Casual Fridays

Running It Back

There’s a few adages in Magic finance that always made a lot of sense to me:

  • Let someone else make the last 10%.
  • Sell into the hype.
  • Don’t reinvent the wheel.

That last one is especially relevant now, with Double Masters 2022 previews starting up as of yesterday. At least one of the previewed cards is a reprint of a reprint, and so we know how this song goes.

For others, the tune isn’t so clear…

Double Masters 2022 was always going to be a big deal. The first one made lots of people lots of money, especially with the VIP packs predating our Collector Boosters. What’s really going to juice the amount of product opened is not the big-ticket price of packs, but the fact that Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate was not a big deal financially. Yes, a couple of the rarest dragons are expensive, but value-wise, the set is quite underwhelming in the short term.

That’s not going to be a problem with DXM2. Immediately we got told that Dockside Extortionist is in the set, with foil-etched and borderless variants. The hits just kept coming from there, and some of them are clearly going to make us some money.

Let’s start with one of the big reveals from Thursday’s stream: Phyrexian Altar.

We know exactly how good this card is. It’s been registered in 44,000 Commander decks online via EDHREC, and that number is only the serious players who bother to set it up online. Plus, this has had only two printings, Invasion and Ultimate Masters. See if you can spot when the reprint happened:

As an additional bonus to that 44k number, it’s never been in a Commander precon, which can really goose some of the inclusion numbers. 

So yes, I’m telling you to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and buy Phyrexian Altar when it gets cheap. I’m especially telling you to go for the regular, nonfoil copies, as those should get to a wonderfully low price, likely under $20 and maybe as low as $10. This is as straightforward as things get in Magic finance, and it’s advice I would give to anyone who asked me for an example of how all this works. I mean it, too: Buying 20 copies when it was $15 (as the UMA copies were for a few months) and holding for two years would get you $60 a copy before fees. If you held for three years you’re looking at $80-$90!

Granted, there were no reprints of any kind for this card, and that’s relatively rare these days. Between Secret Lairs, special inclusions, and a new set every six frigging weeks, there’s a whole lot of reprinting going on.

Doesn’t take away from the simple truth that putting $100 into plain copies of Altar will double your money in a year, and might go higher. Note that this will be a rare again, meaning there will be a lot of copies to go around.

Let’s look at another Ultimate Masters card, this time a mythic:

Mana Vault is one of those cards that I, as a long-time, very enfranchised player, used to put between the spokes of my bike because I was an ignorant little snot who didn’t know how to do this properly. If that teenage jerk had just saved his cards, I’d have a mansion in the hills!

Anyway, we have here the same pattern: Got expensive, got reprinted, got cheap, and then got expensive again. Given that there will be multiple versions of the Vault again, I would repeat my advice that the best return on your money would be to buy the regular, nonfoil copies and then just wait patiently. Don’t spend all your money on any one of these cards, please be sure to diversify, but Double Masters 2022 is going to offer us a lot of opportunities to put some money in and get a lot more out.

This one I’m slightly less sure about, as there’s complicating factors: 

There’s no question that Bloom Tender is a powerful card. It’s an infinite mana engine with Freed from the Real, it’s an Elf, and in five-color decks, it gets out of hand very quickly indeed. Eventide was a low point in Magic sales, which is why the OG foils are so very expensive. This was in the Mystery Booster, and that put juuuuuust enough copies into circulation as to keep the price from going much higher. Then last year, arriving at the same time as the Phyrexian Praetors, this was in the Secret Lair: Jen Bartel edition. 

Again, that’s enough copies to keep the price from going up, which is notable for a card listed in 40,000 decks online. 

What I’ll be watching for, very closely, is the floor on regular copies. Right now, there’s some optimistic pre-orders for around $20, and that bodes very well for future opportunities. I ignore pre-orders, generally speaking, but remember that almost all cards start out at their highest prices, and drop from there. 

Bloom Tender should be no different, and I’m hoping it gets to $5 when all is said and done and all the packs are finally opened. It’ll definitely get to $10, which is an okay buy-in price, but I’ll be much more excited about it if it goes even lower. Having the Secret Lair copies available for $40-$50 depending on foiling puts a pretty hard cap on what Bloom Tender can do long-term, though I’d be expecting to buy in at $5 and get out when it hits $20-$25 retail in 12-18 months.

This is just a sample of what I’m expecting from Double Masters 2022, and as we get more previews, we’ll also be able to focus on what our long-term plans for the set are. Stay tuned!

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.

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Stand And Deliver

Readers!

Ever have one of those days in school where you’re pretty sure the teacher was either hung over or just at the end of their rope? Instead of doing an actual lesson, they put a movie on the little TV on the wheeled cart and you got to do homework for another class or blow the day off? For me, the movie was always the 1988 biography Stand and Deliver starring Edward James Olmos and Lou Diamond Phillips. It worked for every class. Math class? Great, they’re studying for the calculus AP test. Spanish class? You get to learn new words like pendejo. English class? Keep your voice down, my head hurts.

I’m not going to put a movie on the TV and fall asleep here, but I will admit that I lack the sort of mental energy it would take to thematically link these picks. I’m literally just going to give you 5 picks with various justifications for them and call it a day. Is that lazy? I mean, only from a presentation standpoint. I get the distinct feeling that a lot of you would be perfectly happy being passed a bar napkin with the names of 5 cards scrawled on them in eyeliner pencil or whatever my wife had in her purse and you regard the article portion of my article the way I regard someone in a food recipe article telling me long, meandering tale about their Meemaw growing up in a log cabin when I just want to know what temperature to preheat my oven to for lamb. If that’s you, enjoy, it’s blowoff day. Kick you feet up, turn down your screen britghtness so your teacher can’t see you browse twitter (follow me @jasonealt) and enjoy the dulcet tones of Edward James Olmos trying to reach these kids. We’re going to take a negative (my lack of ideas) and multiply it by another negative (my lack of effort for thematics or structure) and turn it into something positive, something I know Jaime Escalante would love. You better stand up, because I’m about to deliver.

Suppression Field basically shuts off treasure tokens and infinite loops that require some sort of activated ability making this card actually just very good against degenerate plays but barely noticeable by people playing EDH as it’s intended to be played – slow and clunky. Shutting off the Food Chain deck and letting the guy just play a Dinosaur every turn and dome people is a very good way to play Magic the Gathering and I think this card should get played more.

Good news, its price has been going up as treasure tokens become evergreen. Suppression Field has one printing and a small number of copies because Ravnica was a long time ago. This is a low-risk pickup and this also costs about a buck less than Perilous Forays, currently.

Hey Jason, what’s the red dot by the TCG Player price? Glad I pretended you asked! When TCG Player has a sale, there will be a dot by the price to indicate cards are on sale on the TCG Player website, or there’s a kickback. You can even hover over the dot to see what the sale is about.

It’s a small change but it’s the kind of thing that can happen because I’m dedicated to making the EDHREC user experience a good one, so if you have suggestions, I’m a great person to run them by. Hit me up in the Pro Trader Discord or on Twitter.

The prices for very good, obvious EA cards are a lot more than their less-good counterparts. That means as the prices diverge, having bought in when the prices were very close is better and better. If the EA was already 2x the regular version, it would be too late, imo, and I wouldn’t say anything, but the EA and regular versions are pretty close and this is already a $5+ card on Card Kingdom and like half that on TCG Player with a slight premium for EA. Look, this mills people and a lot of decks are coming out that want to take cards out of their yards so you don’t need a mill focus. This card is good, it’s not a $3 card and this has already demonstrated it can flirt with $6 on Card Kingdom. I am bullish on these in a big way, and the EA will have an easier time shrugging off an EDH deck reprint, something I’m not even sure this could get given how bad getting domed for half of your deck feels to a new player.

Jon Irenicus gives them your creatures. That’s funny.

Reaper has been going up for a bit, but you see what the printing of a card like this can contribute to. If there are any other cards you’d like to gift, they’re worth taking a look at. I think this is a best case scenario, but there aren’t a ton of pre-modern cards like Reaper to choose from.

Jon Irenicus is not unplayed, being the 7th-most-built commander in the set out of

nice, 69 commanders. That said, I don’t love a card that’s a quarter hoping for a deck built a third as much as the most popular commander will spike it. Master of the Feast was getting there on its own, and with CSI and TCG asking a full buck less than CK and CK showing it growing 5 fold over the last 15 months, I think this could hit $5 organically, and inclusion in a deck that wants to give it away doesn’t hurt at all. I have a Blim deck I love, but Blim isn’t the deck I want to use to give away creatures, so this card being created makes me think they know giving away stuff is cool and it should happen more. If there is another deck that likes to give away cooked grenades (and goads them, which is super cool), then I expect that to use a lot of the same cards as Jon. Notably, Beamtown Bullies, a deck people haven’t even sleeved yet but which is already obsolete, uses Master but also other creatures like Eater of Days which you don’t want in a Jon Irenicus deck. Any card that goes in both decks is doubly blessed, and future iterations of this ability are less likely to play nice with something like Eater of Days which is bad in decks that force you to cast the creature before you can give it away. Stick with cards that are in both Beamtown and Jon, imo, and you’ll be ready for the inevitable future deck that makes Lord of the Pit go up 50 cents.

Guildgates McFadden over here is a Gates deck that needn’t be 5 colors, which is cool and also maybe not cool? What I like is that a bunch of lands-matters cards are sorting themselves by how well they get non-basics and that bodes well for future very competitive decks as well as super casual ones.

This is 30% cheaper on TCG Player and is basically at an all-time low on CK. As the buylist price starts to recover, pay attention. I like the EA version for reasons I discussed earlier, but there’s no reason not to like the regular border.

Even if you don’t like this card or its price, I really like the graph indicating this card has basically bottomed out and is beginning to climb.

This card is kind of boring because every High Synergy card untaps him and they’re all cheap and always will be (none of the stuff that people were using with Vannifar works that well here, which would have been nice data for someone who use Vannifar as a cautionary tale), but there is a card I think has a good corollary.

The ceiling for these seems to be $4 and while it didn’t maintain that for long, it did hit it. The reason I bring it up?

It untaps, making it the perfect card for this deck. I think the deck looks like a fun way to cheat big stuff into play, but in a way more fun way than Vannifar. In a lot of ways, though, it’s the same deck, so however you feel about that should be how you feel about specs for this one.

That does it for me. Lights on, wake up from your nap, put away your phones and head to your next class. I hope you learned something and I hope you like it better when I do a good job constructing the article around the specs because I know I do. Until next time!

Watchtower

Aged to Perfection

It’s normal to focus one’s attention on upcoming sets to look for the next big thing. Everywhere you look content creators are focused on new sets and the reasons are obvious. Content creators want your attention, and nothing keeps the public’s attention like a shiny new object. Yet when it comes to producing reliable returns, often the predictable and boring leads the way.

It has been a little over one year since Strixhaven, Commander 2021, and Modern Horizons 2 released. While a little boring, and repetitive, looking back on these sets with additional data and hindsight provides a great environment to begin cheaply stocking up on key commander staples at prices not previously thought possible. Supply on these sets is still deep enough to suppress prices while giving you the ability to buy “bricks”, i.e. large quantities, which is my favored approach. This is especially true for commander products – whose single prices remain extremely suppressed while pre-constructed decks are still in print and widely available. As you approach the end of a product being in print, typically around two years, prices tend to rise as supply starts to diminish and others begin to see the writing on the wall. Here are a few cards from about a year ago that I believe are set up for long-term success going forward.

Modern Horizons 2: Sword of Hearth and Home

Price today: $9
Possible price: $25
Confidence: 9/10

The sword cycle has been highly successful and profitable over the years. The most recent example was the Sword of Truth and Justice, which at one point was only $9 and has since climbed to $25, in spite of modest reprint. Even its counterpart the Sword of Sinew and Steel was on track to post sold gains despite modest play patterns, moving from $8 to $13, only to have its growth stifled by the reprint in Modern Horizons 2. Despite only being out for one year, the Sword of Hearth and Home is on track to soon eclipse the EDHREC numbers of both the Swords of Truth and Justice plus Sinew and Steel together. That is impressive. While the supply is abundant right now, that will quickly change once Modern Horizon 2 goes out of print. This card has hovered around $10 for a while, but I don’t think it will last. Absent a reprint, this card will no doubt present an easy double up, and likely more going forward.

Commander 2021: Archaeomancer’s Map

Price today: $10
Possible price: $20
Confidence: 7/10

White has gotten a lot of good cards lately, but Archaeomancer’s Map was one of the first cards that started this trend. It’s a strong card that provides card draw and ramp in white – albeit conditional on its opponent’s actions. Despite being a little narrow due to its requirement of several basic plains, it has still has found a home in 8% of white EDHREC decks, with 34,000 inclusions total. The staying power of this card can be seen when contrasted with Monologue Tax from the same set, which is in half the number of decks and its price has collapsed to just a few dollars. Sales for Archaeomancer’s Map remain strong – only the affordable unlimited supply of Commander 2021 decks is holding it back which can’t last forever. Additionally, as the power of white in the color pie grows, this card could also see additional play because it will become easier to run white as a primary rather than as a support color.

Strixhaven: Wandering Archaic

Price today: $5
Possible price: $12
Confidence: 8/10

Right out of the gate, everyone believed Wandering Archaic was good and it’s launch price reflected that. For a long while, this card hovered between $6 to $7 dollars, but recently Wandering Archaic dipped to about $5, which is a significant discount from where it started. The card provides a relatively unique effect in a colorless card – something that Wizards of the Coast has publicly stated they are moving away from going forward. It’s also double sided, providing some flexibility, although no one is running it for the back half. It’s included in over 34,000 decks on EDHREC, which represents about 3% of all decks. This isn’t spectacular as a percentage, but it doesn’t need to be when the card is colorless. Supply is fairly deep due to continued mass box openings of Strixhaven by large vendors (which is surprising), so there is no rush, but once supply is cut off this card will likely rebound quickly based on its strong daily sales.

Casual Fridays

Where the Value Goes

Welcome to Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate. I don’t know what the cards have to do with the game, or the lore, but I do know that this set is jammed with sweet cards and awesome interactions.

What the set lacks, though, is a headliner mythic in terms of value, a card that everyone is chasing. Granted, the first time around, that was a Jeweled Lotus, which set an incredibly high mark for value and for rarity. We didn’t get a card like that, nor a big-value reprint like a Mana Crypt or Mana Drain or anything like that. 

As a result, the value of these cards has to go somewhere, and the first place to look will be the mythics, the most difficult to get. I went over your odds last week, but let’s get into some examples of the cards in CLB and if I’m ready to buy yet.

Ancient Dragons – The key with these five mythics is that each version is twice as rare as other mythics, because they are the only mythics with two special versions. The number of Ancient Gold Dragons in Borderless foil plus the number of Ancient Gold Dragons in Showcase foil is equal to the number of Battle Angels of Tyr in Borderless foil. There aren’t more copies of AGD because there are more versions, there’s just more options for the same number of copies.

As a result, this cycle is probably going to contain the most expensive cards in the set, at least at the beginning. The early prices bear this out, as people move sooner than they should, but it’s entirely possible that one or two of these dragons follows the Old Gnawbone path and just never gets cheap:

Gnawbone is one end of the potential spectrum here, but the other end is this:

My inclination is that while the Ancient Dragons are expensive mana-wise, they will generally be worth it on the board. We might see things like Garruk’s Uprising tick up as Dragon players want to give trample (and draw cards!) but my hunch is that the borderless foils are going to start high and rarely go lower, even after a couple of weeks. 

Kindred Discovery – This is a card that’s had no support but still has been in registered in 18k decks online. Just the Commander 2017 printing and a meager inclusion in The List. We know the card is good, and it’s popular too. As a rare, it’ll be relatively common leftovers after the big operations are done cracking packs, and this is one of my favorite targets in the set. It’s already down to $3 for the cheapest and $20 for the FEA, prices I am content at but I’m waiting a bit longer for hopefully a farther fall. 

Might not go too low, as this is the first foil printing, but we’ll see.

The Allied Battlebond Lands – We have some exact comparisons here, and that puts this on easy mode. FEA versions of the enemy lands from Commander Legends 1 are around $30, and those are about 2.5 times more common. (1/88 for these vs. 1/206 in original CL) Don’t forget that we have Expedition versions to look at too: 

The presence of these cards in a much rarer frame will do a lot to create a price ceiling for these lands, but frankly, let’s look at the graph for the nonfoils:

Battlebond wasn’t as heavily opened as a regular set, but the steady growth of these lands is a sign that the lands might be the safest bet around. I’m going to look for them to fall a bit further, probably to $5 or even $4, and then I’ll want a nice stack.

Cultist of the Absolute – Backgrounds might be useful in the 99 too, especially giving certain abilities. Static, like auras that don’t need to be recast. I’m very likely to wait until the rare and mythic ones find a floor and then pick up a few. Unique effects like this are usually worth speculating on.

Herald’s Horn – Down to $5ish as an uncommon in CLB Precon, and present in 50k decks online, this is another spec I’m all over, except for one problem. Later this year, we’re going to get the first foil version of the card as a year of the Tiger promo coming with The Brothers’ War, and that will soak up a lot of the money to be made.

Buying staples when they get cheap is a basic principle, and Herald’s Horn definitely fits that description. 

Monster Manual – Elvish Piper is good. This is better. I’m not anticipating this being expensive by any means, but I am looking forward to getting in on this at nearly-bulk prices. There’s so many ways to abuse a card like this, and now we have it as an instant-use artifact instead of a fragile 1/1 that has to wait a turn.

Jaheira, Friend of the Forest – NONCREATURE TOKENS COUNT! So your Treasures are now Mox Emeralds, your Food tokens are Moss Diamond, your Blood tokens are some other artifact that hasn’t been printed but would be too good. This might be good on its own or as an amazing addition to the 99 of some other token-themed commander. Another bulk pick that will one day shine so very brightly.

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.

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY