PROTRADER: The Thin Blue Line

By: Travis Allen

First order of business this week: congratulations to Alex Bianchi (@gemmanite) for his Grand Prix Pittsburgh win this past weekend. Of the twelve of us that traveled to the event together, nobody was even remotely considering winning the whole thing. The dream was top eight and/or going 13-2; that was the threshold. Any accomplishment beyond that was completely out of mind. To see a friend win a GP basically out of nowhere is astounding and exciting, and of anyone in Buffalo, I can honestly say that Alex is the most deserving of this accomplishment. He’s devoted a great deal of time and effort to the game, yet has remained friendly and humble, a feat whose difficulty is evidenced by the attitudes of many road-worn grinders. (Though he perhaps enjoys strangling cool deck ideas to death with his own brand of Magic conservatism a bit too much.) To all of you, it’s just another no-name player that won one of hundreds of GPs, but to us, it’s a friend and devoted player that was finally rewarded for his commitment and passion.

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@wizardbumpin, @gemmanite, @deejfordicus, and some randos

Alright, on to why you bother to read this at all: my exceedingly clever word play paired with incisive and urbane observations.

Last week, I covered a lot of cards that are in difficult spots. For each, the answer wasn’t clear whether to hold on and look for more profits, or to sell and move on to something else. As long as you’re making a profit, “sell” is never a truly wrong answer, though realistically, our goal is to do so within 10 to 20 percent of the peak price. I mostly erred on the side of action: sell your cards. Most of the examples fell into one of two camps; either they had gained a great deal of value recently, or they have been losing value continually for a while and show no signs of changing that anytime soon. Investing in Magic cards, as with anything, is always a battle against opportunity cost. The question is less about whether something will make you money, but rather, if it will make you money faster than another option.

One metric served as a tool for evaluating all of the cards, and even if I didn’t explicitly mention it in each example, there was not a single time it didn’t come into consideration. Many of us writers cite it frequently, though I realize it may not be completely obvious why we do so. I’m talking, of course, about buylist prices.

Knowledge is Power

The buylist number is how much a vendor will pay you for your card. It’s the amount that Star City Games or ChannelFireball will give you in cash for a specific item. This number represents the absolute minimum value you should receive for a card at any given time.

Today, right now, Strikezone will give me $30 for an Ugin, the Spirit Dragon. Why should I as a seller ever accept less than $30 for my copy of Ugin, then? At any given time, I can stick it in an envelope and receive that amount. If I wanted $30 for the card, I’d already have it. If I haven’t yet sent it to SZO, it means that I’m either A) in an extreme hurry to sell the card, or B) unwilling to take $30 for Ugin. Scenario A comes up occasionally, but scenario B is our day-to-day reality.

Knowledge of a card’s current buylist price serves as a useful piece of information when transacting Magic, and its existence is a net positive for each actor in the small drama that is Magic finance. In fact, most markets don’t even have something so clean. The used car market, for example, lacks a buylist with the same functionality of Magic. If you decide to sell your car, there’s no obvious number that serves as the lowest cash value you can receive. You can’t just plug your car into a website, see exactly how much cash someone will give you for it, and then ship it over (or drive it over, more realistically). Yes, there’s lots of ways to hone in on what number you can expect, such as Kelly Blue Book, Edmunds, auction results, etc. These only serve to give you a rough estimate, though, and more importantly, none of those places will actually buy your car. They’ll tell you what you should expect to receive for it, but they themselves are not the buyer. You’ll still need to go through Craigslist or trade your car in at a dealer, and they may have a very different idea about what a fair number for your car is. There’s also the possibility that they’re not interested in a fair number at all. The fact that we can, on any day, put a card in the mail and be guaranteed to receive a certain dollar amount is a unique facet of the secondary Magic market.

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From both sides of the deal, buylist numbers make life considerably easier. There’s no debating about what a card may or may not be worth, and no wondering whether or not you may be able to find another buyer. As the seller, you know exactly the minimum value you should receive, and it gives you a position to bargain from. As the buyer, it gives you a target. The buylist price is the absolute best price you can expect to pay for a card, and paying that price is about as close to “perfect” of a deal as you can get. Both sides having this information means that there’s a lot less haggling, a lot fewer people getting screwed, and overall quicker and more pleasant transactions.

Of course, the utility of the buylist in relation to a private-party transaction is only one component of how useful it is. The true value in buylisting is not as a frame of reference for a buyer and seller, but rather, as a gauge of overall market demand for a good.

