ability is so niche that it’s hard to jam in a set where there will be a Limited format, so this seems pretty safe and dangerous to me. If this isn’t in Commander 2017, this needs a look right away.

Leyline of Anticipation

The return of Core Sets makes this card a little tough to judge. Will this get a reprint in a Core Set? Iconic Masters? Where’s the best place to reprint this? I don’t know, but I do know that this is growing steadily and it’s not going to be something we can include in a Commander deck pretty soon. I think this is worth keeping an eye on, although Core Sets coming back makes me a little nervous. I am watching this card but I am not necessarily going all in.

Overburden

This is a bit of a weird one, but this card has plateaued a bit lately and I think that if there is a Wizards deck that returns creatures to your opponents’ hands like I imagine there will be, Overburden is a card that’s going to pull their pants down a little bit. If I have to write about this card on Gathering Magic to make people play it, I will, but they shouldn’t need much coaxing, this card is ridiculous.

I still think you wait and see a full list because inevitably there will be cards among the brand new ones they’re including that enable new archetypes and make old cards better in the new context. Instead of buying based on the word “Wizards” we’ll have a ton more information in a few weeks, so let’s not jump the gun. Let everyone else buy foil Diviner’s Wands. When we’re ready to start buying, I’ll let you know. Until next time!

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY