Sneak Peak into the MTGPrice Trading App

September 30, 2015 Corbin Hosler 11 Comments

It started with a simple goal: build the best MTG trading app possible. It’s a goal we believe can revolutionize the way we share our hobby with each other, and we were lucky enough that the community agreed with us. Thanks to your support, we’ve been working behind the scenes for months, conceptualizing, designing, re-designing, improving, and squashing hundreds of bugs along the way.

Now, we’re finally ready to show off the fruits of our labors.

The Beta release of the MTGPrice trading app is coming, and today I want to give you a glimpse into what’s on the way.

There are a ton of awesome things this app can do. We’ve designed it with speed in mind: it should take you no longer than a few moments to search for and find the price of a card. The app will sync flawlessly with your collection on MTGPrice.com, and any trade you make using it will update your collection in all places.

There’s a lot of cool things the app does: it allows you to track the live value of your collection, shows how much the value of your collection grows over time, and even lets you keep up with the latest pricing trends across the board, from your collection and wishlist to Standard or Modern!

It’s the trading system where things really shine. We set out to create the best trading app available, and that’s what we believe we’ve done—we hope you’ll agree. Accomplishing that goal meant attempting something that’s never been done before: automatic trade suggestions based on location. Looking for a particular card on Friday afternoon of a Grand Prix? Simply put it on your wishlist and have the app find someone across the room who has the card and is interested in something you have for trade. This kind of automatic, GPS-specific evolution can completely change the way we acquire cards, making trading easier and more painless than ever before.

We expect the Beta release to be made within the next week, and we can’t wait to put it in your hands. Thank you for your time, and we’re looking forward to launching this and building the next evolution in trading with you!

–The MTGPrice team

Going Mad

Going Mad – The Numbers are In

September 30, 2015 Derek Madlem 45 Comments

By: Derek Madlem

This last weekend saw the world of competitive Magic pause while big stupid monsters flooded out of hedron-lined crates to do Battle for Zendikar. Every social media channel was jammed full of Expeditions #humblebrags as players showed off their newly unearthed wealth.

Frequency

When we were introduced to the concept of Expeditions in that now infamous Wil Wheaton conducted train wreck stage show. During that deluge of faux-enthusiasm and butthole jokes we were given the approximation of “slightly more common than premium Mythic rares” which equaled out to roughly one per case. Initial reports from the field have these showing up at roughly 1 in 100 packs…a far cry from the “one per case” that we had all anticipated and based our theorycrafting on.

For now we can probably just ignore all the conspiracy theories about loaded prerelease packs, higher occurrence rates in the first print run, or reptilian illuminati overlords. While we’ve seen that it is incredibly easy for Wizards to manipulate print runs and collation, there isn’t much incentive for them to make a set less desirable to consumers. They’re in the business of selling packs of colored cardboard, not in bamboozling their clientele.

This heightened occurrence rate is going to put MASSIVE downward pressure on singles from this set as retailers are going to be incentivized to open more product during the initial scramble for competitive staples. This isn’t even taking into account the number of misguided mouthbreathers that conspired to buy case upon case of sealed product to cash in on the Expedition lottery.

Numbers

With the release of Expeditions into the wild, we’ve got real numbers to look at. TCGPlayer and eBay are both providing actual real world data for the actual selling prices of these cards. Here’s a rough breakdown of what these things are selling for:

Tango lands:
Smoldering Marsh – $50
Canopy Vista – $55
Cinder Glade – $55
Prairie Stream – $65
Sunken Hollow – $65

Shock lands:
Temple Garden – $100
Overgrown Tomb – $100
Godless Shrine – $100
Sacred Foundry – $110
Watery Grave $120
Blood Crypt – $125
Breeding Pool – $125
Stomping Ground – $140
Hallowed Fountain – $145
Steam Vents – $180

Fetch lands:
Marsh Flats – $170
Bloodstained Mire – $170
Windswept Heath – $170
Wooded Foothills – $175
Arid Mesa – $220
Verdant Catacombs – $260
Flooded Strand – $335
Polluted Delta – $375
Misty Rainforest – $375
Scalding Tarn – $440

There’s not too much surprising about the initial price spread on these lands. The tango lands are a little higher than I would have guessed while pretty much all the shocklands with the exception of Steam Vents are spot on. I expected the lower fetches to be a lot closer to $100 than they ended up, but the market is still in flux on all of these cards.

The average price of an Expedition land comes out to roughly $170, this is a number we’re going to use going forward but it’s important to note that the average is heavily skewed by those blue fetches at the top end of the spectrum.

Wholesale

A huge piece of the puzzle that is aggregate pricing for Magic cards is the wholesale price that retailers pay. A booster box costs most retailers between $75 and $80 each. We’ll just call it $80 a box because it’s a nice even number that equals out to $480 a case.

With a case containing 216 packs and a frequency of one Expeditions land per 100 packs, we can expect two Expeditions lands per case (three Expeditions lands in every sixth case) providing an average value of $340 to retailers. This means that retailers only have to make up $140 out of the remaining 216 rares/mythics, 216 full art basics, 6 foil rares, 1 foil mythic, and some quantity of sweet full art foil basic lands to break even.

When you average the EV of the Expeditions across every box, it’s basically adding $56 in expected value to every box, or 70% of the wholesale cost. Factor in another $18 just off of selling full art basics at 50¢ a piece and you’ve got that booster box nearly paid for without selling a single rare. I know there’s a subsection of you out there getting ready to point out that the full art lands will not sell for that much, but if these weren’t already in high demand how is SCG preselling fat packs for $60?

With Expeditions contributing this much EV to booster boxes, it’s a doomsday scenario for individual card prices after the first week or so – nothing makes it out alive this time folks.

Demand

Right now (Sunday night) on eBay, there are a total of 16 total Scalding Tarn Expeditions lands for sale (U.S. only) and only 7 “completed” listings. What do I take away from this? That even the people in the market for these cards are not quite in the market for them at current prices.

Here’s the thing about people with disposable income – outside of lottery winner and trust fund babies, there isn’t a large number of stupid people with boat loads of money…it’s a self correcting ship. So those avid collectors know that now is not the time to buy into Expeditions, which may be a portent into a future where the price on these pornographic landscapes comes tumbling downward. In other words, $400+ Scalding Tarns are likely unsustainable.

Balancing Act

Ok, we’re likely looking at decreasing Expeditions prices. Why doesn’t that mean that we’ll see other prices holding up better? Well, there’s twice as many as we expected for one and we’re not likely to see the prices drop THAT much. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your perspective, we’re not likely to see this set’s flagship cards take the big hit.

We previously predicted that this set wouldn’t retain much value thanks to the one Expeditions land per case. With two Expeditions land per case that outlook hasn’t changed even if the Expeditions lands end up at half their current value, which is unlikely. I expect to see all of the Expeditions lands to dip in price, but that decline won’t be spread evenly across the entire set. We’re much more likely to see the blue fetches take a minor hit while we see the tango lands and lesser demanded shock lands take more significant hits to their value.

Something like this:

Tango lands:
Smoldering Marsh – $30
Canopy Vista – $30
Cinder Glade – $30
Prairie Stream – $35
Sunken Hollow – $35

Shock lands:
Temple Garden – $80
Overgrown Tomb – $80
Godless Shrine – $80
Sacred Foundry – $80
Watery Grave $110
Blood Crypt – $80
Breeding Pool – $90
Stomping Ground – $90
Hallowed Fountain – $110
Steam Vents – $150

Fetch lands:
Marsh Flats – $140
Bloodstained Mire – $140
Windswept Heath – $140
Wooded Foothills – $145
Arid Mesa – $175
Verdant Catacombs – $200
Flooded Strand – $300
Polluted Delta – $350
Misty Rainforest – $350
Scalding Tarn – $400

This is all purely hypothetical, so don’t hold me to these numbers, but in this scenario the average value of an Expeditions land is still around $140, which still provides $280 in EV per case. At that rate, the expeditions are still covering nearly 60% of the EV in a case, add in those basic lands for an easy 80%. With Expeditions soaking up this much value, we might be entering a world of unprecedented low prices for standard cards.

Ignore everything I said last week (you probably did already), it’s looking like the value of paper Battle for Zendikar cards might end up being so low that it’s not even economically feasible to redeem MTGO sets.

The Grand Experiment

If anything’s becoming apparent, it’s that Wizards is leveraging popular cards to line its own pockets while making standard cards more accessible. Modern Masters is a glaring example, but even the event decks and clash packs are becoming regular value bombs. We used to look at these decks as “almost worth it” and now they’re basically free money.

What are we getting this time around? In case you missed it:

Warden of the First Tree
Whisperwood Elemental
Tasigur, the Golden Fang
Hangarback Walker
Llanowar Wastes
Evolutionary Leap

That’s six quality rares for one low price, plus you get all that other crap along with it. This pattern of reprinting Standard staples and leveraging powerful reprints to depress the prices of other cards is definitely something Wizards is keeping an eye on…will increased accessibility make tournaments more appealing to a larger audience? Does the average Magic player really care how much “value” they get out of a booster pack as long as they have a chance to get something they personally value out of that booster?

If the Expeditions lands weren’t enough downward pressure for BFZ prices, we can almost count on Standard’s most popular cards showing up in the Oath of the Gatewatch clash pack in just three short months, so just the looming threat of reprints is enough to keep me from going deep betting on any Standard cards going forward. Tasigur was a sure thing right? Hangarback was right up there with him. Now neither of these cards look like too great an investment.

The End

During Worldwake people bought booster after booster just because they had a chance to open a $100 card. We saw the same behavior with Modern Masters and Modern Master 2015 (to a lesser extent) packs. With Battle for Zendikar we have the same thing all over again. Whether foil Scalding Tarns end up at $400 or $300, they’re still a big shiny carrot that’s sure to appeal to the degenerate gambler in all of us, even after every last bit of value is sucked out of the regular cards in this set.

There’s even a good chance that we’ll continue to prefer Battle for Zendikar once Oath of the Gatewatch comes out because there’s frankly no land cycle that’s going to be more appealing to open as an Expeditions card than the fetch lands.

Jason Alt, ProTrader

Is It Safe?

September 30, 2015 Jason Alt 13 Comments

This is the question everyone should be asking about their investments, both before and after they make them:

Is it safe?

Well? How do we make safe investments in EDH?

Okay, so I’m a few sentences in and I already hate my internal voice reading this article. You remember that episode of Seinfeld where George got the book on tape because he hated the sound of his own voice but had to read a book about risk, and then the guy on the book on tape sounded like him somehow, and I don’t remember how the episode ended because it was like 20 years ago, but I bet Jerry did something annoying and you should really just watch Curb Your Enthusiasm instead? I hate how my voice sounds reading that first paragraph.

Also, before I forget, I didn’t address the title of the article the way none of you were hoping I would. I think today I want to talk about the upcoming Commander sealed product, because it’s going to tank some prices and we want to be ready. Not only that—it’s going to tank prices in a pretty big way, and I think now is the time to buy or sell to get ahead of it. We have gone a full week without any spoilers and everyone is getting antsy. You know some tool is going to swipe a deck and spoil all of it or something like that pretty soon, so let’s get out ahead of that, shall we? EDH players are salivating, talking about the cards they want to get reprinted. Theirs is a Magical Christmasland list, but it’s not a bad idea to look at what they are thinking because staples are bound to take the biggest hit.

Here is what I would sell and what I think is probably safe.

Okay, false alarm. I think we would benefit by looking at how Wizards typically builds these decks by looking at a list from each “generation” of EDH sealed product.

Counterpunch from 2011

1 Barren Moor
1 Command Tower
1 Evolving Wilds
10 Forest
1 Golgari Rot Farm
1 Orzhov Basilica
8 Plains
1 Rupture Spire
1 Secluded Steppe
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
8 Swamp
1 Temple of the False God
1 Tranquil Thicket
1 Vivid Grove
1 Vivid Marsh
1 Vivid Meadow

1 Aquastrand Spider
1 Celestial Force
1 Chorus of the Conclave
1 Dark Hatchling
1 Deadly Recluse
1 Fertilid
1 Golgari Guildmage
1 Hornet Queen
1 Karador, Ghost Chieftain
1 Monk Realist
1 Nantuko Husk
1 Penumbra Spider
1 Sakura-Tribe Elder
1 Scavenging Ooze
1 Selesnya Evangel
1 Selesnya Guildmage
1 Shriekmaw
1 Sigil Captain
1 Spawnwrithe
1 Spike Feeder
1 Squallmonger
1 Symbiotic Wurm
1 Teneb, the Harvester
1 Vampire Nighthawk
1 Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter
1 Yavimaya Elder

1 Acorn Catapult
1 Afterlife
1 Alliance of Arms
1 Attrition
1 Aura Shards
1 Awakening Zone
1 Bestial Menace
1 Cobra Trap
1 Cultivate
1 Darksteel Ingot
1 Death Mutation
1 Doom Blade
1 Fists of Ironwood
1 Footbottom Feast
1 Golgari Signet
1 Harmonize
1 Hex
1 Hour of Reckoning
1 Lightning Greaves
1 Mortify
1 Necrogenesis
1 Nemesis Trap
1 Oblivion Ring
1 Orzhov Signet
1 Selesnya Signet
1 Skullclamp
1 Sol Ring
1 Soul Snare
1 Storm Herd
1 Syphon Flesh
1 Tribute to the Wild
1 Vow of Duty
1 Vow of Malice
1 Vow of Wildness

This deck had fewer than ten reprints at rare, none of them much more than a dollar at the time. The big money here was Scavenging Ooze; a new card that Wizards also wanted to introduce into Legacy, which worked wonders. People tore into these decks, depressing cards like Awakening Zone, Attrition, and Skullclamp, though they all rebounded. If you had asked EDH players to talk about cards they thought would be in a WBG deck, you would have heard answers like Debtors’ Knell, Pernicious Deed, Vindicate, and Overgrown Tomb. We didn’t get that. We got a bunch of pretty cheap rares.

Nature of the Beast from 2013

1 Boros Garrison
1 Boros Guildgate
1 Command Tower
1 Contested Cliffs
1 Drifting Meadow
1 Evolving Wilds
8 Forest
1 Forgotten Cave
1 Gruul Guildgate
1 Homeward Path
1 Jungle Shrine
1 Khalni Garden
1 Mosswort Bridge
5 Mountain
1 Naya Panorama
1 New Benalia
1 Opal Palace
4 Plains
1 Rupture Spire
1 Secluded Steppe
1 Selesnya Guildgate
1 Selesnya Sanctuary
1 Slippery Karst
1 Smoldering Crater
1 Temple of the False God
1 Tranquil Thicket
1 Vitu-Ghazi, the City-Tree
1 Vivid Crag

1 Archangel
1 Avenger of Zendikar
1 Baloth Woodcrasher
1 Crater Hellion
1 Deadwood Treefolk
1 Drumhunter
1 Eternal Dragon
1 Gahiji, Honored One
1 Grazing Gladehart
1 Krosan Tusker
1 Krosan Warchief
1 Magus of the Arena
1 Mayael the Anima
1 Mold Shambler
1 Naya Soulbeast
1 Rakeclaw Gargantuan
1 Rampaging Baloths
1 Ravenous Baloth
1 Spellbreaker Behemoth
1 Spitebellows
1 Terra Ravager
1 Valley Rannet

1 Behemoth Sledge
1 Boros Charm
1 Cultivate
1 Curse of Chaos
1 Curse of Predation
1 Curse of the Forsaken
1 Darksteel Mutation
1 Druidic Satchel
1 Fiery Justice
1 Fireball
1 Fires of Yavimaya
1 From the Ashes
1 Harmonize
1 Hull Breach
1 Mystic Barrier
1 Naya Charm
1 One Dozen Eyes
1 Rain of Thorns
1 Restore
1 Savage Twister
1 Seer’s Sundial
1 Slice and Dice
1 Slice in Twain
1 Sol Ring
1 Spawning Grounds
1 Sprouting Vines
1 Street Spasm
1 Swiftfoot Boots
1 Tempt with Discovery
1 Tower of Fortunes
1 War Cadence
1 Warstorm Surge
1 Where Ancients Tread
1 Witch Hunt
1 Wrath of God

Two years later, the value is still expected to come mostly from the new cards. Rares like Where Ancients Tread, Magus of the Arena, Crater Hellion… If you’d asked EDH players in 2013 before this came out what they expected to be reprinted in a WRG deck, they would have said things like Knight of the Reliquary, Azusa, and Vigor.

Built from Scratch from 2014

1 Goblin Welder
1 Epochrasite
1 Myr Retriever
1 Myr Sire
1 Bottle Gnomes
1 Cathodion
1 Junk Diver
1 Palladium Myr
1 Pilgrim’s Eye
1 Tuktuk the Explorer
1 Dualcaster Mage
1 Feldon of the Third Path
1 Solemn Simulacrum
1 Flametongue Kavu
1 Beetleback Chief
1 Ingot Chewer
1 Steel Hellkite
1 Wurmcoil Engine
1 Spitebellows
1 Hoard-Smelter Dragon
1 Warmonger Hellkite
1 Myr Battlesphere
1 Pentavus
1 Tyrant’s Familiar
1 Bosh, Iron Golem
1 Bogardan Hellkite

1 Faithless Looting
1 Whipflare
1 Scrap Mastery
1 Incite Rebellion
1 Blasphemous Act
1 Impact Resonance
1 Chaos Warp
1 Volcanic Offering
1 Word of Seizing
1 Magmaquake
1 Starstorm

1 Everflowing Chalice
1 Panic Spellbomb
1 Sol Ring
1 Wayfarer’s Bauble
1 Fire Diamond
1 Ichor Wellspring
1 Liquimetal Coating
1 Mind Stone
1 Mycosynth Wellspring
1 Ruby Medallion
1 Swiftfoot Boots
1 Commander’s Sphere
1 Jalum Tome
1 Pristine Talisman
1 Unstable Obelisk
1 Trading Post
1 Caged Sun
1 Dreamstone Hedron
1 Loreseeker’s Stone
1 Spine of Ish Sah
1 Darksteel Citadel
1 Great Furnace

1 Bitter Feud

1 Arcane Lighthouse
1 Buried Ruin
1 Dormant Volcano
1 Flamekin Village
1 Forgotten Cave
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Phyrexia’s Core
1 Reliquary Tower
1 Smoldering Crater
1 Temple of the False God
29 Mountain

This is a best-case scenario for reprints, and the deck’s value was actually kind of absurd, to the point of depressing the prices of good, new cards, ironically. Instead of Dualcaster Mage crushing Wurmcoil Engine, look what happened.

If you had asked people in 2014 what would have gone in a mono-red EDH deck and if you were charitable and told them it would be artifact-themed, they would have said stuff like Goblin Welder or Junk Diver or Metalworker or Bosh. I doubt they would have expected to get most of that list, plus Wurmcoil, plus Junk Diver, plus a silly planeswalker, plus Epochrasite.

We’re starting to see these decks, at least one or two of them per cycle, be pretty good. Is it really so ridiculous to think we could get a Pernicious Deed, Dack Fayden, Vindicate, Gisela, or… Wizards has crapped on Simic cards forever. What’s even the best Simic card? Prophet of Kruphix at $1? Zegana? Zegana, probably. Or Momir Vig. Still, why you gotta poop on Simic and make a ton of terrible cards and then like 10 good ones so we have to play the good ones and then people say, “Why does every Simic player always play Prophet of Kruphix?” and we’re like “BECAUSE WE $%^&ING HAVE TO!”

What are conceivable reprints for EDH decks in a universe where Wizards reprints Wurmcoil Engine? Will Wizards want to repeat a scenario where the reprints don’t get cheaper but they make new cards and old cards alike practically toilet paper?

So what do the enemy color pairings do, anyway? This wiki article talks about what each color pairing is good at and we can probably pick a few strong possibilites for a Wurmcoil-tier reprint and think about getting out of them or picking up cards that are not likely to be reprinted which could go in one of these deck. While Wurmcoil’s price didn’t go down a ton, it did make red, artifact-based decks appealing and the price is rebounding because people want to pick up every loose copy to play with.

So what are enemy-colored pairings all about? We’ll get as far as we can today and finish up next week. How’s that sound?

White / Black

Life Drain

Life drain is a great way for black/white to get people. However, a lot of those cards have been printed into the ground and/or were in Eternal Bargain, the deck with Oloro. That had a strong “life total changes matter” theme. Still, provided we do see something like that, there are some cards I’d expect in the deck.

Exsanguinate is a $1 uncommon that will be trash forever if it’s in a decent EDH deck. If we see any life drain in the WB deck, I expect this to be in the mix. Death Grasp has been printed to absolute death and this is an older card that hasn’t seen a second printing despite being considered a staple for a while. This card is very good.

This is a more powerful card, but it’s narrower. It’s more expensive for small amounts of mana, but once you start to really pump mana in, this does work. Too bad there is no money to be made or lost here.

Another Felidar Sovereign or Divinity of Pride reprinting seem unlikely, given how recently they were both reprinted. A life drain theme could give them upside, but I expect Felidar Sovereign to go up regardless, and again, Oloro’s deck makes me think it’s not super likely we’ll see this theme in an upcoming deck. Still, we need to investigate every lead.

In the unlikely event we do get a life drain theme, a card I expect to not be in the deck but get some real upside in price is this guy.

Serra Ascendant was a mistake, as having a turn-one, one-mana Baneslayer is silly for EDH. I doubt Wizards would reprint this in EDH sealed product despite its price approaching $20. This card will continue to climb in price until reprinted. Do you think Wizards would put this in EDH sealed product? I don’t, either.

This seems pretty safe to me. Even if it is reprinted, it could pull a Wurmcoil and bounce right back up—unless there’s value in the rest of the deck.

Exiling

WB sure is good at exiling stuff. Sometimes white brings it back, sometimes it doesn’t. Black just makes stuff disappear. This is a bit of a subtheme for white-black, but there aren’t a ton of great reprints possible. Do you think Vindicate will be in the deck? It’s possible that we see Unmake, Castigate, Merciless Eviction, etc.

Merciless Eviction is a great card for reprinting in this deck if we see this subtheme at all, which is too bad, because this was a card I liked long-term. It deals with a lot of stuff and its mana cost isn’t prohibitive in EDH the way it was, a bit, in Standard.

Angel of Despair has already gotten a Commander reprinting, and at $3 to $4, I think it could potentially get another nod. This was excluded from FTV Angels. What we could also see in its place is a card that has no reprintings.

If Ashen Rider gets reprinted, boo. If this doesn’t get reprinted, though, we have an opportunity. It could be a while before this is considered for a reprinting, as WWBB makes it a little tough to jam in three- or four-color decks which means the best time to reprint this in an EDH product is now. If it isn’t reprinted, we will be very close to rotation and these will be at their floor. This card is busted. While there are ways other than an EDH product to reprint this, I think dodging a reprinting in Commander 2015 means this card is a must-buy. I’m going deep on these if they’re not included in the deck. They’ll be cheap, they’ll have dodged a very likely reprint opportunity, and they will still be ridiculous in EDH. Sure, it’s not an angel, but it’s also nuts.

I would like to think the white-black deck will avoid the obvious life draining theme, but only because Wizards just did that with Oloro. Instead, I imagine the list will get a little more creative, perhaps doing something with Teysa, Orzhov Scion and similar cards. I expect Teysa in the 99 with a brand new commander at the helm. If Darkest Hour isn’t in the deck, expect that to be a card people “discover” as more people build toward a deck like this. Lingering Souls, Twilight Shepherd, cards that grant persist or undying like Cauldron of Souls, and Mikaeus, the Unhallowed will be in demand or reprinted.

If Wizards disappoints me and goes back to a WB life drain strategy, I won’t be surprised, really, and I covered what to do given that eventuality. Vizkopa Guildmage, the Sanguine Bond/Exquisite Blood combo, and even cards like Tainted Sigil will be in high demand. I’ll talk more about those eventualities when we see spoilers.

Eyes Like Donuts

I’m getting near the point where your eyes glaze over, and I only got through my preamble and one color pairing. I expected to get a little farther today, but that is okay. Since we’re ahead of the curve, we can take our time and be thorough with this subject matter and really do our due diligence.

I have a little wiggle room to talk what we expect the “Wurmcoil” of the WB deck to potentially be. Now, Wizards could spread the value over a lot of cards that will go from $5 to $7 down to $2 to $4, or print a Containment Priest-tier card that will depress the rest of the cards in the deck. However, if this deck does have a reprint in WB that is $15 to $18 like Wurmcoil was, what do we think we could see?

This is around the right price, but this seems kind of underwhelming in EDH. Sure, it’s very versatile, but I don’t know if you make most of the value of an EDH set end up in a card that could have its deck slot occupied by Mortify or Unmake and have the deck be roughly as good. Vindicate is $14 better than Mortify in Legacy. I’m not so sure it is in EDH.

This seems likelier, paired with a $5-ish card, perhaps? This isn’t the same price point, but spreading that value over two cards may do more good overall, putting two staples in players’ hands instead of just one. Attrition, maybe? If we insist on looking at $15-ish cards, there are a few that are WB staples.

