MTG Growth Stocks: 5 Magic Cards You Should Be Buying Right Now

August 27, 2015 James Chillcott 16 Comments

By: James Chillcott (@MTGCritic)

In my ongoing series Digging For Dollars, I try to identify Magic: The Gathering cards in the weeks leading up to the release of each new set that may be undervalued versus their true potential. Most of the time, this prognostication falls short of reality, but occasionally we throw up an early flag on a Tasigur or an Ojutai. DFD is a fun exercise aimed at helping the community think outside the box, but given the long-shot nature of the critique, it’s definitely not the best option if we’re looking to lock in a basket of profitable specs for reliable growth.

By contrast, this new series will attempt to call out a more reliable set of opportunities for our readers interested in generating a consistent and profitable return on their MTG finance activities.

In the stock market world, we talk often about blue-chip stocks, the companies that represent the most reliable combination of profits, longevity, and market leadership that signal a safe harbor for investors seeking reliable long-term growth. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM all fall into this category. The equivalent in the Magic world is cards like Black Lotus, Mishra’s Workshop, and Time Walk: the best cards of all time that are bound to offer modest but reliable annual returns so long as the game continues to grow.

As a relatively young investor with a high risk tolerance, I’m not holding a lot of blue-chip stocks in my stock portfolio. Rather, I tend to focus on growth stocks, or the companies that are growing revenues, earnings, and/or market share the fastest relative to the market at large. These companies tend to be younger and they carry more risk because they haven’t yet proven their long-term value to the market. When they get there, though, they tend to do so in a big way, providing 20- to 100-percent returns in just six to 24 months. Companies such as Tesla, Facebook, and GoPro would be reasonable recent examples of companies that have demonstrated this profile in recent years.

If you’re looking to invest a significant amount of money and kick back for a few years before bothering to check up on the results, blue-chip cards may be for you. If, on the other hand, you want to yield returns above comparable investments in stocks or real estate (with an average of roughly 10-percent annual returns), you may want to consider MTG growth stocks. In past years, cards such as Zendikar fetch lands, Liliana of the Veil, and Snapcaster Mage all represented such opportunities in the Magic community. In identifying cards in this category, we’re generally looking for the following qualities:

Multi-format all-star beyond Standard: Playable in at least two or three of Modern/Legacy/Vintage/EDH/casual.
Played as a three- or four-of: Multiple copies useful in hand or in play.
Played in multiple decks: Often due to being easily splashable and by offering flexible lines of play and a generally high power level.

So what are we hoping to get out of these MTG growth stocks?

Well, typically, I’m looking at this class of cards to provide 25- to 50-percent returns per annum, within a six- to 24-month time horizon. This also implies a focus on raw dollars versus a percentage increase in consideration of the value of our time as measured by the range of our hourly wages (e.g., a 100-percent return on $1 is generally much worse than a 50-percent return on a $30 card when you consider time spent and selling costs).

With all that on the table, here are the five cards I believe you should be buying right now instead of trying to jump on the latest spike:

Jace, Vrynn’s Prodigy (Foil): $50 (Target $80+)

In my Magic Origins Digging for Dollars article, I dismissed the youngest Jace as an overpriced card that needed to find a deck in a hurry to hold its price, but boy did it prove its value! Apparently, a Merfolk Looter with upsides that offer sweet synergies with fetch lands, sorcery-speed spells, and graveyard creature recursion is good enough all the way back to Legacy.

Remember, this is an iconic, mythic planeswalker from a summer set with limited sales, often played as a two- to four-of, viable in Standard, Modern, Legacy, and EDH/casual. The non-foils are going for $35 to $40 or so, and what foils I could find are available around $50, representing a significant discount versus the typical multiplier of two for English foils. Did I mention that there seem to be less than 50 foils available anywhere online and MTG Origins is pretty close to reaching peak supply? I see foil Jace hitting $80 to $100 within the year, and there’s a decent chance this is the next foil Liliana of the Veil. Get if while you can.

Note: In the day it has taken me to write this article, this card is already signalling a strong move upward, with copies under $60 now very rare indeed.

2. Hangarback Walker (Foil): $30 (Target $50-60)

Here’s another tier-one card that almost everyone missed on the first pass. Hangarback has already demonstrated value as a multi-copy slot in a variety of Standard decks from UR Artifacts to Abzan to Jeskai and is likely to be a staple heading into the fall metagame. More importantly, it showed up in top decks all the way back to Vintage at Eternal Weekend last week, having been featured on camera in an innovative Shops/Robots deck. Not that you care, but I’m also testing it with Bitterblossom, Lingering Souls, Evolutionary Leap, and Siege Rhino in Modern, and I suspect it will find plenty of homes in Modern within the year.

As a colorless creature with a flexible mana cost, resiliancy to non-exiling kill spells, synergy with +1/+1 counters, artifacts, sacrifice effects, and creature buffs, Hangarback Walker now looks like the very definition of a card set up to be a long-term multi-format staple. And as a rare from a Magic Origins, a low-supply summer set, chances are good that it can beat average returns and grow in a big way as more and more decks are uncovered that want to use it. Also in it’s favor is the fact that, like Snapcaster Mage, the card is powerful without being utterly broken, making deflation through banning(s) a low-risk scenario. There are very few foil Hangarback Walkers left available online at $30, and supply is dwindling. I fully expect this card to hit $50 to $60 before the end of the year.

3. Kolaghan’s Command (Foil): $18 (Target: $30+)

Initially dismissed as a middling card at first reveal, Kolaghan’s Command quickly caught the attention of Jund and Grixis players in Modern earlier this summer, and is now seen as one of the defining spells in the format and a lynch-pin of decks looking to abuse the extreme flexibility of the card’s four (!) relevant modes. Consider that this card has the ability to perform any two of the following tricks for three mana:

Knocking key permission spells out of opponent’s hands.
Returning a Jace, Vrynn’s Prodigy from your graveyard.
Killing an early attacker.
Slowing down Affinity’s explosive starts.

With that kind of power, this spell has quickly risen to become one of the top 15 spells by play rate in Modern. Dragons of Tarkir is almost certainly at peak supply by this point, there are only about 50 to 60 easily available foil copies out there under $20, and heading into Modern season in the spring of 2016, I would find it hard to believe that this hard-to-replace instant won’t top $30 as more and more players gravitate towards the powerful synergies of the Grixis builds.

4. Thoughtseize: $20 (Target: $30+)

Thoughtseize is quite simply one of the best discard spells of all time, and a key one-mana play in formats all the way back to Legacy. The card ranks at number seven of the most-played spells in Modern (and number 16 in Legacy) with 35 percent of Modern decks playing the card with an average of two copies being played in the main deck. Also of note is the fact that Theros, despite being a high-sales fall set, lacks key eternal-playable lands that will weigh down the non-land rares and mythics. With the gods and other targets from the set likely to take a couple of years to rise, there is very little preventing Thoughtseize from regaining a $30 t o $40 price tag as supply of Theros dries up over the next year.

Note: Foils around $50 are likely also a solid pickup.

5. Evolutionary Leap (Foil): $10 (Target: $25)

Evolutionary Leap is one of the more unproven picks on this list, but I see a card whose true potential is still under the radar. With a low casting cost, easy splashability, and the ability to contribute to both combo and grindy, value strategies seems to balance well against its lack of immediate board impact. At the GP Charlotte Modern tournament last weekend, Chris VanMeter started off 6-0 with his G/B Elves combo deck before fading from contention. The deck was running four copies of Leap and amply demonstrated the ability for this card to lead to big plays. As I mentioned above, I’m currently testing the card as a way to trade tokens for reliably powerful creatures like Siege Rhino in Modern, but I have confidence that a better player will find even more exciting reasons to be running this subtle enchantment as new cards appear on the horizon. At present, there are over 150 copies available online around $10 or $11, so the entry point on foils is attractive if you agree that this is a future pillar in at least one good Modern or Legacy deck. I’m targeting a three- to 12-month window for this one to top $20.

Honorable Mentions

Harbinger of the Tides (Foil): $10 (Target $20+)

This is a four-of in Modern Merfolk, a deck that recently won a Modern GP. As yet another Magic Origins rare that will see Modern play and has some degree of casual appeal, this has a decent shot of doubling up within the next two years.

Splinter Twin: $12 (Target $20+)

So long as Splinter Twin doesn’t end up banned (and so far signals are good it won’t be), the rare should easily rebound above $20 next year. The one warning ping in the back of my mind is that Modern Masters 2016 might be a thing (25-percent chance?), which would threaten all Modern staples that might be reprinted into the ground. Assuming that doesn’t happen, the fact that the Twin combo just jumped the wall into Legacy bodes well for future demand.

KTK fetch lands: $10-$22 (Target +20% Growth)

Heading into a landfall-based Battle for Zendikar set, and with the news that we won’t see the ZEN fetch lands until at least February 2016, there is a decent window for the KTK fetch lands to show solid gains this October and November as a supply crunch driven by vendor hoarding meets increasing demand. The best play here was actually picking up Delta and Strand below $12 at peak supply last winter, but Mire and Heath could easily end up pushing $20 or more if the metagame shakes out right. Keep in mind that ZEN fetches in the winter set could knock back the value of fetches across the board, so the window may be brief or even non-existent, depending on how much Standard actually needs the fetches once we’ve seen the new land template at rare.

Closing Window

Tasigur, the Golden Fang (Foil): $30 to $45 just recently

Tasigur is likely to be a one- or two-of in Modern, Legacy, and even Vintage decks for a long time to come. It’s recently jumped from $25 to $30 to having very few copies available anywhere under $45. As a small set rare already past peak supply, Tasigur should easily hold a $40 to $50 price tag in foil with the potential to top $75 if it ends up in a strong deck in Modern or Legacy that runs three or four copies instead of the usual one or two. That being said, I think the window has mostly closed here for reliable returns.

Full disclosure: I am holding copies of most of the cards on this list.

James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994.

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Corbin Hosler

A Guide to the 2015 World Championship

August 27, 2015 Corbin Hosler 2 Comments

Twenty-four of the best players in the world. One giant event attended by thousands, with those both deeply involved with Magic and completely unexposed to the game in attendance. Tens of thousands of dollars on the line. Plus, this little trophy and title they all want to have.

It’s the 2015 Magic World Championship.

Okay, my coverage writing may have slipped through a little bit there, but the World Championship is an important event both in the realm of the professional Magic world but also the financial side of things. There’s a lot happening at this event, so I want to walk through it today with the information you’ll need to plan your weekend around this tournament.

Coverage of the event starts at noon today (Thursday, August 27), and will continue throughout the weekend. There are a lot of events planned at PAX, and while some are more financially relevant than others, they all matter quite a bit in terms of the future of Magic.

Let’s Start with Thursday

Modern Masters 2015 draft will be fun to watch, and the hype of the event will really kick off in full force once the afternoon brings along the Modern rounds. The pros haven’t had a crack at Modern in a pro-level format since Magic Origins hit, and with the impact we’re already seeing from the set at the Grand Prix level (as well as completely shaking up Standard), it wouldn’t be a surprise to see new tech break out here. Most of the pros I talked to about the format at Worlds expect it to be very important to metagame, so we may well see something unexpected break out that the field isn’t prepared for. Reid Duke showed as much in 2012 when he showed up with Bogles and put it on the map.

There are a few things to digest financially here. First, much like the Blue-Red Ensoul Artifact deck we saw at Pro Tour Magic Origins, just because the pros choose a deck for a format doesn’t mean it’s going to have staying power. The Thopter deck broke out at one event and put up insane win percentages over the weekend, but it has failed to duplicate that same success since. I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar happen at Worlds.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t make money here. Whatever the pros do end up playing will undoubtedly drive prices in the short term, since so many eyes will be trained to the event nonstop (mine included). The opportunity here will be to move early on what sees success on camera, especially if it’s unexpected, and you may be able to make some short-term gains.

Then comes the long-term aspect of it, which frankly is what I’m more interested in. I’m not necessarily looking for the success of a single deck like Bogles or Infect or Storm or whatever the field may not be prepared for. Instead, I’m looking to see what cards are played across the field or what cards from Magic Origins have staying power. We’ve seen a lot of Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy around Magic lately, but the true test will be if he sees widespread play across the field at Worlds. The same goes for Hangarback Walker, which has made waves but hasn’t been a mainstay in Modern yet.

He moonlighted as Master of Wallets in late 2013.

Speaking of waves, I’d love to see someone sleeve up Merfolk and do well, but I’m not necessarily expecting it. The linear and draw-dependent nature of the deck isn’t something pros usually favor, especially at such a high-level event, but hey, I can hope!

Friday Standard

Like with Thursday, Friday’s exciting action doesn’t start until the afternoon. And like with Modern, Standard is all about metagaming. With just 24 players showing up to this event, it’s much more important to play something good against what you expect your opponents to play than it is to find the best deck for a Grand Prix.

I expect Modern to be the big driver in prices this weekend, but I do want to highlight a few things in Standard. For starters, with Standard Rotation so close on the horizon (and some more pieces of that future being revealed this weekend), I doubt we see much Standard price movement, if any at all.

But there are still a few things to watch for.

What decks survive the best at rotation? Look for decks that have a core made up of Magic Origins or Khans of Tarkir cards rather than the usual Courser of Kruphix/Devotion/Thoughtseize varieties. Spotting these (which I plan to elaborate on next week, with results), will tell us a lot about what the post-rotation format could look like.
What planeswalkers make an appearance? We’ve seen a lot of Jace in Standard, with a side helping of Nissa. Will this be the weekend another planeswalker breaks out?
Hangarback Walker has proven itself the terror of the format, and the next question is: is it beatable? Will players bring answers to Hangarback, or will they opt to simply play it themselves? Standard has proven itself to be quite adaptable over the last 12 months, and we’ll see if it can handle one more boogeyman before rotation.
If it can, the next step is to look at whether those answers survive rotation. If they do, I would say the future of Hangarback Walker is to slowly trend down in price. But if they don’t, or everyone just jams Walkers themselves, we could easily see this thing make a run to $25 or $30 immediately following Battle for Zendikar‘s release.

Sunday Standard

More Standard follows in the final rounds of the tournament, and this will be the day that we may finally see some Standard price movement, thanks to being the format the championship hangs on.

Other Stuff to Watch

PAX Prime is a crazy event, both for attendees and other games, not to mention Magic itself. The World Championship is a huge event and an important one, but that’s not all we have to watch this weekend:

The biggest news will drop Saturday night, at 7:30 Pacific, or 10:30 Eastern time. This is the Battle for Zendikar preview show, and we’re going to see spoilers galore at this one. This is key to watch to find out if anything spoiled creates hype and therefore movement on anything else. Obviously, the cards we see previewed here are likely to be overpriced on their spoiling, so look for how they affect other cards instead.
Besides the preview show, there’s also a Felicia Day/Wil Wheaton/LoadingReadyRun-filled event with lots of cards and fun. As viewers, this isn’t super relevant for us, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some more news come out of this.
There’s also what I consider the elephant in the room, and one that has successfully hidden so far. When first announcing the move to PAX, Director of Organized Play Helene Bergeot wrote this: “A major moment for the global Magic community is going to take place at PAX Prime, and moving the 2015 World Championship to PAX Prime is just one part of this global experience.” Considering everything we’ve talked about so far isn’t exactly new, I’m unsure if this is a harbinger of bigger news to come that is being slow-rolled, or if it’s just a general blanket statement about the event.

