I am remaining steadfast in my stance that I’m not going to let Double Masters 2022 get me. I still want to buy some staples, and frankly a lot of those staples, but the prices are going to trickle downwards for a while yet. My research has indicated that six months is new the sweet spot, at least for the basic versions of cards. We’ll see if this holds true to premium versions.
What came out six months ago? Innistrad: Double Feature! I especially love the Silver Screen foils from this set, and the massive multiplier for these cards indicates how little of the product was opened and how rare these foils are. Most of these cards have a pretty low supply, mainly due to the lack of interest in the cards, but also because the set had double the rares and mythics. Each card is that much rarer, and especially in foil.
Also, there were no Collector Boosters of Double Feature. No increased drop rates of anything. Just draft booster packs and 1-3 foil rares per box, the way Richard Garfield intended!
So here’s a list of the cards that have the right intersection of low price, good demand, and limited supply.
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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.
Readers! Dominaria United is coming eventually, and on the tenuous basis of one thing I heard, that there will be a Legendary creature in every pack of Dominaria United, I am going to do that whole speculative thing I do when I say “it’s a D&D set so buy Orcs” or whatever. It’s great because you don’t have to be right, you just have to have people who are also wrong buy the cards from you rather than from someone else. If we are getting new Legendary stuff, and not just reprints of older Legendary creatures in new, premium borders (which is what I actually want) we could see some bold new additions to a kind of deck we haven’t seen much lately until it reappeared with Shrines – the 5 color, Legendary goodstuff deck. We have seen some even more instructive variants, so I will be looking for inspiration in 2 places – Kethis, the Hidden Hand decks and Reki, the History of Kamigawa. If people are going to use the Historic keyword again, it pays to know what a deck built around something Historic plays, and if those decks are to be bolstered by new printings, it pays to know what’s in them. I am imagining we can see quite a bit in the high synergy cards from those decks and go from there. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Kethis has a lot of goodies for us, and while they’re not all worth a look, one class of cards is – the cycle with all 3 copies represented in this Top 10.
Of those 5 spells, only Urza’s Ruinous Blast and Karn’s Temporal Sundering are worth even a dollar, which means there is financial opportunity because they’re cheap or no financial opportunity because they’re so cheap and have been the whole time. Short of printing a new Legendary creature that interacts with those spells better than with any other spells, the slight trickle of copies into a few niche decks hasn’t really excited the price of cards in a set where there are only 19 cards worth more than $2 and 7 of them are reprints. I like Temporal Sundering, though, actually.
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I’ve been writing off-and-on for MTGPrice.com for a few years, but I’m pleased to report that going forward I’ll be publishing articles every Monday discussing developments in the competitive Magic scene and their potential implications on MTG card prices. I’m still working on finding my groove as a writer, so I hope you’ll provide your feedback (good and bad!) along the way via Twitter @OkoAssassin.
Prior to jumping into week-by-week specifics, I thought it would be best to zoom out first and look at the big picture. This week I’ll review a few current role players within the Pioneer format, and next week I’ll look at Modern. Once we have level set a bit, in future weeks I’ll begin to share a noticeable change in the key competitive formats and their potential impacts on prices.
Most players used to shrug when Pioneer’s name came up, but that all changed when WOTC made their long-awaited organized play announcement, which made clear that Pioneer would be a signature format going forward. The Pioneer metagame has been fairly consistent over the last months including a combination of the following archetypes, along with others:
Izzet Phoenix
Rakdos Midrange
Azorius Control
Boros Aggro
Burn
Mono-Green Ramp
Lotus Field
Mono blue/Bant spirits
While some of these strategies are more dominant than others, each plays an important role in shaping the Pioneer format. Cards that overlaps between multiple archetypes – or are otherwise unique – are often worth a look due to this format’s growth potential. As Pioneer becomes more popular, prices should increase going forward, albeit maybe slowly. Paper events are key here – if COVID locks down the world again, Pioneer will once again fall on hard times. So take all this commentary with a large grain of salt.
If you don’t think Pioneer matters, look at the price of Fable of the Mirror-Breaker – which is the 11th most played card in the format. It currently sits around $11 for an in-print rare! Similarly, the top played pioneer card Unlicensed Herse is around $15! Both get support from other formats – but I would argue that Pioneer is a key driver for the price of both cards.
Many of the key pioneer stables are commons and uncommons, making them unattractive from a speculation perspective, even if they see quite a bit of play. Additionally, the number of mythics that see play is also relatively lacking, and most played mythics have seen one or two reprints over time or their prices are fairly high due to their lack of reprint. For these reasons, today we’ll be focused on evaluating a few played but potentially underpriced rares.
Supreme Verdict (Foil Borderless) 37th Most Frequently Played Spell in Pioneer
Current Price: $10 Potential Price: $20 in 18 months Confidence: 8.5/10 Disclosure: None
Supreme Verdict is a long-time staple in both Modern and Pioneer. Blue/White Control is fairly popular in Pioneer and these decks typically run three copies of Supreme Verdict. It’s also solid role player in EDH, being included in nearly 45,000 decks on EDHREC.com.
Absent another reprint the Double Masters 2022 Foil Borderless edition should do well over time – especially if you’re able to time this purchase at its lows. My guess is that these lows will be in December, while others are betting on today. I’m betting December because more collector boosters will eventually be opened and hype will wind down over time, but we shall see. Even at today’s prices, having this card go from $10 to $20 is not unreasonable and seems very likely.
Graveyard Trespasser 23rd Most Frequently Played Card in Pioneer 4rd Most Frequently Played Creature in Pioneer
Current Price: $3.00 Potential Price: $10 in 12 months Confidence: 7/10 Disclosure: None
This card protects itself well even on the turn it’s cast, provides mainboard graveyard hate, and comes at a relatively efficient mana value. Personally, I used to not rate Graveyard Trespasser very highly until I played against it. All it takes is a few frustrating games to understand why this card is so highly played in Pioneer. This card has maintained a high price point on Magic Online for a while based on its high level of play, but that same enthusiasm has mostly not yet transferred to the paper version of this card. It’s a rare from AFR and the supply is extremely deep for the regular and showcase versions of this card. But the Double Feature version is relatively scarce by comparison. 68 copies of the Double Feature version sold already on TCGPlayer.com in July, which is very solid relative to current inventory levels. Assuming this card doesn’t fall out of the metagame – and isn’t reprinted in the upcoming Pioneer Challenger Decks (a risk in Orzhov Humans) – it could see solid gains going forward.
Old-Growth Troll (Foil Extended Art) 38th Most Frequently Played Card in Pioneer 13rd Most Frequently Played Creature in Pioneer
Current Price: $5 Potential Price: $15 in 12 months Confidence: 8/10 Disclosure: None
About 13 percent of Pioneer decks run a full playset of Old-Growth Troll – and only a limited number of Foil Extended Art copies remain available at a reasonable price. The low supply is surprising considering that Kaldheim was cracked heavily by vendors leading to a seemingly never-ending supply. Mono-green has been a staple since Pioneer’s inception, so it’s unlikely to fall off the map completely anytime soon, although its power level has fluctuated over time. Combine all these factors together and I can easily see Old-Growth Troll increasing in price to $15 over the next year.
Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance (Borderless) 3rd Most Frequently Played Land Card in Pioneer
Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire (Borderless) 10rd Most Frequently Played Land in Pioneer
Current Price: $5.50 Potential Price: $12 in 18 months Confidence: 7/10 Disclosure: None
Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance, and Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire both see a reasonable amount of play in Pioneer. They both average a paltry 1 copy per deck, but they see play in many decks as they provide free value, in a similar way as Otawara and Boseiju. They do not see Modern play for the most part, which is reflected in their relatively low price point. Both also see solid EDH play as well, being included in 20,000 and 30,000 decks respectively. I believe cards like these seem underwhelming for now, but over time, they will continue to slowly grow in price as copies drain out based on modest but well-rounded competitive plus EDH demand.
We’re a couple of weeks into Double Masters 2022 and prices are all moving downwards from where they started, and that’s good! That’s the entire point of the set, frankly, to put more copies in circulation and let people buy cards that they couldn’t have gotten before this reprint set.
One of the hardest things to do at this moment is to be patient. We’ve only had the set in hand for a couple of weeks, and while distributors are certain that we aren’t getting any more huge waves of product, we’ve still got a lot of packs left to open.
With that in mind, let’s talk about ‘the dead cat bounce’, and what it means to us as Magic speculators.
The phrase ‘dead cat bounce’ is a stock trading term, used to indicate a time where prices go up for a little while, even as the total trend is downwards. I think we are in the process of seeing this on Imperial Seal:
Yes, that’s a graph that’s trending upwards, but it’s also a graph that is only showing two weeks’ worth of data. Let me give you an example of this effect in a true staple, Doubling Season:
This is the Double Masters from 2020 edition, and you can see how the price has gone back up over time. The dead cat bounce is not the big jump in price just before April 2021. It is a small bump upwards at the very beginning of the graph. Let’s circle it, make it easier to see what I’m talking about:
Yes, that’s a small bump near the beginning of a big price graph, but this is what I’m talking about. A small upward trend in the midst of an overall decline. Let’s zoom in on the circled area, and see what the graph looks like.
So yes, it went up $5 in a couple weeks, and then down again, bumped back up, and within a couple of weeks was at $35 and at $45. Of course, because Doubling Season is its own level of staple, it eventually recovered and got expensive again.
My point here is that the graph for Imperial Seal is not something that makes me want to buy in. I said that this card would get cheap, and I still believe it will. We know exactly what the card is, and what the usage for it will be, as a second copy/strictly worse version of Vampiric Tutor. That card, amazing as it is and widely available thanks to Eternal Masters into Commander Legends, is in 145,000 decks on EDHREC, where the most invested players make sure to optimize lists and share them out.
Because we’re all trying to make sure we buy copies before they get expensive, our very eagerness causes the Dead Cat Bounce. It’s not that Imperial Seal is three to four times better, but it is rarer. Seal is only listed in 28,000 decks, that’s a lot of people who are going to add Seal into their decks. That’s a lot of copies that never make it into circulation, and instead get put right into decks.
I still think Seal will go below $100, and possibly below $75, but every time we flinch and buy copies, it makes the decline take that much more time.
We can’t overlook price memory here either. This phenomenon has to do with a belief that a card is worth a certain amount, even if the actual price is different. Let me give you an example from early in my Magic career.
It’s 1995. I knew Ice Age would be coming out soon, though I didn’t know exactly when. There were no emails, no Internet, just Scrye magazine giving a price guide and vague release dates. Prereleases weren’t even a thing yet! So I stroll into my local shop and there at the front is a double-row box of Ice Age cards for a quarter each. I’m super stoked and start looking through these cards, thinking that I wanted to find new sweet cards for the decks I had, and there it is, staring at me: Counterspell.
To this point, Counterspell had been uncommon in Revised and earlier, but was something like $8 at the time. And here it was, mixed in with a bunch of quarter uncommons! So I frantically searched the box, and bought probably a dozen copies, all the ones I could find.
Then I went and found my gaming friends, and said, ‘Look! They mixed these with the commons! I just got like a hundred bucks worth of cards for three dollars!’ To which they replied, ‘Sorry, Cliff, it’s common now.’ So I bought cards thinking that they had the same value as what I remembered, but actually, the market and the new rarity had spoken.
I imagine there’s a lot of people out there thinking ‘Holy crap, this is a $1500 card and I can get it for $150!?! Take my money!’ and I get it, I do. But we have to compare apples to apples, not apples to previously gilded fruits of legend. We know that P3K reprints come way way down in price, especially on the second reprint like Imperial Recruiter did.
Warrior’s Oath is down to $20 or so, and given that Final Fortune is also $20, I don’t expect Oath to go much lower. I do expect that the recent minor upticks for prices in Phyrexian Altar, Smothering Tithe, and other staples doesn’t reflect the final price that those cards will be at in a few months. Be patient, as hard as it is, and you’ll get your value.
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.
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