Let the Community Surprise You

April 6, 2016 Jason Alt 6 Comments

I didn’t think much of the new Odric when I saw him. In fact, last week, in probably the best article anyone has ever written about EDH Finance, I said the following about him.

That was mostly about how unexcited I was to build around him compared to a card like The Gitrog Monster. Odric is cool and all, but the other Odric just seems way better. Here’s the problem with that logic – the new Odric is NEW. And new is exciting. You can absolutely capitalize on excitement and I’ll tell you how.

Why am I bringing up Odric at all? Well, it’s pretty simple. While the Gitrog Monster is clearly the most exciting card for EDH in all of Shadows over Innistrad, it’s not the only card. People want to build other decks. Based on what I read leading up to the release by basically everyone, the second-most-exciting creature in the set to build around was the new Avacyn. It’s a mythic angel, lets you play red, flips to blow stuff up, makes stuff indestructible and it’s named Avacyn. Those are all super compelling reasons to want to build around her. You will imagine my surprise when EDHREC published their power rankings and the punditry was silenced by raw data.

This list is abridged – the full list can be found in this reddit post.

As a brief aside, I’ll explain how the list is weighted. It’s based on percentage of decks submitted as a snapshot. The numerator is the number of decks submitted with a specific commander and the denominator is the total number of decks submitted to the database over the time period as a snapshot. That means Prossh is 1% of the total decks submitted to EDHREC ever and The Gitrog Monster is 20% of the decks submitted over the 130 decks submitted in April. While this isn’t accurate in terms of showing the most popular decks of all time, it is not that sort of ranking. Those other decks are there merely as context to show relative popularity of decks submitted in April. It’s a power ranking, after all. It shows Meren getting pushed out of the number one spot but still shows how popular Meren has been for context. For more context, they also showed the unweighted, all-time popularity rankings which shows the number of decks for that commander over the total number of decks submitted. Meren didn’t crack the Top 20 all-time (but I can’t imagine it won’t).

So in addition to showing that new cards are topping the power rankings meaning that they experienced the biggest surge, Meren beating out Olivia and Sigarda shows a little context for the surge in popularity for new Commanders relative to older ones people are still excited about. That was to be expected – Sigarda is an angel, but it’s not a very exciting one compared to her older sister. Odric didn’t initially seem that exciting compared to is older brother but the community showed that they were as willing to build an Odric deck as they were Avacyn, at least this early into April. I don’t expect that to stay the same, but as long as people are more excited about Odric than we’d anticipated, it’s worth looking at the cards they are going to want.

Were we wrong in our analysis of how unexciting Odric was during our set review? I don’t think so because even if Odric were 20% of the decks submitted in April, there still wouldn’t be much money to be made pre-ordering him. Non-mythic cards from a 1-of format don’t really move the needle too much when they’re in a set that sells a ton of copies. Ayli is 7th on the power ranking list and look at her price.

The price fluctuated a bit, but dealers didn’t change their buying behavior and they’re as bearish on buying this now as I am. It’s a $7 foil and rightly so, but Odric wasn’t going to make you any money buying just him so telling people not to be excited at presale time seemed correct. There wasn’t money to be made on Odric – he’s no stapler.

I will say I underestimated his utility as a rock, however. Throw Odric into the pool of EDH cards and you’re going to make a ton of ripples. Is there money in them thar waves? Let’s take a look at what those people who are just excited to build with him as they are to build with Avacyn are using.

The Fairly Odd…ric…father. They can’t all be gems.

This is the guy. He’s a Concerted Effort with feet. Is that a thing people like in EDH? You tell me.

Eh. Kinda. Enchantments from Ravnica that get a lot of EDH play are worth actual money. Privileged Position is worth four times as much as Concerted Effort and Perilous Forays, an uncommon, is worth a fourth as much. This price indicates a minimal but statistically-significant level of inclusion. EDHREC gives it a 39% synergy rating with Odric, a card that was just printed, indicating most of its play is recent and even with the card appearing in 44% of the new Odric decks, it’s only in 1.4% of white decks. You can see why I didn’t think having a Concerted Effort with feet was as exciting as a flying murder machine like Avacyn or a 6/6 creature with Deathtouch like The Gitrog Monster (I am planning on building around its huge body and deatchtouch by building Gitrog Votron. No, I’m really not, but can we talk for a second about how stupid it is to give a huge creature deathtouch? It was marginally acceptable on Grave Titan because they had to give him something but it is silly at this point) but the community surprised me by being more excited about this card than I am.

