Casual Fridays

Retro Artifacts go BRR

We are far enough into the set’s cycle that I can say this with confidence: It’s pretty amazing that we’re going to be able to buy so many awesome cards for some very cheap prices, and that they printed a set with two subsets: BRO, plus the BOT and BRR sets. Amazing stuff.

Right now, the serialized artifacts are taking all of the time and attention and money for this set. It’s understandable: there’s exactly 500 of each card, numbered and everything. It’s a gorgeous foiling, too, and we’ve even got crimped or other misprinted serialized cards running around! All the pieces are in place for the non-premium versions to tank pretty hard in the upcoming months. 

As such, I like to plan out my targets in advance for this sort of thing. I’m not buying now, and I’m not buying in three months. I’ve learned, and written about, the new timeline for cards being six months from release.

A note about the EDHREC rank: These rankings represent only the people maximally online and invested in uploading their decks. I haven’t put any of my decks up there, and there’s also a bias towards preconstructed decks. This is useful information, but it isn’t an all-knowing Oracle on the hill, nor a foolproof metric.

Swiftfoot Boots, Ashnod’s Altar, and Chromatic Lantern are by far the most popular cards here, but they will only be viable if the price drops to nearly bulk. Both of them have a lot of printings, and while the retro border is cool, this is absolutely a stay-away for me. 

Burnished Hart is in similar straits, but this at least is the only unique frame for the card. What’s warning me off is that there’s a Foil Extended Art from Commander Legends 1, when the FEAs were notably rarer, and that price is still super cheap. If you can get a lot of shiny versions for very very cheap, you might have a buylist play in the future, but I’m still not planning to buy.

Aetherflux Reservoir (current lowest priced version at $5, highest is $30, listed in 84,000 EDHREC decks) – Now here’s a card I can spec on. Foils for the retro and the schematic frame are $8 and $20, respectively, and that’s a big gap for cards that exist with the same drop rate. It’s got a pedigree, it’s a plan on its own in Commander, and it’s headed for its lowest price ever. I’m hopeful for foils in the $5 range in a few months, and that’s a lovely price for a mythic.

Altar of Dementia ($3 to $20, 64k decks) – There’s only two foils of this, one from Conspiracy and one from Modern Horizons, which you can see was released in June 2019:

We can see how cheap the card has been, and now we’re getting a whole lot more copies put into circulation. It’s a mythic now, not a rare, but that shouldn’t matter too much, given how frantically people are opening BRO Collector Boosters. I like this a lot long-term, and what I’m hoping for is that the foils (currently $5 and $13) keep tumbling lower. Even the Retro foil would be super attractive at $3, given that the other foils are over $11. I would also be interested in nonfoils if they got to the $1 range.

Mox Amber ($22 to $115, 58k decks) – You wouldn’t think that I’d be waiting on the big hit to come down, but I sure as heck am. The mad dash for serialized cards has Amber dropping from its all-time high:

And in fact, let’s zoom in on the recent part:

Yup, it’s fallen by half in the first month since its reveal and it’s definitely not done dropping. This is a marvelous candidate for buying something like 50 copies at ten bucks each around Easter. I can’t wait. The foils for the retro and schematic should get somewhat cheaper too, and will make the Dominaria foil prices look silly.

My only concern is that this card is an excellent candidate for Dominaria Remastered, and whatever special thing they have in mind for that set. Since that’s coming out in January, though, I’ll have enough time to make that decision.

Helm of the Host ($6 to $30, 57k decks) – I was surprised to see that this had only gotten a List reprint, but everything I said about Amber holds true here: It’s falling fast, it’ll fall for a while, and I won’t be shocked to see it in Dominaria Remastered. Once that hurdle is past, though, I’m really hoping that this ends up near one or two bucks a copy. Perfect buylist play once the retail gets to $5 again, and it undoubtedly will. This is one of the biggest equip costs commonly played in Commander, but there’s both ways around it and it’s always worth it anyway. There’s no special frame out there and not even a Secret Lair, so all the interest is going to go straight to these copies.

Ramos, Dragon Engine ($4 to $25, 13k decks total, 4k as Commander) – Finally, let’s discuss a card that has been looking for the right reprint home for some time. Wizards has done a lot to make Dragons a fun species to play, and five-color decks especially. There’s no shortage of ways to abuse this card, including ways to bounce and replay and break this ability right in half. Scrapbasket and Transguild Courier are cards I’ve seen do hilarious things. We can see the effect of all the recent Dragon goodness, as well as the effect of previewing the card, in the graph:

However, this card has been in tiny circulation for the longest time. It was a foil in the original Commander 2017 printing, and it was an Etched Foil for Commander Legends. That was it, till now. Its price was propped up by such small printings, and as such, I fully expect this to drop quite a ways…where I want to buy it up.

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, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Timmy Stuff

Readers!

I haven’t covered the same product two weeks ago in this series and I feel like that sentence can replace the normal paragraph I write above the fold in this series where I express incredulity that my favorite thing in the world could make me feel this consistently terrible. If you’re not like me and you’re capable of only caring about the stuff you care about, you’re probably thrilled that there have never been more chances to buy products and build new decks. The thing is, the best specs are the ones that don’t rely on Commander only, they rely on other formats. Typically a format like Modern will feature a card and a combination of some Modern or Pioneer to a lesser extent (for now, I guess) play with Commander play bodes well for a card. You know what is better than Modern? A format played by the majority of Magic players. The answer is not Commander, believe it or not. No, the format enjoyed by the vast, vast majority of people who play Magic the Gathering is the format “63 unsleeved card I own” and it has been sweeping the nation since 1993. These players are the lifeblood of the game, and while they mostly buy boosters at Walmart, these players are very aware of the internet and how to use it and they buy cards. Caring what cards they buy can help us spec better, and today I want to talk about the casualest casual kind of casual concepts for decks – Lifegain.

Actually, I should have buried the lede under the fold to entice people to sign up for Pro Trader. Let me take that again.

Today I want to talk about… wait, that won’t work. OK, so the cat is out of the bag, I guess. Today I want to talk about lifegain cards, specifically for a deck that is coming out soon or is out already, I am not sure which.

Monks and Lifegain? Is there a more Timmier thing possible? I don’t know if there is, but I’m very excited to see where this goes. In addition to kind of wanting to build the deck, I want to see if there are any Timmy cards in the deck.

Oh yeah. We can work with this.

I think this is a $10 card in waiting, and being able to snag these for $3 from TCG Player seems like a real winner. This is a very Timmy card, granting you lifegain and rebuying spells for you. I honestly with this creature could be Legendary, but I would probably just loop Time Warp with it. Even if this only goes to $7, which it basically can’t if it spikes for a reason, this is still a buy at $3.

Also this.

We mostly missed the boat on this most brutal of White finishers but since it’s $10 on TCG and hit $15 on CK, I’d argue it’s a buy at retail. Reprint risk is impossible to know at this point, so caveat emptor.

This may be the first time I have cited the EDHREC salt score survey that we do like onceish a yearish as a jokeish, but here I go. When these cards first came out, people were furious about outside IP where they try to gather their Magic. Now they seemed to have calmed down a bit, and supply seems real low on this card. I think it’s a good card and being an Advisor doesn’t suck. I don’t know if the Archimandrite will be a real player going forward, I think with the pace of releases those days might be over, but I think Glenn is a $10 card.

How many copies of this card between Legacy and 7th could there really be out there?

Not 0 and not a million. The problem with a card like this is that if it goes up, copies will come out of the woodwork to attenuate the price spike unless you’re insanely quick. I don’t see it. Weird that such an old card is so cheap, though, and it’s great in this deck. Wonder what foils are going for.

Way, way less than I thought. Even 7th seems downright affordable.

How was this $8 in 2019?

When TCG retail is CK buylist, I’m a buyer.

That does it for me this week, nerds. The deck contains a lot more lfiegainy goodies and there are honestly probably 10 more promising cards just on this page. I don’t know if this card will be what does it, but when you look at the Timminess of these cards, you have to admit they don’t really need that much help. Let’s break off some of these sub-200 copy cards and count our money. Until next time!

Casual Fridays

Why is the Festival in a Box still available?

If you are feeling burned out on Secret Lair purchases, that’s valid. It’s been a never-ending stream of cards from the fire hose, with Universes Beyond and Post Malone and 30th Anniversary Countdown, plus everything else that’s come along in the six months before that.

We had something interesting happen, though. A Festival-In-A-Box (hereafter known as FIAB) was released for the Magic event in Philadelphia in March. The last time a FIAB went on sale, it was gone in hours. This time…it’s still available days later, and I want to get into why. What’s changed? Is there still value to be had? Was there ever value? Let’s get into it.

First of all, let’s do the direct comparison. Here’s what you got from the Vegas FIAB last time:

This time, still available for Philadelphia and not shipping till March:

Handily, both were the same price of $270, so we can extrapolate from there. 

The Mystery Booster: Convention Edition is clearly the big draw here. The price went down about $40 as people got their Vegas FIAB and sold the box. These went for around $260 before August; now they are down to $220 or so. That box represents a huge chunk of the value that can be gained from the whole package, and while I respect anyone who wants to resell it, the Mystery draft experience is a great one. 

I doubt that the box prices will have recovered much by March, and frankly, I’d expect the value to take another tumble. Remember that while there are 23 cards in that set currently retailing for $10+, there’s nearly 1700 cards in the set. Lots of people buying, lots of opening, lots of reselling. I wouldn’t be shocked if boxes of MYB were down to $175.

One other thing: they made minor alterations to the set, taking out Rhystic Study but adding in a second Sakashima the Impostor and some others. The full list of changes is near the end here, and the changes were done mainly to distance themselves from artists Wizards has deemed problematic. 

Amazingly, they seem to be out of the promo Sol Ring to give out. This was a giveaway for so many things for so long, and now it’s the Gauntlet Arcane Signet that’s going for just over $20 right now. It’s a cool one, but there’s competition in the Secret Lair (old border!) and the Foil Extended Art and the Warhammer versions and the other Secret Lair…you see what I mean. I’m glad it’s getting traction, but I’m doubtful that it’ll hold $20 for much longer, especially when the FIAB arrive in March.

I’m also going to call the Commander decks a wash. They chose what they had extras of, and those are the ones that didn’t have a lot of valuable reprints. The decks aren’t bad, they just don’t come with a Black Market Connections or anything like that. 

I think Look At The Kitties is a defensible set of choices, with some really cute art. The first cat-themed Secret Lair is reselling for a pretty penny indeed, and we are getting a decent selection of cards. None are super-pricey, but solid choices and good art mean that it should appreciate over time like all of the non-land Secret Lairs have. 

Atraxa Sleeves and a matching playmat, when that’s the most popular commander of the last few years…it’s really an inspired choice. There’s a boatload of those players out there, and it’s just going to take a few hundred who are willing to pay a premium to have the sleeves and the playmat match up. I think this will be a surprisingly profitable item, topping off a valuable package and worth the buy, especially if you’ve got someone you can gift the Commander decks to.

The biggest thing is the quantity out there. I fully expect that Wizards is selling a lot more of these FIAB than they did for Vegas. It’s unlikely that they are going to sell too many at this price and without the cache of the big return to gathering, but there’s no doubt that there will not be scarce quantities of this package out there. 

I’m not going to be buying a bunch of these for spec purposes, but if I had an Atraxa deck, I’d 100% be buying one for my personal use and selling off the other pieces.

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, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: More than Meets the Eye

Readers!

