Normally, I like to squeeze in some info above the fold, because I want to tempt you into being a ProTrader, but you’re already here and there’s a lot to go over with the launch of Aether Revolt, and the bannings, and all sorts of things. So let’s get to it!
ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.
Now usually I don’t do this, but, uh, I’ma go ahead and break y’all off with a little remix of the previews.
Things I don’t like
I don’t like having to talk about things I don’t want to talk about. If you’re a buyer in MTG Finance, you don’t have to have an opinion on every card. You basically only ever have to have an opinion on one card, if it’s the right card. If you saw them spoil Tarmogoyf and said “This could be the first Standard card to break the $30 mark” and bought all of them for basically $1 the first week the card was available, you likely made a mint. People would have patted you on the back for being so prescient. No one would have said “Yeah, you made thousands on Goyf, but you totally whiffed on telling us to buy Coalition Relic and when you said Magus of the Vineyard ‘seemed OK’ I bought a bunch and lost my ass.” No one wants to talk about every card if they don’t have strong feelings about it. That’s why this week I’m going to talk about the cards I have strong feelings about. If you want to figure out what the rest of the set is going to do financially, ask someone who has a strong opinion. Based on what I think is going to happen from EDH demand (and other formats where it’s applicable) I have some opinions on current prices. I almost never recommend preordering (hence the title) but there are cards to watch and cards to buy in my opinion and since this is my article, you’re going to get my opinion until you stop reading. That’s how this works.
More things I don’t like are mono-colored Legendary creatures. The colors an EDH general put you in are just as important as the effect of the general (in general) and how good Sram is at drawing cards pales a bit when you realize you have to build him mono-White unless you relegate him to the 99 of your other decks. Look back at prices from Kaladesh. We’re seeing what people want already.
The bad multi-colored generals are basically at the same price as the good mono-colored ones. Meanwhile the trash mono-colored one (Oviya) is an outlier, as is the very good multi-colored one (Rashmi, whose foil price is 3-4 times the other commanders and whose non-foil price is higher than all of the other non-foils prices also). Foils don’t tell the entire story, however they are the first prices to be sensitive to demand increases because of their lower supply. For non-mythics in the post-mythic era, it takes a lot of demand to move the needle. Masterpieces are crushing everything so much that the in-demand mythic Rashmi is worth basically the same as a less-in-demand-but-still-in-demand card like Pia Nalaar despite the one being mythic and one being non-mythic. Of course a mythic foil will be worth more than a non-mythic foil, but $13ish shows that the demand from EDH players has started already. Pia and Padeem have abilities EDH players want, but the mono-colored nature of Padeem all but relegates him to the 99 whereas Pia and Rashmi can play both roles. Gonti is basically a best-case scenario for a mono-colored commander since he is the second best Legendary creature in the set, is in a good color and wasn’t a buy-a-box promo or whatever. I think we can predict a few things about what we’ll see with the cycle of mono-color Legends in Aether Revolt.
This dude is $5.50 and at that price, it’s the strongest performer. I would say this is probably a better card than Gonti and certainly has people pretty hyped. I don’t want to pay $5 for this considering non-foil Rashmi is $1, however. Foils of this could be in the $10 range if tryhards follow through and end up as hyped about this card as they say they are. What is propping Baral up at this point is his potential for inclusion in Standard. Do we know whether that will happen? Did Reflector Mage’s banning make blue decks better or worse? Look, I wouldn’t ask Pat Chapin to accurately predict what is going to come from Standard post-new set and post-bannings so you’re crazy if you ask me whether this will see Standard play. Stranger things have happened. I do know that this would have to see a TON of Standard play to justify a $5 buy-in for non-foils.
Count all of the mythics under $5. Proceed with caution.
Personally, I think Sram is either the best or second-best Legendary creature in this set. Given its availability at $1.75 on TCGPlayer today, I’m not confident about any of the legendary creatures pre-selling for more than it. I don’t think Hope of Ghirapur’s durdly casual appeal will be enough to justify paying $2 for it. What I don’t like about pre-sale prices above bulk is that they make it difficult to get cheap foils from people. Kaladesh has showed that 3 months on, the best card (Baral? Sram?) are worth about $3.50 as a non-mythic. Baral could be worth $5 or more, but no one is trading you the foil version for $5 at the prerelease if the non-foil is going for that.
Stay away from the other stuff. I think Yahenni is underrated, but the foil is already at $5.50 and that’s probably about right for now. We’ll check back in a year, I guess, but Kaladesh is 3 months ahead and can probably give us a bit of a glimpse into trajectories that hopefully we can apply to Aether Revolt. The sets rotate out at the same time, but EDH doesn’t rotate and the demand is unaffected by such things. Rotation gives us a chance to get cards at their floor, though, and we’ll want to watch some of these cards then, if Standard doesn’t pump their prices, that is.
Things I like
This is a $4 pre-order, which kind of blows if you ask me. The $15 foil seems a little high, but the card has a lot of potential. This reminds me a LOT of Expropriate in terms of its appeal, mythic status, color, pre-sale price and a lot of other factors. Expropriate is in a set whose supply makes it quite inappropriate to try to compare prices, however. Trajectory, though, is a good corollary. At peak supply, I want to look at this card. I hope the foils come down, not because $15 is wrong but because it’s right and I want to pick them up for less than that. Do I think this foil hits the $30 that foil Expropriate hit? Nah. I’ll wait. Keep an eye on this sucker.
Aid From the Cowl is Aether Revolt’s From Beyond. You know how I won’t shut up about From Beyond? Well, sometimes they make a functional reprint (and maybe a slightly better version) of a card that a lot of people in a lot of formats are using that’s worth like $5 after a bunch of reprintings. Maybe this new card is harder to reprint. Maybe the only reason the prices aren’t the same is because the card is very recent and there are hundreds of copies in every retail outlet. It will take a year or two for demand to soak up those copies. In the mean time, you can take your time socking away a ton of copies at your own pace and suddenly From Beyond is like $8 and everyone but you and me is surprised. Aid From the Cowl is this set’s Zendikar Resurgent. This reminds me of Lurking Predators. It casts free Permanents. It will take a minute for this card to go up, but if you make sure you get every copy in every binder over the next few years, you’re going to just make money. Trade away Aetherspire Harvester for 4 copies of this and you’ll end up looking like a genius when Harvester is worth 1/4 as much and Aid is worth 4 times as much. You need a retail out on this, though, since if this quadruples (which it might not) the buylist probably only doubles and then shipping costs eat a lot of your bottom line. Read this. There is a reason I recommend grabbing these in trade and not paying shipping. This will hold value and grow while a lot of the rest of the set will not. If this looks risky to you, stay away. There are plenty of cards that are going to go up faster and aren’t from Masterpiece-containing sets. However, foils of this are $5 which means EDH is very aware that this is nuts. That or dealers think EDH is aware that this is nuts. Either way, I have confidence in this card.
I like this card a lot more than most people, but at peak supply, these will be dirt cheap. I like this as a long-term pickup, especially for people who don’t like foils. Watch this. Trophy Mage is spicy and gets a lot of combo pieces.
At $75 for the masterpiece, $23 for the set foil and $8 for the non-foil, it’s safe to say this card has been identified. I am not sure there are many ways to take advantage of this in Standard, so the price is almost certainly too high given the Masterpieces in the set. This is Panharmonicon levels of good and unless someone jams this in Standard, this will tail off until we hit peak supply. Not much we can do about the foil price since it’s a snap pick-up for players at its current price and I don’t see it getting high enough in the meantime that we’ll wish we’d paid $23 for finance reasons. Not with a $75 Masterpiece, anyway. If those prices move together, though, it’s worth revisiting. However, I think this will go down and we’ll want to revisit at peak supply.
Bulk rare with an $8 foil? I’m listening! If Aid From the Cowl doesn’t end up this set’s From Beyond, this sure will. This may be an early front-runner for this set’s Dictate of Erebos, although Dictate was also predicated on being a nearly identical printing of a $15 card. This isn’t as obvious as all that but it’s certainly powerful and the high foil price indicates someone has a lot of faith in this bulk rare. I think this is good enough to maintain some value moving forward, especially used in concert with cards like Abundance, Mayael, Aid From the Cowl, Lurking Predators and myriad other “I get a random card from the top but not actually that random” cards. This is a steal at bulk status and I want to trade for these all day.
This card has me very excited. This is a value engine and will likely be the centerpiece of some comboes that ruin some lives moving forward. $1.50 on the non-foil is probably good for now, but dealers don’t seem that bullish on this being played in EDH since the foils are only $3. I think $3 for foils of this is probably incorrect. If it gets any cheaper, I’m all-in. As it is, $3 for foils makes me think it could get cheaper since pre-sale foil prices are usually too high given the total lack of competition from other vendors and the uncertainty surrounding getting your hands on enough to fill orders. There is a foil in the set whose current price makes me want to buy, though.
Before I tell you that card, I want to show you a few other graphs.
I’m sure you can guess which card I’m going to point out.
Boom. This gets you any number of rats or apostles out of your deck and it’s currently $1.50 in foil on TCG Player. I’m not bullish about the non-foils until they hit true bulk, and possibly even not then, but this is a steal at $1.50. The apostles are pretty cheap themselves meaning the deck is doable in foil and if the foil is super cheap, why not just get the foil version if you have to pay $1 or whatever for shipping regardless? It’s also worth noting that using Secret Salvage on Hedron Alignment means you can handle exiling a copy and finding your other copies in one card. That’s pretty good if you ask me.
Which cards do you think are worth discussing at their current price? Did I miss something that’s obvious to you because you’re so smart? Leave it in the comments section. Until next week!
By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin
Don’t miss this week’s installment of the MTG Fast Finance podcast, an on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important changes in the Magic economy. And watch this YouTube channel to keep up to date with Cartel Aristocrats, a fun and informative webcast with several other finance personalities!
Wow. Now that was an announcement. If you somehow missed it, Wizards told us that in four hours we were getting the Banned & Restricted List update, one week early, and then dropped an especially large hammer:
Standard:
Smuggler’s Copter is banned.
Emrakul, the Promised End is banned.
Reflector Mage is banned.
Modern:
Golgari-Grave Troll is banned.
Gitaxian Probe is banned.
It’s going to take a lot of weeks, words, and work to figure out what all of this means across Standard and Modern. This week I’ll do my best to capture the surface level of these changes, but please give me some leeway for not catching any huge shifts that may come about. I’m sure even the pros are sitting around scratching their heads about where to go from here right now.
ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.
Hey all,
Wizards of the Coast surprised everyone this morning by announcing the Banned & Restricted list changes for all official formats a week earlier than was planned.
Here are the results:
Ok, so that list was a bit, er, unexpected. Let’s unpack the signals.
Standard
Emrakul, the Promised End is banned because, as part of the various flavors of Marvel Aetherworks combo decks she represents a massive feel-bad scenario as early as Turn 4. The ability to put Emrakul into play in the early game and absolutely wreck opponents on the spot has been a central figure in the perception that we were in the midst of a “bad” Standard format since a few weeks after the release of Kaladesh. Now that sales of Eldritch Moon are no longer a priority, shaking up Standard carries massive benefit as we head into the release of Aether Revolt and Amonkhet, and this ban was widely discussed in the context of potential fixes for the format heading into the announcement.
Smuggler’s Copter was targeted for being so pushed that it was impacting the diversity of the format. Translation? It gets played in too many decks, but it also reduces the chance that many other cards will get played, including other Vehicles and Planeswalkers, of which we have several incoming in upcoming sets. Still, this is going to be a tough pill to swallow for the many Standard players that bought full play sets and the stores that are carrying heavy inventory of the card. My head is now on swivel for this card to crash in price immediately, and I will be looking to pick up foils on the cheap in case it ends up making a splash in Modern (via aggro, Ensoul Artifact or BW tokens builds) or Frontier continues to grow (where it may be safe for now given the unsanctioned nature of the format and some folks desire to make use of their copies.)
Reflector Mage is a very odd choice that WoTC explained was necessary to ensure U/W Flash didn’t run rampant in the format with the other bans on the table. I’m not sure I agree that such a ban was necessary, but at least this one doesn’t cost us much money. Had they targeted Archangel Avacyn, Spell Queller or Gideon, Ally of Zendikar, the financial body count would have been getting pretty high, so a powerful lower cost target makes some sense from that angle.
The most important takeaway from all of this is that Wizards is more than willing to ban for participation issues rather than big tournament/on camera dominance. This factors heavily into the safety of future specs since any card that might be deemed to be impacting sales is now at risk.
Modern
Gitaxian Probe is a card that has been discussed as ban worthy by many pros on the basis of being too flexible, too easy to cast and too useful in sussing out the likely shape of a game in Modern. In decks like Infect and Death’s Shadow Aggro the card allows a pilot to dig deeper, check whether the opponent has a relevant answer in hand, and fill the graveyard with Delve count. The card doesn’t win games by itself, but eliminating it makes some of the most dominant aggro decks a little weaker, and hopefully provides some breathing room for other strategies to rise. Thankfully, I sold any spares I had lying around months ago as ban whispers were rising, and I hope you did the same.
Golgari Grave-Troll now holds the dubious distinction of being a card that has been banned not once, but twice in Modern. In fairness, Drege did not look like a threat when the big green guy last came off the list, but the printing of Prized Amalgam and Cathartic Reunion in particular helped turn the deck into a finely tuned juggernaut capable of ridiculously explosive and non-interactive game play. There was a good time to sell this card earlier in the year, and I hope you took the chance if you were holding because we are highly unlikely to see this card at relevant top tables again any time soon.
New B&R Schedule
The other noteable announcement is that we are now going to get B&R changes before and after Pro Tours. Here are the details:
From a financial perspective this is going to make speculating on especially strong cards a bit more risky, since there is now an official safety valve on hand should things get out of hand. This should be read as a measure being introduce primarily to ensure that Standard seasons stay on track in terms of sales and participation, since problems of this kind can’t really be easily discerned on this schedule for Modern, since there are no longer Modern Pro Tour stops.
Make sure to note the relevant days in your calendar so that you can stay on top of things moving forward.
James is the 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.
