Presale Movement From Phyrexia: All Will Be One

February 10, 2023 Cliff Daigle

Today, Phyrexia: All Will Be One becomes legal on TCGPlayer, and I’m expecting quite a frenzy around a few very specific cards.

This past week, we had that nebulous zone between prerelease and Opening Day, where the only cards that can be sold are the ones individuals opened in the prerelease events. Store-level vendors weren’t allowed to sell yet, everything is pre-ordered and cannot be shipped yet.

As a result, cards have stayed very expensive and some cards have gotten a frenzy of attention. Let’s go over some of the bigger movers, and a pickup or two, as well as where I’m expecting them to go from here.

A generalized caveat: I always tell people to sell/trade everything they open at the prerelease level. There is a lot of money to be made doing that, and almost everything is going to lose a lot of value. We don’t have to go very far for examples of this, but let’s take a card with a lot of hype:

Ajani, Sleeper Agent in regular nonfoil has dropped by more than half even after we started tracking in September, but some of the pre-order prices in August were north of $30! So get rid of things while you can.

Now, as for the new set, let’s take a peek at what’s gone up this week as hype cycles have happened.

Mercurial Spelldancer has gotten Legacy attention as a great way to get ridiculous value over and over again. It’s already decent as a two-mana, two-power unblockable creature, but in a format overloaded with cheap noncreature spells (and this includes Modern) it’s just about casting Ponder and Bolt, it’s about using Mishra’s Bauble and other such broken cards to set up a copied huge spell, and I’m here for that.

This card went from about $3 to $11+, and as a rare, it’s about to have a lot of copies opened. If you get $7 this weekend I’ll be impressed, but I’m willing to bet that this is back under $4 within two weeks. Sell like mad!

Vraska, Betrayal’s Sting was under $10 at one point recently but is now going for $25 because it’s an instant-win with Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider. If Vorinclex is on your field, and you play Vraska, she comes in with twelve counters and can instantly ultimate. If a player has anything less than nine poison, they are going to be poisoned out. Eight counters means they get one more, which Vorinclex doubles to two, giving them ten and that’s GG.

Two-card combos are usually not a problem in Commander, or even Modern. Splinter Twin remains illegal in Modern, mainly because both Pestermite and Exarch flash in and tap the land you could use for interaction.The Copy Cat combo is legal in Modern, and that’s three mana into four. This is five mana into six, and the five mana part can be attacked to death before the combo happens.

Vraska is a mythic, but there’s still going to be a lot opened and her price will tumble back to $15, and eventually be under $10 again.

Venerated Rotpriest is clearly a combo card, and one that works with a lot of different cards to combo an opponent out. Ground Rift is a current favorite, as the Storm mechanic lets you build up a critical mass very quickly. There won’t be a shortage of busted things to do here, especially when Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief is a card too.

I expect this to keep riding a rollercoaster. It’s already been up to $20, down to $12, and is now $15. It’ll drop down to $5 or so, but the good news for this card’s value is that people who play it want four copies. Every new combo with the card will result in it popping up, then retracing downward. Be prepared to sell into spikes.

The Mycosynth Gardens has gotten a lot of attention for being an easy way to copy Lion’s Eye Diamond, for decks able to take advantage of that. If you can recur the land, it keeps working, because it’s zero to activate the ability and the LED can still be used even if it’s tapped.

While a neat interaction, it’s remarkably narrow. LED is restricted in paper Vintage, though it is Legacy and Commander legal. Given how many decks are running Urza’s Saga in Modern, I won’t be shocked if this sees a little play there too, just to get more and more value from lands. Unfortunately, these corner cases are not enough to prop up the price, which started at $15, fell to $6, and is now about $10. A very steep decline is coming for this card, and you should prepared accordingly.

One precognitive note, though: When this gets cheap (I mean like a buck in six months) I’m going to pick up a brick of these. The Dark Depths/Thespian’s Stage combo is an example of how open-ended synergies can work out, and some artifact that comes into play with counters and needs those counters removed…combo kill! Can’t wait to see what it does. It’s already very good in Commander if you run Mana Crypt and Sol Ring. Please note that it stops being a land when you activate it, unless you copy an artifact land.

Jace, the Perfected Mind is my pick for a card that has the best chance to go up right away. Control decks crave exactly this interaction, an early way to nullify one of their creatures and force the opponent to build up a wider board, setting up for the Supreme Verdict next turn.

JaceTPM has trickled downward from $15 to $8, and if enough control decks adopt him for the midgame, he’s got a good chance to rise up. I don’t think he’ll be the next Ledger Shredder or anything, but this is a very very good blue Planeswalker in control shells.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

Jason Alt, ProTrader

Pro Trader: Pro Liferation

February 7, 2023 Jason Alt

Readers!

I’m back on my particular signature brand of BS for this week and it’s going to be a fun article to write. Finally, we get to write about cards I like to play. By that, of course I mean cards I want to put in decks. Notice I didn’t say “deck” because with the stupid, stupid, stupid, idiotic stupid poison counter theme in Phyrexia: All Will Be One (PAWBO for short), we have another theme that works hand in hand with it, enables other strategies (Planeswalkers) and is heavily in the best color combination (Simic). I am talking, of course, about ~~Landfall~~ Proliferate.

Proliferate is a big subtheme in PAWBO, but between the set which gave us a few Proliferate cards and the precons which seemed to ignore the main set in that regard, we have old cards and new cards that are both getting some new looks. While Ezuri is of course not the most popular commander in the set, I think it’s the best place to see the Proliferate cards that matter. Let’s take a look.

I really expected a reprinting of Inexorable Tide, but I think it might be a minute for a reprint. I also think if Inexorable Tide gets printed, it’s unlikely to be in a big set and that could hurt its upside. Also, this isn’t the first time we made money on this card.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Casual Fridays

Expectations for Pro Tour ONE

February 5, 2023 Cliff Daigle

I know it seems odd to be writing about the Pro Tour in two weeks, when the new set is out now.

My financial advice for people playing in prerelease events remains the same as always: Sell it all. Find someone who wants your lands. Move it and don’t wait around. Someone will see the sweet foil you opened and want to trade for it right now, not realizing (or not caring) that it’ll be 1/3 the price in two weeks.

So whatever you can move, right now, do that.

As for the Pro Tour in Philadelphia, on Feb 17-19, that’s a more complicated plan.

It used to be that Pro Tours were such big events that we (MTGPrice writers) would do round-by-round coverage of the Constructed games. Being featured on camera tends to do amazing things to a card. Here’s an example I made money from:

For context: In July 2017, Pro Tour Hour of Devastation happened, and put six Mono-Red decks into the Top 8. All of them were running three or four copies of Hazoret, who is really the perfect top-end card for an aggro deck. Because so many top results included this card, and so many on-camera matches showed players just wrecking with the card, the price took a huge jump.

Personally, I bought copies that Friday for under $5 and resold them within two weeks at $15-$20, before fees. I even wrote about it that Friday, which when looking through the archives, you might note that we featured round-by-round coverage of the PT. Yes, Hazoret is an example from five years ago, but that’s a really clear example of on-camera play plus tournament results turning a $5 mythic into a $20 mythic.

Wizards really wants this era back. They don’t like to give away the money, to spend the cash on streaming and commentating, but there’s a measurable impact on card prices and therefore tournament participation.

What we’re looking for is card prices moving because of these results. If the prices move significantly, and sell at the new prices, then we’re looking at a notable chunk of the population who meet the following characteristics:

They want to play in paper tournaments
They have a tournament in mind that they are buying for
They are willing to invest into a deck that is good for that format.

There’s a lot to be said for the growth of Arena during the pandemic, and how it papered over the complete loss of paper play/transitioned online play, but when Standard was a healthy, thriving format, everything at Wizards was that much better. A couple years after that PT, we got a Modern-lite format in Pioneer, which is notable for skipping the fetchlands and some of the more busted mechanics.

Pioneer doesn’t rotate, and that’s the format that PT ONE will have. Standard can breed some resentment with more casual players, because your cards are probably going to lose value and they are definitely going to rotate out of the card pool. Pioneer skips that problem, but trades it for only some cards being relevant, both in the metagame and in the financial sense.

At this point, I’m waiting on seeing Pioneer pushing prices, and same with Standard. The smallest subgroup for those three characteristics is probably those who have a paper tournament that they want to play in, because so many stores closed and not many have opened.

It’s not there yet. There’s a small effect, as we can see the card that Nathan Steuer used to overpower people over and over again in the October 2022 World Championships did bump from a dollar to $2.50:

As a counterexample, though, Haunted Ridge was in a tremendous number of decks that weekend, is a big-time Commander card, and is also used in Pioneer. It’s grown in price, but that’s started to trend downwards at it looks towards rotation in a few months:

This is the edition that paper tournaments would be exerting pressure on if there was a lot of demand. Not the foils, not the FEA, not the Double Feature versions. It’s hanging out at $10, which is still very good for a rare, but given the decks it is in, I would have expected it to keep the $12-$15 price a bit longer.

So to put it all together, I’m not expecting to see any big jumps this weekend, at least none that have staying power. I won’t be shocked at some cards having minor gains, but there’s nothing on the horizon that makes me think there’s long-term use going on. When I see cards getting big gains from tournament results, I’ll rethink this policy, but for now, I’m avoiding trying to cash in on one event’s results.

