Unlocked Pro Trader: How to Invest in Crypto

lith Rite

Readers! My attempt to game the headline analyzer algorithm are yielding some interesting results – this time I did a bit worse, 72%. I guess it’s better to make specific promises – “making 40k” than it is to tell people how to do things. Fair enough. The headline analyzer doesn’t think you want to be taught how to fish, it thinks you want fish spoonfed to you. I’m not going to do that, readers. It’s not because I respect your intelligence too much, far from it, I’m just not inclined to try and feed anyone fish with a spoon. I’m going to forkfeed these picks to you. That said, there isn’t a ton more data now than there was last week, and the EDHREC backend has gotten a little more complicated so we only have data from one deck. Let’s beat it to death and see if anything else comes rolling out of the corpse. Actually, no, I changed my mind mid-paragraph and rather than just erase that and write what I’m actually going to do, I’m going to leave all of it which will have the effect of showing you how my thought process works and also emphasize that this other thing is so important that I don’t want to risk forgetting about it. They made Necrotic Ooze a commander.

It doesn’t have the activated abilities of all creatures, but having the activated abilities of all Artifact Creatures is enough because you don’t need any creatures that aren’t artifacts.

I know I sound like a broken record here, but Phyrexian Devourer is very good with Necrotic Ooze effects and they’re going to come back into focus soon. Notice the Old Stickfingers bumps I warned about? The price has been cut in half, but since we have an even better Necrotic Ooze commander now, I figured why not just make a lot of money when this hits $30 again? Second spike, baby. Making money on this card is so much fun and I’ve done it so often I should send the Alliances design lead a gift basket. One of those edible arrangements or something. Something classy with a bunch of pineapple and shit. People love being thanked with a bunch of pineapple and honeydew melon but they don’t want to pay $45 plus delivery fees to get like 4 chocolate covered strawberries to be served to them at room temperature in front of all of their work colleagues. That’s where I’ll come in. Did I make you a bunch of money with this card in 2021? I bet I did. Is it absolutely going to happen again? Don’t answer here, that was a rhetorical question since this is an article and not a conversation. Let your chocolate covered pineapple wedges on skewers do the talking.

Second spikes feel like cheating. This bad boy snaked all the way back down to a buck fiddy, can it be $7.50 again? It will probably be more, try to have copies when that happens. I have no idea how much this mono-Black commander will get played, but it doesn’t have to get played at all, that’s the beautiful part.

Imagine this pic is accompanied by a fart noise sound effect that goes on so long it stops being funny then starts being funny again

Not great build metrics here, but the hype sure took these cards to the moon, even though they didn’t stay there very long, like people who went to the actual moon landing faked video in that California studio directed by Stanley Kubrick. Buy early and often, sell into hype always. If you miss your window, these specs will literally inevitably go up again. They’re not reprinting Phyrexian Devourer, nor are they likely to make a version of it that’s so much better that people will stop also playing Phrexian Devourer in a format that literally allows you to run 100 cards, especially given that Artifacts are not excluded from any of those decks on the basis of color identity.

Let’s see how the reprint impacted the price of Walking Ballista.

….K

Sure wish I had seen this coming 2 years ago, but it is down significantly from its peak, and the next bump goes higher. It likely takes a world event rather than a reprinting since it’s not just Triskelion that needs to go up but also Antiquities as a whole, but this is worth knowing.

Maybe Mirrodin foils are the play?

Anyway, this wasn’t even intended to be the main body of the article, but it was so interesting it got its own half an article. I like when stuff I talked about before happens again, even though I don’t remember which article I covered these cards in and it would be so painstaking to find it, it’s literally easier to repeat myself. Besides, maybe you didn’t read the last one, so enjoy the this one.

Moving on to our main topic which will be, at most, as big as this side topic and likely smaller, we have a deck with data on EDHREC, so that’s cool.

I don’t know if people like this dude or the Asstarts or however you pronounce that, but they seem to like the deck, so let’s see what goes in it.

If you’re like me, you looked at the High Synergy cards before you read the massive wall of text on this stupid wizard rectangle and right now you’re trying to mentally work backward to how this commander works looking at a bunch of weird Red Tims and suspend cards and the 5th best card in the “loyal” cycle. What in the world?

Oh, so those suspend cards just get cascaded into by any spell, basically. That’s pretty rad since you can control the exact amount of damage you deal.

Seems like this foil is always in play and with just one more impetus for it to go up and the fact that most Ravnica Allegiance foils have rolled themselves into tubes by now, the supply will only get lower.

Compare Spewer to this card that got a rarity downshift and still flirted with $2. Not bad. Alchemist is obviously a much better card, but, you know, still.

Compare this to a card I confidently paid $8 a copy for release week.

Uncommons that get played a lot can be worth money in foil, even if a deeply stupid deck is where they’re mostly played. Magic finance is fun which is why I never bothered to learn to trade stocks.

Really expected this to tank more, but I’ll take it.

I know foils are mostly trash these days, but the foil is the same price as the non-foil and that’s an opportunity for you to either bet on foil or non-foil or hedge your bets and do both and conduct some A/B testing of your own. There’s no wrong way to invest in Wizard triangles because if I admit there is a wrong way you’ll start remembering my past mistakes and holding them against me and you not doing that for a decade has allowed me to quit working in a stinky laboratory so don’t start now, I have no idea what any of the instruments are anymore and I’m too old to go to back to college.

This is a lot to think about, but I also feel like I barely scratched the surface of Abaddon (more like abadcard amirite) and you can certainly look more into what a pretty unremarkable Grixis spellslinger deck, a very old concept, it truly is if you want. Check my work, I welcome it. Ping me in the Pro Trader Discord server sometime, I’ll always respond to a DM from a Pro Trader, I love to chat, I just don’t love to follow the threads. Discord is actually a massive source of stress for me, but DMs make me happy and make my overall Discord experience a lot better, actually, so hit me up. I don’t bite, I promise. Until next time!

These Mean Streets of New Capenna

I don’t think you should be buying anything from Dominaria United right now. There might be something in the set that’s going to grow based on multi-format usage, like Ledger Shredder or Unlicensed Hearse, but for the most part, prices are about to take a bath.

What I’d like to focus on is the cards in Streets of New Capenna that are currently underpriced compared to their usage in Modern, Pioneer, Standard, and especially Commander. We’ve had about five months since the set came out, and prices have stabilized nicely. Even if things dropped about 10% more before flattening out, I’d feel good about where I bought in.

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Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

Unlocked Pro Trader: How to Make 40k

Readers!

Here I was making a stupid pun title about the 40k decks, little did I know what I was actually doing was striking a rich vein of SEO GOLD BABY! Check out my score from the WordPress “headline analyzer” feature that I swear is a real thing and that I swear I have tried to game multiple times.

Now THAT’S a headline! I’m learning the headline analyzer just wants to see how good a job you can do sounding like a tech bro. My articles aren’t for general consumption and you get them from our feed or from me on twitter, but I can’t help but try and game this thing. Gamers gonna game, right? At least that’s WotC’s theory – they think people who game 40K on a tabletop will want to buy the new 40K preconstructed decks, and that EDH players will want to pay $100 for a precon that’s all curly-ass foils of absolutely pushed Magic cards. Just dumb, broken stuff that will plague Commander for a decade. Remember the Brawl decks? Let me refresh your memory.

Cool format you’ve got there, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it! Like we print a bunch of obvious. pushed commanders that end up in the top 100 of the last 2 years. Is the top 100 a hard goal to reach? Well, for reference, we got 70 new Legendary creatures in Dominaria United alone. It’s safe to say putting 4 commanders in the top 62 is an indication something is wrong. They didn’t get people to play Brawl at all but they permanently changed the face of Commander, so that’s nice. Are these 40k Commanders on the same power level? No, of course not. They’re worse. Much, much worse.

Here are the decklists

This doesn’t seem so bad. Does it synergize with anything in the deck that seems troubling?

I’d say so. Great googily moogily this card is bonkers. Gruul Hydra decks are going to be all over this but now the decks have access to Blue for cards like, I don’t know, Inexorable Tide.

It’s not your job to care about how to use EDHREC so I’ll tell you briefly that I went to Themes on the top bar, then clicked the word “tribes” and scrolled down to hydras. We have a Temur Hydras deck to look at, we don’t even have to extrapolate from Gruul. The deck is Animar and it has a lot of info about how people likely tackle The Swarmlord.

This is pretty interesting.

It’s wild that someone took a look at this price graph and said “this needs a Double Double Masters reprint STAT” but what do I know? WotC won’t even return my emails. I’m not sure which is more insane, the decline from $40 to $4 or the fact that the Double Double Masters reprint at rare had basically no impact on the price. I think if this card hits $2, you brick them. It’s not a $40 Standard scourge, nor is it a bulk mythic (though it got a rarity downshift which is a terrifying signal about the future of Simic creatures).

These are very solid underlying metrics for a $4 card and insane metrics for a $2 one if you consider how few copies of an Eldraine mythic and a rare from a set with $100 booster packs are out there.

But I don’t know how much else plays nicely with The Swarmlord specifically. One card I’ve been talking about fiveever is still a decent spec imo.

Barring a reprint this is a $7-$10 card, especially with some help from The Swarmlord. I don’t know how this card is still so cheap but it’s approaching $3 on the buylist, which is more than retail was when I first started beating this drum. Slow and steady until a reprint knocks out legs out from under us, that’s how we like it.

This will be a very popular commander and basically everything that will be in the deck is on this page for Torbran that you can peruse at your convenience. I want to get to more than one precon today but I think I might not be able to. This deck will be three much fun.

With less turnaround time than before, WoTC is unlikely to let this stay at $8 but I don’t think they can stop it from reaching that number. Mystery Booster printing did very little, if CSI wants $3 for this, I say oblige them.

Yes, they are that cheap and are still available for now.

I honestly don’t hate these under $10. Secret Lair drop cards always seem to go up and I loved that terrible Dungeons and Dragons TV show even before I had played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. It was reruns, calm down, I’m not even 40 yet.

Torbran made this foil POP. Does Card Kingdom only want $7?

Well, yes and no.

At this point, any foil from an old set that does 1 damage in Izzet colors is a potential Aether Sting, which is exciting.

I have these in my bulk foils for sure, I haven’t picked that stuff in like 5 years.

Some sort of haste tribal deck seems very cool, and it’s not just Ball Lightnings that would be impacted. Let’s look at the page for Ball Lightning and see if we can glean anything from what cards tend to get played alongside it.

Look at these for a bit (if the image is too small, here is the page) and tell me if you see what I see. Give up?

Ognis is basically haste tribal!

Check out the High Synergy cards for Dragon tribal!

Deathleaper is one of the most exciting creatures we’ve seen in a while, and here is a card I will be putting directly onto my biggest creature.

Omnath, Locus of Rage made this no longer a bulk rare, what can Deathleaper do for it?

There is a lot to unpack here and each deck likely gets its own article, but it’s never too early to think about new cards even though we still haven’t even scratched the surface of Dominaria United. I could do this all day but I hit my word cap which means your eyes glazed over 4 paragraphs ago. Sorry for that. I’ll be back next week with more hot tips and cool quips. Until next time!

Dominaria United on Release Day!

Here we are, the day where the set is legal to buy and sell on the major sites, and it’s time to see if we can pull the diamonds from the rough. I have advocated repeatedly to not pre-order cards, and here I am, wondering if these are priced too low.

So let’s get to the cards, both the things I want to buy now and the things I’m going to be patient on. Prices right now can be a little wild, so if you spot copies that cost a little more or a little less, act accordingly.

Liliana of the Veil (DMU copies available from $40 to $73) – The big reprint of the set, it’s been a while since we’ve had a lot of copies around. 

We’ve gotten some reprints, but there’s a big difference between being a Modern Masters 2017 mythic and a Dominaria United mythic. I’m not expecting her to fall too far, as she’s being rapidly adopted in Pioneer, but I think she’ll settle out near $30 for the cheapest versions. The premium versions from DMU are not really on my radar, as there’s Box Toppers and Pro Tour Promos to chase. 

Long-term, I think Liliana is an excellent place to gain some value, though I won’t be buying any for a few months.

Sheoldred, the Apocalypse ($38 to $117) – Sheoldred is a card I expect to take over a lot of Commander tables. I wrote an article about good specs for her deck, but Neksuar is three colors, blah blah blah. Black decks will need an explicit reason not to run this gem of a card, which is also a combo enabler in many ways. 

If it seems expensive right now for a Phyrexian foil, I’d agree with you, but I also want to keep in mind that Sheoldred’s most sought-after version is impressively hard to pull from Collector Boosters. As I pointed out last week, for every 100 Borderless foil Liliana of the Veil, there’s 50 Phyrexian Sheoldred and 50 Showcase. 

The graphs for Vorinclex and Jin-Gitaxias and Urabrask are pretty similar, but no one’s got the early hype spikes that the green one did:

Vorinclex showed up every 296 Collector Boosters, Jin-Gitaxias was every 544 but is now under $100, and Urabrask is every 492. Sheoldred is every 346 boosters for a Phyrexian foil, and is a much stronger card being both cheaper to cast and with a nasty backhand of an effect. Commander players love drawing cards!

I’m expecting Sheoldred to follow in Vorinclex’s footprints: an early spike followed by a gradual decline. Buying now for your deck at about $117 is not too far off where the price will be in three months, and if it makes you happy, go for it.

Ajani, Sleeper Agent ($8 to $45) – Foil Phyrexian Ajani is twice as rare as the Sheoldred, checking in at once every 692 Collector Boosters and the rarest non-Hidetsugu card of the last couple years. (I’m not counting the Legends inserts.) However rare he is…his card isn’t terribly powerful. Tamiyo in Phyrexian is available for just about $20, several months later. 

Planeswalkers who come down early and can get you ahead are good. Ajani on three (plus the 2 life) is still capable of ticking up and gaining card advantage, but not for control-themed decks. He’s good but not broken, and so I think his curve will follow Tamiyo’s, unless some other amazing combo comes along.

Leyline Binding ($10 to $21) – I’m terrified of making a prediction about this card. It seems too good to be true in Modern, where a Triome and a shockland make this a one-mana Oblivion Ring. However, Modern already has lots of great removal. In the last year, we’re seeing decks run some combination of Prismatic Ending and March of Otherworldly Light. If the domain decks are big, I’d be delighted to see cool stuff like Scion of Draco have its day, but we’ll see if that takes off. I think this will see play, but it’s not going to be Ledger Shredder. I think there’s enough demand to keep the price high, yet not too high. I don’t think it’ll hold a price of $15, nor go below $7.

The Defilers ($5 to $21) – All five are decent to good, but the blue one that fuels itself and the green one that grows your team are probably the strongest cards. Green especially has a lot more ‘green mana only’ costs, topping out at Primalcrux. I will want to have some of these long-term but for now, I’ll be content to let their prices drop.

Plaza of Heroes ($9 to $18) – It’s nice to have the last ability that saves a legendary creature, but right now, I don’t think this is a card anyone needs to go deep on. I know there’s a lot of chatter about legendary humans especially, but given the lands that already exist (Cavern of Souls, Unclaimed Territory, Secluded Courtyard) I don’t think that deck needs more. This should fall by at least half, if not more.

One other thing I want to note: The rare and mythic artifacts do not have a special version in this set. I strongly suspect we’re going to see some special version before too long, and therefore I don’t want to go deep on any of these until that shoe drops.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY