UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Safety Deposit Boxes of Khans of Tarkir

By: Travis Allen

After Modern Masters hit the streets not quite two years ago, I started acquiring Modern cards as much as possible. Anything that wasn’t printed in MM was fair game, especially anything with keywords. Spellskite? Scoop ‘em up. Snapcasters. Fast lands. Goryo’s Vengeance. Various other cards that I don’t recall at this point. Suffice to say, I spent well over a year trading for as much Modern product as I could. With the format growing in popularity and the big reprint vehicle in the rear-view mirror, I wanted as much of my stock as possible to be Modern staples. And that’s what I did for months and months.

Not that long ago, my consideration of that format as an iron-clad storage chest for Magic value began to wane. Modern Masters 2015 had been announced, and the number of places reprints were popping up was beginning to outnumber the amount of cards needing reprints. We’re now firmly amidst a sea of reprint avenues, each representing a potential hemorrhaging of value. I’ve been forced to stop stockpiling generic Modern staples and instead have been driven to find greener pastures in which to park my Magic value.

Standard card prices rise quickly and fall off almost as fast. Changes occur on a weekly basis. The entire market is far more nimble and lean than Modern or Legacy. And while nothing is as safe and effortless as plenty of Modern cards are, there’s definite money to be made. I can’t park a few hundred bucks in Spellskites anymore, but as long as I’m paying attention, I can probably make more money. The trick is not to chase weekly tides. Rather, I want to look at long cycles, and get in while they’re at their floors. Today we’re going to talk about Khans of Tarkir, a set that is rapidly approaching its local value floor, and where to put your MTG funbux for the next six months.

AAA Stocks

If you read my article last week all about rotations and pricing trends, you would know that Khan’s price peak should be some time in mid to late October, and that its floor should be between July and August. As good financiers who pay attention to the details though, we may notice that Khans is a little different than other sets . Whereas most fall sets are drafted through the spring, KTK is not. Once Dragons of Tarkir hit the market, KTK packs left the drafting economy. Is this enough to impact the price behavior?

Let’s do some homework and find out. After all, perhaps the most important skill to cultivate in this field is doing your homework. In order to make wise decisions, you need to ask questions, and you need information to answer those questions. And no, bugging myself or Corbin or whomever on Twitter doesn’t count as doing your homework. Check price graphs. Find cards that are similar and note their behaviors. Look back through older sets for comparisons. Without all of this effort, you’re not doing anything other than making wild guesses.

Alright, aside aside, we know the last time a set behaved in this fashion was Innistrad back in 2011. Once Avacyn Restored hit, Innistrad and Dark Ascension dropped out of the draft. Here’s INN’s price graph.

INN

Looks like the price floor is right where we expected it to be; between July and August. Excellent. Right now we’re six to twelve weeks from hitting the floor. How much further of a drop are we talking? Well, between today’s date in 2011 and the absolute floor that summer, Innistrad dropped about 18%. So we haven’t completely bottomed out yet, but we’re close. What we want to be doing now is identifying which cards we think will do the best through the fall rotation, and begin moving in on those. Starting now gives us a chance to decide our best course of action early, and time to start acquiring. Unless our plan is to just dump hundreds of dollars all at once on August 1, starting to trade today is a wise decision.

Today I’m going to start with Khans, and touch on Fate Reforged another week.

People have forgotten about Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker by now, given Stormbreath Dragon and a general preponderance of dragons in Standard. It may feel surprising today, but there was a time when Sarkhan was being compared favorably to Stormbreath, and he had a price tag to match.

Capture

While I’m not holding my breath for $50 again anytime soon, I do think that $8 is much lower than he can and should be. Admit it, you probably thought he was $10 or $12, right? We’ve collectively forgotten about him, and subsequently didn’t realize how cheap he’s gotten. His power level is undeniable though. He’s a five mana hasty 4/4 indestructible flyer—immune to cards like Ultimate Price, mind you—that can alternatively come down and nuke a tapped Ojutai. He’s a premier planeswalker from Khans, and when the index jumps 80 percent this fall, he’s going to be a big part of it. At the very least, we should see a price of $10 to $12, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him climb above $15 at some point in October. There’s few safer bets in KTK than Sarkhan.

Take everything I said about Sarkhan and apply it to Sorin, Solemn Visitor, only slightly less so. His price spiked less hard at release, only cresting $30, and he hasn’t fallen as far, with a current price tag of $10, but he’s still a powerful planeswalker that is trading well below his future value. What makes Sorin particularly good is that while Sarkhan is mostly sitting on the sidelines right now, Sorin is still getting in game wins here and there in various stripes of Abzan decks. We know beyond a doubt that Sorin is strong enough for a high-powered Standard format such as this, and when we suddenly lose half the available cards, his relative power level will spike. There are plenty of decks in the format where your opponent casting a Sorin and activating the first ability it is essentially game over. We even see Sorin pop up in Modern decks occasionally, which is a testament to his strength. I can’t get enough Sorins right now.

I’m struggling to reconcile Siege Rhino’s price with everything I know about Magic finance. We have a premier-level threat in two formats—Standard and Modern—and I can currently buy multiple playsets on TCGplayer for $4.25 a copy? What? Yes, it’s a fall set rare, and that means there is no shortage of copies on the market. But so what? Abrupt Decay was a fall set rare and was $10 while in Standard. In fact, it was in the same set as Deathrite Shaman, which was also at least $10. Oh, and both of those were also in the same set as shock lands.

My point is that while fall set rares tend to be suppressed, especially when good lands are in the set, I don’t believe that it’s enough to stop tier-one grade-S staples from hitting high prices. Nearly every year I’m impressed by how valuable some rare manages to be despite being a fall set rare. This year around that card is going to be Siege Rhino. I expect it will at least double to $10, and I think $15 is within the realm of possibility. We’re talking about what is arguably the best card in Standard and is also a full playset in one of the best Modern decks in the format. In fact, my goal between now and July is to sell some excess stock I have and buy up Rhinos in anticipation of this fall.

I was lukewarm on See the Unwritten when Khans was spoiled, but I didn’t know the next set was Battle for Zendikar, either. After BFZ was spoiled at PAX, Unwritten jumped from around $2 to around $6. It’s since pulled back towards $4, which is great for us: the lower the buy-in, the better. As soon as the first Eldrazi is spoiled, Unwritten is going to jump towards at least $8 as people get hyped to flip gigantic otherworldly monsters into play. Let me be clear here: Eldrazi don’t even need to be legal yet for this to double in price. At $3 or $4 in trade, this is a spec that will be profitable on hype alone.

If it’s actually good, we’ll see prices well into the double digits. See the Unwritten is a popular card across several demographics and formats, such as kitchen-table Magic and EDH, so any Standard demand whatsoever is going to push the price very hard. I’m in for seventy copies or so right now and I’ll be looking to expand that investment through trade binders this summer.

We’ve all come to take Sylvan Caryatid for granted. It’s been so long at this point it feels like a permanent fixture. She’s (they?) are on her way out though, and we’ll need something in her stead. Enter Rattleclaw Mystic. There’s really no other comparable mana fixer in Standard right now. It’s possible we get Birds of Paradise, which would be awesome, but I’m not holding my breath.

As a buy-a-box promo, we already know that Rattleclaw Mystic is slated to be a serious Standard contender, just as Sylvan Caryatid was. It plays extremely well with the Deathmist Raptor/Den Protector synergy that is likely to be the backbone of many Standard decks over the coming months, allowing them to splash into red or blue. Battle for Zendikar will have all sorts of cool things to ramp into. What’s not to like here?

Notable Exclusions

While Wingmate Roc performed admirably earlier in the season, I’m not particularly excited about it this fall. Our embarrassment of riches in the DTK dragons is my primary reason for doubting the return of the bird. With so many powerful flying threats such as Ojutai and Atarka, it’s going to be tough to find a reason to play a card like Roc. Does this mean the card has no future whatsoever and is total bulk? No, absolutely not. It could very well come to transpire that Roc ends up being a relevant component of the metagame this fall and hits $10 again. I’m not writing this article to look for “maybes” though. While you could do worse than Roc, I’d much rather put my Magic dollars into what I feel are basically home runs, such as Siege Rhino and Sarkhan.

I’ve been hemming and hawing over what to do with Dig Through Time while writing this article, and I finally realized that my indecision is exactly my issue with the card. Could DTT hit $15? Aaaabsolutely. No question. Is it a 100 percent slam dunk the way I consider these other cards to be? Not at all. It’s banned in Modern, which cuts a big chunk of potential demand out from under it. It sees some light play in Legacy, but rarely as a full playset. Browsing the EDH stats over at MTGS, Dig Through Time isn’t even a top-50 blue card in the format.

Perhaps my biggest concern with Dig Through Time is that it’s already a $6 card. That’s a tough number to make profit on when we’re talking about a rare rather than a mythic. When Siege Rhinos are $4, Dig Through Times at $6 are simply less appealing to me.

I fully understand if some of you out there want to go deep because you expect DTT to hit $15 this fall. It’s definitely a possibility. It’s the strongest blue card draw spell we’ve seen in ages, and it’s clearly eternal playable. It comes down to a matter of opportunity cost. For every Dig Through Time you buy, it’s one-and-a-half fewer Siege Rhinos available to you. At the end of the day, I’m more comfortable with Rhinos than Digs, though I can respect those of you that opt to pick up copies.

What do you think about the opportunities out of Khans?

Is it Safe? Part 1

Marathon-Man
This is still better than triple Khans draft

We all want safe investments, don’t we? This week, with a spoiler that purports to contain most (but not all, because… reasons) of the mythics from Modern Masters 2015 circulating and not knowing enough information to comment on it, I decided to talk about something else. Besides, the rares will impact EDH finance more than the mythic rares in MM15, and we don’t have much information on those beyond the same spoiler claiming the Commands cycle will be in the set, likely at rare. Sure, that will impact EDH, but we don’t know much beyond that.

Speaking of the cycle of Commands, it made me laugh to see someone on Reddit question why Wizards would bother to reprint the whole cycle of commands in Modern Masters when only one, maybe two of them even see play in Modern. It’s really funny to me that people don’t seem to remember that Modern Masters printed a lot of cards that were great in EDH and had little to no applicability in Modern. What did those people think when they saw Stonehewer Giant in the first Modern Masters? Did they say, “Well, obviously Ardarkar Valkyrie is a Modern staple”? It’s silly, but it just goes to show that people do a good idea of ignoring the stuff they don’t care about.

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ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.

Editor’s Note: Announcing exclusive content for ProTraders!

Hello!

If you’re reading this, I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’ve been quite busy around here.

Put simply, it’s an exciting time for MTGPrice. We’ve been working hard to increase our content offerings for you. I’m sure you’ve noticed we’ve been running more great content from the best authors in the business (If you haven’t, I suggest you take some time to look over the work our authors have created, it’s truly top-of-the-line). We’re working hard to make sure we’re ahead of the finance game and get that information to you as quickly as possible. We’ve got big plans for more content and features to come, and if you stick with us you’ll see the fruit of those labors over the coming months.

With that in mind, I have an exciting announcement for our ProTrader subscribers. We have an all-star staff of writers here, most of whom have many years of experience in the business and have seen it all when it comes to the financial side of the game. Beginning this week, we are making some of that content available exclusively to our ProTrader subscribers. Whether you’re a longtime member or just giving us a try as part of the Kickstarter, we’re excited to offer this to you.

Our lineup of ProTrader-exclusive articles comes from the most respected names in the business, a group of experienced traders and dealers who have time and again proven why they’re the best there is to offer.

Moving forward, this is the content that will be available exclusively to ProTraders.

Monday: Sigmund Ausfresser

Tuesday: Danny Brown

Wednesday: Jason Alt and Travis Allen

Thursday: Corbin Hosler and Guo Heng Chin

Friday: Ross Lennon

Saturday: Guo Heng Chin and James Chillcot

 

That’s six full days of the best Magic finance writing on the planet. In addition to that lineup, ProTraders have access to the buzzing MTGPrice forums (for all your truly up-to-the-second financial needs), early access to the industry-leading Brainstorm Brewery podcast, advanced tools for tracking your collection’s value over time, and access to raw inventory data from individual stores to track just how much a particular card is moving.

That’s a lot of value for your $4.99 monthly subscription, and if this sounds interesting to you, I hope you consider becoming a ProTrader today.

But if that’s not for you, fear not; MTGPrice will always have some free content as well. Our authors writing for the free side are quite capable, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading these guys every week.

Monday: Jared Yost and James Chillcot

Tuesday: Guo Heng Chin

Wednesday: Derek Madlem

Thursday: Douglas Johnson

Friday: Cliff Daigle and Houston Whitehead

 

Magic has made some huge leaps over the past few years, and it’s truly an exciting time to be around the game. We’re going to continue to work hard here at MTGPrice to make sure you’re able to keep up, and we like to think it’s an exciting time around here as well. Spend some time around our site, and I think you’ll agree.

 

– Corbin Hosler

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: Planeswalker Finance, April 2015

By: Danny Brown

If you’ve been around MTG finance for long, you’ve often heard that trading into Reserved List cards is a great way to lock in and grow value over time. Indeed, picking up dual lands, Force of Will, Wasteland, and other eternal staples has proven time and again to be a great way to hold value, if not make a profit.

But there’s two problems with this strategy:

  1. Finding these types of cards in trade binders is tough.
  2. Not everyone has the value needed to trade for big cards like this.

And let’s be real, for every Old Man of the Sea, there’s a Sorrow’s Path, and despite being on the Reserved List, you should not pick up Sorrow’s Path. I know, these are the kinds of hot takes that keep you coming back to MTGPrice every week.

sorrowspath

Okay, so what is a new or budget-minded or just-plain-cheap mage to do? Very few people are going to trade their Legacy staples for your Sylvan Caryatids and Coursers of Kruphix, but they’re still losing value every day all the same. Maybe you can flip them into Dragonlord Silumgars and Atarka’s Commands, but those have a shelf life of their own, meaning you’re just going to be playing this same game next year.

Fetch lands are the obvious answer, but everybody touches on that fact, and just saying the same thing doesn’t make for a very interesting or informative article. And even still, it’s been shown that reprinting major lands in Standard drops their prices in a big way, so it’s not like you can just hold on to fetches forever.

So where do we look?

It’s In the Title

Look, you already know I’m talking about planeswalkers today, so I’ll quit pretending that I’m leading up to some major revelation.

Planeswalkers, you may be aware, are a casual favorite, from kitchen-table to Commander to Cube. There aren’t very many of them (only 59 by my count!), which makes them special compared to just about every other card type in the game. When they are good in eternal formats, they tend to get pretty darn expensive.

jtmsBut even when they’re universally despised, they still hold a minimum amount of value. Even Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded is around $3, and nobody wants that card for any format. (True story: I will always live in shame that I lost in the finals of Avacyn Restored Game Day to a Craterhoof BehemothUnburial Rites deck featuring Lingering Souls and, yes, Tibalt. So I guess somebody wanted it for a tournament, shockingly.)

There are distinct categories of planeswalkers, and we’ll be grouping all 59 of them today, for posterity.

Standard Planeswalkers

Okay, this one’s easy. If you’re looking to lock in value, don’t trade for Standard planeswalkers. They are almost always fringe-playable in Standard at the least, and that helps buoy their values until rotation. The floor price almost always comes just after they rotate, so I wouldn’t mess with Standard planeswalkers until then (unless you need them to actually, like, play Standard).

There are 16 planeswalkers currently in Standard, which is kind of crazy when you consider that’s more than a quarter of all planeswalkers ever printed. There’s 10 that I believe will be available for between $4 and $5 after rotation, and significantly, never go down from there.

  1. Ajani Steadfast
  2. Ajani, Mentor of Heroes
  3. Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver
  4. Chandra, Pyromaster
  5. Elspeth, Sun’s Champion
  6. Jace, the Living Guildpact
  7. Kiora, the Crashing Wave
  8. Liliana Vess
  9. Sorin, Solemn Visitor
  10. Xenagos, the Reveler

Only Jace, the Living Guildpact might go below $4 of these—that guy may indeed end up being buddies with Tibalt. All these others are trade targets at $5, in my opinion. They’ll hold that $5 in perpetuity, and many of them will gain value over time. (We’ll look at past examples of this effect later in this article).

There’s an exception to buying planeswalkers while in Standard, and that’s that there’s almost always a planeswalker that hits it big leading up to and through rotation. We saw it with Jace, Architect of Thought a couple years ago, then both Xenagos, the Reveler and Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver last year. The potentials in current Standard for this type of growth are:

  1. Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker
  2. Sarkhan Unbroken
  3. Narset Transcendant
  4. Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
  5. (Sorin, Solemn Visitor)

Sorin is parenthetical because I mentioned him above, but with a current price of around $10, he could fit in this boat. Really, though, all of these cards are a little more expensive than Jace, Xenagos, or Ashiok, and I just don’t feel like any is a great buy right now. At around $8, Sarkhan, the Dragonspeaker comes closest, but I’d like to see it around $6 before I pull any triggers. It’s not like the card has been blowing up the tournament scene in the last year.

Ugin is interesting, as Karn Liberated‘s history is going to impact the Spirit Dragon’s trajectory in a big way. I don’t believe we will ever see Ugin below $15, and that will likely not be until rotation. Being from a small, middle set means the supply is particularly low, so I would not be surprised to see this outstrip Karn within a few years.

Finally, Garruk Apex Predator and Nissa, Worldwaker will probably not drop to the $5 point where I expect most other current Standard planeswalkers to end up. Any price under $10 for these two cards is probably a good acquisition rate, as these are powerful, evocative, popular, and in low supply. Like the last few core sets, M15 wasn’t overwhelmingly popular.

Eternally Competitive

Very few planeswalkers make it in Modern, and even fewer make it in Legacy. When they do, the price usually reflects it, although to varying degrees.

  1. Ajani Vengeant
  2. Dack Fayden
  3. Elspeth, Knight-Errant
  4. Jace, the Mind Sculptor
  5. Karn Liberated
  6. Liliana of the Veil

It’s a very short list. Elspeth and Ajani both are between $10 and $20, but both have multiple printings to help satisfy demand. The other four or are all $25 or more, with Jace and Liliana pushing up toward $100. Dack gets most of his demand from short supply and Vintage playability, but it’s such a powerhouse in that format that it seems reasonable to add it here.

Still, though, with so few planeswalkers being good enough—and I highly doubt any in Standard will join this list expect perhaps Ugin—the next section is where things get really interesting.

“Bad” Casual Planeswalkers

I’m going to divide the rest of the 59 planeswalkers we haven’t discussed into two groups: “bad” planeswalkers and “good” planeswalkers. I’m basing this on what’s popular in Commander, Cube, and other casual formats, as well as just how frequently I see a card played anywhere. Yes, this is fairly subjective. Deal with it. Fair Trade Prices are as of April 27, 2015, and are listed next to each card.

  1. Ajani, Caller of the Pride $5.48
  2. Chandra Ablaze $8.45
  3. Chandra Nalaar $4.40
  4. Chandra, the Firebrand $4.03
  5. Gideon, Champion of Justice $4.79
  6. Jace, Memory Adept $5.24
  7. Liliana of the Dark Realms $6.39
  8. Nahiri, the Lithomancer $4.76
  9. Nissa Revane $13.28
  10. Sarkhan the Mad $8.38
  11. Sarkhan Vol $10.73
  12. Sorin Markov $14.58
  13. Teferi, Temporal Archmage $5.40
  14. Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded $2.91
  15. Vraska the Unseen $3.33

You can certainly argue that some of these deserve to be on the “good” list, but I don’t think there’s much argument that this list closely approximates “the 15 worst planeswalkers ever printed,” give or take one or two that’s still in Standard (with the exception of Jace, Memory Adept, which just doesn’t see a lot of play because it’s too good in small-deck formats and not good enough in big-deck ones).

Note that only two of these planeswalkers are under $4 and only four are between $4 and $5. Many are over $10, some in the face of reprints. The average price of these “bad” planeswalkers is $6.81.

“Good” Casual Planeswalkers

Here are the planeswalkers most often seen in Cube, Commander, and other casual formats, plus ones that were powerhouses in their Standard formats, are liked as characters, or just otherwise popular or powerful. This is everything not mentioned in this article so far:

  1. Ajani Goldmane $10.30
  2. Daretti, Scrap Savant $4.22
  3. Domri Rade $7.08
  4. Elspeth Tirel $12.99
  5. Freyalise, Llanowar’s Fury $6.94
  6. Garruk Relentless $3.51
  7. Garruk Wildspeaker $9.23
  8. Garruk, Caller of Beasts $6.19
  9. Garruk, Primal Hunter $7.57
  10. Gideon Jura $4.35
  11. Jace Beleren $9.53
  12. Jace, Architect of Thought $2.82
  13. Koth of the Hammer $6.83
  14. Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker $10.25
  15. Ral Zarek $7.09
  16. Sorin, Lord of Innistrad $6.51
  17. Tamiyo, the Moon Sage $19.71
  18. Tezzeret the Seeker $15.91
  19. Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas $14.91
  20. Venser, the Sojourner $8.31

Here we have an average price of $8.71, just about $2 over what the “bad” planeswalkers are worth. Pulling the average down are Daretti, Scrap Savant (who Douglas Johnson called out in a recent article) and Jace, Architect of Thought, which is at a shockingly-low $2.82. Yes, this saw a Duel Deck printing, but so did several of the cards on the above list, and they didn’t ever go this low. Jace’s Duel Deck art also has the distinction of being hideous, so you would think the RTR versions would be worth a bit more.

Check out the charts for some of the above cards. Except for the ones that just rotated out of Standard, many have been increasing over the last year. Tamiyo went from $12 to $19. Koth went from $4 to $6. Nicol Bolas went from $4 to $10.

As a general rule that holds true so, so often, planeswalkers go up over time. They almost never go down, except when they rotate from Standard. Even reprints don’t devastate their prices in the same way they devastate other reprinted cards. In many ways, planeswalkers are some of the safest cheap investments you can make.

Besides Jace AOT, Garruk Relentless just seems too low. Sure, it’s not big and flashy for Commander, but it’s fantastic in Cube, only has one printing, and is the only double-sided planeswalker ever printed. For all I know, that last point could actually be a point against it, but double-faced cards really did end up going over very well (and will be back in Magic: Origins).

And the best thing about picking up rotating planeswalkers? Whether they end up in the “good” camp or the “bad” camp, they all tend to go up over time. Isn’t that awesome?

Recurring Nightmare

I’m going to revisit this topic periodically, perhaps every few months, but at least once or twice a year. Planeswalkers perform like nothing else in MTG finance, and that makes them worth a close look on a regular basis.

Have comments? Want to harangue me for calling your favorite planeswalker bad? Or do you want to point out the next hot planeswalker spec? If you have things to say, you know what to do.

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY