Brainstorm Brewery #175 – Instances of Sorceries

December 17, 2015 Jason Alt

Corbin starts us off by regaling all of us with a tale of his pocket getting “picketed” and we’re off to the races with a great episode where clearly we know there isn’t a lot to talk about Magic-wise until we start discussing it and, holy crap there’s actually a lot to talk about. The episode goes a little long. These things happen. The important thing to remember is that we’re your favorite Magic podcast and Corbin getting robbed is hilarious. There’s time to discuss spoilers, why it’s terrible that we have so many spoilers, and why this set is going to be a real financial curveball.

Corbin’s picket-pocket story
SPERLERS! Sperlers galore!
Expeditions are discussed at length
Potential new fair dual lands?
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City of Traders

PROTRADER: The Printer is Leaking

December 16, 2015 Travis Allen 2 Comments

By: Travis Allen

Whether you call them spoilers or a leak, you’re correct. In this case, it’s a leak that spoiled us. It’s the largest leak since the New Phyrexia godbook, which if you don’t recall, was when a French dope got goaded in IRC of all places into releasing every single card weeks and weeks ahead of schedule. I know what you’re thinking—who the hell still used IRC back then? Great question. People dumb enough to be taken advantage of in IRC, I guess.

If you were following Magic at that time, you’d know that the event was, on the whole, disappointing. For about an hour it was quite exciting—the entire set! this is awesome! What the $*&@ are they thinking with Batterskull!—but the suspense was gone shortly after. As official spoilers finally began firing three weeks before the street date, people couldn’t care less. Everyone had been exposed, gotten excited, then gotten over the cards already. There was a fatigued, “Yeah, yeah, stop feigning interest in pretending we don’t know everything and just let us have the cards already,” current running through the community. Taken as a whole, the experience was less fun than when all of the spoilers happen at the intended rate.

This is similar, though obviously at a lesser scale. We’ve got seven mythics, half the set’s worth, as well as the entire run of Expeditions. Regardless of what you may see a few say, this was not Wizards-approved. One could argue that the Kozilek/Wastes leak was planted by Wizards. I disagree, but you could argue it.

This, though? No way. This takes all the wind out of so many collective sails. No chance to get excited over Wasteland. Over Strip Mine. Over Horizon Canopy. It’s one shotgun blast of frenzied chatter, and now…whatever. To those that may be so inclined to do this in the future: please don’t. It’s less fun for all of us.

Well, alright. It’s sort of crummy that this is where we are, but there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Speaking of genies, did you ever read the theory that Disney’s Aladdin is set in the future? Talking animals like Iago can be explained by radiation from a major world war that also would have wiped out most ruins of a technologically superior society. The same type of society that could have left behind hover technology sophisticated enough to be mistaken for a magic floating carpet. Like most media conspiracies, it’s almost undoubtedly untrue, but still fun to think about. I always found the St. Elsewhere theory a good party story too. (I’m terribly boring at parties.)

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Going Mad

Going Mad – The Distortion

December 16, 2015 Derek Madlem 6 Comments

By: Derek Madlem

Well, the cat’s out of the bag and this time it’s no Rootborn Defenses. The release of Oath of the Gatewatch has been plagued with a series of leaks and we’re supposed to feel really bad about it. Well except for all those “accidental” leaks we had in the past…are we really supposed to take this seriously when Wizards is staging fake leaks all the time?

The first thing we saw from Oath was combination of Wastes and Kozilek, the Great Distortion. These cards sent people’s imaginations flying and there was some pretty terrible things speculated about the new mana symbol that luckily are not the case.

As it turns out, those little diamonds are quite simple: colorless that is actually colorless. That’s it. So now we finally get the big payoff for the pain lands being in Magic Origins (OMG THEY’RE BASICALLY TRI-LANDS!!!), but we also get a boatload of errata. Like this guy:

Oh that’s not awkward at all…see here’s the kicker, Wizards obviously knew about this change for a very long time but waited until the second half of a block to introduce what is to be an evergreen mechanic. Yeah, yeah, you’re right, it’s not really a mechanic so much as an unnecessary restriction that adds needless complexity to one of the most complex games to ever exist, but I’m sure it’s totally worth it!