We got dese dumb Transformah decks and I think they’ll do… not nothing? I expected more impact from the Street Fighter Secret Lairs and it seems like there are finally so many products that large numbers of people cannot be relied upon reasonably to engage with all of them. It’s great that not every product is for everyone, but how do we guess which products are for no one? People are going to buy these Transformers cards, sue, and some of them might even play EDH. However, I have no idea whether this will matter enough to sell singles. I’m going to do what I have always done hoping things just click or I figure out the next technique, but I feel a ton of instability in my life right now and it’s making me worry about everything I used to believe in.

I am going to act as though I think these Transformers cards will impact the game to enough of an extent that prices move, something that Street Fighter hasn’t really borne out yet. I’m hoping the Transformers stuff is important, but if it’s not, all I did was waste an article slot. You will have spent money. I am not telling you I don’t believe in my picks because I’m a bad at this, rather I am saying that I don’t have the normal confidence in the premise of this being a worthwhile exercise – I will identify picks the same way I always do. As always, there is risk – if this was easy money, everyone would do it and I would be a carpenter or something. Anyway, let’s do that thing we do.



We have a whopping 15 commanders in this product. It’s a lot of cards. I don’t know, I hate this, what do you want from me?


Let’s go in order of popularity until we stop wanting to, shall we?




High Synergy card piles are starting to look like the first 10 cards reprinted the next time they do a precon, something they do 11 times a year now. I don’t know, it’s really hard to be excited about these staples, especially when half of them were in a precon to begin with.




This is a real Timmy card and at $2 for a mythic and $4 for an EA mythic, I think we are basically at the floor. You can get these from TCG Player for basically buylist. I don’t know what the future holds, but a big, dumb, dorky creature like this that makes so much power is great, especially in a deck where you’ll creature 12 pre-combat effortlessly. Flame Rift gives you 12 mana in this deck, you’ll be farting out huge creatures in no time.




This is an absurd card, held in check by its high CMC in a deck where colorless mana is as abundant as water. I’m into this in the format in general. The biggest reason for some of these cards not doing better is people have never seen them before. I suspect Bronze Guardian hasn’t been seen much and any card that can go from $2 to $10 because it was on Game Knights is worth keeping an eye on, and you can keep a very close eye on them if they’re in a pile on your desk like all of my specs.




Why would this price go down before it goes up? This card is insane. Unfortunately, it’s one of only like 20 cards worth more than $3 from those precons, so…. whee. Does that make the buy-in higher than I’d like? A bit, but it won’t matter in a year.




I have told you and told you to get this card – I sure hope you listened! It’s half on TCG what they want on CK so, that’s something. I love this card and I don’t know why it’s hasn’t been reprinted, but I have basically made money on this card 3 times so it’s about time I lost all of it, I guess. This isn’t a buy because of Optimus Prime decks, but it’s not like those hurt.



The guy that turns into an 80s ghetto blaster is the third most popular, go figure.




So here is another troubling concept.




Curiosity Crafter was shown on Game Knights, to great effect I might add. It spiked accordingly, and hard. It fell way, way off – not settling midway between the spike and pre-spike price, but rather at barely twice it. Buying in at $1 trying to cash out at $2 is hard work, so you need to be ready to pull the trigger and list when they start to pop for $15. Are you that nimble? This is the best case scenario for a lot of specs. Seems stressful, right? This is how you make actual money on a $1 card, though.




I have made money on this card this year, but I’m not ruling out buying back the same copies from CK that I buylisted to them and trying again now that CK retail is below what I buylisted them for. I hope I see my same old copies and get to get paid for babysitting them again. Other cards that do this a lot are Teferi’s Puzzle Box, Anvil of Bogardan and Sunforger. Feels good to sell a company cards you just bought from it for more than you paid, it’s arbitrage without a third part. The dream.




This is the absolute floor for this card. It tanking because of a reprint rather than loss of adoption makes it basically impossible this ever sees $40 again, but what do you want for a seven dollar and forty cent buy-in?


That does it for me this week, nerds. Thanks for reading. Until next time!

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY