Today, the complete list of Modern Masters 2017 goes up, and I’m busy refreshing pages and going crazy just like you.
I’m keenly aware of some truly amazing cards and the higher distribution, and I can’t wait to find out how overpriced my shop is going to hold drafts at, but I want to focus on the fetches in MM17 and what the future holds for them.
We have a baseline for what’s going to happen to the enemy fetches from Zendikar, with their inclusion in MM17: The allied fetches in Khans of Tarkir.
This was at more than $100, just from Legacy and casual demand. Going from Onslaught to Khans is an enormous jump in availability, but there was a new demand as Modern players could now add these to decks. A loss of half was immediate, and it’s halved again.
Notably, the demand hasn’t spiked since the KTK printing, though this is the Onslaught version we are looking at, the original. It’s lost a lot of value and hasn’t recovered, which is a bit of a surprise to me.
Let’s look at what the Khans version has done.
First of all, it’s at half the price of the Onslaught version. It’s much more common, yes, but this is a big gap for a card between its two printings. I think that with such a big difference in art and frame, I’m not surprised that there is a gap, which is consistent across all five of the fetches. People are willing to pay more for the old version.
I am surprised that the gap has held. We’ve got six versions of allied fetches for you to choose from, allowing you to balance your budget with your desire for the shiny or unique.
What this means for the enemy fetches is this: I’m expecting them to lose value immediately, down to the $15-$20 range. I expect them to recover somewhat at the start of Amonkhet, and start an upward creep…but not very far.
Reusing the art is a big deal for the fetchlands. These are going to be the same as the originals, except for the expansion symbol and other small frame tweaks, and that means the originals are going to be dragged down in price significantly.
If I had them, I might try to move extras but buylists might not be honored now, and I can’t imagine eBay sales are going to happen much. It couldn’t hurt trying to sell them now, but I don’t think you’ll get very far.
If you’re holding nonfoils, I think you’re going to simply have to hold onto them and accept that you’re going to have to wait some time to get much of your value back.
Foils, though, that’s a different matter. I doubt that the foils are going to recover effectively, given that there’s a super-chase-mega-rare one to go get, but my guess is that the foils take a hit of about 40% and then stabilize. Having the new foils look almost the same as the old ones is going to mean that the older ones come down toward the newer ones.
Modern Masters 2017 has a truly ridiculous number of chase cards, and I want to address what Wizards is trying to do: make the format cheaper and sell a bunch of packs. I don’t think this is a move of the desperate, but they are trying to goose player interest in the format.
Modern as a format has looked flat, but my goodness, we have a lot of toys to play with in this set, some of which harken back to other amazing formats, e.g. Mystical Teachings.
While I think that the fetches are going to stay stable, I suspect that this is going to lead to growth if the player base grows. Fetches are going to be the canary in the coal mine for Modern: If the players come to the format, the prices of the lands will be the first to show it. This set is gas and it’s going to get a lot of people playing the format because the cards will be cheap.
Make no mistake, this is going to torpedo some prices significantly. Stores have more product. Some stores are selling boxes for less than the MSRP of $240, and that’s a sign for how much product they want to move. There’s going to be a lot of Liliana of the Veil running around, a lot more Damnation and Blood Moon, and people want to play with their awesome new and expensive cards.
I think that Wizards is sending another signal here: Anything not on the Reserved List is fair game. The EV on a MM17 pack is ridiculously high, at least for right now. That won’t last, though, as packs get opened and prices crash. Remember that stores get boxes from distributors for less than retail, and they will open boxes if the price is right on singles. That pressure will keep the price of the non-chase cards super duper low.
In previous sets, they decided to cap the values of boxes, by only reprinting so many valuable cards. This is not the case in 2017, instead they chose both low-print-run cards (Liliana) to cards they have goosed a bunch (Tarmogoyf) and so on. Going forward, nothing’s safe. Please keep that in mind as we go forward into this brave new world.
With the latest spoilers revealed this morning, Modern Masters 2017 is officially the most exciting edition of the series, and one of the most exciting Magic sets of all time. Wizards of the Coast is clearly looking for a home run here and there is a lot to digest in terms of how the set will impact investments in the Modern format for players and speculators.