The simple and most elegant solution would be to have included the new colorless mana symbol on those pain lands we talked about and just rolled it out from there. Nobody is excited about “the big payoff” of seeing that Kozilek has a restrictive casting cost…maybe there’s other things in the pipeline that are totally going to blow our minds, but I’m not holding my breath. Among the spoilers are a cycle of guildgate style duals that just enter the battlefield tapped and a number of two-color legendary creatures so we can infer that a decent portion of the set is carved out for multicolored cards.

Kozilek’s Return

The bulk of the spoilers leaked so far have been pictures of damaged Expeditions, but we’ve already seen half our mythic rares spoiled which isn’t going to leave us much to open Christmas morning (or whenever the awkward media blitz begins). We’ll circle back around to the Expeditions, I want to talk about the new Bonfire of the Damned.

See here’s the thing about giant wormy creatures that destroy everything in their wake, they’re bound to come bursting out of the ground every once in a while and lay waste to everything around them. This card is strong enough as a three mana instant speed Pyroclasm that gets around protection…but then they decided to bump it up two rarities and tack that second paragraph on and you’ve got what is likely to become a format warping card.

Big stupid decks have always been soft to the fast and wide ground game in Magic and this shores up a lot of those problems. Having played the big dumb ramp deck for the last few weeks, I am excited (and afraid) of what this coming Standard format is going to look like. The Eldrazi deck already has an incredible long game in abusing Sanctum of Ugin to chain Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger into Ulamog into Ulamog, but give me the ability to exile two permanents, deal five damage to all creatures, and search up Kozilek for an encore really pushes the strategy up a few rungs on the ladder.

Shrine of the Forsaken Gods seems like a pretty good endeavor at this point. Shrine essentially allows you to cast your Ulamogs (and now Kozileks) an entire turn sooner than you would have been capable of before. This card is critical for any attempt at a Standard Eldrazi deck and they’re currently sitting at less than a buck a piece, so it’s hard to make an argument against Shrine. But what’s stranger to me is that it’s partner in crime is below 50¢ and is played with the same frequency.

Sanctum of Ugin is the real powerhouse in Big.Dumb.Eldrazi.deck because it allows you to chain threats into more threats. In what is surely a Vorthos blasphemy, this allows you to cast an Ugin and fetch up an Ulamog to mop up whatever the spirit dragon is unable to. With Oath, this card only gets better as you can use it to fetch up Kozilek to refill your hand with more big stupids and a pile of functional counter magic.

Ulamog is one a very small handful of cards in BFZ that I still have any optimism for going forward, but a mythic that is going to be a 4x in Standard while also slotting into Modern and Commander decks seems like a pretty safe bet, especially when the current archetype gains so much from just two cards and the bulk of the set is still waiting to be revealed.

If you’re even of the mind that you COULD play this deck in Standard, now’s the time kids. There’s a good chance this gets ugly.

The current foil for big dumb Eldrazi is Infinite Obliteration, this card was fairly simple answer that the various Jace and Abzan decks could slot in to answer Ulamog outright. The deck can still win with Ugin, the Spirit Dragon but he’s nowhere close to the clock that Ulamog is and is often forced into the -X game rather than the Lightning Bolt game. There’s a chance this card continues to be the go-to answer for Eldrazi, but even having a second big dumb stupid is usually more than enough for the Eldrazi.

Void Winnower is currently sitting around $2.50 which seems criminally low for a sweet game altering mythic rare. Void Winnower could play a very important role in the upcoming Standard as it plays a dual role: it stops your opponent from casting both Ulamog and Kozilek and it also diversifies your threat package to avoid Inifinite Obliteration from the decks that can cast it. If nothing else, I like this card long term because it does something annoying in Commander and is a mythic rare. <Obligatory “can’t even” joke>

