By now if you’ve been playing the game long enough to know what a “bulk rare” is you know the rest of pack is just “bulk.” The reality of it is if you leave those cards on the table you’re probably incrementally costing yourself a bunch of money.
There are so many names for the other 14 cards in a booster pack. Sometimes it’s bulk, sometimes more caustically known as “draft trash,” but most of the time it’s just a bunch of quarters, dimes, and dollars people often leave behind or throw in the garbage. Picking bulk is a hard thing to do and people pay for bulk because they assume it hasn’t been picked to it’s fullest potential. I’m not going to teach you how to pick every card out of bulk that can be sold for some amount of money. What I will suggest is just picking your own bulk for cards you know you will probably need at some point in a set’s lifetime in Standard.
Saving Some Dollars
So I took a look at the orders from my LGS (I usually buy them online and then pick them up in store) is over the course of the 15ish months that Fate Reforged was in Standard, I spent close to $5 on Arashin Clerics (mostly due to losing them). It might not sound like a lot when Standard had $200 mana bases but a few dollars here and there can make a big difference at the end of the year. If you’re a serious Standard player that doesn’t play the same deck for it’s entire life in Standard sometimes you need a pile of commons and uncommons you weren’t using. Sometimes those are cards you already owned and forgot where you left them. Laziness is a real problem and cost me at least $5. Picking your bulk cards can help ease the problem with finding the right cards to play with while also not costing you a ton of time or money.
What To Pick
The biggest question is what do you pick. If you don’t want to sort literally every card you own there must be a threshold for a card to be worth setting aside. I have a few rules of thumb that I follow when figuring out what to pick:
- Is it first pickable in draft? A lot of very powerful limited cards find there way into Standard. The poster child for this is rares like Pack Rat and Citadel Siege. In more recent sets even commons have become constructed all stars. How many people expected the top 8 of Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch to include Eldrazi Skyspawner in Modern?
- Does it cost 3 or less? Cards that cost 3 or less are more likely to be constructed playable. When they cost a low enough amount of mana, even basically vanilla creatures like Dragon Hunter and Expedition Envoy become constructed playable.
- Does it do some situationally relevant thing very well? Commons and uncommons that I’ve found myself unlikely to have are weird niche sideboard cards. This is the category for cards like Clip Wings, Arashin Cleric, Negate, etc. When they’re good, they’re very good. But when they’re bad, they’re almost unplayable.
- Is it a land? Lands are always playable in some capacity. Although you may never play most of them, it’s a small price to pay to own a bunch of weird lands just so you don’t have to spend a few bucks to buy them. This is also especially important when a land is in it’s first print cycle (like the Shadows over Innistrad enemy colored tap lands and Warped Landscape).
- Is it an uncommon? I’m much more liberal with pulling uncommons than commons because the more playable uncommons are typically much more expensive. While most constructed playable commons from recent sets don’t typically get more than $0.50, very good uncommons can be $3 or more (like Monastery Swiftspear).
- Does it kill things? Cheap, efficient removal is almost always one of those things that finds a way into constructed formats.
- Does it do a similar thing to a card you already know is playable? I know this is a little hard to describe so I will give the best analogy. Flaying Tendrils is a lot like Drown in Sorrow. Drown in Sorrow was very playable when it was in Standard so I would assume Flaying Tendrils has a higher than average chance of being played. Biting Rain would also be picked under the same context.
What does this all look like?
To give you a better idea of how I pick my bulk, I’ll give you the list of cards I took out:
Commons:
- Catalog
- Deny Existence
- Just the Wind
- Nagging Thoughts
- Pieces of the Puzzle
- Alms of the Vein
- Dead Weight
- Murderous Compulsion
- Shamble Back
- Dual Shot
- Fiery Temper
- Insolent Neonate
- Tormenting Voice
- Clip Wings
- Fork in the Road
- Loam Dryad
- Root Out
- Vessel of Nascency
- Angelic Purge
- Thraben Inspector
- Vessel of Ephemera
- Warped Landscape
Uncommons:
- Biting Rain
- Call the Bloodline
- Indulgent Aristocrat
- Olivia’s Bloodsworn
- Pick the Brain
- Sinister Concoction
- Compelling Deterrence
- Essence Flux
- Invasive Surgery
- Ongoing Investigation
- Pore over the Pages
- Rise from the Tides
- Topplegeist
- Groundskeeper
- Weirding Wood
- Dance with Devils
- Geistblast
- Gibbering Fiend
- Incorrigible Youths
- Lightning Axe
- Ravenous Bloodseeker
- Forsaken Sanctuary
- Foul Orchard
- Highland Lake
- Stone Quarry
- Woodland Stream
The last thing I picked was all of the double faced cards. I’m not sure which ones will be good or bad but there are so few that if I ever need any of them I will likely be short as it is. As the case was, I didn’t have 4 Duskwatch Recruiters to make the Bant Company deck. At any rate, I figure I will find myself taking these cards out of the fatpack box they now reside in and thanking my lucky stars I picked them.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go through my sorted picks from Magic Origins and get my Bounding Krasi (Krasises? What’s the plural of krasis?) and feel good I won’t pay $1 for them.