Let’s get up to speed on the mythics revealed thus far:
We now know 14 of the 15 mythic rares in Modern Masters 2017 [Update: Olivia Voldaren is the final mythic], and despite the inclusion of both Liliana of the Veil AND Tarmogoyf, with Snapcaster Mage and Cavern of Souls as a side dish, this offering is actually not that different than Modern Masters 2015.
Here are some figures on the MM15 Mythics, courtesy of number crunching that Saffron Olive did over on MTGGoldFish at the time.
As you can see mythics were on track to contribute just under $90 in EV (Estimated Value) to MM15 at launch. Now take a look at the MM17 mythic offerings by comparison.
As you can see, the mythics may actually represent less value in this set than in MM15, largely because they are dazzling us with LoTV and Tarmogoyf, while offering up significantly less $25+ cards. That being said, the demand profile as persistent, multi-deck four-ofs for Tarmogoyf, Snapcaster Mage, and Cavern of Souls may help those cards hold value better and recover faster down the road.
Now let’s take a look at the rares that are on offer:
Prices as of noon Mar 2/17.
Clearly the biggest story here is the inclusion of the Zendikar fetch lands. Adding five high demand rares currently priced between $30-$60 (after immediate deflation upon the reveal) was the clearest flag that this set is intended to push the envelope on Estimated Value. But the rare value goes significantly deeper overall than it did with MM15. Have a look at the different in EV just based on the rares we know so far:
Numbers are rough here, but rares are clearly a much bigger contributor to EV this time.
If you squint, that’s a potentially whopping 50%+ increase in the EV being added by rares in this set, assuming a roughly equivalent value for the remaining rares, including likely bulk rares.
I haven’t run the numbers on uncommons yet, but with key cards like Path to Exile, Inquisition of Kozilek, Serum Visions, Terminate and Might of Old Krosa, my guess is these numbers will come in equal to or above even Modern Masters (2013), and significantly above the uncommon poor MM15.
If the set allocations were the same, these figures alone would make boxes a slam dunk, but beware, because there is more to this story.
A Word on Product Allocations
Early word from vendors was that Modern Masters 2017 featured an entirely different distribution pattern than the last two installments of the series. Previously, most vendors got some of their limited edition product from WoTC directly, and some of it via their distributors. This time around, distributors are controlling all of the inventory, making it much harder to get a handle on how much the print run has been increased (since you can’t simply measure WoTC case allocations). Many vendors reported that they had been offered “as much as they wanted” for MM17, which suggests that WoTC is fully aware of how juiced this set is and is looking to take advantage of the hype the kichen sink approach to set design will drive in order to achieve significantly greater sales. Solid information is still unfolding at this point but based on what I’ve heard so far I would estimate that the print run is at least 50-100% larger than previously, and possibly even beyond that. Massdrop.com sold over 1700 boxes in one drop the other day, and even more on a second one.
Interestingly, after the fiasco of Eternal Masters “limited” product being made available to vendors a full six months after it was first released (in Dec 2016), many players and speculators were looking gun shy at the prospect of pre-ordering this set and I managed to pick up my boxes at $175 without issue before most of the reveals went down. As of this morning, boxes are hovering around $210-$220 a box and they hype train could easily drive them back into the MSRP range of $240 or even beyond depending on what the forthcoming final EV calculation articles confirm about the expected value of a pack or box.
So should you be piling on to buy boxes with everyone else? I don’t think so. The Estimated Value on offer just so far, without the full set revealed, looks roughly equivalent for the mythics and significantly increased in the rare and uncommon slots. Paired with higher supply that suggests to me that nearly all of the cards included are going to take a large hit in the 20-50% range as we approach peak supply. Sure, a lot of cards recovered well from the last two Modern Masters sets, but they had less supply, and MM15 boxes appreciated much less than MM13 before them (partially due to lessened set value).
If you got in on boxes under $190 when those were available in the last few weeks, you may get a chance to flip them for +$40/box at peak hype, and cracking them will be unlikely to cost you much if you need the cards. Boxes over $240 however are not somewhere I want to be with this set, as the EV today is very unlikely to resemble the EV in a few months. Couple that with the specter of another holiday season surprise re-release and even Japanese boxes around $300 look scary.
Play it Smart
Speculation with Modern Masters 2017 cards is not going to be easy. Once we know more about total supply, and we’ve seen inventory levels of key cards and mapped their likely peak supply pricing, we can start to probe for potential targets.
Generally speaking you are going to want to look for desperation sales from folks who snapped up boxes looking to crack and flip, only to find that everyone else is doing the same thing and driving prices into the ground.
Rares especially are going to be tough to keep afloat, and sales on Twitter and Facebook are likely to abound by early April. With a foil in every pack you should get a chance at some good deals on sparkly things for your cube or EDH deck.
When picking targets you will want to pair your patience with data on which cards are actually being played in multiple archetypes, usually as a 4-of, and in multiple formats. Fetchlands, Snapcaster Mage, Goyf, Cavern of Souls, etc fit this profile.
The other group of cards you will want to take a hard look (prioritizing on the same basis) at are the ones that definitely won’t be in MM17, including:
Blinkmoth Nexus
Cryptic Command
Engineered Explosives
Glimmervoid
Grove of the Burnwillows
Horizon Canopy
Inkmoth Nexus
Karn Liberated
Mishra’s Bauble
Saffi, Eriksdotter
Valakut
Priority Exits (If You Can)
Given how much of this set is going to be bought and cracked in the next two months, you have already missed out on some key opportunities to sell off staples like Cavern of Souls and Liliana of the Veil.
Given current pricing, which is collapsing by the minute, there are still a few overpriced cards that should be exited in a hurry, if you have the chance:
Zendikar Fetchlands: These are going to lose another 20-30% of their value as rares. There is too much going on in this set, supply is higher and dealers aren’t going to be motivated to prop up prices via aggressive buylisting. Same art too, so you can safely ditch and get back in with holograms a bit down the road if you have extras lying around.
Tarmogoyf: I think Goyf could get as low as $60-70 this time if supply is high enough. Remember this is his third printing in 5 years, and supply wasn’t draining after the last time.
Damnation: This card’s price was propped up largely by the number of years it dodged a mainstream reprint. At $40-45, it might have held most of that value as a mythic, but as a rare, this thing will be far, far more common in six weeks. It’s really only run in Jund and Abzan in Modern, and usually then as a 1-of in the sideboard. Stony Silence is played more, and it’s $5. I think the price will get cut in half or worse, so if you can exit over $30, that should be a solid move.
Cratehoof Behemoth: This will drop from $20 to $10. Get out.
Linvala, Keeper of Silence: $10-15 card by the time this is over.
Looking Forward
It is worth noting that in removing Modern as a Pro Tour format, a reduction in Modern tournament support throughout the competitive ecosystem, and the continued LGS-only distribution of Modern Masters products, WoTC is signally strongly that Modern (and other Eternal formats) are Tier 2 priorities for them and are not the core drivers of revenue and user growth.
That being said, there is no reason to believe that Modern won’t carry on much as it has been over the last twelve months or so, as a largish niche for competitive players that have been around for a while and have the collections to support it. Modern Masters 2017 represents a strong shift towards accessibility and away from prioritizing collection value, in Modern in specific, and Magic as a game, as represented by the evolving set design strategy of Wizards of the Coast. With so many key staples being reprinted here, and with expansive print runs on deck, there is every reason to believe that some new players will pick up a Modern deck, and that Modern players will diversify their options by expanding their staples collection. (Hilariously, cognitive dissonance will likely enable many players to ignore the drop in their collection value as they happily run out to scoop up cheaper staples.)
From the speculators perspective, this paradigm shift towards accessibility suggests that holding Modern staples for more than a few years after release is going to be a very risky game. I didn’t get caught out on much with this set list, but cards like Abupt Decay and Scavenging Ooze now likely represent failed specs that I would be happy to sell at or near cost, given how long they might take to recover past potential. Moving forward, opportunities related to Modern are much more likely to involve three specific categories of targets:
High demand recovering reprints, eg: LoTV, Tarmogoyf, Snapcaster Mage, Cavern of Souls
Recent reprint dodgers, eg: Ancestral Visions, Inkmoth Nexus, Engineered Explosives, Grove of the Burnwillows, Mishra’s Bauble
Newly unlocked/underestimated cards, eg: Rite of Passage, Death’s Shadow, Amulet of Vigor, etc.
Good luck out there…it’s getting tougher!
CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.
I don’t list this among my biggest MTG Finance regrets or talk about it often, and the thing was pretty beat up. Besides, $50 was a good price for it back when I sold it. This was during a period where I was having a hard time justifying all of the money I had tied up in a Legacy Maverick deck (that should tell you the year) that had as many German cards in it as I could find. I didn’t want my deck to be foil so I figured German was a good way to make the deck look sexy. I was most of the way done when I sold the whole thing and one of the last English cards, a jacked up Gaea’s Cradle, wasn’t a card I cared about.
A few years later, I got into EDH. I feel like I could really use that Cradle now. Lots of decks I run could use a Cradle and I could build a few I’m holding off on building, also. I come across Cradles, occasionally but I always quick flip them, never letting myself divert that much money from my business to my personal collection just so I can make my Prossh deck a teensy bit better. If Cradle were $20, though? I’d probably buy 10 of them. Even though I won’t spend $200 on one card (let’s pretend I wouldn’t pay buylist), I’ll spend $200 on 10 cards. I realize that Magic player Jason is a poor but that’s because player Jason would have to either embezzle money from financier Jason’s business or divert money from Dad Jason’s kid’s college fund. Fortunately, she’s a year old and still doesn’t know her own name, so it’s possible that college fund could become discretionary spending in no time.
I don’t think my experience is uncommon. Could I break off two hundo and throw it at some cardboard? Sure, but I’m loath to do that, especially for a bulk rare format like EDH. For $200 I could basically build an entire new deck, and a good one. I don’t think this is uncommon for EDH players, especially those who don’t come across as many copies of cards as I do, aren’t able to pay buylist prices as often as I am and aren’t cash money dolla billionaires like me. If you have a life outside of Magic like I don’t, you may just not even consider certain cards because while they’re great, they’re probably not necessary.
I think this is important because I think it means people can treat cards like Gaea’s Cradle like Dre and forget about them. When you neglect a card for so long that you forget about it, you’re unlikely to remember to include it in the lists you draft, even if you never intend to build those decks. Those cards end up underrepresented on sites like EDHREC and Tappedout and suddenly you have an underestimation of the demand of a card. I think there are cards that are in higher demand than some of our metrics indicate and that this could lead to them recovering faster from reprints. I think that’s worth knowing.
Some of these will be predicated on me guessing that they’re in Modern Masters 2017, but I feel like I have pretty strong justification for thinking this and I’ll support my conclusions. I also realize this is a lot of writing with no pictures, so I am going to type “hidden demand” into google and see what comes up.
Fascinating.
So before I launch into which cards I think have demand that is understated and which could recover faster than other cards, let’s look at a few cards haven’t been spoiled but which I think will be in the set.
Adam Prosak wrote a sweet article where he talks about design (and also spoils Damnation, which was all appreciated) and there is a relevant section that got me thinking a lot about what I expect to be in the set.
We have seen some of those archetypes shape up. Blink got Restoration Angel, Deadey Navigator and Snapcater Mage so far, Control has gotten Damnation, Temporal Mastery and Inquisition of Kozilek and both got Venser. Similarly the Populate decks have Seance and Thragtusk, the token decks have Goblin Assault and I think there is a creature that could go in either one of those decks. Based on them wanting a ton of small tokens and a way to make them bigger, I’m predicting the following.
Hoofy is a big card that wins games, but with that hefty pricetag, it’s tough for players to justify jamming him. Honestly, this is a contributing factor to the price of a card like Triumph of the Hordes. Wizards has also tried to give us cards like Decimator of the Provinces which is a poor facsimile for the Behoimoth but which will do in a pinch. Players jamming cheaper alternatives to the best card for the slot will cast aside their budget beaters once Craterhoof becomes affordable. There are players basically playing placeholders for this card without even knowing it. And if a player who didn’t have the money to break off to take themselves to hoof town can suddenly afford it, they might just jam both. The point is, the numbers for this card in terms of recent inclusion in decks belie the high price and I think that indicates pent-up demand.
Tarmogoyf is a bad example of a card to use as an example of what happens to prices from a Modern Masters set when there is a lot of demand because dealers manipulated what happened with Goyf by being able to buy a significant percentage of the Goyfs opened in Modern Masters total by being at GP Las Vegas twice when there was a huge Modern Masters event (something that’s not happening this year). I don’t see Goyf being in the set but Goyf did show us that pent-up demand can sometimes overwhelm supply. We saw the same thing with cards that weren’t bought quite as aggressively as was Goyf, and those graphic trends will likely be repeated with cards like Craterhoof.
Archmage (transiently, but still) actually exceeded its original price after its Modern Masters printing. I don’t expect that will happen with Craterhoof, necessarily, but I think it’s good to demonstrate that cards with a lot of demand (Archmage’s came from Modern) can rebound prices more than we’d expect.
An important caveat
By all accounts, dealers are getting WAY MORE of this product than they did of Modern Masters 1 or 2. Is this in part to the fact that they’ve foolishly opted not to have a big, kickass Modern Masters tourney at GP Vegas which is a few months away? Possibly. But given how many stores there are and how many boxes they’re able to order, I’m willing to be that we’re seeing a huge growth in the print allotment due to the tentative Modern Masters printing and the slightly braver Modern Masters 2 printing not pulling a Chronicles with the game. Either way, there are likely to be more packs of this set opened at your LGS. Recovery of cards, especially non-mythics will be tougher than before. We’re unlikely to see prices go up after this printing the way they did in the past. On the other side of the coin, it’s unlikely it will be as difficult for rares to recover from a printing in this set than, say, a set like Khans of Tarkir.
There are other cards in the set that I expect have some understated demand, and if they dip a lot, like I expect them to, I expect you’ll be competing for cheap copies with a lot of players who were excited to be able to get them cheap enough to play with.
Damnation has to have been the #1 card requested by the EDH community, which is sort of funny to me. I’d much, much rather have cheap copies of Phyrexian Altar, a card that really needed a Commander 2015 printing and didn’t get it. However, EDH players have been clamoring for this card forever. It’s just not reasonable to pay $70+ for a $5 card that happens to be a different mana color. Damnation is a card that EDH players are happy to jam in their decks in a world where price is no object but it’s so expensive money-wise that they’re going with alternatives that are expensive mana-wise. While it’s obvious that Toxic Deluge can mostly get the job done and Decree of Pain is much better, people just want to pay 4 and wipe the board. Competitive players tend to gravitate to lower-mana-cost spells as well because their games are usually tighter. This is good news because if casual players buy the copies under $30, competitive players are more likely than casual players to continue to buy copies at a higher price, ensuring the recovery goes more smoothly than people are imagining. Make no mistake, the floor is going to drop out from under this card. However, I think people are counting on it not to recover, and I’m not so sure that’s the case. Don’t count this card out because there’s hidden demand that is going to make itself known very soon.
I’m not speculating here, we know this card is in the set, but we are speculating about the percent of the demand that is from EDH and the percent that was predicated on it doing well in one deck that no one plays anymore in Modern one time. Its inclusion numbers on EDHREC look very healthy and it’s a component of a lot of devastating cheaty decks like Roon and Brago as well as some of the spikier decks like the new Teferi Chain Veil shenanigans. However, when it spiked as much as it did, and not predicated on its EDH demand at all, price memory kept the price high and it priced a lot of EDH players out of the market. There are plenty of people who would play this card if it were cheaper who are staying away. Cheaper copies would encourage them to buy in. I also think this card is being propped up by scarcity more than people are aware so we may see these two effects – artificial high from a Modern-based buyout and price memory combining with some unexpected demand from players who can’t justify playing $20 for a Remanderang with feet. This card is a little healthier than we might think.
I think as more and more cards are spoiled, we should keep an eye on cards that were very expensive and are about to not be. In particular, cards that are from the pre-mythic era that aren’t getting a rarity shift to mythic. I think there’s more value in determining which cards we want to target at their price floor. For example, I expect Voice of Resurgence to be in the set but I’m not as excited about buying those at their price floor as I would Craterhoof. I’ve made a lot of money on Craterhoof, twice and if I can do it again, I’ll be living the dream. We’ll have some more to discuss next week as reprintings make entire decks buildable that might not have been buildable before and we’ll have a lot more targets to discuss. Until next time!
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.
Chances are, by the time you’re looking at this, the very first Modern Masters 2017 spoilers will just be hitting Twitter. My guess is that before the day is over we’ll have Liliana of the Veil confirmed, and possibly Domri Rade. Other than that, who knows! Hopefully we’ll also get an idea of major returning mechanics, so that we can start to figure out what’s in store for us over the next two weeks.