Pure Speculation

I like Drana, Liberator of Malakir. Drana is the kind of underwhelming powerhouse that steps up and surprises you from time to time. I have a harder and harder time imagining a world where Drana stays at $7. We have another set that is seemingly going to be heavy into the Allies followed by a return to the land of Vampires, how can you lose? Ironically, in a realm with four color decks, Drana is somewhat hard to cast thanks to that double black in the casting cost but that’s all going away in just a few short months as the tri-lands and fetch lands rotate out in April and we’re forced to return to something a bit more modest. But if Drana alone wasn’t enough to convince you that Vampires might be a thing…

Another leak from Oath, Kalitas is back and has apparently joined the wrong side for the Battle for Zendikar because he’s now a traitorous jerk that eats your opponents friends, makes them into zombies, and then eats them again. While I don’t expect this card to be a Standard powerhouse, it is another moving part in a black deck featuring Liliana, Heretical Healer and Wasteland Strangler and exploits the death synergy to good measure. There is a world that exists where we get a lot of sweet commons and uncommons that synergize well with this, but given Wizards’ recent track record, I don’t think we’re living in it.

Expeditions

I’ll go into the Expeditions more in a future article as I probably have to do some research to back up any outrageous claims that I’d make about them. I can admit that I’m pleasantly surprised with the assortment of lands that’s included as I was expecting them to consist of just the man lands and filter lands. While it’s disappointing to see Tectonic Edge in the ultra-mythic-super-saiyan-rare slot, it could have been much much worse.

If we’re fine with putting uncommons into that slot, the Mike Linnemann in me would have much rather seen an Eldrazi Temple with really sweet art just to hammer home the flavor. I thought the inclusion of Kor Haven was a flavor good catch on their part as it’s a Commander staple that actually fits contextually on Zendikar. The entire cycle in general appeals to a more causal audience than it’s predecessors, but still has some hardcore gems like Mana Confluence, Forbidden Orchard, and Horizon Canopy…you know, in case you want to pimp out that Bogles deck.

The prices for these are going to be much harder to peg down as shocks and fetches had a pretty well established hierarchy. We knew that if Scalding Tarn was going to be $250, everything else had to be less. This time around we’re going to have to let the market do most of the heavy lifting as there are no clear winners.

Jason Alt

On Clerics: The Article I Said in the Spoiler Coverage I Was Going to Write

December 16, 2015 Jason Alt 13 Comments

I’m helping with the Spoiler Coverage for Oath of the Gatewatch. Well, I mean, am I helping, or am I just doing it and DJ is helping me? I’ll let you be the judge. Unless you think I’m helping him and not the other way around. Then I’m never letting you be the judge again. Usually you have to go to law school first, and you suck at it.

I said in said coverage that DJ is helping me with that I was going to write about one of the cards at length, because while I expect it’s probably going to be a bulk rare, I also expect it’s going to make an entire deck playable that people have wanted to play and have not been able to. I’m talking, of course, about Mono-Black Splash White Kor Tribal™.

The Coming Tide

Real talk, though, having a black-white legendary cleric is something that people have wanted since EDH was a thing. We want four-color commanders, we want an Izzet-colored Commander that deals with artifacts, and we want a cockadoodie black and white cockadoodie cleric so we can build a COCK-A-DOODIE CLERIC DECK.

We’ve waited for long enough. Ayli and Daxos have made me seriously consider converting to Orzhov, and this is after Simic basically gave me everything I ever wanted in the form of the new Ezuri. Infinite turns with Sage of Hours? That’s cool. What have you done for me lately? Lumping myself in with Orzhov people who have waited patiently for this momentous occasion aside, what would the deck play and what can we even make money off of?

The deck would play a lot of back and white clerics cards, and those cards are old enough to be scarce, yet new enough to be available in foil. This pleases me. There’s gold in them thar’ hills, and we can mine it ahead of the coming gold rush if we’re canny enough to know where to start prospectin’. So let’s prospect.

EDHREC is a great resource for us, but without a commander to plug in, it’s hard to know where to start. It’s time to strap on our gumshoes and do some old-fashioned detective work. I googled “BW Clerics EDH” and looked at a few decks to see if they had anything in common. This gave me my first lead.