The great thing about EDH is that it moves prices predictably and more slowly than Standard which gives us time to position ourselves in front of coming waves. Cards used in Odric are going to sell slowly, trade well and generally just tick up reliably if he keeps being built at the rate he is. We’ve looked at Concerted Effort already, so why not look at it again and call it the first card on our list?

Activity has been pretty flat lately and with a new event (a deck where 44% of the new builders are including a redundant copy of their Commander) and the reprint risk being low, I think there is upside. Dealers aren’t adjusting their buying yet so the copies in stores are going to be lower than they would on a card whose popularity was well anticipated so buying behavior could shock the price a little bit. I don’t like the card, personally, but with obvious synergy with a popular commander and a $2.50 buy-in (and I guess a ceiling at $13 like Privileged Position, which would be predicated on much, much more play than it’s ever likely to see) there is a non-zero amount of money to be made here. I’d try to snag these cheap and out them for $5 in trade soon-ish. I still get these shipped to me in bulk rares.

The cards that are best with a creature like this are creatures with multiple abilities. You’re going to be able to grant your team a lot of abilities with fewer creatures in play by doubling or tripling up on the abilities on any given creature. There are some pretty saucy cards that pair with Odric in this manner.

Giving 3 solid abilities to your other creatures and being not-too-shabby on its own, Baneslayer seems like a fairly obvious inclusion. Baneslayer has been flat lately, and the FTV printing didn’t help any. Baneslayer is always going to be a good card, a casual favorite and something for angel collectors to covet. I think we’re done seeing reprints of Baneslayer for a while, unless Commander 2016 or ’17 gives us a commander that pairs well with angels, in which case this would be a good inclusion as that deck’s Wurmcoil. We have seen a lot of reprints in the $10-$15 range in those products, but only when they are slam dunk inclusions. This seems pretty safe to me and I think there is upside either based on an Odric bump or just time marching on.

If it weren’t for Modern Masters 2015, this would likely be much higher. Formats that play more than one copy of this card still like it and the extra interest from other formats like Legacy (Death and Taxes, mostly) just gives this more upside. I hope this is done getting reprinted because this could see $4 or $5 again and I want to have a pile when it does. Have creatures that grant double strike are going to be very useful in an Odric deck, and this is basically the only white double-striker worth any money as the rest are big, durdly white uncommons. Those other cards are nothing to sneeze as because most of them also grant flying, but there isn’t a ton of money to be made there unless you’re buying bulk and picking them out to buylist for for a dime. For the record, I don’t hate buying bulk and buylisting dimes.

With great numbers of abilities comes great responsibility. Or something. Look, this card has approximately all of the abilities. The issue? It also has approximately all of the printings. Angels are pretty good with Odric because they tend to be both white and laden with cool abilities and Akroma here is no exception. This is going to load up your team with a ton of relevant abilities and I think there is upside for Akroma if they can see their way clear to stop reprinting her. I feel like a bunch of duel deck anthologies copies are about to hit the market since it’s becoming increasingly efficient for speculators to crack those open since they contain an Ancestral Vision. That means more copies of Akroma could hit the market as people dump the rest of the cards in those decks since they broke even on a few cards and the rest are gravy. I don’t like this as a result, so I think this card is a long-term hold that will keep getting pushed to longer and longer terms. There isn’t even upside for the older versions because EDH players in general want the cheapest copy, not the prettiest.

Currently this has an even higher synergy rating with Odric than Concerted Effort does. This grants two useful abilities, is super good in other decks and does it all for 3 mana. I feel like the reprint risk is medium to high but in the medium term, this absolutely has upside. All this does is climb.

This pick is ballsy. Reprinted in both Commander 2014 and Commander 2015, this could have been a $5 card by now. Commander 2016 could easily see another printing which would disappoint me. I’m inclined to say the reprint risk is very high since they did it in back-to-back sets, but maybe they feel like they have printed this enough. I don’t know what the play is here, but this is certainly a good card in the deck.

Fetching equipment is useful in decks like this. Grabbing one of any number of equipment that grant multiple abilities is saucy in this deck. Open the Armory is too prevalent out there for us to make money on right now (You can get these for free just by picking up draft chaff people leave on tables) but Steelshaper’s Gift is still plugging along. This demonstrated an ability to hit $7, but that was predicated on the banning of Stoneforge Mystic in Modern and the mistaken idea that this was a suitable replacement. That first spike concentrated copies in the hands of dealers, though, making it less likely that increased demand will be flattened out by copies coming out of the woodwork. Second spikes always end up being steeper. Odric isn’t enough to spike this card, but increased demand is going to lead to increased price for all of those reasons. I don’t hate this as a buy and it’s unlikely to get reprinted if they’re going to print cards like Open the Armory that are just better (although more expensive mana-wise).

I am over my word count mandate, but I will briefly say this is never going down in price barring a reprint, which isn’t all that likely outside of Commander supplemental product, something we’ll be able to predict once we know what the color combinations for Commander 2016 are and what the generals are likely to do. I like this a lot.

There are quite a few more saucy cards and I think you get the idea by now. Check out the entire Odric page on EDHREC for more ideas. Check the synergy rating and pricing trends. For this article I avoided cards that are only good because it’s a mono-white deck like Caged Sun and Nykthos, cards that are color staples rather than Odric staples like Land Tax and Swords to Plowshares and are too cheap and prevalent to experience upside like Aven Sunstriker and Sungrace Pegasus. There are cards that will see a bump if Odric is built as aggressively in the coming months as he was the last week. I didn’t predict that happening at all, but luckily we are in a position to let the community surprise us. Until next week!

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Conjured Currency, Douglas Johnson

Damaged Goods

April 6, 2016 Douglas Johnson 6 Comments

Yes, I actually play Magic Sometimes

So most of you reading this article will know of the existence of my Child of Alara Lands Commander deck, mostly because I incessantly talk about it whenever a new card gets spoiled that could be played in the deck. It’s my favorite deck that I own by a fair margin, and I’ve been working to foil out as much of the deck as possible. I’m even trying to foil out the cards that don’t exist in foil, with the help of TheProxyGuy (NOTE: Do not ask him to sell proxies. I traded cards for the below custom proxies, and you should contact him at zeerbe@gmail.com if you’re interested in trading.)

So where am I going with this? Oh, right. So I was hanging around on TCGplayer a week or so ago, looking for ~~a card to ruthlessly buy out~~ a foil for my Child deck. I forgot that Petrified Field had just spiked, and I was on the hunt for any foil copies that hadn’t been bought out yet. At the time of my purchase, there were a couple NM foils at $30+, and one damaged foil at $15. The nonfoil had just spiked to $10, so I decided to take a gamble. Now, most of you have probably taken a peek at TCGplayers’ (or another similar store’s) grading guide at some point in the past, so we’re going to skip past the initial paragraphs and check out the relevant one.

Look at that work of art. Someone at TCGplayer probably had to paint their driveway with that card before taking that picture for a stock photograph. So technically, I’m risking getting that thing in the mail when I open up my foil Petrified Field. Considering this deck is my pride and joy, I’d rather my foils not look like they were used to whet the anime sword held by new Olivia. Considering the foil was half the price of all the other copies on the market, its’ safe to say that it was infected with leprosy and no other buyer wanted to touch it. When the package came in the mail today, I honestly expected something in this condition.

Instead, we ended up with this. I’m going to warn you, MTGprice has no way to tag an article with NSFW. This image is not for the faint of h-

Oh. Uhhhh…. alright then. Neat. Did I get lucky? I probably got lucky. That wear on the bottom right corner of the backside is pretty noticable though, and the card might have been more correctly labeled as Heavily Played. TCGplayer’s grading guideline says that damaged cards may not even be sleeve playable, but it’s certainly better than the mutilated corpse of a Magic card than I was half expecting to receive. I’ll be completely happy to jam this into Child, and no one will be the wiser that it had a little accident in the corner.

