Casual Fridays, ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Midpoint Pickups

Since Standard is on a once-a-year rotation, I like to think about what’s on deck. Yes, we are about to lose two blocks in September, but there’s two that have another 18 months or so, and that’s what I want to focus on. Kaladesh and Aether Revolt are at their low points, so this is when I want to look for value.

I’m looking at cards that are being played, and are not as expensive as their amount of play might indicate. I’m not expecting huge gains, but I do want to think about increases in value, especially in trade or Pucapoints (if you’re still doing that).

Verdurous Gearhulk ($7.89): Considering what a beating this is, I’m surprised that this mythic is as low as it is, especially because B/G Snake decks are a thing. Sometime in the next 18 months, a Gearhulk deck will have a great tournament and this will easily break $10, likely hit $15, and possibly $20 again.

The graph for the green Gearhulk is exactly where I want to be: getting in at the lowest point.

Dovin Baan ($3.16): I don’t see how this can get any cheaper, even if it doesn’t budge until rotation this is silly cheap for a planeswalker. I really like picking up specs that have good potential short term and long term. The fact that he’s the only planeswalker with the Dovin type is good for Commander too, since he’s a good fit in superfriends builds without being the seventh Jace.

Panharmonicon ($2.66): Shhh. Hush! Don’t say anything. Just slowly walk over to your store, grab all you can of these, and try to not look like you’re getting fantastic value. We’ve already seen this spike up to the $8-$10 range and it’s not gonna take much for that to happen again.

The foil is still just 3x the value, which is very surprising to me. Buy for these. Trade for these. Don’t trade them till they spike, and if you’re into the long-term holds, the foils are going to be rock-solid.

Scrapheap Scrounger ($2.44): This is played in a huge number of decks and is always a four-of. Mardu has a target on its back, and that’s fine, but this is a card that requires the Magma Spray immediately or it’s going to just keep coming back. I’m shocked at how cheap this is, frankly, and if Mardu adds a card or adapts to the hate somehow, I’d expect this to climb to at least $5.

Skysovereign, Consul Flagship ($2.44): It’s an in-print mythic that just dominates the board and isn’t easy to answer. Heart of Kiraan is stealing a lot of the thunder, but this has become so cheap that I want to have a few copies just in case it pops up again.

Metallurgic Summonings ($1.25/$4.50): I want to try a couple copies of this card in the assorted control decks. I’m in love with Drake Haven right now but the potential of this card is astronomical. If you land it and live through the following turn, then your Glimmers come with a 4/4. You get a 2/2 when casting Grasp of Darkness. Your end-of-turn Pull from Tomorrow is as big as you want to make it. This is also a super-cheap mythic that is looking for the right deck, and should it hit, it’ll hit big.

Rashmi, Eternities Crafter ($1.37/$7.22): This is more of a very-long-term pick, as it is amazing in casual formats and why her foil price is six times higher. These are the best colors in Commander, and she’s going to get you some extra cards, no matter what. I love the foils a lot more but dollar mythics are always super intriguing.

Foil Paradoxical Outcome ($3): It’s a niche card, but that niche is Vintage. I appreciate when people try to make this work in Standard, with endless Bone Saw castings, but no, this is an Eternal card and I want to have some foils in long-term storage.

Cliff is an avid player of any and all casual formats, the weirder the better, going all the way back to his first tournament wins: Iron Mage, keeping a life total from round to round, and a grand melee where he cast a Hurricane for 43 and lived.

Jason Alt

Unlocked Pro Trader: Here There Be Dargons

What a week it’s been. Fortunately for David Leavitt, someone else came along and grabbed the mantle of “Person the Magic Community is most mad at” which is probably too little too late considering even my local morning zoo radio program DJs (I don’t listen to the fart noises that pass for local radio, but a buddy with less taste does and he told me about it) was talking about his joke (which barely qualifies as a joke, not because it was offensive but because it was lazy) leaving the Magic community to focus on who we don’t like this week. And we don’t like the person who leaked pictures of the Dragons from the Commander 2017 dragon deck. At all.

