Reserved List in Commander

March 3, 2016 Douglas Johnson 2 Comments

So About Those Legacy Cards….

How about that? Magic prices have been going crazy over the past few weeks, and a lot of it is thanks to the Eternal Masters Announcement that I personally haven’t really talked about a whole lot. I’ve been more focused on casual hits and collection grinding recently to worry about that kind of stuff, although I did enjoy the jumps on a few Legacy staples. Thankfully, the market that I want to talk about today moves a lot slower than the more competitive land of 4-ofs. While the wake-up call of “Reserved List is here to stay” has driven some interesting Legacy prices spikes, I’m happy to say that Commander has so far remained relatively untouched. If you’re someone who’s been on the fence about certain Commander staples for a while, let me be one of the first to say that you don’t have a lot of time left.

Why Commander?

First, let me address some of the reasons for speculating on cards when their sole demand comes from singleton formats like Commander, Cube, and Tiny Lea-hahahaha…. Sorry, I couldn’t write that with a straight face. Anyway, let’s say for example that you buy 9x SP copies of Volrath’s Stronghold for $21.29 each. You know that it’s a powerful staple in almost every black Commander deck, and you’ve jammed it in at least a few Cube drafts before. According to EDHrec, Stronghold sees play in 10% of all decks that can support it. While this isn’t close to the numbers of staple cards like Eternal Witness or Sol Ring, it’s still a strong showing and a versatile card.

You did so because you’ve been noticing the supply dwindle on TCGplayer from 48 sellers with no price filters, all the way down to 30 sellers as of 3/1/2016. You want to check vendor confidence in the card, so you check SCG’s storefront and their buylist. They’re currently out of stock on Volrath’s Stronghold at $30, and their buylist for NM copies is $17.50, which is 75% of the TCGmid price today. Starcity wants more Strongholds, so I’m going to follow suit.

One of the problems in speculating on a 1-of wonder is the inability to unload a significant amount of copies relatively quickly. Patience is a virtue when dealing with Commander cards and finding the right buyer for them, because we’re not shipping them out in playsets or selling into the hype from tournament results. We have to accept the slow trickle of sales as they come, and that type of strategy certainly isn’t for everyone. It’s probable that this is not the single best Magic: The Gathering card to buy right now if you’re looking to make a huge amount of money in a short period of time (In other words, it’s not the next City of Traitors where you can easily sell playsets to aspiring Legacy players). However I think it’s safe to say that cards like Volrath’s Stronghold and Earthcraft are some of the safest buys you can make at the moment (Except bulk rares!), especially if you intend to jam them into your Commander decks for the next year or so.

Specsheet Tracking

I sometimes obsess over cards that I speculate on, because I’m that confident in them. Many of the cards that I buy in collections and set aside for later have an “Eh, maybe one day” feel attached to them (Breaking // Entering, Seance, and Aggressive Mining are some of the forerunners in this category). However, the rest are the vocal majority that I’ve chosen to write about. I like to break down as many aspects of the card as possible, and keep my finger on the pulse day after day to check any minuscule change. Noticing the small 2-3% increases in price day after day is often the sign of an incoming spike in the near future.

While this spreadsheet model is far from perfect, I think it’s a decent representation of the factors that I’m trying to keep track of in my single-card case studies. Creating an “MTGfinance” routine in the morning can take less than ten minutes; simply scroll through Twitter, check your mtgstocks interests, and take quick glances at the applicable pieces of information in the spreadsheet above.

So Other than Stronghold….

Oh, right. Volrath’s Stronghold is obviously not the only card that we need to keep our eyes on here.

Is “Buy reserved list cards” going to be earth-shattering news to anyone with a cardboard cutout degree in Magic finance? No, of course not. You all have already made your money on Mox Diamond and City of Traitors, so these singletons are irrelevant to you.

End Step

Breaking news: Wizards just announced the first werewolf planeswalker, which we can probably assume will follow the trend of being a double-sided walker like Garruk Relentless. I would assume that she is able to flip back and forth between forms due to the following line “she can control the transformation, in both directions, with relative ease.“
As we talked about last week in the Werewolf article, the Shadows over Innistrad checklist that was spoiled shows no mention of any legendary werewolf or planeswalker, but it is labeled “CH1/297”. I think this all but confirms that we will receive a second checklist card with a separate set of double-faced cards to represent [Ed note: Wednesday’s Werewolf Planeswalker announcement supports this]
I do not think that Wizards will reuse the templating from the Origins planeswalkers, because “Legendary creature turning into planeswalker” now has the flavor attachment of igniting a spark and having time pass between the two faces of the card.

Jason Alt

Safety

March 3, 2016 Jason Alt 3 Comments

Uncertainty can be a bitch.

Uncertainty makes people regress to their baser instincts and a lot of investment decisions are driven by fear. Don’t buy too late or you’ll miss out. Don’t sell too early or you’ll miss out. Buy a Powerball ticket, ever. If being calm and rational in the face of losing money – real or potential, were easy, everyone would be a cash money millionaire with dolla dolla bills, y’all, drinking cough syrup out of a bejewled chalice and going to jail for tax evasion. Cash may rule everything around you, but your amygdala rules you and it makes you kind of a pansy.

This is why the removal of uncertainty can serve as as much of an event as anything else in EDH Finance. We talked about the last EDH Rules Committee announcement because it gave us a lot of significant events – the changes to the color identity rule that helped us predict a huge spike in the price of cards like Sen Triplets. The banning of Prophet of Kruphix that helped us lose a lot of money on our copies of Prophet of Kruphix. Less blatantly, though, we saw a subtle indication that Prophet was more troublesome than a card like Consecrated Sphinx. The result?

The price went up by 45% in a week. Nothing gives prices a shot in the ass like a little certainty, and nothing says “safe for at least another 3 months, likely much longer” like using Consecrated Sphinx as an example contrasting with a card they did ban. It wasn’t designed to make the price on Sphinx go nuts, but everyone knew Sphinx was a card that people whined about and it was on all sorts of watch lists. It’s hard to spend $15 on a card that could be banned tomorrow. Well, good news – now it’s $25.

A little certainty, even very little certainty, is smashing some card prices.

Safe For a Year is Forever in Finance Years

Back before Commander 2015 was spoiled, I looked at each deck and tried to predict some cards that would be included in those decks and end up being the next Wurmcoil Engine – that is to say what would be the $15 +/- $3ish card that would get reprinted in a Commander sealed deck, lose some value but ultimately retain a lot of it because every copy opened would go straight in a deck rather than hitting the market. In the case of an older card we might see some value reduction just because copies of an Invasion card are much rarer than a Scars of Mirrodin card. Regardless of what the card did after the copies hit shelves, I expected Wizards to target quite a few cards in the same price sweet spot as Wurmcoil Engine and I got, with basically no clues other than what the Commanders did, quite a few right – namely Urza’s Incubator, Black Market and Phyrexian Arena.

That’s not the point – they were guesses and I’m not going to pretend I want a pat on the back when I guess right because I sure don’t want someone to give me a hard time when I guess wrong. It’s that kind of thing that has a lot of MTG Finance people only talking about cards after they go up so they’ll never be wrong. The point isn’t that we guessed correctly, the point is that the stuff was predictable. We nailed quite a few cards in a recent article merely by listing Reserved List cards that were playable in both Legacy and EDH.

The point is if we predicted it once, we can predict it again. And we can also predict what happens to the cards that aren’t in the Commander sealed product because that’s what I want to talk about today.

There sure is, Brian. There sure is.

I bring up the articles I wrote about cards we thought could be in Commander 2015 because Phyrexian Altar was a very good candidate. Its price at the time of the article? $15ish – right in the sweet spot to be the next Wurmcoil. I didn’t know anything except that it would be a good idea to go to the Magic wiki and see what they said the two color combinations did. Golgari seemed to like sacrificing stuff and when I saw what Mazirek and Meren did I felt like Phyrexian Altar was a very good candidate for a reprint. Phyrexian Altar was not reprinted.

Then, this happened.

The price basically doubled. Why? Well, since Phyrexian Altar looked like a very good candidate for reprinting in Commander 2015, it was a risky pickup at the time. But, psychologically, something funny happened when it wasn’t reprinted. The way Commander cards are reprinted is much more predictable, now. There was always the risk of a reprinting in the core set or in something like Modern Masters. With an annual Commander sealed set, reprints for Commander cards are all but relegated to that once-yearly product. With this predictability comes some stability.

With that stability comes confidence. When Phyrexian Altar wasn’t reprinted at the $15 price point, people who were on the fence pulled the trigger, just as they did with Consecrated Sphinx. Altar isn’t going to ever be banned and with it escaping reprinting in the Commander 2015 set, it was safe for at least another year. That made it relatively safe to scoop up the 20ish copies on TCG Player, trigger the 1 or 2 copies on sites like Card Shark and Strike Zone to be snapped up and basically pegged the new price at $30.

Suddenly a card that was risky as a $15 staple that made sense in sealed product was a less risky card that had another year to grow and had people’s confidence. The same reasons (great in Meren and Mazirek decks, for example) that made it an obvious choice for printing in those decks makes it a great pickup for people building those decks. Demand increases, confidence increases. The farther the price gets from $15, the more sense it makes to invest. The card is hot, it’s not getting reprinted for at least another year, and what are the odds they print a deck next year where it would slot in so perfectly? And if they’re trying to find a $15 Wurmcoil analog to jam some value in, are they going to print a $21 Phyrexian Altar in a product with $35 MSRP? What about a $25 Altar? What about a $30 altar? Suddenly the reprint risk is gone. Suddenly Phyrexian Altar looks very safe indeed. What better place to park $30?

$15 Commander staples that escape reprinting in sealed product and get better with the new set basically miss their reprint window. Altar is much tougher to reprint than it was a year ago and with the contents of Commander 2016 getting close to being finalized if they’re not already, what is Wizards to do? Jam Altar in FTV: Lore? Unlikely. Conspiracy 2? It would have to work with the set- it couldn’t just be jammed in there willy-nilly. Another Commander’s Arsenal? That is the opposite of helping. They’re backed into a corner, basically, and another EDH staple becomes unaffordable for the average EDH player. A functional reprint or slight upgrade is a more feasible option than putting a $30 card in a $35 product unless there is no value in the rest of the cards and that makes the deck weak relative to the other decks. They’re handcuffed.

As bad as it is for the game, it doesn’t hurt us to be able to identify a few cards that could be the next Phyrexian Altar since Phyrexian Altar wasn’t the next Wurmcoil Engine.

What are Our Criteria?

First of all, the card can’t be on the Reserved List. Don’t get me wrong – those cards are great targets and a lot of them are starting to go up. But that’s a separate article. Like, to the extent that I already wrote that article.

Second of all, they should be cheap enough that reprinting the cards in an upcoming Commander set makes sense and failing to reprint them will be seen as a mistake. How good Phyrexian Arena is in Daxos decks could have pushed arena up in price the way Serra’s Sanctum is climbing but it got the reprinting and the price is reasonable, now. Altar wasn’t so lucky.

Thirdly, it can’t make sense to reprint the cards anywhere else. We’re not looking at the same kind of pressure that was on Phyrexian Altar if the card makes a lot of sense as a reprint in Eternal Masters or Conspiracy. $30 isn’t too much for a reprinting in a set that doesn’t have a set MSRP the way Commander stuff does but rather tends to enforce the total price of the set around the price of a redemption set on MODO. Phyrexian Altar would be clunky to jam in Conspiracy 2 or Eternal Masters but Shardless Agent wouldn’t.

With that, I have a few cards I want to discuss.

In case you thought Phyrexian Altar was an isolated incident, think again. All things Phyrexian got a second look lately and Tower followed the same behavior. Tower was a reasonable inclusion in a Commander set at $15, synergizes well with the Golgari deck and escaped inclusion in Commander 2015. Tower is not on the Reserved List because they needed to make room for Argothian Wurm and Opal Archangel (Funny how no one complained a decade ago about the color-shifted printing of Argothian Wurm that circumvented the Reserved List) and renewed confidence in it as a spec on top of how good it is with the most-built new deck means it missed its reprint window. This price is going to be tough to reign in, and if people start playing Nic Fit, a deck that is pretty strong in Legacy and which can get away with fewer duals since you want more basics than normal, this could see even more upside due to the additional exposure. I feel like this effect is very real.

Candidates

This could be nearing its reprint window. This gets played in Ayli, the second-most-built deck and synergizes well with Felidar Sovereign which is much more affordable, now. I’m not sure what the themes of the Commander 2016 decks will be, but lifegain usually features and this could be $22-$25 soon if not reprinted and that will make it much harder to reprint later. This is much newer than Phyrexians Tower and Altar but this is also cheating in EDH since it’s a 1-mana Baneslayer. If this isn’t reprinted soon it probably never can be.

This is very recent to be in the spot it’s in, but price-wise, this is on the bubble, I feel. This is a shoo-in for Karador decks and Karador is still being built a ton, especially with the new goodies from, you guessed it, the Golgari Commander 2015 precon. This may be a little easier to reprint in the new Innistrad block but I don’t see that happening. The lore will likely progress, making it tougher to reprint a Legendary creature at a very specific point in his life than it is a card like Thoughtseize. I’d say this is still tricky to reprint and if people start buying more aggressively, it will become even tougher.

This was always a great pickup, but with the changes to Rule 4 governing the colors of mana a rock like this could produce, this got even more attention and it’s going to need a reprinting soon before its price gets too high to touch. There are way more Lanterns out there than Phyrexian Altars but this goes in way more decks. This could be the next Sol Ring – reprinted into powder every cycle to make it accessible so it can go in a ton of decks or this could be the next Sensei’s Divining Top.

Conclusion

I will revisit this topic in a few months. The examples I gave are strong ones, but they’re also based a bit on a false paradigm – I selected cards that are in decks being built the most now but new archetypes may emerge with the printing of Commander 2016 which will make us focus on different cards. The criteria won’t change but they will be easier to find. I’m not advocating buying up these cards but I am suggesting that we can predict something very similar to what happened with Phyrexian Altar. You don’t want to be the guy who didn’t pull the trigger at $15 now faced with the grim reality of having to pay twice that. We can predict these jumps very nicely and we’ll do so when we have more information.

Am I off-base with this new theory? If not, what should I name it? The Phyrexian Altar Effect? Something pithier? Wittier? Hit me up in the comments section, nerds. Until next week!

City of Traders

PROTRADER: Presidential Conspiracy Theory

March 2, 2016 Travis Allen

By: Travis Allen
@wizardbumpin

Are you familiar with this piece of American folklore? The lives of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln shared many facets, which depending on your understanding of probability, ranges from “unremarkable” to “concrete evidence in reincarnation.” Among those amazing coincidences are “last and whole names include the same number of letters” and “assassinated.” Here’s the Wiki page on the topic; I’d advise you refrain from viewing if you’re the gullible sort.

(Seemingly) switching topics entirely, do the words “God Book” mean anything to you? If you started playing Magic in the last few years, probably not. Perhaps you heard tenured players use the term in reference to New Phyrexia, but if you weren’t playing back then, you wouldn’t have much reason to know what it is.

Those of us that were around for New Phyrexia are quite familiar with God Books though.

A whole sordid tale played out over several weeks, which you can read about here. It was the first major leak in modern-bordered Magic. The short version is that a French guy who was good friends with Guillaume Matignon and Guillaume Wafo-Tapa was goaded to releasing a pdf of the entirety of New Phyrexia on IRC. (Yes, IRC. Don’t know what IRC is? Don’t feel bad; it was just as irrelevant in 2011 as it is today.) Shortly after the God Book found its way into the hands of the public, and a month before official spoilers started, the entire internet-using Magic community had access to the entire card list.

It was thrilling and shocking at the time. (What was especially shocking was that not only was a Stoneforge Mystic answer not in the set, but they had doubled down with this new nonsensical equipment “Batterskull.” We all know how that one turned out.) After the initial excitement of pouring over the entire list, the fervor died down, and like the man who knows his girlfriend already found the ring in the jacket pocket, Wizards was forced to go through the motions with full knowledge that the audience lacked the emotional intensity so desired. Months later, once the dust had settled, several players were banned for years and the set was likely undersold as a result of diminished hype.

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Jim Casale

Grinder Finance – Not Everything is for You

March 1, 2016 Jim Casale 5 Comments

Man, does it feel like there is a lot of stuff coming out this year? I immediately realized after tons of announcements in a very short period of time, that we’re in for an exceptional year of Magic.

How exceptional?

As of right now, this is this year’s release calendar. This doesn’t include a 2nd duel deck and a From the Vault set [announced to be FTV: Lore]. FTVs usually come out in August so I have no idea where it will be now [Ed note: it still will]. It’s clear based on this release schedule that Wizards of the Coast is trying to release more products that appeal to more niche groups. A lot of players have already realized “not everything is for me” but this summer will have some of the toughest choices for players in a long time.

Eternal Masters

This sets off a 3 month period of back to back set releases. Obviously Wizards wants to lead with this one because it has the highest MSRP. If it sells out (which it probably will) it will be great for their parent company.

Without any kind of spoilers it is hard to tell who this set is really for. If you assume based on it’s name its to support Legacy and Vintage players with some reprints then it makes a lot of sense. The reality of those players is the vast majority of them have already owned their deck and the cards needed for a long time. I think this set is the biggest trap and biggest potential for people to waste money. If your LGS supports a large community of Standard and Modern players (which is most common around the US), then this set will likely not provide a ton of value to those players.

There may be some overlap cards that are good in both Eternal formats and Modern (ie Cavern of Souls, Chalice of the Void, Tarmogoyf, Cursecatcher), it likely won’t include very many in the interest of including format staples that are generally outside of Modern (Wasteland, Force of Will, Ancient Tomb, Cabal Therapy, etc). The reality of the reserve list is even if you buy a case of Eternal Masters you’re probably no closer to making a Legacy or Vintage deck than you are just spending that money on a Modern Burn deck.

Leading with the set is obviously a play by Wizards to try to get as much of your impulse spending money as possible. It will be hard for people to resist buying booster packs that could contain a Foil Force of Will, which will assuredly be a few hundred dollars.

Eldritch Moon

I am calling it now. This set will have the most expensive new cards all year. This set will not sell nearly well enough to keep the best cards in Standard low enough. It’s being sandwiched between two presumably exceptional draft formats. Oh yeah, 3 draftable sets in a row, which one do you think people will skip? Has Wizards solved the second set by jamming two sets worth of playables into it? Is Oath of the Gatewatch setting the standard for small sets of the future? There are a lot of questions but there is also some precedents we can look to.

Show of hands, how many people bought a ton of Magic Origins? No? Why not? Did you perhaps by too much Modern Masters 2015? I have a feeling this same problem will happen again. Shadows over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon will occupy the same slots as Dragons of Tarkir and Magic Origins did last year. Did you know a box of Dragons of Tarkir has the highest EV of any set in Standard right now? Magic Origins is only a few dollars behind Khans of Tarkir and Fate Reforged booster boxes which can contain the most powerful lands in the game. The reason DTK and ORI are so expensive is because those two sets are the bun that surrounded the Modern Masters 2015 Hamburger. Their short draft time has lead to supply problems with some of the most popular cards in the set.

If Eldritch Moon is another set of similar quality to Born of the Gods then we might not have a lot to worry about. On the other hand, if we get another Oath of the Gatewatch then we will have some really expensive cards. If you play a lot of Standard this will be the best set to invest your money in. I can’t see a world where the player base opens enough of this set to satisfy competitive players.

Conspiracy: Take the Crown

I’ll start out by saying I’m the most surprised by this set coming out this year. I don’t know how Wizards got the resources to test 3 different draft formats all for release on the same summer but more power to them. Due to the fact that this is a draft heavy format I don’t expect a ton of valuable cards to come out of it. It won’t be used to hold any Legacy or Vintage style reprints (since those will help sell Eternal Masters). It probably won’t contain a lot of reprints from Conspiracy because the set is only 221 cards. With that in mind, Conspiracy 1 only had 210 cards but without a bigger breakdown of the number of uncommons, rares, and mythics we won’t know where the extra cards went. What I will expect from this set is very expensive foils and Commander cards.

My short list of the Commander style of cards that can probably be in Conspiracy:

What I don’t expect is actual the actual legendary creature printings in foil because they have been doing those as Judge foils.

The point of all this

Be careful this summer. There are a lot of Magic sets being released this summer, a lot more than usual. Make sure you realize which sets are for you and spend your money appropriately. Really take a hard look at what you’re buying because if you end up needing stuff from one of the other sets it will be very expensive.

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