This weekend saw two events; a Standard GP over in Europe and an SCG Modern Open in Indianapolis. Looking through the Standard results, I’m completely unmoved. It feels like 80% of the format is BG or Mardu Vehicles, with a small smattering of Saheeli and a few Dynavolt lists that a couple of crazy European guys came up with. I’m not seeing any potential price shifts that we can capitalize on, and even the Dynavolt lists don’t have any cards that could spike. We’re basically stuck until someone reinvents the format or Amonkhet spoilers start rolling in.
SCG’s Modern results were slightly more interesting I suppose. They’re tough to work with though, given that nearly every card I would be inclined to write about could theoretically be announced as a reprint within an hour of my article being posted.
Atarka’s Command
Price Today: $6 Possible Price: $15
While energy has certainly been the most compelling mechanic from Kaladesh and Aether Revolt, the mechanic of the same name has inspired a new build of Zoo, that is, Revolt Zoo. Revolt Zoo plays 12 fetches to fuel Hidden Herbalists and Narnam Renegade. Herbalists are Burning-Tree Emissarys 5-8, giving the deck the ability to spill it’s entire hand between turn 2 and 3. Wrap it up with a Reckless Bushwhacker and you can theoretically be swinging for lethal on turn two.
A list came in 9th at the SCG Modern open, and it’s awfully light on rares. You’ve got a playset of Goblin Guides, which is hardly cheap. With MM3 spoilers rolling out in an hour though, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Guide takes a huge hit in the immediate future. If Guide is reprinted and his price crashes, that leaves just the mana and Atarka’s Command as the only rares in the main deck. What that translates to is a list that’s explosive, promises Magical Christmas Land turns (which more casual and entry-level Modern players love), and most importantly is affordable. This is that “budget Magic deck” recipe that really only has a single card that can reasonably budge in price, and in this case, it’s Atarka’s Command.
I don’t anticipate Command rocketing upwards in price or anything. I think that if A. Goblin Guide is reprinted at rare and B. the deck has enough staying power to keep people on it, that Command could double over a few months as players begin picking it up as a cheap, fun strategy. That Command is also usable in the Naya Burn lists that have become mainstays in modern certainly helps. I’d consider looking for these in trade over the coming weeks, as there’s at least potential.
Utopia Sprawl
Price Today: $2.50 Possible Price: $10
It’s not often I get to pick a common as something to watch for, but as far as commons go, this is a spicy one. Of course, this comes with a huge caveat: if it’s reprinted in MM3 — or any set, as it could realistically show up in any non-Standard product — then the price is immediately flattened. Utopia Sprawl is a ticking time bomb in this regard, but we could see it explode before the price is defused.
Most recently this popped up in a GR Ponza deck that took 15th at the Modern Open. That man is doing God’s work. GR Ponza, for players that haven’t had the pleasure, is a deck that focuses on denying your opponent mana. This particular list has a full playset of Blood Moon, three Mwonvuli Acid-Moss, and best of all, honest-to-God Stone Rain. Stone Rain! There are few more cards more fun to cast in Modern than that.
This build, like many of this stripe, tends to be mana hungry. You’re trying to deny your opponent’s mana resources while at the same time building an advantage on the board, so that they can’t eventually draw into enough lands to stabilize. To that end, it’s using MTGSalvation-rogue-deck-building-form favorite Arbor Elf and Utopia Sprawl. This fun, flirty little combo sets up four mana on turn two, which gives you Blood Moon, Stone Rain, and most dirty of all, Mwonvuli Acid-Moss. I’m eager to play Magic just writing that sentence.
Ok, focus. Utopia Sprawl is the best at what it does, and it’s useful in all of these green ramp style decks we see floating around Modern. It was used in the Nykthos, Shrine of Nyx builds from a year or two ago, and a Tooth and Nail build popped up in the MODO results recently that uses it as well. It’s hardly a format staple, but there’s several various lists on the fringes that all want to put it to good use alongside Arbor Elf.
A $2.50 common may sound wild, but remember that Mishra’s Bauble is a firmly $25+ uncommon. Utopia Sprawl is older, with only a single Dissension printing. If one of these decks picks up a head of steam — good or not — we’ll see Sprawl dry up real quick. I can easily see this card hanging out in the $8 to $12 range. Of course, as I mentioned before, it can be reprinted in basically every single non-Standard product that exists, so buyer beware.
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
