Readers!
My goal of not writing about the same product 2 months in a row for all of 2022 is going nicely. This week I’ll be reviewing Jumpstart because why not? Jumpstart always sells a ton of packs but, also, the more linear type of Commander creatures favored by a straightforward product like Jumpstart can really move prices.
Member diss? You can argue that it wasn’t just Tinybones that did this, but this spike had come and gone before anyone had even heard the name “Tergrid.” This is a graph of the buylist price, not retail, mind you. I don’t know if anything from this Jumpstart will be this robust at lightning fires under the asses of some of the more lethargic prices of EDH-playables. Will anything from this Jumpstart be Tinybones two k twenty-two? I don’t know, but it’s my job to tell you if I see anything that might do some work. Let’s look at Jumpstart.
If this looks really preliminary, it’s because it is. The thing is, as much as I think Isu is a fun deck to run as just a crazy landfall deck that they don’t realize is landfall until you KO them for 20 unblockable, we can’t ignore the sick meme action that is Kibo, Uktabi Prince.
If Kibo is going to do some monkey business, I want to be the business man who gets in on the action. There will be banana tokens in these packs, too, and since Kibo is a mythic, the tokens will be at mythic rarity as well, so try not to toss them in the trash when you bust a billion packs of this stupid set. Kibo is legit actually probably really fun to play, so let’s get into it.
OK, so I have been looking at 10 card snapshots like this for a long time. Rather than go into like 10 different commanders, I’m going to do more of my work out loud in case you’re interested in my thought process. It’s been a few years since I have done this, so if you’re new, maybe more of my methodology will make sense to you soon.
You have to play Monkeys in a Kibo deck if you want to get full value out of his abilities, and monkeys and apes with very good abilities make up the bulk of this top 10. For those very new, “High Synergy” means the cards appear in a large number of Kibo decks but not many other decks. The higher the synergy score, the more specific the cards are to that deck. Seeing 9 strong apes here didn’t surprise me, but the 10th card being Viridian Revel is noteworthy.
If you don’t play EDH, and I don’t expect you to, you might not know Viridian Revel was touted tech for dealing with the deluge of Treasure Counter decks like Prosper. It was discussed on a few popular podcasts and inventory was impacted as they say.
This is a price graph I am way into because it tells me a few things despite not looking great at first glance. First of all, it spiked very hard and precipitously which means there was a low inventory situation and the market was shocked by a sudden spike in demand. The card has returned to halfway between what it was at first and where it spiked to, which we see a lot, but the buylist price went down. That means dealers aren’t aggressively restocking because they have a lot of the copies. When dealers have all of the copies of a card and it spikes, no copies are in binders or boxes for people to ferret out and the price will spike harder and faster the second time around. Viridian Revel is due for, if not a shock and a spike, at the very least a correction. I think it’s very reprintable, but those risks are the nature of our reality, now.
After high synergy, I look at top cards. Those are just cards played in a lot of the Kibo decks whether or not lots of decks play them or not. A lot of these cards will be monkey cards, too, but you’ll see a few format staples here sometimes.
Whenever a card as old as Monkey Cage, an ancient card from a set that came out when I was… in High School. Jesus, my skeleton suddenly feels like it has weight. Whenever I see a card from basically last century, I see if it’s a weird meme card that someone collects or if there are basically 900 $0.25 copies of the card on TCG Player.
As funny as it would be to spend a couple hundred bucks to signal to the market that there was a run on Monkey Cage, I saw something else in my researching the stock levels on this card.
Turns out Jumpstart may be the wrong place to try and find Monkey-adjacent cards to spec on until the full set is spoiled, I guess.
Once we’re past High Synergy and Top Cards, you may feel overwhelmed at the gigantic list of cards. It takes a while to remember which kinds of cards end up first on the list and which ones are undervalues and to get a knack for remembering cards that show up a lot. But usually when I write an article like this, I will think about cards that work BEST with Kibo. Sure, Kibo needs monkeys, but Kibo basically gives them an artifact to crack. They get benefit from it so there isn’t much point in not cracking it, which means you can hurt them from doing it to shut off your commander’s drawback, but you can also punish them for cracking their treasure tokens or having artifacts when you wipe their board. Vandalblast isn’t as good a spec as Viridian Revel in the medium term imo, but Vandalblast tells us people will want to wipe their opponents’ Artifacts and hurt them for it. That helps us narrow down the cards to look at and ignore format staples.
I quickly tune out the cards that I know are not tied to Kibo’s fate and look at the rest.
Did you know this was a million dollars? I noticed it came back down, but I also noticed that there is a little uptick. Going in to a bunch of Urza Mishra artifact sets means cards like this are only getting better. Maybe it’s worth pulling those Saga Uncommons out of bulk.
If we’re doing a “give them an artifact and then hurt them for having an artifact” thing, which cards HAVE to be in that deck?
If a graph tells me absolutely no information like this one does, it pays to see if we can check stock levels.
Looks bad to me, but that number can stampede quickly. The problem is, most of the sets listed are 4 at a time, so dealers backstock copies rather than listing them all and having them be subject to a buyout. The wall is low but it’s long and long is bad, too.
This card is far more… dare I say… tempting?
This took a bit to get from $2 to $3 but what about stock levels?
Welp.
For me, this is a good way to glance through a page and be reminded that cards I thought would pop that haven’t, like Ancient Runes, are getting another shot at it, potentially in a very populat deck. Cards like Powerllech are stupid and very funny in this deck and they cost less than a Doubling Season. I see Titania’s Song could be a thing and check to see if it has too many printings. It does. Branching Evolution from last Jumpstart is down to $10? What happened?
It’s down hard over the last few months, but with the +1/+1 counters decks coming out, I love this under $12 right now, especially if CK will be charging $25 for it in a few weeks.
OK, if someone on TCG Player wants $11.50 for a card CK will give me $13 in credit for because they think it will be like $30 next year, I won’t argue.
I hope this glimpse into my thought process was educational, or, more likely, you saw that I mostly do it like you do but you think your way is better. I’m sure you’re right. However, I do excel at paying attention very hard and I hope that means you didn’t have to this week. Thanks for reading, everyone. Until next time!