Grey Matter

Cards generally have two prices. The first is the fair market price. That’s what MTGPrice puts in big bold text when you look up an Ugin. Some will arrive at this number differently—they may strictly take TCGplayer low or average, or just use SCG’s price (both strategies which have their own flaws)—but in essence, this number is the cost to acquire a card at any time. Fair market price is dichotomous with buylist prices, which is what an individual can sell her card for at any time, and is the second of our two-price model. The market price is how much it costs to buy this card whenever I want it, and the buylist price is how much I receive if I sell this card whenever I want. In between is where people negotiate.

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What’s unquestionably useful to us as financiers is the gap in between those two numbers. Specifically, the size of the difference between the two relative to how much the card costs. That’s known as the spread. Several writers here at MTGPrice have written about spread, and understanding it is essential to being successful in this field.

Very quickly, you find the spread by dividing the highest buylist price by the lowest possible retail price, and subtracting from one.

Ugin, the Spirit Dragon Spread Equation
Best Buylist: $30
Lowest Retail: $42

( 1 -( buylist / retail ) ) x100
( 1 – ( $30 / $42 ) ) x100
( 1 – ( .714 ) ) x100
( .286 ) x100
Spread = 28.6 percent

The larger the spread, the larger the gap between the market price and the buylist price. The lower the spread, the closer the two numbers are. When it’s a negative number, it means there’s an opportunity for arbitrage.

Allow me to illustrate, since I’m sure many of you are visual learners like I am. Here’s an example of a large spread.

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And here’s an example of a small spread.

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Finally, here’s an example of a negative spread.

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On October 2, you could have bought foil Mind’s Desire for less money than another vendor would give you for that card. Buy it from SCG for $5.50, put it in an envelope to CFB, and they’ll give you $8.05 each. Nifty.

Arbitrage is a fun way to grind out profits, especially when you start utilizing credit bonuses for trade-ins. Sigmund has written about it recently, and I know others have as well. I’ve been doing it myself lately. Last week I found a vendor who was paying $1.81 cash for Sigil of the Empty Throne, while another vendor was selling them for $2. At cash prices I’d still be losing, but with a trade-in bonus, I was paying $2 cash for Sigil and getting $2.25 in store credit. Buy out one vendor, ship to another, and increase your overall store credit value by 12.5 percent. Do this a handful of times with an increasing amount of store credit, and suddenly you’re gaining 10 to 30 percent on a rolling ball of several hundred dollars. I’m actually finding that my store credit is quickly beginning to eclipse the total value available in a transaction. I may have $500 in credit, but no vendor wants $500 worth of Sigil of the Empty Thrones.

Indexing

Alright, that was a useful little aside, but not exactly my point. Getting back on track, spread is not only good for occasionally making money, but is more importantly useful as a tool for evaluating demand. The smaller the spread, the more “true” demand there is. Inversely, the greater the spread, the less true demand there is. What do I mean by true demand?

Imagine for a moment that you decided to make a big move on the secondary market. You’re going to corner The Great Aurora. You dutifully buy out every vendor online. TCG, SCG, CFB, eBay—you hit them all. Vendors relist, so you buy them out again. Over the course of a week, you obtain a majority share of all the loose copies in North America. Now begins your evil plan. After having paid between $.25 and $2 a copy, you relist them all on TCG for $15 each. It’s genius! If anyone wants a copy, they’ll need to pay you $15. Other vendors will scramble to match your price, unwilling to sell theirs at $2. After all, if you’re asking $15, why wouldn’t they just ask $14? You singlehandedly swing the market upwards, and soon prices across the board have risen.

Except that this is all predicated on a flawed assumption: you assume that people actually want The Great Aurora enough to pay $15 a copy. Before they were only willing to pay maybe $1 each. Why would they suddenly pay 15 times that? Someone is going to see the card, think “boy I could use one of those,” notice the price, and tweet some awful words about #mtgfinance before skipping it and moving on. While you may get a few fish to bite, nobody is really buying The Great Aurora for $15. There’s simply no true demand for the card.

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While this is all happening, vendors are trying to keep up with the market. They’ll dig a few copies out of a collection they have yet to sort and they’ll list them for between $10 and $20. They’ll keep their buylist extremely low, because they don’t actually know if this card can sell for that much yet. As copies of The Great Aurora continue to sit in their inventory, unsold at $10, their buylist will similarly sit where it was pre-spike. The only reason to raise that number is to get people to sell you copies. But if you can’t sell the copies you have, why would you buy more? People will see a massive spread looking at MTGPrice, with the market price north of $10 and buylist prices of $.25. As people continue to not buy $15 copies, individual sellers and vendors will keep dropping their prices until somebody bites, and it won’t take long before the card finds itself at $1 again. People will look back at the incident and see a huge rise in the market price on the graph, but the blue buylist line won’t have budged. No stores will have been offering more money for the card because nobody was in turn buying it from them.

On the other side of the spectrum is true demand. A dealer lists its Flooded Strands at $17. They are completely bought out within a few hours. Their buylist is at $10, but they’re not receiving many copies at all. They raise it to $12, and someone sells them three Strands. The dealer relists those copies, and they’re gone again almost immediately. Dealers across the market are realizing that Flooded Strands sell quickly. Cards that sell quickly are great as a dealer, because you make your money in volume. The more Strands they can pass through their store, the more money they’ll make. The buylist will rise. A small margin between what they pay for the card and what they sell it for doesn’t matter much, since their goal is to sell as many as possible. Market prices will rise too of course, but not as fast as the buylists will. Eventually you’ll end up with dealers selling copies at $21 and paying $18. Sure they’re only making $3 a copy, but if everyone is selling you their Flooded Strands, you actually get to keep them in stock while your competitors run dry. The margins are small, but so long as you’re churning through as many as possible, you’re making money. If you start paying less money for them, or charging more, people will stop selling to you or buying from you accordingly.

In the first example with The Great Aurora, we see possibility of how the secondary market price can explode while actual demand from the player base hasn’t truly increased. It’s highly unlikely that the scenario is in actuality committed by someone hoping to corner the market in such a diabolical fashion; that scenario simply served to illustate the point.

In the Flooded Strand example, we see how the player base has a rabid hunger for Flooded Strand, and how that drives a narrowing gap between buylist prices and market values. Because lots of real human beings (if you can call Magic players that) truly want to own Flooded Strand—unlike The Great Aurora—stores will continue to up their buylists. Spreads will shrink, and the gap between the green line and the blue line will narrow.

Understanding this process is key to understanding the future of a card’s financial trajectory. Let’s look again at a card I advised selling last week, Scavenging Ooze.

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Notice how in the last two years, the best buylist has only dropped. More importantly, since December of last year, both the market price and buylist price have remained completely stagnant. Neither has shifted appreciably in either direction. For the last year, Ooze has been at perfect equilibrium. If there were a great demand for this card, we’d see a slowly rising buylist, accompanied by a market price growing either slowly or spiking. Either way, we’d see dealer confidence in Ooze increasing. But we aren’t. Dealers aren’t any more confident they’ll sell this card today than they were a year ago. That means they aren’t selling that many copies, and that there simply aren’t that many people out there buying it.

Scavenging Ooze has a poor buylist trend, as does Deathrite Shaman, two cards that I advised you sell. When buylist numbers look like that, there’s simply no reason to be holding onto copies.

Ooze is showing no signs of gaining, and DRS is only losing ground. You can tell me until you’re blue in the face that Ooze is a great spec target for Modern, and I don’t fully disagree that eventually it may be worth quite a bit more than today. I’m looking at the data, though, and the data is telling me that right now we have no reason to expect Ooze to move anytime soon. Once that buylist starts creeping up, that will be the time to revisit it.

Forecasting

Let’s now look at the Expeditions copy of Flooded Strand. It’s quite a new card, and the data is not plentiful yet, but we immediately see a trend.

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As of November 5, the buylist was $100. As of the 22nd, it was $127. Over the course of three weeks, dealer confidence in this card rose by 25 percent. At the same time, the market price rose from $200 on the 7th to $220 on the 22nd. That’s a rise of 10 percent. Here’s that comparison in graph form.

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Expeditions copies of Flooded Strand are growing in dealer confidence faster than in market price. That’s extremely useful information, because it tells us that dealers are selling through their copies of this card and they want to own more of them. When buylists are rising at a faster rate than the market price, we’re due for a price correction. Flooded Strands are not going to be $220 market for much longer.

How about another example?

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Here’s a segment of Ugin’s price history, from two to 20 weeks ago. On July 24, the buylist was $16 and the market value was $28, for a spread of 42 percent. On October 2, the buylist was $20 and market value was still $28. That’s a 25 percent increase in the buylist value, with no change on the market price. Unsurprisingly, the market price had jumped by October 30 by 25 percent—exactly the buylist change that had occurred over the last three months.

And one more just for kicks.

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Who Watches the Watchmen

This isn’t a call for you to buy Flooded Strands (although it’s probably not a bad idea), but rather to illustrate that rising buylist values relative to market prices indicate increases in true demand, which will eventually lead to those market values adjusting appropriately. There’s a massive card-buying community out there, and they aren’t all hopping on Twitter to tell you what they’re purchasing. In order to know what cards people actually want and subsequently what prices are going to rise, you need to watch buylists. Rising buylists tells us that real people are buying cards, and being on top of those trends is the most surefire avenue to make a profit in this business.

Think of buylists as a poll of Magic players as a whole. Buylists are a way to measure the silent majority, to observe card-buying trends of a population that would otherwise be invisible to people like you and I. SCG and CFB are large enough to analyze their own sales data and see what’s moving, then make decisions based on that. We don’t have that data, so instead we look at vendors who do have that information and what they’re doing with it. They have a bunch of data, and that data is telling them to pay more money for Expeditions Flooded Strands. If you don’t have access to raw sales figures, your next best strategy is to observe the behaviors of those that do.

We can sit around all day long speculating on cards that we think will rise or fall. Scavenging Ooze is going to spike this spring! This is Necrotic Ooze’s year! 2016 is year of the ooze! While I do my fair share of this, and I enjoy it, recognize that some specs are based on the potential for a breakout performance, which will cause prices to skyrocket, and some specs are based on increasing demand, which lead to slower, sustainable growth. Trying to nail the breakout specs is amusing, but it’s extremely difficult and really just a crap shoot.

Our more reliable venture should be identifying cards with increasing demand and getting in ahead of market corrections. Holding onto Scavenging Ooze is neither of those things—we aren’t going to see any breakout performances, and at the same time, the buylist is telling us there’s been absolutely no growth in demand for two years now. Expeditions Flooded Strand has a growing buylist relative to its market value. We’re seeing the seeds for a growth in market value. There are plenty of cards like this out there, you just have to find them. That’s the type cardboard you want to own.

Watch the blue line. It will tell you where to go.


Going Mad – GPs, Waste Lands, & Expeditions

By: Derek Madlem

The Search

So I’m looking over the decklists from Grand Prix Pittsburg and there’s something noticeably absent: Protean Hulk. While I’m disappointed that all the hype didn’t result in a top finish, there is a lesson here that should already have been learned in the distant past. Cards that search for free things will always break. We should have seen this one coming, well I should say YOU should have seen this one coming, I already have a FOIL playset and 6 or 7 regular Hulks in my Mulch Box.

Cards like this aren’t always beat us over the head obvious because they aren’t usually printed in preconstructed decks with everything needed for a ridiculous combo printed around them. Sometimes that combo is super simple: Stoneforge Mystic + Batterskull. Other times that combo is part of larger synergies like we saw with Ranger of Eos + Goblin Guide or Goblin Bushwhacker in Standard and eventually the various roles the Ranger has performed in Modern. We recently just learned this lesson again with Knight of the Reliquary. How many times have we forgotten about this gal?

If a card can search for something and play it for free or a reduced cost, it’s not a matter of if it breaks, but when it breaks. That’s why I’m still holding out hope for these Woodland Bellowers, but this devoid nonsense is definitely not helping.

Top 8

Modern can be an incredibly diverse format, but it’s always in a state of expansion and contraction in terms of which decks are truly viable in a fifteen round tournament. When we look at this week’s top eight decklists we see a hefty presence of two of the format’s boogeymen.

Splinter Twin and Affinity, along with burn,  form a trifecta of terror within Modern. Loading up on sideboard hate for one opens you up to a browbeating from the others. This is before your sideboard gets stretched into other directions to curtail the threat of Blood Moon, graveyard shenanigans, or garbage decks like Infect and Bogles. This weekend’s top eight featured three Splinter Twin decks and two Affinity, with more of each rounding out the top 32.

For us this presents a format that is ripe with investment opportunities. For example, there was only one copy of Tron in the top 32 decklists this weekend, so the deck is likely to garner less attention than it has in the past. We have another round of Eldrazi showing up in less than two months with a pretty decent likelihood that SOMETHING ends up being good in Tron; that Kozilek is already looking pretty sweet depending on what those stupid diamond mana symbols mean (more on that later).  With Tron falling out of favor, it’s easy to grab a few staples and ride the rising tide as players flood back into an archetype…it also doesn’t hurt that you’ll have no problems shipping cards like Karn Liberated and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon for years to come.

After this past weekend you’d traditionally see an increase in demand for Splinter Twin and Affinity cards, but with the holidays coming up, it’s typically the season for all prices to slip a bit as attention shifts away from spending money on Magic to spending money on turkeys and appliances our family members will never use.

Once we get past the holiday season the trick is to jump into the right boat at the right time, which is easier said than done. Let’s take a look at a breakdown of each archetype to see where we’re at THIS week:

Affinity – 5
Grixis Control – 2
Splinter Twin(s) – 5.5 (Living Twin)
Titan Scapeshift – 1
G/W Aggro – 1
Amulet Bloom – 3
Living End – 1.5 (Living Twin)
Burn(s) – 3
Abzan Company – 1
Faeries – 1
Elves – 1
Zoo – 1
Infect – 2
G/R Tron – 1
Jund – 3

With fifteen different archetypes (arguably 16 with “Living Twin” (Twinning End -ed.)) we have a pretty diverse top 32 and will have a real hard time convincing anyone (other than PVDDR) that Modern is an unhealthy format. I’m hoping that this means we’ve finally found a “settled” Modern and Wizards will lay off the “shakeup bans” going forward and start unbanning the rest of the more questionable offenders on the ban list.

Hype and Speculation

So this is a thing that happened:

Kozilek

We still don’t know exactly what this means. There are theories floating around that basically range from this being Magic adding colorless as it’s sixth color to snow mana 2.0 to basically anything. I have to believe in that Wizards isn’t stupid enough to create a sixth color and releasing it as a gimmick mechanic in a small set, but that’s a real possibility at this point.

My theory, the one I have to believe is true if I’m going to take Wizards seriously moving forward, is that these new mana symbols should be read as “colorless that has to be devoid of color”. For example, you could cast this Kozilek with eight forests and a Shrine of the Forsaken Gods but not ten forests. This would also go a long way to explain why we still have the pain lands in Magic Origins since they do add colorless mana in addition to the two colors.

There is still the nightmare scenario where these guys are required:

Wastes

While these would technically be searchable off an Explosive Vegetation thanks to being a “basic land”, they don’t have a basic land type listed so they won’t do anything for all those domain decks you kids like to build. Luckily these were easily explainable within my mana theory as big number “1” looks stupid on a full art card. But then this card showed up:

Mirrorpool

You see that? No “T: Add (1) to your mana pool” on this card, it’s that diamond, so my whole theory gets thrown right out the window and I’m left here banging my head on the desk crying out “WHY? WHY? WHY?” Sure, there’s still the possibility that at common we have a plethora of cards that flesh out the rules for “Wastes mana” but why not include all of this in Battle for Zendikar from the start if it’s just “colorless finally gets it’s own mana symbol”?  This is the question I can’t really answer without immediately asking myself what they were thinking.

It’s all starting to make a lot of sense why Wizards chose to include Expeditions; this block is trying really really hard to just be a massive steaming pile of Eldrazi turds.

Speaking of Expeditions

@nqtnguyen "decided to buy a few expeditions #gpppitt"
@nqtnguyen “decided to buy a few expeditions #gpppitt”

We’re probably about as close to bottom as we’re going to get with the expeditions and @nqtnguyen’s photo above really brought this to the forefront of my mind moving forward. While I still think there is time left to get in on the ground floor for these, I have a feeling that once these start disappearing, that it’s going to happen very fast.

My initial thought was that informed buyers were waiting for bottom to buy in to these, but after further consideration I’m revising my timeline a bit, we’re pretty much at bottom now and these aren’t flying off the proverbial shelves quite yet, but we’re left with a gap in our knowledge base that’s going to be filled in soon: Oath of the Gatewatch. There’s twenty more coming and I think many people are waiting to see what they’re going to be before pushing all their chips into the middle of the table.

Once we reach Oath, we’ll see those players that held onto their Expeditions way too long start to begrudgingly sell them off to buy the new hotness but less will be entering the market as the limited format will shift to a single pack of BFZ vs the three we’re seeing now.

Ultimately prices are settling out to be pretty close to my initial feelings. I didn’t see a reality where the Expeditions Scalding Tarn was going to cost 100% more than the original FOIL and we knew it was going to form the upper ceiling when it came to pricing the rest of the lot. We’re looking at a world where the Expeditions Scalding Tarn is around  33% more expensive than it’s predecessor rather than 133%. Here’s a breakdown of where the relevant expeditions are sitting now:

Scalding Tarn $250
Polluted Delta $215
Misty Rainforest $210
Flooded Strand $185
Verdant Catacombs $160
Bloodstained Mire $110
Arid Mesa $105
Wooded Foothills $105
Windswept Heath $100
Marsh Flats $100
Steam Vents $100
Hallowed Fountain $75
Breeding Pool $70
Stomping Ground $70
Watery Grave $70
Overgrown Tomb $70
Godless Shrine $70
Sacred Foundry $65
Blood Crypt $60
Temple Garden $60

I would expect these to dip maybe another 10% over the holiday and upcoming spoiler season, but after that it should be a slow and steady climb upwards. That said, it’s probably going to take a while (years rather than months) for these to catch up to the insane prices we saw during the prerelease and first week of the set’s release. Remember those $440 Scalding Tarns? That WAS a good laugh wasn’t it?

The reality is that a lot of vendors and retailers have been buying these up and squirreling them away because the prices as they are currently are “too low” in their opinion. Even if there isn’t an organic groundswell in demand for these cards coming, there is an artificially tightening of supply coming so we’re likely to see some decent price movement on these in the coming months.


 

Grinder Finance – One win from the Pro Tour

While you usually come here to see my articles about MTG Finance, Corbin suggested I take the week off to talk about playing in Grand Prix Pittsburgh.  While I didn’t end up getting a Pro Tour invite from this past weekend, I did learn a lot about using your time wisely in a tournament.  And everyone knows time is money.

What did I play?

visual decklist

I played Naya Burn and for a very good reason.  My mental and physical fortitude was going to be tested in 15 or more rounds of Magic.  If you are not an expert Modern player, it’s hard to recommend any deck that is likely to go to time in the round throughout the tournament.  Burn has a pretty favorable matchup against most of the popular decks in the format.  Almost every 3 color deck is a walk in the park due to the pain from the mana base.  If and when a Scars styled fastland comes out for UR or BG combinations this may not be true.  You can compete with non-interactive combo decks like Bloom, Storm, Ad Nausem, and Goryo’s Vengeance decks by relying on a quick clock and Eidolon of the Great Revel.  Tron typically beats up on your worst matchups and often can’t mount any kind of defense before turn 3.  The move toward Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy and away from heavy counter spell decks made Burn a great choice for this weekend.

Card choices

I didn’t play Wild Nacatl.  While I think there is some place for “Cat Burn,” I don’t think this is a good time to be playing it.  The fact that Nacatl doesn’t have haste and people are more likely to have an answer before it can attack means it is often a liability.  The Searing Blazes over performed all weekend.  There are not many decks that have no targets but when you are able to get landfall, it is a complete blowout.  You are more likely to lose to decks that block your Goblin Guide than those that kill it.  Also, unlike Draconic Roar, you can’t counter Searing  Blaze by sacrificing the targeted creature.

The Sideboard

To be honest, some matches I didn’t sideboard any cards.  I may have gone a little overboard on things I didn’t end up playing.

  • Searing Bloods are great against the mirror, Elves, Affinity, Birds of Paradise decks, and are reasonable against infect. I wanted to make sure my good matchups stayed good and had some flexible cards for bad ones.
  • Deflecting Palm is a card that I think is pretty underrated as a sideboard option. It’s pretty good against Emrakul, Griselbrand, Tarmogoyf, Wurmcoil Engine, and Eidolon of the Great Revel, and Valakut the Molten Pinnacle but you have to be in a pretty vulnerable position to use it.   The downside is it’s miserable to draw more than one.
  • Molten Rain on the play is good against some decks. I don’t bring them in on the draw as they tend to be too slow and difficult to cast.  On the play it can punish a 3 color deck, Tron, or Amulet just long enough to get a win.
  • Destructive Revelry was fine this weekend. 4 is probably too many but I didn’t draw any against Affinity.
  • Smash to Smithereens is great against Tron and Affinity. It’s really just a 5th Destructive Revelry in those matchups.
  • Path to Exile was great. I think 3 is just the right number.  Drawing 2 feels miserable but drawing one is usually a blow out.  It’s not as clean as Self-Inflicted Wound against Tarmogoyf but I like it’s flexibility more.  I typically bring them in against anything Tarmogoyf decks, Twin, Tron (on the draw only), and any deck I suspect will play Kitchen Finks or Kor Firewalker.

Missing notables

  • Kor Firewalker is only really good in the mirror. You aren’t guaranteed to draw one and there are many other axis you can fight the mirror on.  My plan was to bring in Searing Blood and Deflecting Palm to keep their creatures off the board and counter their burn spells.
  • Blood Moon is too hard to cast. It doesn’t really do anything unless you have a creature in play and then it’s only marginally impactful.
  • Ancient Grudge may be a consideration next time. It doesn’t do any damage like Revelry or Smash to Smithereens but you’re also not just dead to a Spell Pierce.
  • Rending Volley is just worse than Path to Exile most of the time. There’s no reason to play this.

Matchups:

Round 1: Bye on Nothing – It was a tough battle but I managed to pull out a 2-0 win.  He shamefully dropped after the round.

Record 1-0

Round 2: Luke Bartosik on R/G Tron – This is a great way to start a tournament.  I won the die roll and proceeded to ruin his morning by attacking before his first turn with Goblin Guide.  His natural turn 3 Tron had no Wurmcoil Engine so the game ended shortly there after.  Game 2 he made a mistake of cracking his Expedition map using the colorless from both of his Grove of the Burnwillows.  This gave me an opportunity to seal the deal without fear of a Nature’s Claim.

Record 2-0

Round 3: Roman Fusco on Jund:  This was another great matchup for me.  An early creature followed by a flurry of burn spells ended game 1.  Game 2 I played an Eidolon after taking 6 damage from my lands by turn 2.  I then proceeded to take 8 damage from my Eidolon while my opponent cast a bunch of 4-6 mana spells.  The final Boros Charm put me to 3.

Record 3-0

Round 4: Matt Tumavitch on Affinity : This matchup is miserable if they draw a Cranial Plating or a Vault Skirge.  This matchup is usually unwinnable if they draw both.  Vault Skirge dispatched me quickly.

Record 3-1

Round 5: Ben Rasmussen on Jund: Okay back to Tarmogoyf and friends.  Game 1 went better than excepted as he got stuck on 1 land and Goblin Guide showed him his future of no additional lands.  Game 2 was rather close, I suspended two rift bolts with him at 4, expecting to win short of a Thragtusk.  After he -2 Liliana of the Veil targeting himself (sacrificing Kitchen Finks) and played Huntmaster I had to draw another spell to win the game.  Luckily, my deck is ~ 50% spells that do damage to my opponent.

Record 4-1

Round 6: Eric Feltner on Temur Twin: Three color mana bases are great for me.  He won the die roll but lead by fetchling a Steam Vents with a Scalding Tarn to play Grim Lavamancer, essentially saving me a whole spell.  Blind Fetch / Shock is one of the easiest ways for Burn to get ahead even if they’re on the draw.  Game 2 he played a Scavenging Ooze and that is actually way more terrifying than Tarmogoyf in most situations.  I was lucky to dispatch is quickly with a Searing Blaze and picked up another win.

Record 5-1

Round 7: Eric Blanchet on UR Twin: This is the point in the article where I had to go back and write last names because I had two opponents in a row named Eric playing twin.  This match went to three games as Burn really has no ability to play around the combo.  The crucial turn in the last game was me deciding if I should suspend my Rift Bolt or leave my Sacred Foundry untapped to represent a removal spell.  Ultimately I couldn’t beat a counter spell and a twin and if he just had a counter spell then not suspending the Rift Bolt just makes my next turn worse.  I dodged the untap, twin and won on the back of overloading their counter magic with sorcery speed burn.

Record 6-1

Round 8: Aryeh Wiznitzer on R/G Tron:  The greatest hits keep on coming and after keeping a really awkward hand with only a Lavamancer as my only creature I take a quick game 1.  After game 1 we got deck checked and Aryeh, a competitor from the top 8 of Atlanta last weekend, lamented on his loss last round to Burn.  After we got our decks back and he mulliganed to 5, I was a favorite to take the match in record time.  My turn 1 Goblin Guide into turn 2 Smash to Smithereens on his Spellskite would have been hard to beat on 7.  After another good matchup, I am locked up to play tomorrow.

Record 7-1

Round 9: Stephen Berrios on Grixis Twin: I had not played this matchup yet but got slowly killed game 1 after keeping a 1 land hand and having it tapped multiple turns in a row by Pestermite and Deceiver Exarch.  Before the end of the game he played a Thought Scour on himself and put 2 Splinter Twin into his graveyard.  “Score one for the good guys,” I chided.  We had a short discussion on whether Twin or Burn was the good guy.  Game 2 I won with a turn 1 Goblin Guide into a turn 2 Eidolon of the Great Revel.  He declined to Terminate it on his main phase so when I attacked I was able to Boros Charm to keep it alive.  The damage is a wash (since the Eidolon gets in for another 2 and then deals 2 more on the next removal spell) unless he draws a big blocker or doesn’t play more 3 or less mana spells.  I ended up ahead in that exchange as his next turn was Snapcaster Mage + Lightning Bolt to kill the Eidolon.  Game 3 was another haste creature followed by a flurry of spells.  Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy makes these decks more likely to play removal than counter spells and makes it extremely difficult to interact with Burn.

Record 8-1

At the end of the first day I did better than expected.  A number of good matchups came my way and I only had to play against Affinity once.  I ran through the rain to the nearest sit down restaurant and stuffed my face before going to sleep.

Day 2:

Round 10: Richard Roberts on Jeskai Kiki-Twin?: I was pretty confused by his deck game 1 because he played a turn 1 Grim Lavamancer off of a fetchland and a shockland.  He didn’t draw any particularly relevant threats and played a Valorous Stance on his Grim Lavamancer when I went to Searing Blaze it.  I figure his deck doesn’t actually play counter magic and take game 1.  Game 2 I missed an opportunity to kill him when he played a Village Bell-Ringer with only red mana untapped.  Luckily he played a Restoration Angel the next turn and I was able to fire off 3 instant speed burn spells to kill him from 8.

Record 9-1

Round 11: Christopher Harabas on UR Twin:  I don’t have good notes on this match but it seems like Goblin Guide revealed multiple Splinter Twins which is never good for them.  Life pad says he probably died because he fetched at 5.  Sorry if you’re reading this Chris!

Record 10-1

Round 12: Robert Cucunato on Affinity: Wheels gotta fall off somewhere, right?  This match took 5 turns after I conceded to the unstoppable Vault Skirge with Cranial Plating.  The upside was I was able to use the other 40 minutes of this round to grab food and use the restroom.  It’s great to be playing burn, right?

Record 10-2

Round 13: Adam Schop on Jund:  This was another typical play all my spells and win the game sorta deal.  I took a minute to decided if I should cast spells on my turn or not and Adam encouraged me to play faster.  I’m not sure how to take that since the matchup took 20 minutes total but whatever.

Record 11-2

Round 14:  Charles League on Abzan Company:  Well if you thought Vault Skirge was bad, I won game 1 after my opponent played 3 Kitchen Finks!  I wasn’t sure if I was in Top 8 contention but I was feeling reasonably good after dispatching someone that gained 12 life that game.  Games 2 I almost lost immediately as he played a Kor Firewalker on turn 2 but a timely Path to Exile dispatched it.  I ended up unable to assemble the exact amount of burn required to kill him before he had infinite life.  Game 3 I kept a 1 land hand on the play with multiple 1 mana spells.  Unfortunately I was unable to draw a second land for many turns and put enough pressure to kill him before he gained infinite life.  Unfortunately decks that “gain infinite life” are a bad matchup.

Record 11-3

Round 15: Matthew Rayes on Grixis Control: Game 1 was one of the longest I had played all weekend.  We were both at 1 after I Searing Blazed his lethal Snapcaster Mage but his follow up Tasigur was better than the fetchland I drew.  Game 2 I got off to an early lead with a Goblin Guide followed by a Grim Lavamancer.  Overloading his removal early allowed both creatures to sneak in some damage and the remaining burn spells put the game away.  Game 3 I played a turn 1 Goblin Guide and his “removal spell” of choice was a Snapcaster Mage doing it’s best Ambush Viper impression.  Unfortunately for him I had the Searing Blaze that was greeted by a audible look of disbelief as he fell to 12 on my 2nd turn of the game.  A few Lava Spikes later and I was packing my cards up getting ready to get on the plane.

Final Thoughts

Modern is a fine format.  It definitely has some rock – paper – scissors type matchups which are unfortunate.  Luck has a lot to do with how often you will win or lose in large tournaments.  That being said, Lava Spike is pretty much the best spell in the deck.  It’s awkward in the fact that it’s a sorcery and only costs 1 mana so it’s very difficult to counter.  It also can’t be redirected to a Spellskite. I think this deck benefits a lot from the Vancouver Mulligan rule as I was able to frequently send back 4 land 3 spell hands and keep 3 land 3 spell hands.  I would recommend it to anyone looking to make a jump into Modern as it’s relatively inexpensive and extremely powerful.

PROTRADER: Planeswalker Finance, November 2015

It’s time to return to the card type with the fewest options in existence: planeswalker. We last visited this topic in April 2015, and with more than six months passed, a review of what’s happened since then—both in price movement for old cards and printings of new cards—is warranted.

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