Casual Hits in Origins Pt. 2

By: Cliff Daigle

Last week I didn’t have the whole spoiler, so today, before you prerelease, I want to remind you to trade everything away. People will pay/trade more for these cards right now than they will at any other point.

Now, on to the rest of the cards I want to talk about. Mostly I’m basing my price predictions on their casual appeal, and if something gets popular in Constructed, expect a strong surge.

Archangel of Tithes
There are two equally annoying modes on this card and unfortunately, Tax decks are a thing, usually led by the Grand Arbiter Augustin IV in Commander.

This might have a place in a white devotion strategy, or some other deck. It combines can’t-attack and can’t-block effects, but instead of paying two or more mana, it’s just one.

I doubt this will ever be worth much more than a $4.

 

Woodland Bellower  
Value comes in many shapes and sizes. This gets you a range of things, but I imagine that in Commander especially, this will fetch up Eternal Witness pretty often. I wouldn’t overlook what Riftsweeper can do if people like to exile your pretty toys.

Also note that you can find anything that’s even partially green. Savage Knuckleblade, Knight of the Reliquary, Shambling Shell…whatever you need.

I think this has potential to keep a decent amount of value. I’m expecting it to stay in the $5-$10 range.

 

Ghirapur Aether Grid
This is the combo piece that a lot of casual decks have been craving, even if they didn’t know it. This will be a card with a higher-than-expected foil price for solely that reason. A surprising number of decks in a lot of formats don’t know what to do once they make 5,000 Myr tokens. The Grid allows for the game to instantly end, which is often a blessing in disguise.

Even foils of this uncommon won’t be worth much more than two dollars, unless there’s yet another infinite combo deck in Modern that exploits it.

 

Willbreaker
Key here is the targeting clause. It’s not just spells. It’s abilities as well. I am drooling to get one of these into my Experiment Kraj EDH deck and if someone at my prerelease opens a foil of this I’m going to overpay badly.

This is probably a bulk rare and a five-dollar foil. Too much has to go right for this to be good, but that’s never stopped us.

 

Herald of the Pantheon
As an enabler, this fits right into any Enchantress deck in any format. Amusingly, those decks tend to get stuck on mana, not cards, and the life gain is a handy bonus too. Still, it’s a minor cog and won’t ever have a huge price.

 

Erebos’s Titan
It’s sort of a shame that Wizards is stopping core sets right when they decided to use those sets to supercharge the soon-to-be-rotating block. It might just be coincidence, as Theros is featured in KG’s backstory.

The Titan has a lot of potential and requires multiple readings to get right. What isn’t clear is if cubes want this or Phyrexian Obliterator for their mono-black aggro decks. There’s a long and awesome history of four-drop 5/5 creatures in black, and this one has two upsides! Not to be overlooked is how this survives Languish in Origins Limited or control shells in Constructed.

As for its price, it’s going to see a fair amount of play in a lot of formats. I would expect this to start high and trickle down slowly over time.

 

Hangarback Walker
By itself, this card isn’t terribly impressive. Two mana for each +1/+1 counter is rather meh, even if there’s good value to be had when it dies.

A little help makes it amazing, though. Doubling Season is the granddaddy of them all. Season on five means Hangarback Walker for six mana and six counters, then twelve tokens. Ding! Parallel Lives, Gilder Bairn, even Hardened Scales will help this be better than its bulk price.

 

Evolutionary Leap
I am not overwhelmed with this card. Everything depends on what you find, though it wouldn’t be too hard to build a deck where everything entered the battlefield, or left it, for value. I’d love to see this chained a few times and then reloaded with Second Sunrise or the like. Bulk rare.

 

Talent of the Telepath
I don’t like to use the term ‘staple’ for EDH or Cube, as there’s a lot of ways to build your experience. However, almost everyone builds a ‘stop hurting yourself’ sort of deck that uses your opponents’ overpowered cards against them. Bribery is the oldest and most feared (target the Kaalia of the Vast player, get Iona, Shield of Emeria) and Knowledge Exploitation costs seven mana. Talent is more random in its payoff but it costs significantly less and might even get you two copies. Now if you’re play in this alongside Hive Mind in a Riku of Two Reflections deck…I’m going to to go make a sandwich while you figure out who does what first.

This will not be a bulk rare, more like $1-$2, and likely $6 in foil.

 

Pyromancer’s Goggles
This is amazing. Just amazing. Normally you have to do a lot of work to copy spells, like get Riku of Two Reflections to survive. The Goggles pay you off easily and almost immediately. Suddenly, Lightning Bolt is a great card to hold till turn five, when you can double up on it. This is another card that doesn’t require mono-red spells, either. Invoke the Firemind is my first thought, but there’s all sorts of great spells to copy.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this popped up as a fun-of in Legacy or Modern. It’s true that more people maindecking Kolaghan’s Command makes the Goggles a weaker inclusion, but how much value do you get if you’re copying your own Command?

This is going to be $3-$5 in regular and more than $20-$25 in foil all summer long. The prices will creep down, but if an Eternal deck does well with it, it’ll spike pretty hard.

 

Demonic Pact
People are brewing in lots of formats with this humdinger of a Donate target, and it’s tricky to evaluate. In cube, it’s unlikely to see play, but there are all sorts of Jinxed Idol/Bazaar Trader/Zedruu the Greathearted decks out there. I see this as another $5 card with a big premium on the foil, $15-$20.


 

PROTRADER: Guo’s Magic Origins Mythic Review Part II

By Guo Heng

Welcome back! Today’s piece will continue where last week’s mythic review left off. It’s Magic Origins review week this week and don’t forget to check out the financial review of each individual color in the set which my fellow MTGPrice writers wrote throughout the week. Without much ado, let’s kick off with the three black mythic rares in the set:

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PROTRADER: Magic Origins Set Review, Artifacts

Hello, everyone!

I know we’re going a bit out of order here, but once the colors for the set review were divvied up, you see what I’m left with!

In all honestly, though, that’s fine. I don’t mind taking the block of cards known as “also in the set.” In fact, some of these are actually pretty exciting.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Bulk Rare EDH

I already know what you’re thinking. You clicked on this article because it had “EDH” in the title, and because you thought, “Finally, someone on this website who actually knows what they’re talking about when it comes to the Commander format.” You wanted a benevolent writer who’s not afraid to tell you how much I like your smile, instead of an angst-filled podcaster who’s gonna call you a nerd. I feel you. I understand you. We’re gonna steal some of Jason Alt‘s spotlight for the week, and combine something that I love (bulk rares) with his EDH fetish.

DJ, You Play Magic?

Articletweet

That tweet was posted from #GPVegas, but that’s beside the point. I do actually own five EDH decks and enjoy the slow process of foiling them out through trades. It warms my cold, financier heart to find a foil piece for Savra in a binder when I’m so close to having the deck as foil as possible; it gives me something to actually be excited about when trading.

hollow

(If anyone has a foil one of these, I’d gladly trade for it.)

However, some of my decks end up being too powerful for local and new groups that I attend. I’m pretty awful at figuring out whether or not my deck is 75%, but I still wanted to have a brew that could be on a somewhat similar power level to someone who just picked up a Commander preconstructed deck from the Walmart.

I also have thousands of bulk rares that sit on top of my display case and there are some that I’ll never run out of (I’m so glad I have a dozen copies of Sultai Ascendancy). A few months ago, I figured that maybe I could use those… Fate Reforged had just been released, and I wanted to make a Tasigur deck while still being original and having a cool “theme.”

bulkrares

The $30 Deck

I already had Jarad as my mono-dredge deck, so I didn’t want to go down that path with Tasigur. I had Savra for tokens and sacrifice themes, and Nath was all enchantments. I really didn’t want to make a “good stuff” BUG deck with all of the best Sultai staples that were just recurred over and over again, because I like all of my decks to have their own dedicated theme or niche.

While I was pawing through some of my bulk rares in my display case, I had the idea to combine the best of both worlds: what if I made the Tasigur deck, and only used rares that were under a certain price point? It would limit the power level of the deck to the point where I’d be comfortable playing in a lot more environments with casual players, the deck would cost me literally nothing to build (I resolved to only use cards in my $.25 rare box), and I might be able to start a trend in my area. If this building restriction ended up being a ton of fun and took off, then I have a ton of bulk rares to sell to my friends who might make their own bulk rare EDH decks.

These are the rules that I kept myself to during deck construction:

  1. Every card in the 99 that is not a basic land must be rare, and worth less than $.80 TCG mid (most cards above that price end up in my $1.00 box, so I don’t consider them true “bulk rares”).
  2. The general is excluded from this rule, because damn it, I want to play Tasigur.
  3. Mythic rares are not allowed, because those aren’t in my $.25 boxes.
  4. If the card jumps above the right price point, it must be removed from the deck.
  5. I didn’t care if the card had been reprinted as common or uncommon, as long as I was playing the rare version.
  6. No foils, other than Tasigur. That would make the card too expensive to play.

The “Golden” Fang

My first rough draft ended up, well, pretty rough. I learned really quickly that most decent mana fixing was printed at common or uncommon, so Farseek, Cultivate, and even guildgates were out. Any semi-quality rare dual lands are above $1, so I was unable to use stuff like Drowned Catacombs even though it has four printings. As a result, I managed to find Astral Cornucopia and the Ramos rocks as begrudgingly playable. It’s not as though anyone was clamoring to buy them out of my bulk boxes anyway. Ways to fill my graveyard were especially hard to come by, but I managed to pull out Jace’s Archivist and one of those good old Sultai Ascendancies to help cast Tasigur even easier. I even had a cute combo with Laboratory Maniac in the list for a while, but now it looks like I’ll have to remove him. He’s grown up to be a big boy and will move onto the $1 box, so I’ll have to find an additional win condition. My favorite win condition in the deck is definitely Villainous Wealththough: if I can’t cast expensive and powerful Magic cards, I’ll just try to use yours!

After a bit of tweaking a few months ago, this is what I have sleeved up today.

bulkrareEDH

While writing this article, I’m learning that more and more cards that I initially had in the list no longer fit the price requirement that I set. Though I set my number at around $.80, you can pick whatever number you like, which I think is a cool way to adjust the format to your personal playgroup’s budget. Removing commons and uncommons from the equation makes it a sort of “anti-Pauper,” where you put a lot of faith in WOTC’s inability to designate rarities early on in the game’s development. I can take advantage of Persuasion having  a gold set symbol, but I don’t get to play Control Magic.

Advantages of Battling with Bulk

I’m not going to pretend that I play as much EDH as Jason does. I’ve probably only played this deck a dozen times in the six or so months that it’s been together. However, I’ve gotten enough positive local feedback and interactions by using the deck, that I think there are tangible benefits to building one if you’re an individual looking to sell off some of your bulk rares for higher than $.15 a piece to a vendor.

When I cast Sudden Spoiling to ruin someone’s entire army of dragons and make blocks that devastate their board, one of the responses of the opposing players was, “There’s no way that’s a bulk rare. It’s way too powerful.” That conversation quickly turned into, “How many extras of those do you have that you would sell me? I need one in every black deck.” By displaying powerful bulk rares that can stand up to higher-tier decks, you can show them first-hand that building a deck that I can only accurately describe as “not that bad” can be surprisingly cheap.

I mentioned this earlier in the opening, but it’s worth going over again. If you or your playgroups find this type of idea to be fun (I mean, it’s probably cheaper and more fun than Tiny Leaders, if you’re an EDH player who tried that format out), then it’s easy to buy into, challenging to build, and allows for constant adjusting of your deck. I’ve had the deck together for less than a year, and I’ve already been forced to remove at least 7 cards from it because they slowly crept up in price. If I played enough Magic to know for sure, I’d guess that changing your deck up little by little over time manages to keep it fun, refreshing, and exciting to play. These types of decks are also fantastic to show blossoming EDH players who have just purchased their precons, or who have no idea where to start.

While we’re on the subject of comparing this to Tiny Leaders, I have to make the amusing observation that it’s impossible for this “format variation” to warp the market like TL did. I’m not suggesting that this will ever actually be as big as TL was, but if a card becomes powerful enough and demanded just because of its efficiency in bulk rare decks, then it no longer becomes a bulk rare. When that happens, we remove the card from our decks until it goes back down to where we want!

One final advantage that I want to aggressively push at you about this variant of EDH that I created, is that talking about it is actually getting me to feel and care about spoilers again.

I’m actually excited for Gilt-Leaf Winnower to drop down to a bulk rare so I can try it out in this deck. Is it going to be good enough? I have no idea, but I want to try it. I’m going to end up paying $.10 for one eventually anyway, so I might as well take it for a run. I’m even crossing my fingers hoping that Managorger Hydra becomes a bulk rare to supplement the +1/+1 counter subtheme that the deck has slowly evolved into.

End Step

Am I crazy for thinking this is an actual fun tweak on EDH/Commander? I’ve had a blast playing with my Tasigur deck against other relatively low-power decks. If you’re a fan of 60-card pauper or pauper EDH, I think this is something you’d enjoy a lot. As someone who never used to enjoy actually building decks, I enjoy keeping this one up to date, and writing about it has revived my fervor for sharing it with the world.

Let me know what you think in the comments section, on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, email, whatever. You know the drill. Thanks for reading!

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