This got me thinking though; what if we take most of the risk out of the equation? While there’s no way to contact a seller directly through TCGplayer without buying a card from them first, we can use the power of the internet to ask exactly what these “damaged” cards look like before picking them up. If I as a player could get a 40-50% discount on the NM price just because a seller is an extremely harsh grader, then I feel like I’d be a lot more likely to purchase the card. Considering some damaged cards sit on the storefront for extended periods of time before disappearing (I assume due to fear of the cards looking like they were cooked over an open flame for an extended period of time), then we might just be able to get a message back from a seller at an email address with a few pictures.

Unfortunately, I’m sitting at my computer at 11:47pm and just came up with this article idea not two hours ago, so I don’t exactly have a paper trail of conversation with a TCGplayer vendor about damaged cards ready and raring to go. However, I can provide you with an example of a card that I’ve had my eye on for a little while. Remember how I wouldn’t shut up about Volrath’s Stronghold for like a week or two? Well there’s currently a damaged one sitting on TCGplayer for $21 shipped, sold by The End Games.

Less than a dozen clicks away, and I’m on their web page ready to ask them about this particular Stronghold that they have listed on TCGplayer. I’m going to take a slight risk and assume that there is only one store called The End Games in the state of Virginia, but bear with me here. As long as we provide an email address and use our please and thank you’s, I don’t see why we wouldn’t be able to get a bit more specifying information on the card that’s been on TCGplayer for multiple weeks now. If it just has a couple creases on the corners or has slight water damage, you could easily pick up the copy you want for your Commander deck at a much lower price than the other copies currently available.

One of the downsides to this method is of course that you probably won’t be able to contact a store if they’re not actually a Certified Hobby Shop. Some of the stores with fewer number of sales that just do this on the level that I do won’t be Google-able, and as such would be more difficult to contact if you wanted to inquire about the exact status of their more heavily worn cards. Still, the goal of this article was simply to show that not all “damaged” cards will be ripped in half or dipped in chocolate syrup. I took a gamble and it paid off, but there could have been ways to remove the risk from the equation and safely end up with a nice discount on a pretty looking foil that I wanted to add to my Commander deck anyway. See you next week!

End Step

As a couple of you mentioned in the comments of my previous article, yes I was probably wrong about Mayor again. As much as I want to justify buying them at $3, I just refuse to buy into a card after it already spiked the first time. I would much rather put my money elsewhere, like into collections.
I definitely missed the boat on Always Watching. It turns out that calling Glorious Anthem with upside a bulk rare is a bad idea. On the plus side, I can still be right about 80% of the rest of the set because I call almost everything a bulk rare, and maintain that sweet, sweet, batting average of pure pessimism.

City of Traders

PROTRADER: A New Modern

April 6, 2016 Travis Allen 12 Comments

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

This is hands down the most surprising and unprecedented Banned & Restricted list update that Modern has seen since the format began five years ago. (Has it only been five years? It feels so much longer than that.)

Everyone knew part of Eldrazi was going; it was simply a matter of Eye of Ugin or Eldrazi Temple. Frankly I’m surprised they chose Eye. I think it’s the less consistent card and comes with greater drawbacks relative to Temple, a land which carries no penalty aside from making only colorless mana. You can’t turn-two Thought-Knot Seers with Eye, but you sure can with Temple! Whatever. What’s done is done.

No, the Eldrazi ban isn’t surprising. What’s surprising is the unbans of Ancestral Vision and Sword of the Meek. We haven’t seen a shake up this profound in Modern ever before, and it’s possible that reading between the lines will give us even more information. (Credit to @kirblar024 for initially bringing this to my attention.)

Wizards has typically held changes to Modern’s ban list until just before the Pro Tour, in order to give the top level pros a new format to take a crack at. We all get to watch exciting new decks, and pros have the ability to leverage their deck building and format exploration skills. However, seeing two unbans at this point in the year, and alongside a major ban to boot, may mean that we’re not getting another Modern Pro Tour. Without a Pro Tour to hold changes for, there’s no reason not to fire of the unbans as soon as they’re appropriate. While there was a tremendous outcry at the removal of the Modern Pro Tour initially, that was before they announced the change to the block structure. Now that we know about that change, many of us have walked back our comments about needing a non-Standard Tour. Wizards has listened in the past, and they may have again.

Ok, back on track. Eldrazi gone, Visions and Sword here. Let’s do the Eldrazi real quick.

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Corbin Hosler

Where Does Modern Go From Here?

April 5, 2016 Corbin Hosler 7 Comments

Saying goodbye to Eye of Ugin was not a surprise. We knew Eldrazi had become too strong, too consistent and too prevalent to continue existing in Modern. We knew something was going to be banned — I advocated for Eye of Ugin — and in the end it’s no surprise to see the deck knocked down a pretty large peg.

But how about the rest of that announcement? Did any of us really expect this?

Today I want to look at the other half of the announcement – the part where Ancestral Vision and Sword of the Meek were unbanned. People certainly expect these to have a huge impact on Modern; after all both were banned for a reason after they had dominating runs in Extended over the years. And given the hype and rush on these cards, is it any surprise that the prices went crazy as well? Sword of the Meek is a mind-blowing $20 Uncommon as of today, while Ancestral Vision is $50 despite multiple printings.

The question is, where do we go from here?

First off, I don’t believe either will blow up Modern and take over, and as a result I don’t believe the current prices are here to stay. Players and dealers will dig these up over the next few weeks and months, and the price will slowly come down as players realize that they won’t be taking over the entire format anytime soon. If you don’t need these to play a tournament right now, your wallet will thank you if you wait a few weeks or months before deciding to buy in.

But will you even need to? Will these two cards shake up Modern that much, or will they become simply another pair of cards that are sometimes good and other times hated out?

Sword of the Meek

Let’s start with this one, because it’s a little more straightforward. Sword of the Meek forms a deadly combo with Thopter Foundry, with the Foundry sacrificing the Sword to create a 1/1, which conveniently brings the Sword back, netting its user 1 life and a Thopter. They then have the Sword ready to sacrifice again, and for every mana the user spends they get a Thopter and a point of life.

It’s a pretty brutal lockdown method, and closes out a game quickly while also taking its user out of burn range. Back when Extended held the place of Modern, Thopter Foundry was a pretty dominant strategy, slotting into several decks but most notably combining with the combo of Vampire Hexmage and Dark Depths to form a brutal one-two punch. With Muddle the Mixture available to transmute for missing pieces of either combo, the deck was an absolute powerhouse and was the bane of the format for long enough to land Sword of the Meek on the banlist when Modern was announced.

So now Wizards has unleashed the Thopter menace back on us. What to do?

Well, the first piece of advice I have is to not panic that this is going to ruin Modern. There are a lot of interesting ways to take the deck, from a lockdown Ensaring Bridge deck to a focused Tezzerator build with either Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas or Tezzeret the Seeker providing the namesake and the Thopter engine closing out games. Even in a more traditional control deck the combo gives it an extremely powerful endgame that if left alone will end the game rather quickly.

But it’s the “left alone” part of that statement that merits more consideration.

When Thopter/Sword was good, abrupt decay, Kolaghan’s command, scavenging ooze, and RiP didn’t exist. Look at Legacy. Sword unban is safe.

— Sam Black (@SamuelHBlack) April 4, 2016

Add to that list Stony Silence. Yes, Thopter combo is still very powerful, but the important thing to remember is that this is not the Extended of 2010 when Gerry Thompson unleashed this monster on the world.

Take a look at that decklist. The powerful Thopter combo is there, but a lot of other cards are missing. Starting at the top, Dark Depths is still banned, taking out half the deck’s plan right away. Just as devastating is the lack of Chrome Mox, which allowed the deck to play the first combo piece on Turn 1 and lay the second on the second turn and immediately make a Thopter, closing out the game soon after.

Simply put, that won’t be able to happen in Modern, and not just because Chrome Mox rightfully lives on the banlist. Sure, Mox Opal will sometimes do a reasonable impersonation, but there are lots of ways for current Modern decks to deal with the combo. Crucially, these are maindeckable ways, with Abrupt Decay and Kolaghan’s Command living at the top of that list. Both of those cards are played in multiple Tier 1 decks, and their presence will help keep Thopters from dominating Game 1s. Then in comes the sideboard hate, with Stony Silence, Ancient Grudge, Shatterstorm, graveyard hate, Creeping Corrosion and even Fracturing Gust able to efficiently answer most of what a Thopter player is doing.

That’s not to say that Thopter-Sword won’t be good – with the ability to wait to “go off” until the end of an opponent’s turn, the combo will be very good in a lot of situations. That said, it does seem like all these factors push it into the role of finisher in a control deck, rather than the centerpiece of a degenerate combo deck.

All in all, I think Thopter-Sword will be a strong addition to control decks and improve the diversity of the format.

Ancestral Vision

The other half of our unbannings, Ancestral Vision is a contentious one. After all, the games where it is suspended Turn 1 and then the player proceeds to counter or kill your first three plays before reloading with Vision feel pretty bad. But those times are somewhat balanced out by the fact that it makes for a poor topdeck and isn’t necessarily all that much better than other “Turn 4-5” spells like Collected Company.

Let’s look at the history of the card. Since its printing in Time Spiral, Vision has been a solid card advantage choice for Control players. After all, drawing three cards is something blue mages have done since Ancestral Recall in Alpha, and as the banning of Treasure Cruise last year shows, there are few lengths to which players won’t go to if it means drawing three cards. In the past, Ancestral Vision was a devastating Turn 1 play in decks like Faeries that could follow up with a Bitterblossom and then removal spells and Mistbind Clique or Cryptic Command.

Interestingly, that’s a line that is now going to be available in Modern. But Faeries has been far from dominant (or even “good”), and cards like Cavern of Souls and strategies that naturally prey on Faeries have kept it from being the terror it was during its heyday.

Which brings us back to Ancestral Vision, which had quite the heyday. Fewer things are more soul-crushing than watching a Bloodbraid Elf cascade into Ancestral Vision, and in the days preceding Modern there were plenty of Jund decks splashing blue just to have access to this backbreaking play. It shouldn’t be any surprise that Bloodbraid Elf is still on the current Modern banlist, and it’s no surprise that blue mages who remember those days are excited to have Vision back.

But is it really going to be that bad? As I mentioned earlier, Cavern of Souls existing automatically means some decks will have natural advantages against Ancestral Vision decks, and you can add to that the fact that anyone who suspends this card on the first turn isn’t using a Lightning Bolt to take down the Goblin Guide attacking their face. And let’s face it, when you can’t suspend Ancestral Vision on the first turn because you’re facing down a Wild Nacatl or Goblin Guide or Glistener Elf, the card becomes much worse.

That only covers the early game. There’s a huge difference between drawing, say, a Treasure Cruise on Turn 5 and drawing Ancestral Vision on that same turn. There seem to be plenty of natural checks to this card in the current Modern metagame, and considering the underdog role Control decks are starting from in the first place, this doesn’t seem likely to push them fully over the top.

Conclusion

While I’ve spent the preceding paragraphs detailing the ways in which Thopter-Sword and Ancestral Vision are manageable, that doesn’t mean these cards aren’t very good, because they are. I expect both to find homes in Modern, and in the case of Thopter-Sword may actually encourage entirely new archetypes.

And — coupled with the ban on Eye of Ugin — both should help control decks make a comeback into Modern. Both of these offer powerful mid and late-game options for those decks, and will help them compete with some of the card advantage engines we’ve recently seen come to define decks in the other colors. There is a chance that things will swing to the control side of the spectrum (chaining Cryptic Command into a resolved Ancestral Vision is pretty darn good), considering the underdog position traditional control strategies are starting from, I don’t think there’s any doubt they could use a little love right now. I’m excited for the possibilities this opens up for Modern, and I’m excited to see where things go from here.

Just know that I’ll still be playing Merfolk.

Thanks for reading,