Black Market is out of control and pretty good in a WB deck. If you’re sacrificing a lot of stuff to a creature like Teysa, blowing up a lot of permanents with removal, or just letting stuff die like it tends to in EDH, this card is dumb. There aren’t too many cards like this. Braid of Fire is another, that benefit from the removal of the mana burn rule. You’ve seen what pure EDH demand has done to this unfair card and a reprinting would be a nice relief valve for the price and give a few more players access. It synergizes with just about any WB strategy, also, rewarding you for sacrificing creatures or fueling a big Exsanguinate. This would be a good reprint.

“This card is HOW MUCH?” –Non-EDH players.

Phyrexian Altar is a great choice, too. It fits well into a WB deck that emphasizes sacrificing, life-draining, or even both. It’s a card that more players would play if they could afford it, and Wizards could give it some sick new art depicting a newer hero than Tsabo. This card is pure EDH and the price reflects that reality.

Grab the Cushion

I think we can put a pin in it for this week. Next week, I’ll skip the preamble and launch right into it. We’ll see if we can’t take down two color combinations next week and two the week after. Seems like a good way to split it up to me.

What did I miss? What did I overstate? What do you hope to see in a white-black EDH deck? For those who don’t care about EDH, why? A poop rare like Black Market is now $18 and you’re off fighting over how many pennies you can make on Woodland Wanderer. Don’t be clowns—at least pay attention to what casuals are doing. Who would you rather trade with? That’s what I thought.

Until next week!

City of Traders, ProTrader

PROTRADER: Combo for Zendikar

September 30, 2015 Travis Allen 4 Comments

By: Travis Allen

There’s something sort of lacking this time around, isn’t there? It’s like the collective Magic community came in with this set of expectations about what Battle for Zendikar should look like, and the set has mostly failed to meet those expectations.

Where the original Zendikar had cards like Lotus Cobra, which at the time was discussed as dethroning Tarmogoyf as the green two-drop, as well as what were exciting cards like Roil Elemental, Oracle of Mul Daya, Obsidian Fireheart, and Warren Instigator, the new Zendikar has a three-mana sorcery-speed Lightning Bolt. Many of the cards feel like an extra mana was tacked on to the casting cost.

Is this Wizards turning down the power level on Standard? Quite possibly. It’s a disappointing place to do it, though. I would have much preferred Khans of Tarkir, a brand-new setting, to be the plane that brought the tenor down a few pitches, rather than Zendikar, a plane remembered fondly as one of intense power levels and exciting cards.

On top of that, the Eldrazi have been a complete miss. While the original designs were certainly not flawlessly executed, our memory of them speaks to their resonance: they were weird, unfathomable, scary, and eye-poppingly powerful. Sure, there were cards like Dread Drone, but we’ve mostly forgotten about those. Instead, we remember the home runs. The big three god-legend mythic monsters, plus Eldrazi Conscription, All is Dust, Spawnsire of Ulamog, and the stellarly named It That Betrays. This time around we get… an X/X for X? Two 10/10s for 10? A 4/5 for 5 that comes with 3 scions? Void Winnower is amusing, I suppose.

Oblivion Sower and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger are the only two that are remotely interesting. Sower eating cards off the top of your opponent’s library on cast and then using those cards to further your own board state is wholly Eldrazi in manner, but he is sadly the only one to do that. Wizards did a decent job with Ulamog. His cast trigger is even better than the last time around, and his attack trigger, while not as powerful as annihilator 4, is both more fair and more flavorful.

Multicolor Eldrazi are just an absolute mess of text, and totally ungrokable. Ingest is buried in text boxes, and I saw multiple people fail to notice that creatures had the keyword because there was just so much going on in these cards. Even if those creatures end up playing well, they’re so wordy without being powerful that they defy any sort of emotional connection. We’re forced to evaluate them by thinking about them, rather than feeling about them.

Whatever. I won’t rag on them anymore (today). What I’d like to focus on instead are the doors that BFZ opens for other cards, particularly combo pieces. The original Zendikar brought us Vampire Hexmage, which jumped Dark Depths from $1.50 to $50, dominated a season of Extended, made Gerry T a household name, and got the combo banned in Modern. Scapeshift, a tier-1.5 Modern deck, was also enabled by Zendikar block with the printing of Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle. Jeskai Ascendancy combo was enabled by the eponymous card in Khans of Tarkir. Birthing Pod in New Phyrexia made multiple value cards suddenly Modern playable. Amulet of Vigor turned EDH staples like Karoo lands and Azusa, Lost but Seeking into boogeymen. Mirrodin block gave us… all of Affinity.

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