Reddit Questions #3: Finance 101

November 19, 2015 Douglas Johnson 1 Comment

I really enjoy writing these personalized response threads, because I know for a fact that my content is helping at least a few specific people in particular with their questions about Magic finance. If you weren’t around to read the first two articles where I answered questions from Reddit, then feel free to do so. I mean, I’m not sure if the answers to those questions are still relevant two months later, but they should at least make for some decent reading material if you’re bored. Hopefully next week, I’ll be back with a more comprehensive article on collection buying, since that appears to be my niche among MTGPrice writers.

GriselGrand Prix

Our first question comes from user Edward_Dionysos

Griselbrand GP promo. It’s played in Legacy, modern and has a lot of casual appeal. It’s down to 13 and I think I can pick a number up for 11.

Worth buying into or wait a couple months yet? The regular foil is at 60.

I don’t think the promo Griselbrand is the best pickup you should be aiming for right now (unless you happen to need copies for personal play, in which case I don’t think you need to wait for it to drop any further). The supply on these is absolutely huge, and I think people often forget that these are still being given out! There will be over a thousand more copies added to the pool this weekend at GP Pittsburgh, and I don’t think the casual appeal on this is as high as you suggest, partially due to his “banned in Commander” status.

If you’re looking for safe Modern-legal investments, I would turn your attention towards Modern Masters 2015 cards that have been suppressed over the summer and fall, and will continue to dodge reprints through next year. We’re not opening anymore of that set, and we’re almost guaranteed to see cards like Remand that have hit an all-time low start to creep back up. I also wouldn’t hate you for picking up Fulminator Mage, Mox Opal, or Cryptic Command.

Boros Bartering

Question number two comes to us from A_Tattooed_Biker:

I pulled an Arid Mesa Expedition (currently @ $105) and a Sacred Foundry Expedition (currently at $65). I’ve watched the Mesa climb from mid 70s to the current price. My question is, how long should I hold on to these guys? They’re only going up, right?

Expeditions lands have definitely settled down over the past month, although I don’t recall Mesa ever being at $70. If you’re someone looking for pure finanical gain, then you’re correct that I think these can only go up in the long term. However, that long term is, well, a very long term. I expect these to slowly creep up over years, not weeks or months. If you’re a player who is on the hunt for pieces to decks, then I can only recommend trading or selling them to help you play Magic.

If you’re looking to get into Modern, these two lands can help to put a decent dent in some of the higher-dollar cards that you probably don’t want to shell out pure cash for. The Foundry can turn into a set of regular Foundries plus $15 in other random goodies. The Mesa can split itself into two Mesas plus some other small stuff. There’s probably someone at your LGS who is hunting these down and has a fully stocked trade binder for you to go digging through that you normally wouldn’t have access to without these kinds of cards. If you care about trying to build a deck, I think these are your ticket to help with that. If you’re not planning on playing anytime soon, they should be considered reasonably stable holds.

The Waiting Game

Next up at bat is N1trobunny asking about the potential growth of sealed product:

Greetings!

I usually just lurk on r/mtgfinance[1] , so please forgive me if I’m asking a question that always comes up (a link would be nice too!)

I was thinking of snagging a couple boxes of Khans to hang onto, as I imagine they’d go up in value due to the fetch land content. Is this a realistic Idea, or would I be better off buying fetches and letting them go up?

Thanks all!

Not to go too deep into the time machine, but one of my favorite articles that I wrote back on Brainstorm Brewery was about investing in Sealed product, and how it’s really not what it used to be. Return investment on boxes of RTR have been, well, lackluster to say the best, and that was three years ago. The TL;DR of the article is that other than novelty product like the first-ever Commander set, I really don’t think we can expect the return on investment for fall- or spring-set booster boxes to be what it used to, like with Zendikar or Scars of Mirrodin. You’d be waiting three, maybe four years to get a return of 20, maybe 30, percent and then what? Selling them will be brutal with all of the shipping costs. I really think you’re better off looking into single card specs at that point, although not fetches. They’re currently too high from their ubiquity in Standard. If you’re looking for card specs that have the potential to span over several years, you can continue reading and we’ll get to that in just a bit.

If you’re looking to hold onto the boxes for three years and then have some booster drafts with your friends down the road for nostalgia, then my advice is a bit different. I’d tell you that you can find KTK boxes for around $85 on Massdrop. If you can’t wait patiently until the next drop becomes available, you can find a local judge who’s willing to sell you his box that he received for judging an event, or until you find a lucky deal on eBay or something. I wouldn’t feel like you have to run out and buy it right now is the point I’m trying to make here.

Bulk Rares are Best Rares

Lastly, we have a question on cheap cards to invest in that have the potential to show a lot of growth very suddenly, from dbchiu.

Okay, so maybe he wanted to know more about Pauper picks, but he didn’t ask that specifically in the question, did he? Eh, I’ll use any excuse to talk about bulk rare penny stocks. Instead of Pauper penny stocks that you may or may not have a hard time getting rid of to a large crowd, I love setting aside certain bulk rares that I pick up for a dime a piece. Eventually some of them pop, like Spoils of the Vault earlier this year. More recently, Kabira Evangel and his other ally friends from Zendikar gave me some pretty ridiculous percentage gains.

In terms of risk versus reward, I absolutely love cards that just have that sense of “this could be broken if the right card is printed.” At a dime each, you can’t really go wrong. The worst case scenario is buylisting back to a large vendor at a Grand Prix, or shipping them to someone like me who wants all of your bulk rares.

Okay, seriously. Someone has to break this eventually. It has so much potential, and just screams combo.

Once a proud $6 card, now reduced to a mere bulk rare. This one’s less of a “combotastic Modern sleeper” and more of a “non-competitive slow gainer over three years,” but I’d rather have 1,000 copies of this instead of a booster box of Khans of Tarkir any day. Even if I wait two years for a slow gain back up to being buylistable at 50 cents, I’m perfectly fine with that.

End Step

Normally this is where I give you some random small tid-bits of information that I realized at some point throughout the week, but I’m not sure I have anything today.

This coming weekend is Grand Prix Pittsburgh, and you might see me there. If I do decide to go, I promise I won’t write about it for next week. I’m trying to think of a topic focusing on collection buying that I can hone in on, so if you have any suggestions or requests, then I’d be glad to hear them! Hit me up on the Twitter or Facebook, or in the comments section. Have a great week!

Corbin Hosler

PROTRADER: All About Expeditions

November 19, 2015 Corbin Hosler 1 Comment

Remember the first time we saw this?

Disillusioned with a lack of enemy fetch lands coming in Battle for Zendikar, players already had their expectations set low. As the first few trickles of news came in, no one expected much to change.

Then we caught the surprise news, and the community was shaken out of its stupor. Zendikar Expeditions were coming, and fetching would never be the same.

The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Going Mad

Going Mad – One Blood Crypt

November 18, 2015 Derek Madlem 5 Comments

By: Derek Madlem

In a recent article I asked for players to leave questions / future topics in the comments and a handful of you did. The question that sparked the most interest (for other commenters and me as a writer) was how you should go about choosing what cards to acquire first in Modern.

Most people will tell you to acquire the lands first, because they give you the most options going forward. For example your Temple Garden can go into a variety of Bant decks, Bogles, Naya, G/W hatebears, assorted Abzan decks and much much more. Getting cards that you can use in a number of places is always a great way to start. But approaching the format this way put’s a big fat wall in front of new players as lands are not always the cheapest thing to acquire and there’s a good chance that if you go in blind, you’re going to end up with some extras that you don’t really need.

Fetch Lands

For the last year and some change it’s been a great idea to pick up the fetch lands from Khans of Tarkir. You’ve already missed “bottom” on these, but they’re still extremely useful going forward, but which ones are the most useful?

Fetch lands are an oddity when it comes to deck construction, you’re going to get 95% usefulness out of a fetch land that is one color off in most decks, but that 5% reallly matters if you’re playing competitive level tournaments. You can easily substitute a Flooded Strand for a Scalding Tarn if you’re playing Splinter Twin, and for local weekly tournaments it’s hardly ever going to make or break many games for you. Burn decks generally don’t even care which red fetchlands you use.

MTGGoldfish.com has tool that ranks lands by how many archetypes they’re played in and you might be surprised that the most expensive isn’t the most commonly used. While I would recommend strictly following the percentages if you were a deckbuilding robot looking to optimize the order in which you completed ALL decks, I think it’s better to pick what types of archetypes you enjoy and see where the overlap is:

Scalding Tarn – Grixis Control, Splinter Twin, Pyromancer Ascension, Storm, Jeskai
Misty Rainforest – Infect, Splinter Twin, Temur Twin, Temur Aggro, Scapeshift
Verdant Catacombs – Abzan Company, Abzan Midrange, Jund, Infect
Arid Mesa – Zoo, Burn, Naya Company, Jeskai Control
Marsh Flats – Abzan, Abzan Company, B/W Tokens
Polluted Delta – Grixis Control, Grixis Twin, Ad Nauseum, Esper Control, Esper Gifts, Dredgevine
Flooded Strand – U/W Control, U/W Gifts, Jeskai Control
Wooded Foothills – Zoo, Burn, Jund, Kiki Chord, Naya Company, Jund Dredgevine
Windswept Heath – Bogles, Abzan Company, Abzan Aggro, Kiki Chord, Naya Allies
Bloodstained Mire – Living End, Jund, Grixis Twin, Grixing Control, Jund Dredgevine

As you can see, there is a lot of overlap between the fetch lands and you’re not going to be disappointed owning four of any of them. That said, you don’t necessarily need four copies of all of them. If you’re looking to play Abzan decks, for example, Verdant Catacombs and Windswept Heaths are your primary choices and Marsh Flats is your tertiary fetch – you only really need two copies in most builds. Arid Mesa is in a similar position in most decks that include it outside of Burn, which doesn’t care which fetches you use.

By just shaving two copies of each of those out of your “Modern playset” list, you’re freeing up $160 in value that you can be allocated elsewhere.

Shock Lands

Shock lands are interesting to look at because the numbers ultimately reflect something that emotionally we’re blind to: you don’t need them all. When Return to Ravnica rotated out of Standard we all snatched up as many shock lands as we could because they “were a sure thing” just like those Zendikar fetches that we’d seen skyrocket. As it turned out–not so much. This was mostly due to the fact that in Standard we were playing four copies of each and that is not the case at all in Modern.

Especially with access to all ten fetch lands, the need to run more than two of any shock land is rare and typically only shows up in the strict two-color decks. Even then, it’s more likely that you’re going to run three copies rather than four. So let’s take a look at how many of these you actually NEED for Modern:

Watery Grave:
Esper Gifts – 2
Grixis Twin – 1
Grixis Control – 1
Sultai – 1
Steam Vents:
Scapeshift – 4
U/R Delver – 3
U/R Storm – 3
U/R Twin – 2
Grixis Twin – 2
Grixis Control – 2
Jeskai Midrange – 2
Jeskai Control – 2
Temur Tempo – 2
Breeding Pool:
Infect – 3
Scapeshift – 2
U/R Twin – 1
Sultai – 1
Temur Tempo – 1
Hallowed Fountain:
Jeskai Midrange – 2
Jeskai Control 2
U/W Control – 1
Esper Gifts – 1
Godless Shrine:
Abzan – 2
Esper Gifts – 1
Goryo’s – 1
Stomping Ground:
Scapeshift – 4
Through the Breach Valakuut – 4
Naya Zoo – 3
Naya Burn – 2
Temur Tempo – 1
Jund – 1
Naya Company – 1
U/R Twin – 1
Living End – 1
Temple Garden:
Bogles – 4
Naya company – 2
Naya Allies – 2
Naya Zoo – 1
Abzan – 1
Overgrown Tomb:
Sultai – 3
Abzan – 2
Jund – 1
Living End – 1
Sacred Foundry:
Naya Burn – 3
Naya Allies – 1
Naya Zoo – 1
Naya Company – 1
Jeskai Midrange – 1
Jeskai Control – 1
Blood Crypt:
Jund – 1
Living End – 1
Grixis Twin – 1
Grixis Control – 1
Goryo’s – 1

This is by no means EVERY shock land played in Modern, these are just the top 40 or so most common decks appearing on MTGO in daily events. As you can see the number of each shock land you NEED depends heavily on which archetypes you were hoping to play, but if you were to make a master list of shock lands that covered every deck you could want to play it would probably look a little bit like this:

Watery Grave – 2
Steam Vents – 4
Breeding Pool – 3
Hallowed Fountain – 2
Godless Shrine – 2
Stomping Ground – 4
Temple Garden – 4
Overgrown Tomb – 3
Sacred Foundry – 3
Blood Crypt – 1

As you can see, approaching your Modern shock lands with a plan rather than just acquiring four of each will save you significant resources that you can direct elsewhere. This list can be shaved even further if you decide that there are some decks that you will just never play.

Watery Grave – 2
Steam Vents – 3
Breeding Pool – 1
Hallowed Fountain – 2
Godless Shrine – 2
Stomping Ground – 3
Temple Garden – 2
Overgrown Tomb – 3
Sacred Foundry – 3
Blood Crypt – 1

I know that I’m never going to play Scapeshift, Through the Breach Valakuut, Bogles, or Infect so I can go down to three Steam Vents, Three Stomping Grounds, two copies of Temple Garden, and a single copy of Breeding Pool and trade the rest of them away at my local shop or on Pucatrade. This is going to give me around $65 worth of value that I can direct elsewhere – or nearly one half of a Tarmogoyf.

Fork in the Road

Entering Modern can be a daunting task. You don’t really know where to start and the best path often seems to be to get one of the “cheap decks” to start out with just so you can play. This seems like a great strategy on paper when you’re starting from zero, but how many of us are truly in that position? It’s enticing to throw resources at decks like Affinity, Tron, Elves, or Merfolk but you end up putting all your eggs in one basket as many of these cards don’t translate to other decks. Take a look at an UrzaTron list for example:

Creatures (6)
1 Spellskite
3 Wurmcoil Engine
1 Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn

Spells (34)
4 Ancient Stirrings
4 Chromatic Sphere
4 Chromatic Star
4 Expedition Map
2 Relic of Progenitus
3 Pyroclasm
4 Sylvan Scrying
3 Oblivion Stone
4 Karn Liberated
2 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

Lands (20)
1 Eye of Ugin
2 Forest
1 Ghost Quarter
4 Grove of the Burnwillows
4 Urza’s Mine
4 Urza’s Power Plant
4 Urza’s Tower

All of those cards highlighted in red? Oh, those are the cards that essentially see play in zero other decks in Modern. Tron is an awesome deck to play and there are few things I’ve done in Magic that were more satisfying than turn three Karn Liberated into turn four Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre into turn five Karn but the deck is highly specialized and if you get sick of it, the cards just aren’t useful in anything else.

Starting in the middle and radiating out from there as you have more resources at your disposal is going to give you the most bangs for your bucks. Do you like casting Lightning Bolt and Serum Visions? Grab a couple copies of Steam Vents. Fancy yourself a Noble Hierarch man? Temple Garden is the place to start. Did you trade your Standard deck into a playset of Tarmogoyfs? Overgrown Tomb is the probably the land for you.

Knowing your play style is the most important thing, Modern is much more of an open field than Standard so you can play almost anything you want to a fairly reasonable win percentage assuming you learn the deck well. Owning Tarmogoyfs helps, but Young Pyromancer and his elemental friends can often do just as much damage while clogging up the board with a swarm of blockers, so it’s not at all about who has the most money at their disposal.

No matter what current or past Standard decks you’ve enjoyed, there’s a deck in Modern that will match your play style. If you need suggestions for where to start your upgrade path, just post in the comments below and I’ll do my best to advise you on a path forward. But if you only take one thing away from this article it’s this – you only need one Blood Crypt.

Jason Alt

You Sunk My Battleship

November 18, 2015 Jason Alt 2 Comments

I talk a lot about rising tides lifting boats, but we cannot ignore what has just happened. Commander 2015 is out, and while the new cards’ prices are obviously in flux, starting at arbitrary preorder numbers guessed at by individuals and stores like Star City Games (and not always good guesses as the $1 they wanted for Blade of Selves can attest) and being buffeted by the waves of supply and demand until the stormy seas calm down and the prices find their equilibrium, wherever that may be.

It doesn’t do us a ton of good right now to even talk about new singles, because the most efficient way to get the cards is still to crack precons, something I recommend. It’s roughly $120ish to get a full set of the 5 decks, which is basically a buy-four-get-one-free deal at MSRP, and it’s worth it for all of the deckbuilding stock, if that’s what you’re into.

Forget Deckbuilding, Where’s the Money?

If you aren’t into that and are more interested in investing, I’m going to advise we stay away from new cards for a while. The one real good buy-in opportunity for preorder cards was the $1 Blade, and when I saw on Saturday that was its price, I wrote my weekly article a few days early. By the time it was published Tuesday, a day earlier than normal, the price had quintupled. I think that ship has sailed, but there is opportunity to buy cheaply if we know where to look.

Remember how I keep harping on Wurmcoil Engine? There’s a very good reason for that. We can learn quite a bit from Wurmcoil Engine about the future of singles prices, and the past Commander sets are going to be an excellent guide. Let’s spend some time looking at the prices of cards that are down, but not down for the count.

Can you tell when Commander 2014 was announced? That’s when prices started to really tail off. What’s interesting about this graph isn’t just that it recovered, but you can actually see the exact day the sets were released. Can you guess where November 7 is? That’s right.

So the set came out and the price immediately stopped falling. Dealers lost confidence entirely, taking their buylist price lower and lower, but the retail price of Wurmcoil stopped declining. Now, this is likely due to people not buying any copies of old Wurmcoil because they can get a new one for $30 along with the Dualcaster Mage that Wizards was so confident would be the new Snapcaster that they made a judge foil out of it and a ton of other great cards. The red deck was stacked, and while speculators were all-in on the white deck to get Containment Priest and throw the other 99 cards in the trash, the red one was mostly bought by players because Daretti is a cheater of a commander.

But even though people stopped buying the old Wurmcoil as much because they could get the new one, look at the price of the new one. This graph starts on November 12, a few short days after the set hit. Despite supply hitting a new high, demand hit a new high as well and an MSRP of $30 for the entire deck wasn’t enough to keep Wurmcoil under $20.

There are other cards like this that saw a reprint and whose prices rebounded nicely. Looking at a few older examples can help us pick out some cards that are going to tick back up, albeit slower than Wurmcoil (which is a bit of an anomaly but which also demonstrates the power EDH has to influence prices).

A Lesson in Tools

A useful thing to know how to do on MTGPrice is to search for cards by set. At the top of the main, non-blog page, there are a few tabs, one of which is “Browse sets” which brings up a page where the sets are listed chronologically with the newest set on top. You can sort the cards in each set by price and see which cards are surprisingly expensive.

When Commander first debuted, Scavenging Ooze was the slam-dunk of the set, retailing for around $50. Currently, twenty cards in Commander are more expensive than the now-heavily reprinted Scavenging Ooze (and good for Wizards for reprinting it so it could be played in Modern), and only twelve of those cards were new in that set. Eight reprints surged or maintained while Ooze plummeted. Of those eight reprints, three of them surged or were propped up by Modern. That leaves five cards with enough EDH playability to have made them good investments. Was there any money to be made buying at the right time? What time was that?

MTG Price’s data on Commander sets starts in 2013, but we can still learn a bit about how time has a way of making initial investments look good a few years down the road.

While Wizards hasn’t reprinted this card since, it has taken some of the pressure off with cards like Dictate of Erebos and Butcher of Malakir, a card the company will never stop printing every three months. Buying even two years after the set was released, you would have made money on Grave Pact, turning a $5 initial buy-in into an opportunity to sell at retail for $15. Grave Pact is never not going to be good in EDH, but I invested in Dictate of Erebos instead—and barring a reprint, I’m looking forward to that card hitting the $5 mark before I sell my hundreds of copies all purchased at bulk rare price.

Some of this growth could be due to Modern, but this is a planeswalker and it’s hard to keep an original-five planeswalker down. Despite ten different versions of the guy floating around out there, all are worth roughly the same $8 right now. I like almost any non-Tibalt planeswalker at around $4, and Daretti’s price is making me salivate.

It’s hard to keep a good Wrath down, and this may be the best EDH Wrath ever with modes that you can play around or be entirely unaffected by. The price is flat now, but you could have turned $4 into $10 just by recognizing this card was perhaps the best white Wrath effect in EDH. Not bad.

And these don’t even give the creature hexproof!

Commander 2013 has a few attractive targets, but even this far back, we haven’t quite seen how things are going to play out for a lot of them. Commander 2013 was bought to such an extent that there are only three cards that retail for over $5 in the whole set, new cards and reprints combined.

It seems like they’re printing new chase utility lands rather than reprinting, so we may be safe from Homeward Path reprints for a while, giving the price a chance to grow a bit. It’s demonstrated the ability to hit $6 and I think it can again and more. The card is very good, and while Commander 2013 pushed out way more copies than the original Commander set, Homeward Path is in the Naya deck, easily the worst-selling of the five. If it doesn’t get reprinted, this is likely an $8 to $10 card in two years. However, I’m not buying in too heavily at $4.

Utility uncommons can turn into powder if they get reprinted, but Deceiver Exarch surged due to a Modern-predicated buyout. You could have gotten these for practically nothing for a whole year and a half and ridden the wave. Are there any good Modern cards hiding in other Commander sets? Yep! And a recent printing in Commander 2015 is going to crush their prices, giving you a very good buy-in opportunity. We’ll be on the lookout for cards that have a place in EDH but are also Modern staples. I can think of one in particular.

This card is going to shrug off a lot of reprints. Will this ever settle under $5? I don’t think so. EDH players rarely take decks apart, so every time they build a new deck with green in it, they’re going to want another copy of this. Modern players rediscover this card every once in a while and buy them by the playset. Commander 2015 just reprinted it and threatens to smash the price a bit, but if we ever see the days of $3 Eternal Witness again, it’s a snap buy. Can this card see $7 again? I am actually fairly confident that it can. The reprint risk is high, but I think how far you buy below $6 is all guaranteed profit when it pops back up to its previous high.

Not all cards can shrug off repeated reprints, however. Some are starting to show signs of fatigue.

Back-to-back reprintings in Commander 2014 and Commander 2015 have probably cooked this goose completely. It doesn’t help that Solemn was in Built from Scratch, the same deck as Wurmcoil Engine, meaning the deck needed no help from a card like Sad Robot to bring up the value.

I expect the Ezuri deck, where it’s reprinted this time, to be a little different. With a lot of the value spread over $5 cards, it’s a totally different situation. That could be enough to prop the value up a bit, but I don’t see potential. I imagine Solemn will be in Commander 2016, as well. I don’t think they need to do these every year, but the cards that are only appropriate to be reprinted in one of the decks, or not at all, stand to gain a lot from people building new decks. Remember, Commander doesn’t need to grow that much as a format, it just needs to not shrink—because every new deck is a new excuse to build a bunch of decks.

It’s clear this wasn’t price growth as much as price correction. The blue Commander 2014 precon was garbage: hot, greasy garbage. The white precon got Containment Priest and the blue one got Dulcet Sirens. The price fell way too far predicated on the reprinting being the pin in its price’s balloon that would keep it from surging out of control. Here’s the problem: it’s in a terrible deck and the card is just too good. Any card that is too good for the bad deck it’s in could see a price correction like this saw. Rift isn’t done going up, either, and should settle a little below its pre-drop price of $6 to $7. If you bought these at $1, you’re feeling good right now, especially since the RTR versions never dipped below $2. Next week, I’ll be trying to find cards analogous to this and a few others from this piece.

Did anyone not see this coming? Yet how aggressively was anyone really buying at $2? And why not? This is a stupid elf that makes other stupid elves. It’s perhaps the best elf lord ever printed. Did we not expect it to double in a year’s time and climb higher if it’s not printed again? There are insanely popular tribes out there and their staples shrug off reprints because it’s s fun to have multiple elf decks. My Ezuri elf deck and my Nath elf deck aren’t going to have the same color sleeves so I can switch a bunch of cards between them. I’m going to buy another Imperious Perfect because I’m not a poor. Everyone else will, too, and the increased supply is going to create increased demand.

What happens isn’t always easy to predict, though.

Sometimes the card doesn’t correct like you expect it to. There are a few things going on here, and the first is that it was reprinted in another deck so that’s going to curb its price growth potential quite a bit. The second hiccup is that the new “tuck” rule means this card isn’t quite the “suck it, nerd, your commander is gone forever” card that it used to be. But what people lamenting the fact that you can’t short a card are forgetting is that this is still practically the only way to remove a troublesome permanent in mono-red, and mono-red is really fun in EDH sometimes. I mean, it’s the worst color and it isn’t mitigated by other colors, but you can still do some fun and annoying stuff and if you want your commander to be Daretti or Godo or Kiki-Jiki or whomever, you’re going to have to have a way to remove permanents that isn’t Nevinyrral’s Disk. This is that. I expected this to go up already, so I’m a little puzzled. The Commander 2014 version is a whole dollar cheaper, probably because Wurmcoil is picking up so much slack that the rest of the cards in that deck are practically chaff, which is odd because almost every card in the red deck is better than almost every card in the blue one. Sometimes it’s not a meritocracy out there, folks.

What’s Happening Next Time?

I am looking forward to coming back hard next week and giving you my picks for cards that are soon to reverse the dip they took after their reprintings. There is opportunity—just look at how much money you could have made buying Cyclonic Rift, Austere Command, Exarch, or a few dozen other real “growers.” Fortunately, the growers aren’t always show-ers, and if we can root them out, we could have as much as a year to get the copies we want before the prices start to soar.

Check in with me next week and we’ll take a look at some of my picks. As always, leave it in the comments and let’s make some money.

MTGPrice Blog