I wanted to post the silly post he tried to make on twitter about how he isn’t responsible for the leaks, he just had a friend give him the pictures to share. The whole thing is really funny to me on top of how annoyed I am that some human parasite leaked a bunch of card images early and forced us to talk about them. Pasting your Instagram name on the leaks seems like a bad way to escape Wizards’ inevitable wrath coming down on you and is hilarious. Saying you’re not responsible for the leaks while being 100% responsible for the leaks is hilarious. Changing your Instagram name to “Turn 1 Thoughtseize” when there is already a Magic podcast with that name and pissing them off on top of everything else is hilarious. As much as this dude sucks for leaking the cards, at least he had the common decency to turn the entire affair into a gigantic comedy of errors for my amusement. It’s put me in such a good mood that I’m writing my article for next week super early so you can get in on this giant gamble we’re all going to be in on. Let’s look at what was leaked and what will matter.

 

The Ur-Dragon

This is a mythic that really feels mythic. That’s not necessarily saying it feels good, it just feels mythic. Learning nothing from how annoying Oloro, Ageless Ascetic is to play against, Wizards has come out with another creature that affects the board from the Command Zone. Let me assure you that “one or more Dragons you control attack” is correct grammatically and the fact that it isn’t “attacks” does not prove this is fake.

I’m not sure if this card is going to spike anything on its own. The fact that it’s the commander of a 5 color dragon deck likely makes a lot of stuff go up but I don’t want to recommend a bunch of cards that are likely to be reprinted so I’m going to stick to stuff I think is very safe.

What is very safe? First up, I would say stuff from Commander 2016. I expect Chromatic Lantern to be safe, which means it seems very, very likely to me that Coalition Relic is in these decks. Stay away from that, but if we get a full spoiler and still no relic, that’s a signal that they never intend to reprint that card again ever because they don’t know what they’re doing. Crystalline Crawler and Conquerer’s Flail would be great targets if they both hadn’t gone up already. There is a card from C16 that I do like, though.

Prismatic Geoscope

This is a “worse” Gilded Lotus that can sometimes tap for 5 mana which makes it very good. I like things that are very good in 5 color decks and this is it. I can’t imagine this stays below $5 over the next week or two. It was already a card I had my eye on and with a 5 color deck being spoiled, mana fixing will be at a premium and this has such a low likelihood of being reprinted this soon that I am all over this card, whose price is trending down and therefore seems like a great bargain. Yes, coming into play tapped sucks. But tapping for 5 mana does not suck and this is going to tap for 5 a lot. It’s going to tap for 2 a lot, also, but the kind of person who builds a tribal Dargon deck isn’t thinking about that.

You know what a person who builds Ur-Dargon IS thinking about?

Zirilian of the Claw

You know what’s safer than safe? Cards on the Reserved List, that’s what. This card is safe on the Reserved List, nestled between Yare and Zuberi Golden Feather. The buylist price for this never quite got as excited as the pretend retail price did in January of 2015 when someone bought a copy of this off of TCG Player and everyone pretended the entire internet was out of stock. If terrible dragons like Kolaghan getting printed can spike this card, imagine what the second spike is going to look like on the back of an actual dragon deck being printed without this card inside it. This is a no-brainer. Sell this to people with no brains. I don’t think any of this good will is going to extend to Hivis of the Scale, which is too bad, since stealing dragons seems very spicy in the wake of them printing new dragons. Zirilian isn’t getting play in Scion decks right now, though, so get out quickly.

Edit – Or not. This is basically gone from the internet. I told you it was a no-brainer. Don’t chase this spec, let everyone else deal with trying to offload copies.

There isn’t a whole lot else that’s really spicy that I don’t think has a decent shot of being in the deck. Urza’s Incubator seems like it’s on the table, Dragon Arch seems like a shoo-in, etc. I am tending to avoid obvious tribal stuff. Not every good card is a dargon, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

O-Kagachi, Vengeful Kami

Yes, that’s right, THE O-Kagachi, Vengeful Kami, from all of those Kamigawa block flavor texts and novels.

This seems really underwhelming. It’s not always easy to hit them with a creature and if you do, the reward should be better than “Maybe destroy a permanent” but that might just be me. I’m not excited about putting this at the helm of its own deck. I’m sure you will get to summon this a lot more often than Ur-Dragon, but I just don’t like this card much. It’s not going to make anything that the 5-color dragon deck just existing won’t spike already so I’m not going to waste too much more ink on this card.

Wasitora, Nekoru Queen

Finally, the Jund-colored Cat Dragon that makes Cat Dragon tokens we’ve all been begging for.

I could see this getting its own deck built around it, actually. I don’t know how popular it would be, but this is very aggressive. Things that double your attack phases or the number of tokens you produce will get played, but I don’t know how much upside they have. Saskia basically already spiked everything this would spike and I don’t know if this adds enough additional demand for any of it to go up again. This just feels a little weak for multiplayer. Only getting the token if they don’t have a creature to sac feels durdly. If you die both things every time this might feel more playable. This also has no white so you couldn’t even play any of the other cat cards basically making this card’s tribal identity as a cat worthless.

Ramos, Dragon Engine

I hate to have to post a pic with dumdum’s Instagram account slapped on it, but this is the picture we have so we’re going with it. I was joking before but this actually is THE Ramos from Mercadian Masques era lore. I don’t know if you want this as your commander as opposed to Ur-Dragon, but this is pretty sweet. With the amount of Proliferate and cards like Doubling Season running around, this could potentially get out of hand quickly. Only being able to activate his ability once a turn keeps this from getting completely bonkers, but this is a great mana battery and I expect people to build something around him. I don’t think this spikes anything that Atraxa, a commander still bound to be more popular than anything from the dragon deck a year from now, hasn’t spiked already.

Taigam, Ojutai Master

Finally, a card that isn’t 100% a dragon card. This could spawn its own deck, rebounding cards like Time Warp, which this makes uncounterable. This is the most exciting card we’ve seen for sure and this, while it references dragons, need not be played with them at all, unless you really want to jam Ojutai(s) which you probably should do because, why not?

There is no real rush on this card so I’m going to give it its own article because there are so many relevant cards based on the deck that will creep up around this. People have dargon fever today so I want to finish out by addressing the rest of the dragon stuff I think has upside.

Foil Everything

We want to buy cards that are safe from reprint and in addition to stuff on the Reserved List, foils are safe. Only the new cards are getting the foil treatment meaning even stuff we know is being reprinted can be a buy in foil, especially if it plays nicely in the decks.

Haven and Crucible of the Spirit Dragon seem like decent moves to make in foil. They will be staples of Dargon tribal decks forever and aren’t very easy at all to reprint in foil. People are going to treat the non-foils like radioactive waste now that they’re spoiled but have months to go before they’re reprinted which means some people might use the intervening time to upgrade. Cavern of Souls is already plenty expensive, but cheaper, tribal lands that pertain to Dragons seem like cheap foil pickups that are going to fly off of shelves.

Stuff From Scion Decks

We don’t have to really guess what’s going to get played in Ur-Dragon 5-color dragons because people are already playing that deck, basically. Scion of the Ur-Dragon has a very detailed EDHREC page full of the cards that are going to get played in the deck and that’s pretty good intel. We can see that cards like Crux of Fate and Quicksilver Amulet are staples in decks like this and will probably be good moves going forward (I’d avoid non-foils on Crux).

Here’s an example of a card that’s languishing a bit and could get the kick in the ass it needs to reverse course and shape up a bit. The reprint tanked the price, even on foils, but it’s unlikely this card is ever reprinted in foil. What’s out there is what’s out there. I like this pickup and this card has already demonstrated it can be $8, so its current price of $1.50 foil on Coolstuff is pretty damn tempting.

Similarly, this has been printed 3 times (Archenemy and a Duel Deck) but only once in foil. I would say there is a decent likelihood this is in the deck but not in foil. I also like foils of this card’s wimpier Khans block corollary – Dragonlord’s Servent. Foils seem safe and with the price pretty flat (although the buylist price is showing signs of life, maybe) any increase in demand is going to be reflected in the price right away.

Check the EDHREC page because there is a lot there. Sarkhan’s Triumph? Dragonstorm? Belbe’s Portal? There are a ton of cards already associated with 5-color Dragons that are ready to go when we get this deck in the fall.

Next time I will dig into what I like in a Taigam deck, but for now, enjoy this early edition brought on by the leaks. You suck, MTG Noobie and I’m glad you deleted your Twitter account between the time I started writing this article and finished it. Still, we can’t pretend the leaks didn’t happen, so let’s get out there and buy accordingly. Until next time!

Rachel Agnes, The Collector

Drawing Inspiration from Alters

9 Comments

What is the most rewarding part of playing Magic the Gathering for you? For some it is the gameplay and for others competition. For many it is just something to play casually with friends. For others, their favorite aspect of paying Magic the Gathering is customizing their cards. Finding unique and fun ways for everyone to enjoy Magic is something the game itself strives to do. Creating a welcoming environment where players are free to express themselves explains the need for so many different formats and variations of cards. Having your card stand out from the pack is something many players desire when playing Magic.

Some players find foils a great way to do this, and will go out of their way to find premium versions to spice up their decks. For some people, misprints are their preferred method of standing out. Misprints occur where something happened in the actual physical manufacturing of the card itself causing an abnormality to occur. For others, alters are the way they choose to cultivate their creativity. Today, I will be discussing some of my favorite MTG alterists at the moment and some of their alters that have really caught my eye.

It may come as a surprise to some, but there is actually a massive online card altering market. Ebay, Etsy, and Facebook have provided successful social media outlets to display your artwork and players have been devouring it. The desire to have your cards customized by not just top notch alterists but even small, lesser known alterists, is ever-growing. I do not purchase many alters myself because all my allotted MTG money is spent on foils and artwork, but I do absolutely have some favorites.

5. Eric Klug

https://www.facebook.com/klugalters/

Eric has been in the altering business for almost a decade and he is at the top of his class when it comes to producing high quality alters. I figure most people reading this have heard of him before and even purchased an alter from him. Here are a few of my favorites of his.

I love Klug’s alter on the most powerful spell ever printed, Black Lotus. His ability to replicate Terese Nielsen’s gorgeous Guru land style is superb. This full-art alter that covers the entirety of the border, yet somehow doesn’t take away from the allure of the lotus itself.

This MC Escher inspired Maze of Ith is one of Klug’s most famous alters. The line-work is amazing and I can’t even imagine how beautiful it looks on the battlefield.

This is one of Klug’s most recent masterpieces. I absolutely love Damnation and Gustave Dore so this alter hits me in all the right ways.

4. Brossard Alters

https://www.facebook.com/brossardalters/photos/?tab=album&album_id=432419673635182

I absolutely love this alterist’s way of blending real world items into their pieces.

I absolutely LOVE alters that take a spin on what the card does.  Casting Maelstrom Wanderer in Commander is always a spin of the wheel and the images on the roulette wheel certainly represent some sweet hits. Can you name them all?

Ok, admit it. We ALL thought that that promo Snapcaster Mage looked like a soccer player. This is a brilliant execution of that concept and I love how the lines on the field and the number 25 on the shirt look like the foiling process itself.

You know an alter is top notch when you confuse it with a photograph. I cannot get over how realistic the casino chips look on this Mox Emerald. Masterful shadowing and scale.

3. Blacklion Alters

https://www.facebook.com/pg/blacklionalters/photos/?ref=page_internal

This alterist makes the list for their masterful border extensions and full-art re imaginings. I absolutely love these Unglued basics because the colors really pop and you can’t tell where the original artist’s work ends and where the alter begins.

Ooo I love me some cherry blossoms and I absolutely love how this alter uses the Japanese influence to compliment the top. It doesn’t overdo it, which is an important thing to consider.

Ok someone is gonna have a sickkk looking Modern deck here. Hard to pick which my favorite here is because of how the picture is taken, but I love how they all work together. The colors are great and the cards are easily recognizable.

2. Sandreline Mousse

https://www.facebook.com/sandreline.altered/photos_albums

Sandreline has many different styles and each of them is masterfully done. I can never tell right off the bat when a piece is done by her but if it catches my eye and is beautifully done, I am never surprised it was painted by her.

Those lions look super realistic and majestic. It’s easy to forget that these are on Magic cards, they are so well done. I absolutely love the black and white aspect here too.

These art nouveau inspired duals and very popular alters by both Sandreline and Eric Klug. I think they are unique and interesting, even if I do prefer clean Fbb’s myself.

Stained glass Lightning Bolt?! Be still my fiery heart! I absolutely love all her stained glass alters but this one takes the cake for me. Talk about a sweet idea for a future Masterpiece series.

  1. MIB Alters

https://www.facebook.com/pg/MIB-MTG-Alter-1431618703795097/photos/?ref=page_internal

I’m not gonna lie, I absolutely had MIB alters as my number 1 pick for favorite MTG alterist by a landslide. I absolutely adore their style to no end and cannot get enough of seeing each of these amazing alters. I would KILL to own one someday.

I absolutely love this art style and it is so unique to MIB alters. I can instantly tell who illustrated it and its uniqueness even among alters really strikes me. I love this Daretti because of his facial expression. I just screams curious mischief to me.

The colors here are absolutely breathtaking and the facial expression is both natural and cartoony at the same time. I don’t know how that’s even possible.

All hail Phyrexia! Praise to Atraxa our overlord and long may her reign be! Okay, this artwork captures an adorable Atraxa, which isn’t easy to do while still keeping some of her menacing features. An absolute home run, and alters like this are what keep me coming back to MIB for inspiration.

I hope you enjoyed checking out some sweet alters with me. There are so many amazing alterists and alters that I didn’t get to mention here. I truly respect all forms of this art and do recommend purchasing at least one alter in your life, even if you just use the card casually. Who are your favorite alterists? Do you have a favorite alter that you own? Let me know in the comments and thank you for reading!

Alter by BlackWingStudio

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: Gone Before You Can Blink

3 Comments

Last week we talked about Amonkhet cards pushing older commanders to the forefront of builders’ minds and how cards we thought had settled might be shaken up again by the new activity. Sometimes one or two new cards are enough to get people excited about an old deck and people who didn’t have a deck before or are rebuilding it can be just as powerful financially as a new deck materializing. Was Anointed Procession combined with Harsh Mentor and Canyon Slough enough of an impetus for Queen Marchesa and Alesha to jump? It seems that way. Would one new card be enough of an impetus for an older deck to go up. What if it wasn’t from the latest Conspiracy set but from even farther back? Would one card be enough to get people excited about Brago? It depends. What if that card is Ancestral Recall with 0 mana buyback?

With Brago, King Eternal, we take this $0.60 uncommon from an OK card in Limited if you get enough cartouches to Power 9, letting you draw 3 cards a turn if you play your cards right. Brago was good before, was considered Tier 1 or 1.5 in French by many people (which is such a foreign concept to most EDH players that it’s barely worth mentioning) and with people starting to play 1v1 online, he could get even more popular, which could translate into paper demand. Did I say could? I mean “almost has to” because anything that is sufficiently popular will translate into being more popular anywhere no matter how much compartmentalization there is between MODO and paper and 1v1 and multiplayer. People who lose to something will imitate it.

If Brago does get a second look, cards in the Brago deck, especially ones that get better with new Amonkhet cards and are therefore even more likely to make the cut in a new deck, are worth looking at. Here’s what I think matters.

Panharmonicon

I think it’s basically time on this card. It’s recovering from a historic low and while I don’t like to “grab a falling knife” as they say on Wall Street, I don’t want to wait too long to see how high this bounces. I think this is one of the EDHiest cards to ever ED any Hs and that’s good for this card. It made a bit of a splash in Standard for a minute, hence the high price. High price for a minute up first was good because a high buylist meant a lot of them went from packs to dealers’ hands as players traded them in to the LGS for store credit to buy more packs and such. Bulk rares have a tendency to accumulate and get forgotten in boxes but $8 cards are more easily accounted for.

There is some danger surrounding this card vis-a-vis whether or not this eats it at rotation. If you pay $2 and this becomes $0.50, that might feel bad. But even in that situation I think you are OK paying $2 and here’s why.

  1. I don’t think this gets that cheap. This is a card used in a ton of EDH decks already and that number will only grow. Players love triggers and doubling triggers is the best. Look at what EDH has made expensive that used to be a bulk rare – Parallel Lives, Doubling Season, Mana Reflection, Caged Sun. Double is good and Panharmonicon doubles stuff.
  2. I don’t think you care even if it does tank. EDH demand is robust and while it’s not quite a staple, 6200 inclusions and counting is strong and that means the card will go back up. People used to say Parallel Lives wouldn’t hit $2 because it wasn’t half as good as Doubling Season. K. This card is stupid, it’s played in as many decks as Illusionists’ Bracers and that card is $2.50 and counting. If this does dip below a buck at rotation, which I doubt, buy more. Your average cost sinks way below $2 and you profit a ton when this hits $5+.

I think it’s time to buy this card and worry about a potential price decrease later. They change the rotation policy every year so I have no idea what effect this rotation will have on the price of a card like this but I know that it’s about as cheap as it’s going to get for now. If you’re that worried, trade all of your new stuff that you’re sure is going to go down at rotation for these and that way you don’t worry about overpaying for cash. In general, I like to find targets that will retain value and trade all of my standard stuff that I can’t sell into them. If you find yourself waiting too long, you can also ship a bunch of standard jank in to dealers with a high trade-in bonus and cash out. Finally, there’s PucaTrade, which I guess people hate now but which has been useful for trading stacks of jank into Torpor Orbs for me. I haven’t messed with that site in a minute, though.

Parallax Wave

Price correction is due here for certain. I noticed that this was $5.50 on Card Kingdom and is all but sold out elsewhere. A few shops have this at $4 or so (up from the $3 it was last time I wrote about it) but have low stock. TCG Player Market Price concurs with this at around $5.50. We have a coming price correction that needs an impetus, and I think more Brago decks could be it. There isn’t enough of a discrepancy between the new price ($6+) that will be coming and the current, low-hanging fruit price on a few loose copies for there to be an arbitrage opportunities, but I still think buying ahead of an impending correction is wise. This card is played in Atraxa and the number of Atraxa decks keeps growing, not to mention the number of Brago decks that are being built this week. I like this card a ton moving forward.

Eldrazi Displacer

While we’re talking about cards that I don’t think will dip a ton at rotation and which get played enough in EDH to justify paying around $2 for them, there’s this gem. True colorless mana is a little tricky to come by but shouldn’t be too arduous in a 2-color deck. You have Temple of the False God (a card I hate), Ash Barrens, Academy Ruins, Inventor’s Fair, Mystic Gate, Rogue’s Passage and Reliquary Tower all commonly played in Brago decks, though, so you should be good for an activation or two even without your Sol Ring.

Again, I’m not worried about too much of a dip at rotation. I think this is played enough in enough different decks and formats that you’re not going to ever eat it buying in around $2. If this does end up $0.50 by some crazy fluke, don’t you want every copy of it at $0.50? Steel of the Godhead is $2, I’m OK paying $0.50 for Eldrazi Displacer, a card that, by the way, is way harder to reprint than Steel of the Godhead.

Strionic Resonator

Anyone else notice this happening? If you thought these were still cheap, well, they ain’t. They’ve been climbing for a year and while it took two years for it to finally happen, it did. I hope you snatched an armload of these for bulk back in the day. I even had Noah Bradley sign one for me.

Something else to notice is that this peaked around $5 and is down a bit. This means $5 is a safe bet for a future price and as more copies get taken out of the marketplace, it’s even safer. Every dollar you buy below $5 is basically a dollar you’re guaranteed to make in a year or maybe less. Brago decks love this card and so do a lot of other decks, so I think this is a pretty safe pickup the closer you can buy to $3 right now. This card is 2014’s Panharmonicon and look at it grow.

Everything else in Brago is either cheap or Grim Monolith. You can probably scoop up a bunch of Mystic Remora but who knows when that will pay off? (I bought a hundred of them for a nickel each but I’ve been waiting for a long time and still no payoff. At this point I might just buylist them for $0.30) You could try and make money on Restoration Angel or one of the myriad angels in the deck. You could buy every Reality Acid on TCG Player and watch everyone wonder why. The point is, if you notice something that wasn’t really exciting (Brago decks) because suddenly very exciting, see why people are excited. In this case, they’re excited about drawing 3 cards a turn on top of the cards you’ll draw with Cloudblazer and Mulldrifter.

Thanks for reading. Next week, I’m sure there will be something else I notice, if only as a result of building more stupid EDH decks even though I already have too many. Until next time!

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