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Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Don’t Say 10k

January 31, 2023 Jason Alt

Readers!

Using EDHREC or, if you want to do it the hard way, I guess, other sources, it’s easy to see which cards are getting played in Commander and which aren’t. Look at a set and see what’s getting played with. That used to be enough information for us. Barring reprints, cards were printed the same amount, roughly, foils were flat and still special and older cards went up when new cards made them matter again. The problem is, the more they wanted us to buy, the more the cards had to be good. They need to keep pushing the gas, which means more good cards per set, more sets, which means more cards you need to play. Do you build a new deck or take cards out of the 3 week old deck you’ve played twice to make room for the new cards that made your old ones obsolete? And if a card is too good to be made obsolete, do you take comfort in that and invest or do you worry about what the card that makes people stop playing Dockside Extortionist is going to look like? I personally worry about how just getting played a lot doesn’t matter, and also doesn’t seem to be useful for figuring out where prices will go. Let’s look at a few cards, shall we?

Forgive my hasty alignment using paint of all programs, I don’t want to take the time to fix it because I wanted to make a point. Both of these cards are played a lot in new Elesh Norn decks, and in the format in general. One costs more than the other despite being newer. Does that mean Terramancer is played more across the format?

No, in fact. There are lots of versions of Welcoming Vampire, and Deep Gnome Terramancer was in a set that has a lot of really good cards. Do I expect Terramancer to hit $10 when Welcoming Vampire is played more and hasn’t come close? How many reprints and variants and promos does it take to drag a card down to being a buck less than a card played half as much? As there other factors at play here?

The real question here is that whether Deep Gnome Terramancer is a good pickup at under $5. We’d love for it to hit at least $10 if we’re outing at retail prices, much more if we want to clear our shipping costs buylisting them. Is this sort of spec dead? Moreover, is being a format staple even good enough anymore?

We used to be impressed by a card being in 10,000 decks as far back as EDHREC measured, and one of the reasons I cautioned against arbitrary levels like that was that the number would have to constantly change and no one would know where it should be. At this point, is 22k enough? Why can’t 41k and a year of time offset multiple promo versions? What trajectory is Terramancer even on?

If 4 is the floor on this card and it’s already rebounding, will it pull farther away from Vampire despite being played less? What are we to make of these contradictions? Worse, is being in 40 or even 50k decks enough anymore? With all of the new keywords comes enablers and that means cards get more and more specialized until the decks build themselves. We used to be at a sweet spot where staples were an index and individual cards being buoyed by new releases meant some narrow cards would get a new look and that scrutiny would lead to buying and price increases. Now, the cards are so specialized that people are basically leaving the precons as-is a card being in a 40K deck matters more than being in 40k decks, you know?

The neon Hidetsugu and the promise of extended art foil Boseiju and foils of the EDH precon cards continued the unsustainable trend of collector boosters being opened until the prices were all meaningless. Is The Reality Chip a buy at $3? More than that, are we OK with a game where the 9th most played card in the most popular format is $2.50? Let me rephrase that, of course I want a game like that, but is it worth doing Mtg Finance the way I have done Mtg Finance the last decade if the demand can’t ever catch supply?

The days of snagging like 100 cheap copies of something you think is going up on TCG Player seem over. Mtg Finance has always been “adapt or die” and after taking a month off to grapple with how I felt about my current approach to Mtg Finance, I think I am ready to adapt. To that end, I’ll be spending the next few months developing and reporting on new techniques and pointing out times where my old approach pays off.

It wasn’t that Kibo, Uktabi Prince couldn’t move prices, it’s that Ravenous Baboons were the only card the really went anywhere. The price immediately went back down as there wasn’t much real demand since the card doesn’t especially synergize with Kibo and it was more likely just an old Monkey people remembered because they’ve been playing as long as me.

My current method, which we’re updating, is still useful for paying attention to movement, usage, relative ubiquity. Staring at the Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines page on EDHREC doesn’t feel like it used to where specs would leap off of the page at me. I just see the same mono-White Blink deck stuff that I said would go up based on another White Blink commander but didn’t. Cards used to be cards, but now the product matters a lot. Limited releases like Baldur’s Gate give us stronger signals, faster. Look what is in 40k decks and has been out exactly as long as Deep Gnome.

Moving forward, I’ll be targeting older cards for specs and only straying into newer card territory when it makes sense to do so, or if it’s in a dynamite set like Baldur’s Gate. I think Baldur’s Gate has more to give us, so I’ll be diving directly into that set next week. Until then, I usually include specs and this week I mostly told you what not to buy, so here are some presented without explanation.