Either way, it’s going to be fun. And I’m looking forward to watching. We’ll have complete spoiler coverage here on MTGPrice, so make sure you keep a tab open over here while you’re watching Twitch.

Thanks for reading,

Corbin Hosler

@Chosler88 on Twitter

Addendum: One more thing before I go. I try not to promote myself often, but I’ve added a few things recently I want to mention. I produce a lot of articles weekly, with two regularl columns plus coverage writing, but what I haven’t done before is move much into the video realm. That changes now, and over the past few weeks I’ve gotten heavily into streaming at www.twitch.tv/chosler88, and I’m also producing at least two videos a week for my YouTube channel as well. If you’re interested in following along with either of these, feel free to follow/subscribe/share. Thanks, everyone!

Conjured Currency

Stream of Consciousness

August 27, 2015 Douglas Johnson 25 Comments

Welcome back, DJ!

Thanks, I needed that. As you might have noticed last Thursday, my content was conspicuously absent from MTGPrice. As a resident assistant for the returning students at my school, I was extremely busy last week with preparing the building, checking new students into the residence hall, and repeating the mandatory training that is drilled into us every year. Although the job is a lot of fun and I highly recommend it to any of my fellow college students who are interested, move-in week certainly takes up a chunk of my time. To all of my fellow college-student MTG financiers, I highly recommend applying for the job at your school. It’s a great experience overall, even though it’s a pretty large time commitment.

Unfortunately, even if I did have time to write an article last week, I didn’t exactly have a specific topic ready and waiting to be scribbled down. In fact, I still don’t have a topic this week. I’m just kind of winging it right now, because I’m pretty apathetic about most of Magic right now.

I’m not one to obsess over the angels in the new From the Vault, everyone else has already written about the fetch lands and their Battle for Zendikar predictions, and I think I’ve exhausted your patience for “articles concerning my weekly collection buying and organizational processes” in the past couple of months (seriously though, if you guys/girls want to read about more of that stuff, I can do that. I love writing about collection buying). So let’s just see where this goes, okay?

More Fetch Land Talk

Actually, you know what? I do want to talk about fetch lands, even though the spike was a billion weeks ago at this point. In recent news, there was a fake leak of enemy Zendikar fetches being spoiled at PAX. After several diligent researchers determed that the art was cherry-picked from various other internet sources, the frenzy quieted down. If you’re one of the people who bought a huge number of fetches before the spike and had a miniature heart attack at the sight of the faked announcement due to still owning a couple thousand dollars worth of fetch lands, that was your warning shot.

I’m still advocating unloading these now instead of waiting a few months, as I think there’s a high probability of Wizards including the five lands in the second set of the block. If you wait too long into BFZ to sell them, then you won’t be able to find any buyers as everyone will be holding off until “Sweat“ is released. Lock in the profits now and you can have cash on hand just in case someone comes up to you to sell a collection. I still have some Zendikar fetches left over that I picked up from the story I’m about to tell you, and the few seconds of jump scare made me realize I need to pick up the pace on selling them.

Sticker Time

While we’re on the subject of fetches, I’d like everyone to gather ’round for story time. We’re traveling back a billion weeks ago to the day of the “enemy fetchlands will not be in Battle for Zendikar” announcement, in a small town called Camden, New York. The closest LGS is 30 minutes away, but at least this one has a singles display case, stocked with staples. Although our weekly EDH night didn’t start until 6:00 p.m., I wanted to get there early and see if the shop had any fetches in its display case at a reasonable price. This was right in the middle of the buyout, with SCG being bought out not even an hour before.

I arrived at the store and noticed that they still had quite a few fetches in stock: Misty Rainforests for $35, Marsh Flats for $25, Verdant Catacombs for $34, and Scalding Tarns for $54. Excellent. There were no Arid Mesas, but you can’t have everything. I inspected the condition to make sure they were all NM and gave the employee my card to swipe. I told him that I was purchasing all of these fetch lands because I expected them to be worth a lot more by the end of the day, and I ended up being correct (for once). One of the main reasons I’ve kept coming back to this store is that it always honors the sticker price, even if the card has already jumped. I help the store out by pointing out low prices when I’m not going to buy cards, too.

Now, let’s fast forward to the next week. I wanted to buy new binders because the Monster brand ones that I’ve used for the past few years were finally at their limit. I didn’t want to wait a week for them to arrive from Amazon, so I stopped by the LGS once again. This time, I was met with an interesting change in the store: it was no longer labeling its singles with price stickers—one now had to ask an employee for the price of each individual card.

I suppose the owner was tired of having people like me buy cards after their actual retail price had already increased. The store certainly loses out on potential income when I buy $5.50 Living Ends, I’m not arguing that point. Then again, I’ve been on the other side of the fence plenty of times, considering I just sold a Cloudstone Curio out of my own display case for $6 before I had the chance to update the price. It’s an unfortunate reality of the business we’re in.

However, I can’t help but wonder if removing the stickers is the best possible move for the store, and I’d love to get your thoughts in the comments section about this. By forcing employees to check the price on every single card sold out of its case, the store loses out on a large number of impulse purchases from players who don’t play nearly as competitively as us vocal minority. I can only assume that an EDH player who is browsing the case for new additions to her decks won’t go through the trouble of asking the price on every single potential candidate—she will narrow her purchase to save on time. It’s much easier for customers to mentally visualize their own budgets and how many cards they can afford when the prices are right in front of them, and this system also removes the joy of finding a card that’s even slightly underpriced, even if it’s only finding a $7 Blood Crypt that was $8 everywhere else one looked. There’s also the employee’s time and effort to take into consideration, because he now has to double-check every single price every time someone asks about a card.

As someone who sold several Goblin Rabblemasters for $7 out of my case while they were $15 everywhere else, I held no animosity or resentment towards the players and financiers who I sold these cards to. What are your thoughts on this?

Uhh…

Alright, so now that that’s out of the way, what else is there to talk about… Hmm.

End Step

Apparently Hangarback Walker is a $20 Magic: The Gathering card, which upsets me way more than $80 Scalding Tarns. If you own these, I’m still calling to sell them. I mean, I suggested you sell them at $8, then I suggested selling them at $14, so what do I know? All I know is that this card is the same price as Thoughtseize was almost two years ago, and I highly doubt that Walker has the same longevity.

Temple of Epiphany got its second wind for about a week off the back of the UR Artifacts deck, and then everyone realized: “Oh wait, this stupid thing is about to rotate.” I managed to sell off a pile into the hype, but I think that’s just about died down for now. If you want to pick up any other Temples for speculation, you can probably find the cheaper ones at near-bulk prices as everyone else abandons ship. While I’m still staying away from any and all Temples in favor of collection buying, I’ve been wrong before. A lot, actually.

Foil Hive Mind was bought out recently, but I haven’t really heard or seen anything about that. While it might be part of your daily ritual to check the daily interests on MTGStocks, remember to click that foil tab every day as well.

While we’re on the subject of foils, I fully support Travis’s call on foil Tasigur at $30 to $40. While I’m not going to drop several hundred cash dollars on it like he did, I’m going to horde the few copies I already have in my spec box, target them aggressively in trades, and keep a finger on the pulse of the card’s price moving forward.

That’s all I’ve got for this week. If you have anything in particular you’d like me to write about, hit me up. Summer is usually a pretty dull time in Magic finance anyway, until all hell breaks loose with the release of the fall set. Look forward to the next few weeks as spoiler season starts trickling in, as I’ll be helping Jason and Corbin create up-to-date spoiler coverage and tossing my hat into the ring on where I think most of the cards’ prices will end up in the future months! (Spoiler alert: I predict 90 percent of the set will be bulk rares.)

Going Mad

Going Mad – Modern & Legacy & Vintage – OH MY!

August 26, 2015 Derek Madlem 5 Comments

By: Derek Madlem

Maybe you spent this last weekend underground, or on a boat, or even on a smaller boat than that (the kind without free WiFi), but there were a couple of fairly substantial tournaments this weekend that you may or may not have heard about. While you were not glued to the screen honing your Magical craft via proxy Wizarding the rest of us tuned in to see some pretty sweet things happening on coverage.

My Horse

Since the moment I first saw Evolutionary Leap, I knew the card was abstractly powerful and that it was only a matter of time before someone broke it. I sang praise for Evolutionary Leap from the rooftops and the world was split as to whether this card was hot garbage or hot fire… turns out it might actually be hot fire. Chris VanMeter proved that Evolutionary Leap is not “slower than Chord of Calling” by piloting a sweet elves list that was capable of churning through the entire deck to find and cast Emrakul, the Aeons Torn as early as turn two, thanks entirely to Evolutionary Leap.

How did it this dream scenario string of shenanigans go?

Turn 1: Forest, Nettle Sentinel
Turn 2: Forest, Nettle Sentinel, Heritage Druid…tap for three, play an elf to net some mana and then stick a Cloudstone Curio or Evolutionary Leap to generate as much mana as you could possibly need.

The Evolutionary Leap method sacrificed the elf to burn through and find another elf and net one mana at each step until casting a Regal Force or Emrakul

Cloudstone Curio bounced an elf to replay at a net gain of net two mana per cast, then cast Elvish Visionary and draw the whole deck or just play an Emrakul to end the game.

Vanmeter didn’t crush the open with this deck, but it did do well enough to show “proof of concept” and silence many of the haters. A lackluster performance with a new deck on it’s first outing doesn’t prove it’s bad, it just gives us a baseline to tweak and tune from.

Evolutionary Leap has only climbed about 25% since this deck showed up on camera while it’s partner in crime, Cloudstone Curio, has casually tripled up. We’ve seen Cloudstone Curio spike before and come back down to Earth, but this time it’s more likely to stick as it’s been tempered in the fires of battle rather than it’s price being based on a theoretical synergy with Beck // Call.

Evolutionary Leap is still a really cheap card in the grand scheme of things (hovering around $2.50 as of writing this article) so it’s not too late to pick up a playset or even a small mountain of them. I’m fairly certain we haven’t seen the last of this card as new innovations are sure to continue bubbling up to the surface. For those keeping score at home this now means that two out of my three pet cards from Magic Origins are seeing some serious action, now I’m just waiting on Woodland Bellower to bring me the Triple Crown.

Modern Shakeups?

Ultimately the Modern event was taken down by the format’s greatest antihero: Jund. Herrera’s Jund list featured mostly just the usual suspects but added a little spice with a card I’m pretty fond of: Abbot of Keral Keep. The top 32 decklists of this event show a diverse and robustly healthy format where everybody gets to play pretty much any style of deck they want…and Splinter Twin didn’t even make top 8.

Meanwhile in sunny Philadelphia…

Eternal Weekend was in full bloom with 744 players sleeving up Legacy decks to battle for a really big Tundra and glory. The only thing more surprising than the Legacy turnout was the reality that this event would have been even larger if it wasn’t for the World Magic Cup Qualifier running alongside it, peeling off a non-zero number of players. Reaching 750 players for a non-SCG non-GP event proves that Legacy is alive and well in the hearts of Magic players.

So what was hot? How about Dig Through Time showing up in six out of the top eight decks and making a strong case for the ban hammer. With so much of the blue’s primary arsenal pairing well with Dig Through Time, it’s hard to imagine a world where Dig doesn’t get banned in Legacy (and likely restricted in Vintage). Dig Through Time is painting itself into a corner financially, quickly turning into a terrible long-term pick with very few chances to curve out. Even the FOIL copies are going to have a hard time paying off big if the only place to play them is going to be Vintage, Cube, and Commander…especially when you factor in the prerelease versions.

But then there’s Splinter Twin…in Legacy. Max Ansbro was able to pilot Splinter Twin to an impressive 10-1 record in the swiss portion of the event. It’s easy to write this off as Max simply being an “archetype master” because Legacy is a format that rewards players for knowing their decks just as much as it does playing a good decks, but dropping only a single match in eleven rounds of swiss at the year’s premiere Legacy event is no small feat.

What’s this mean for Splinter Twin? It definitely brings the card to center stage and only embolden’s any case against allowing the card to continue being legal in Modern. Do I think that a card being Legacy playable is reason enough to ban it in Modern? If that were the case we’d have seen Abrupt Decay, Tarmogoyf, and Delver of Secrets banned a long time ago. What it does do, though, is amplifies the conversation that’s already being had. Splinter Twin is not disproportionately strong in Modern, but it is an abysmal deck from a user-experience perspective…nobody likes to be on the losing side of “HA HA GOT YOU!” combos backed up with a pile of counter magic.

Ultimately I think that the success of the Legacy Twin deck has more to do with Dig Through Time than it does Splinter Twin so I don’t expect much to happen to the price of Splinter Twin any time soon outside the potential for one of Wizards’ lazy “Pro Tour” bannings just to shake up the format. Banning Splinter Twin in Modern right after reprinting it would be an embarrassing mistake for Wizards so I doubt we even see a shakeup banning at this point.

Dig Through Time having the ability to search up and piece together multiple pieces of combos (however bad) only furthers the case for its banning in Legacy and there’s probably a strong case to be made for restricting it in Vintage for the same reasons.

Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy has found his way to Legacy and this pretty much sums up how I feel about it:

At this point I’m still just dumbfounded that people continue trying this card but even more so dumbfounded that it keeps showing up in high profile finishes. Did I mention there were also four copies in the 5th place Grixis Control deck for the Modern open?

I’m to the point now where I am almost forced to acknowledge just how good Jace is and take him for a test drive. Apparently Merfolk Looter was just on the cusp of greatness for all these years just waiting for some sweet Delve spells to push it over the top.

I want to say that Jace is probably just a flash in the pan, but it’s starting to look like he might be a multi-format all star in addition to being a casual favorite. I really feel gross typing this: Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy is likely the second best Jace ever printed and as time goes on, we’re going to wish we had those FOILs, so grab them now while they’re only casually stupid-expensive.

Vintage

The slow death of Vintage has been a greatly exaggerated “fact” for years now. This year featured the largest Vintage Championships turnout yet with over 460 players, that’s over a hundred additional players compared to last year’s turnout.

Breakout cards in Vintage are often irrelevant as far as #mtgfinance is concerned because the market for these cards just isn’t that deep. That said, there’s a very good reason why FOIL Dack Fayden is nearly ten times the price of a non-FOIL Dack Fayden – Vintage players are willing to spend money.

While it’s easy to point out that Dack Fayden is snowballing in popularity in Vintage, the real breakout card from this event came from Magic Origins – Hangarback Walker. Normally I would just pass this off as Vintage being Vintage; ridiculous things happen all the time in Vintage – people attack with Slash Panther, people play a NON-FOIL copy of Polluted Delta from Khans of Tarkir right next to their hand-painted Mox Emerald, some people even go so far as to white-border their entire deck using acetone and an eraser… these people are occasional savages that will occasionally do savage things. Some of these things are easy to ignore, but what I can’t ignore is a card showing up in decks ranging all the way from Standard to Vintage. Enter the Hangarback.

We’ve already seen Hangarback Walker make it’s presence known in Standard and Vintage, and there are murmurings of it’s power in Modern affinity…how long until Hangarback fills in the gaps and shows up in Legacy? When a card has such a strong cross-format appeal, there’s significant upside to picking up FOIL copies – just look at Abrupt Decay as a great example. When a card defies convention and sets up (work)shop in multiple formats, it’s likely to be a player for a long time and I think Hangarback is on the cusp of that level of greatness.

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