Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: The Shifting Landscape

Readers!

I titled this article “The Shifting Landscape” because the landscape is shifting. I will not be taking further questions at this time.

Baldur’s Gate still hasn’t settled and some of the top commanders in the set are shaking out a bit differently. Let’s take a look at the leaderboard this week.

Captain value has absolutely rocketed up the charts and it’s worth taking a look at, but you’re going to be disappointed. A growing trend has started to emerge lately, and I attribute it in part to how little time we have to brew and tune decks before we’re encouraged to ditch them and move on to the next thing. I’m convinced every Captain N’ghathrod deck is just the precon sprinkled with 25% of an Umbris deck that didn’t get finished since a set came out every few weeks since then and there never seemed to be time to finish. What makes me think people are using largely unmodified precons?

Every single High Synergy card,

and every top card are in the precon. 28/28 on the key cards in the deck being shipped with it. The precons are getting more and more tuned and less and less broad, and the more tuned they get, the more they’re forced to reprint very specific cards that will never leave the deck and the less people are adding singles from other sets. It’s not every deck that’s like that, certainly, but the small window between sets is clearly having an impact on builders and it’s being reflected in the data no matter whether it’s a measure of cards appearing a lot in this one deck and nowhere else or a measure of cards just showing up in this deck a ton. Yeah, I’m not surprised people are playing Thought Vessel and Lightning Greaves, but every single card here is in the precon.

Accordingly, we have to scroll down pretty far to find anything, bad news when we’ve proved in this column that the deck’s ranking in the set and top commanders of the week list can predict whether the deck has the velocity to launch all but the lowest-stock of specs. I think there is a non-trivial amount here, and I’ll find it, but I’m not thrilled about it.

You can say that Card Kingdom prices aren’t real, but this card is sold out on Card Kingdom at $5 a copy and CSI still has some for $2.50.

Is this card bad? Is the price real? Is CK a reliable metric? I will answer any and all questions by silently pointing to the part of your computer screen where I showed with data that you could arbitrage this card to CK’s buylist by paying retail at Coolstuff if you were so inclined. If you do, please use EDHREC’s clipboard feature to upload your want list to one of the affiliated sites so I don’t have to get a day job.

It’s my job to know what’s going on here but I will be real honest, I do not. There are copies on other sites, but TCG Player seems to be experiencing a run on this and that’s really interesting. Don’t expect this to be $10, but don’t expect it to stay under $5 if it’s not reprinted pronto.

So what about a deck where we’re bound to have a bunch of old cards? Will we see a ton of precon cards or what?

Looks like there’s something here after all. Let’s dig in.

You have got to love the shapes of both of these graphs. These are cards that are ready to move. The set is a year old but 90 products have come out since then and people have moved on hard from Commander Legends one. It’s time to pay more than $3 for a better Boundless Realms. This card rules.

No idea what’s taking this card so long when it already spiked to $5 but I continue to not understand this graph shape. What I do know is that this card is quite good and it’s very cheap but has also demonstrated the ability to hit $5 for a bit. I’m into these under a buck.

This card keeps threatening to mean business – I wish anyone took it seriously. Personally, if these are scoopable for half of their peak price right now, I don’t know what any of us is waiting for.

This wasn’t as deep a dive into the set as maybe you would have liked, but I covered two new commanders with radically different spec outlooks and I think they contrast each other in a way that’s instructive. I hope you agree and I hope you’ll tell me about it in the comments or on Discord. Until next time!

Watchtower

Blue Foils for the Win

Have you ever identified such a compelling speculation target that you’ve dreamed about it – perhaps in nightmare where you missed the opportunity and now the price has gone soaring? I recently had a bad dreams about Double Masters 2022 (2X2) booster boxes, which at the time were prices around $255 per box – a week later were up to $320 per box. Fortunately, after this dream I was smart (or dumb) enough to purchase several cases of 2X2, which are currently on track to be very profitable! While I have not yet had a dream about my first pick yet, that’s likely because I already took out a sizable position on it due to it being my first 10/10 confidence level selection. 

One factor I often use when evaluating potential selections is by looking at the quantity and type sold for any given card on TCGPlayer.com, which can be very illuminating. Typically, non-foil versions sell at a greater frequency for most cards, especially for products with collector boosters producing a large quantity of foils. But there are of course always exceptions to this rule. One exception is cards in many EDH decks that also have a limited number of foil printings. This is especially true for first time foils, for example Carpet of Flowers, which was first printed in foil in a Secret Lair Artist Series: Johannes Voss. This first-time foil started out at around $30 and continued to grow over time to $60 today. When combined with the other contents of this drop, this Secret Lair has doubled up in value in just one year.

I believe my first pick will replicate the success of Carpet of Flowers, if not more.

Secret Lair Kelogsloops Foil Edition – Including First Time Foil Mystic Remora

Price today: $39.99 plus tax
Possible price: $80 in 12 months
Confidence: 10/10

Mystic Remora is included in 117,989 decks on EDHREC, which is two and a half times as many decks as Carpet of Flowers. This is despite zero reprints until this new Secret Lair – in any form – which will finally put more eyes on the card. Impressive. The original printing of Mystic Remora from Ice Age was cheap for a long time, but over the last few years it had begun to climb to over $10. Absent this reprint, it would have been a $20 card in a hurry, and I think it still is on this trajectory given a little more time. Having a strong non-foil price is important to give foil copies a solid foundation to establish a favorable foil-multiplier. I expect foil Mystic Remora’s to start off reasonably expensive and begin climbing even higher after months of supply draining out.

The rest of this Secret Lairs’ contents are very solid as well, which is why I recommend the entire drop instead of buying singles post-release. This drop also includes Burgeoning, Utopia Sprawl, and Retreat to Coralhelm, plus any unexpected bonus card.  In particular, Burgeoning is a very solid reprint based on its inclusion in 30,000 EDHREC decks and current $20 non-foil price tag. Burgeoning’s current foil price of $70 doesn’t seem like a realistic comparison, considering it’s from the 2016 release Conspiracy: Take the Crown, but still, the foils should do well.

Lastly, the art of this drop is amazing, and it’s borderless to boot. This Secret Lair is firing on all cylinders and is about as close to a sure bet that we’ve seen in a Secret Lairs for a long time, assuming no other reprints of these cards in the short term.

Rhystic Study (Unstable Harmonics): Secret Lair Foil

Price today: $30
Possible price: $60 in 18 months
Confidence: 8/10

Everyone knows Rhystic Study is an S tier staple in EDH. It’s included in nearly 200,000 decks on EDHREC and is often featured by key content producers who focus on the Commander format. What you might not know is that the only affordable foil version of this card is starting to dry up fast. when the Unstable Harmonics version of Rhystic Study first hit the market, there were large bricks available as far as the eye could see. Vendors had 20, 30, 60 copies available for sale – and for a moment the price fell below $30/copy. But from June 1-20, 150 near mint foil copies have sold on TCGPlayer.com. There are still a few vendors with bricks available, including one with 48 copies, but it’s significantly less than a month ago and it’s only a matter of time until this version of Rhystic Study begins climbing significantly in price. Its current foil competition is the Commander’s Arsenal version which is $75 for a light played foil or closer to $100 for a near mint version. While it’s unlikely that this new Secret Lair version will catch up with a 10-year-old foil, it should be much closer to this foil version than the none foils, which is where it stands right now. I would wait until this card is officially crushed out of 2X2, before picking up your copies just to be safe. After that, it seems like this foil should be a solid steady gainer moving forward.

Spellseeker – Judge Foil

Price today: $80
Possible price: $150 in 12 months
Confidence: 7/10

Spellseeker is an incredible EDH card, providing a solid tutor effect on a body that can be repeated if flickered. It is in 36,000 EDHREC decks, including six percent of all blue decks. The only non-foil printing of this card is around $35, setting a high price starting point for the foil multiplier. This judge promo originally began circulating in early 2020, so we should be near the tail-end of supply. In April 2022, the price for the judge promo climbed to over $150, with a few selling at $200, before falling back to its present level. While fleeting, this highlights the solid potential of this version of the card. Given another year, I believe this card can once again become a $150+ card. While the original foil Battlebond version is slightly cheaper at the moment, that hasn’t held back other similarly positioned cards, and I don’t think it will be able to contain Spellseeker either.  

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!

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY