I was originally going to write about Oath of the Gatewatch as a set, a topic I’ve been wanting to cover for three weeks now, but this banned list change is too juicy. Maybe next week!
By now I’m sure you’ve heard that Splinter Twin and Summer Bloom are banned in Modern. The day this article goes live, Wednesday, is two days after the official announcement was to be made Monday morning.
What you may have missed is how we found out. Friday night, news rapidly began to spread that Twin and Bloom were banned in the MTGO beta. The question was whether Wizards had been pre-empted by its own lack of foresight and planning on a digital product, or if the software was encountering one of it’s uncountable, nonsensical bugs and erroneously indicating the cards illegal. Considering both possibilities were predicated on Wizards mishandling its digital product, Occam’s razor was of no help.
WotC either accidentally preempts B&R update with beta, or beta is buggy piece of shit and thinks two cards are banned. Both 100% plausible
It wasn’t long before Wizards accepted that the jig was up and officially confirmed the news: Twin and Bloom are out. The latter of those was a foregone conclusion; anyone that wasn’t emotionally invested in the deck knew it was coming after watching Justin Cohen trounce people at Pro Tour Fate Reforged a year ago. The deck regularly violated the “turn four rule” while still able to play a long, grindy attrition game. Defenders of the deck will point out that it hasn’t taken over the format the way combo boogeymen have in the past, but this is more a result of the deck’s extremely challenging lines of play more than anything.
I first noticed the deck when Gerry Thompson mentioned it in an article, and after loading it up in Magic Workstation, was struck by just how difficult the deck was to pilot. I mentioned as much to Gerry on Twitter, and he confirmed that it was possibly the toughest deck he had ever played. Success requires a skilled player investing considerable time and effort into learning the intricacies of the various lines, especially in the face of opposition. That any average Joe couldn’t pick up the list and pop over to his nearest SCG Open and wreck house is a major reason Bloom wasn’t dominating the format.
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Greetings! We’ve got a sweet new set in Oath of the Gatewatch, and lots of potential cube cards to cover today, so let’s get right into it.
A couple quick notes: First, I’m saving everything with the new colorless mana symbol for the end, because that’s going to require some extra words. We’ll start with the traditional stuff. Second, while I might mention foils for commons and uncommons, my goal with my Cube articles is to keep costs down as much as possible, so the object here is not to find the cards that are going to go up the most, but to find the best time to buy the cards that we actually want to play with in our cubes. Got it? Let’s go.
Monocolored
This is a powerful card, but I’m not sure it beats out cards like Sun Titanor Elesh Nornat the top of white’s curve in Cube. It’s definitely one to test, but I’m not convinced it will make anything but the most expansive lists.
As for its financial future, Standard could bring its price up in the short term, but there’s no way it sees play in any eternal competitive formats. It’s probably fine in Commander, but it doesn’t seem insane. While it could surprise us in the short term, this should be way less than its preorder price in the long term.
(Note: All TCGplayer mid prices cited in this article were pulled on the day of writing, January 15, 2016. They may have definitely changed since that date.)
TCGplayer mid: $7.49 Likelihood to get a cube slot: Medium-low Verdict: Wait to buy
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I’ll talk a little about Modern because it’s all the haps these days. You know them hip kids and buying out the internet and whatever.
The worst part about these graphs is that the Grove of the Burnwillows one isn’t even as high as it should be. Almost every store that MTGPrice.com pulls price information has stagnated because they are out of stock (it is common practice not to update the prices on sold-out cards). Let’s look at the less steady but technically more accurate TCGPlayer prices.
You know what’s really bad about this? Convergent Mid and Low pricing. With big shakeups like this even though the mid pricing seems to dip a little, copies are still being bought. A steady price between mid and low indicates supply and demand are satisfied at this price point. At the end of November that all changed and we haven’t settled since then. It’s insane to think that the most expensive dual land in a pair of colors is not the ABUR dual. Hence the title of my article, Grove of the Burnwillows is strictly better because of the formats it is legal in and it’s interaction with Punishing Fire. Which brings me to my first point.
A Lot of F***ing People Play Modern
Excuse my French but that is the truth. A lot of people are picking up Modern decks and playing them because of great strides to reduce the cost to play.
Do you remember the time when Hallowed Fountains were $45? Modern was in it’s infancy and barely anyone played it. Do you know how bad had they not reprinted them with such vigor 3 years ago? If you think Modern is expensive now, let me tell you, it could have been so much worse. Fetchland reprints in Khans of Tarkir also brought some needed reduction to the cost of Modern but that also made cards more expensive.
Bans and unbans make stuff more expensive
Pour one out for my homies – my binder
People knew the writing was on the wall for Bloom. The deck defied some ground rules for the Modern format but getting blindsided by a Splinter Twin ban is causing some really bad panic buying. Scapeshift is the easiest deck you can port Twin into (most of the shell is similar) but Scapeshift isn’t a card that got reprinted 6 months ago. The original printing is from Morningtide which is even older (and smaller print run) than the original Splinter Twin printing. The ripple effect will continue until probably a month after the Pro Tour as people try to figure out what to play now. The security knowing the “pillars of the format” is lost in Modern now and we might see a cascade of price changes as people adjust their strategy. At this point unless you need to play in a Modern event until Shadows over Innistrad, I would just stop buying Modern cards.
But this ban brings new brews!
Yeah, maybe? To be quite honest, the Eldrazi deck is already bringing enough of a shake up to Modern I’m not sure we needed to ban Splinter Twin. While it’s true the boogie man that was Twin allows for other decks to flourish, if you couldn’t beat Twin what makes you think your brew can beat the remaining decks? I think people think that removing one of their bad matchups all of a sudden makes their deck playable. What I am expecting is the opposite. If your brew couldn’t beat a 3 mana 1/4 blue creature it probably can’t beat a lot of the decks in Modern. While this is a finance column, I can not advocate people go out and buy a new deck right now because the format will be very unsettled.
Rise of the Rise of… Wait no – Oaths of Oath of the Gatewatch
These two are likely to become a dynamic duo in Standard in the coming months. They have both seen non-stop upward movement since their very early spoiling. If you got in early you are probably feeling great but at this point I think I’d rather trade for them than buy copies. Baring an unusually high finish (or large percentage of the top 8/16), they will likely not see a big jump next weekend.
This guy has been gaining the past week also. He probably won’t see as much play as Ulamog (Kozilek is much worse in multiples) which means he probably can’t maintain a $18-20 price tag for very long. I expect him to dip in the coming months and I’m a buyer at $10-12. Kozilek, the Great Distortion (like Kozilek, the Butcher of Truth) will likely retain a higher price tag than he should due to being a casual favorite. The only thing I can think that may change this course is if some Tron team at the Pro Tour adopts a large number of Kozilek in the main deck. That will probably lead him to disappear from the internet in a few hours.
The best card in the set. I regret not pre-ordering these at $4, $7, or $8 because the internet thinks they are worth $15. I’m not interested at that point. I’m not sure it’s good enough for Standard and Modern demand likely won’t push it close to the price of the rares of the Eldrazi deck. My rule of thumb is it can’t be more than Ulamog or Eye of Ugin. If you need them for a deck, I’m sorry but you probably wont find a better deal at $15 so good luck.
This is a potential “sleeper” of the set. I’m not sure how much upside there is at $5 but if you like the cut of his jib I wouldn’t fault you for getting yours. Outside of Cracking Doom, nobody is really set up to kill this guy.
I’m totally on board buying all of these lands. They’re $2-3.50 each which is in the ball park that the lower man land (Lumbering Falls) from Battle for Zendikar dropped to. If these get a lot of play in Modern and EDH… Well I guess really it’s “when” they get a lot of play, they will go up. There are not a lot of choice of good enemy colored dual lands.
Some people swear by this guy, and on paper he looks pretty good. The reality is he’s actually pretty difficult to cast unless you reshape your mana a lot to support it. I’m not sure people will and I’m not on board buying into a $7 rare. This is one of those “I have to see it to believe it” kinda cards. But I’m not always right, I felt that way about Collected Company before that was $15.
This is the last card I’ll touch on. He’s great. He’s $2.75 but he’s the buy a box promo. I would not fault you for buying or trading for some. I may have done it myself. While this unlikely another Goblin Rabblemaster, he’s got enough value on a sturdy body to be around for a bit.
One last bone to pick
So you guys know I used to advocate Pucatrade. It was a fantastic service. Was.
This is the current Pucatrade plan page. They have tripled the bonuses you get for signing up for paid plans and have the same bonus for new referrals. That’s a huge amount of additional Pucapoints flowing into the market that will cause more inflation. At this point I don’t think there is an upside to using Pucatrade because there is such a large possibility people just stop sending you cards. The fact that at this point, your entire Puca subscription cost turns into pucapoints is VERY concerning. Without a way to take them out of the market it’s possible pucapoints just turn into Zimbabwean Dollars. It is just a really bad way to get caught with your pants down. I don’t know if the new website will fix these issues but it should be pointed out as something to watch.
Thanks as always for reading, hopefully if my weekend goes to plan and you’re watching the StarCity open in Atlanta you will see me on camera! Gotta keep up the facade that I play more Magic than every other writer on this website, right?
Last Saturday, numerous Magic players woke up to surprising news: the sudden release of the latest Banned & Restricted announcements. The story goes that the MTGO Beta team enforced these updates, yet they hadn’t been announced yet on the Mothership. With the internet being what it is these days, it took all of a few milliseconds for this information to hit Reddit, then Twitter, and then the world.
Wizards had no choice but to acknowledge the mishap by reporting the changes. Talk about impactful!
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