This card will go in 100 percent of Ayli decks. It’s a way to gain life to make sure you switch on her last ability. It’s a way to kill people. Can you imagine having a ton of clerics and just one-shotting an opponent by saccing Doubtless One to this land?

Foils are under $2, and that seems insane but also easy to fix. There just aren’t a ton of copies of this land out there, and EDH players aren’t really socking these away into collections and decks because there really wasn’t a way to build this deck unless you did what some people did and built around Teysa or an Esper-colored creature that served to occupy your command zone while you played the clerics you wanted to play. With an actual commander, this land will be the first card to go, and with as cheap and rare as it is, I see real upside. Not only was identifying this card a leg up, it also gave me something to search EDHREC for.

How many decks that weren’t running a ton of clerics were going to run this land? Very, very few. This gave me a list of cards that were frequently paired in decks with Starlit Sanctum. So which cards are likely to go up based on the abundance of new clerics decks built around Ayli?

Now here’s a real card. This can go in other decks, probably, but if we’re going to be sacrificing a ton of clerics, this gives us a way to replace them with bodies, and it has crossover appeal with zombie decks. Kinda. The point is that this has been pretty steady, had a recent brush with arbitrage, and is generally in low enough supply that it could easily jump over $5 and beyond if people give it any attention. How do I know a ton of people aren’t paying attention? Easy.

The foil is has a multiplier of only two. Casual players are making Rotlung Reanimator a $2.50 card with a $5 foil, and Ayli can really drive both prices up and make the foil multiplier diverge. A foil cleric deck is doable right now with only a few cards like Auriok Champion being prohibitively expensive to foil out. I feel like the foils cost now what the non-foils could cost very soon if people start to build around Ayli.

How about that Tiny Leaders format? I am not going to sit here and say, “I told you so,” but I did refuse to write about Tiny Leaders as a format before it really established itself as something other than a flash in the pan, and every subsequent “next hotness” that comes along like 1994 and Canadian Highlander I vow to stay out of for a year to give myself time to learn about them and for the formats to fizzle out. Now that the price of this cleric is returning to earth, be cautioned. The copies of this card are concentrated in the hands of speculators who couldn’t sell them, dealers foolish enough to jack up their buy price, and store display cases. When a card spikes after not really being a real card, copies come out of the woodwork. Speculators hit every LGS in the area to scour bulk bins and binders. People buylist them because they were junk and now they are worth something. Loose copies all get concentrated. If this card spikes again, even a little, the market will get flooded with copies. This is still too expensive for what it is, and I don’t see financial opportunity in trying to bank on this card going up based on clerics being popular. It’s a good card and good in the deck. It goes in the deck. But you’re not going to make money on this, I fear. There are too many people looking to undersell you to dump their hella copies and a much bigger shock will be needed to move the needle.

Tapping five clerics may look a little steep, but gaining 10 life is a reusable way to keep your Ayli switched on and keep yourself from dying to regular damage. This is also a very old foil that’s under $2 and will go in every Ayli deck that’s built with victory in mind. This card’s fate, like so many cards in this article, is directly tied to Ayli, but with Commander players clamoring for a black-white cleric and finally getting their prayers answered, there is real upside. This card fuels several clericy win conditions, as well as making sure you can keep nuking non-land permanents with Ayli. This is a must-include.

So many foil staples under $2. This is making me really want to just build this deck. A recent arbitrage opportunity and dealer behavior showing they are willing to come very close to the retail price, repeatedly, shows that dealers have a tough time keeping the relatively small number of copies in stock, but are willing to get these in and sell them for a small margin. This card is biggity-bonkers in a clerics deck and can make you friends at the table and keep your life total high enough to keep Ayli switched on. This is dumb. Under $2 is dumb.

If this card were older, it might be closer to $2 in foil instead of the $1 in foil it is now. Protecting your life total is important, and this card can keep you from dying to a token swarm or cards like Goblin Bombardment, which happens more often than you might think. Expensive mana-wise, this is worth it. And it’s cheap money-wise, so I’m even more inclined to just build a foil clerics deck. The foil Debtors’ Knell will suck, but the rest of the cards are like a damn dollar. For now, that is.

Conversely, casuals are already very aware of this tough-to-destroy creature who can get very large and very formidable very quickly. With foils at $13, there is room for divergence. It looks like this card will go up over time anyway, so it’s hard to lose here.

I don’t know if you jam this in the deck, and if you do, how many, but just remember these were sitting on draft chaff piles for free and they’re approaching $2 and $5 in foil. Just thought this card was worth revisiting.

This only tacks on $3 to our foil cleric deck price and it does WORK. A recent brush with arbitrage shows at least one dealer has confidence this will get somewhere some day. Personally, I just think it goes in the deck and probably just the one deck, but there is real upside. This is good in the deck.

“Hey guys, remember me? Well, I make clerics. You need to sacrifice a cleric? Use one of mine. Can I make the game get out of control? Yep, sure can.”

Heliod seems to have bottomed out and is starting to creep back up. He’s a much more useful card in EDH than he was in Standard, and I expect to see him pass a few lesser gods on his way up. He makes enchantments and clerics at the same time. So many decks want that. Foils are only $8 for now, which seems super reasonable.

I am seeing a lot of recent arbitrage opportunities on these $2 foils, and all around the same point in history. I wonder what happened that crazy month. Probably an article like this one. Am I creating false hysteria? I don’t think so—we’re getting a CLERIC COMMANDER.

There are a few other creatures that are probably shoo-ins, like Eight-and-a-Half-Tails and Auriok Champion, a card that costs as much as the rest of the deck at $50 in foil. Those are fairly obvious. Put basically every cleric creature in the deck. Heliod, though, is less obvious, and I think you read my column because I come up with some things you might not have thought of on your own. How does this pile of clerics become a deck?

This should take some of the sting out of sacrificing your clerics all day long. Getting them back for value all the time and being able to use Ayli a lot will feel good, and this card goes in lots of other decks. It’s not going to go down in price much, if at all, and any bump in demand should send the price up a bit. This is a solid place to park some money. I may even spring for the foil at $21. This foil clerics deck will be fun.

This $6 card is available for $9 in foil. A 1.5x multiplier tells me that casual players love this card, and foil nuts like I’m gradually becoming aren’t as keen yet. But as cheap as it is, I’m springing for the foil, as there are so few copies that people paying attention to this card should see that multiplier grow even if the non-foil price grows more slowly. This card says “win the game” on it and rewards you for gaining life like you already planned to. Deal.

The reprint at non-mythic rare threw this card off a cliff. You can pretend this is a $4 card all you want, but Battle for Zendikar copies are bulk. BFZ foils are $2. Will this card recover? Yes. Just not this year.

This used to be a $30 foil. I almost bought one, and I’m glad I didn’t, but even if I had shelled out like $25 for this, I would have been able to use it for a year before its price took a dump, and winning games with this would have made it worth it. BFZ foils at $2 seems interesting, but remember, it’s not mythic anymore, and that sucks. Now I know how Yu-Gi-Oh! financiers feel.

Do people just not know about this card? How is this not more expensive? In any case, this does work in a deck where you are sacrificing your guys and want them back to sacrifice them again. This card is from Urza’s Saga, meaning it’s old enough to vote, and we’re not getting more of these printed because it’s so busted that Wizards saw fit to include it on the Reserved List. With the cards in Battle for Zendikar that reward sacrifice, this seems like it has upside to me.

This could get reprinted, but until it does, why not Grave Pact them and make them not want to cast removal spells on your stuff? This card is growing very steadily because it’s busted, and clerics decks where your commander is a sacrifice outlet won’t shy away from this card by any means.

I went way over my word count and didn’t even jam in my usual space-wasting rhetoric this week. This is a topic that could have easily yielded another full article full of picks. What I suggest is looking at how the deck would be built and getting ahead of the people who will likely want to build around Ayli when the set is released. Forewarned is forearmed, so be armed with the info from this article or I will forearm you in the throat. You know, with my forearm. That word means two things.

Did I make a clerical error and forget to include an obvious cleric card? Leave it in the comments below. Until next week, nerds. Smell ya later!

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