The Treasure token has gone through a lot of iterations. Once a throwaway, it has become an extremely useful piece of Magic design. We’re about to get a turbocharged look into what Treasures can do, with this Streets of New Capenna mythic:
Now it’s true that Jason wrote about some of its implications on Wednesday, but there’s a lot of cards that would love to have this in play, and today I want to go over them. Not only is this card going to interact well with the ones I’m picking, but these are cards that will love anything which makes Treasures now, or ones in the future.
I’m talking about sweet combos, like adding this to the new uncommon Stimulus Package, which lets you sacrifice a Treasure to make a 1/1 Citizen token. Every land is now a Squirrel Nest? Ding!
So let’s get into these cards, both old and new.
The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.
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.
It’s an exciting time to be involved in MtG Finance because everything is changing so rapidly that no one has any data. I don’t know how many times the cards I think will really be impactful in the format can and will be reprinted, and the effect of a Masters printing versus a Commander deck printing versus a Secret Lair printing versus The List are almost card-by-card rather than product-by-product. It’s easier than ever to predict what will matter as I get better at using EDHREC, but it’s no easier to predict what will get and stay expensive. What I plan to do today is talk about what likely gets expensive and I’ll leave deciding what will stay expensive (the harder part by far) up to you.
I know I like to talk about which commanders will matter, and we’ll have a lot of data to pore over next week, but for now, we have to take a look at one card that could signal that a new evergreen mechanic in Magic that could plague us for years to come. I want to talk about what to do about it and how that impacts us. Also, I don’t have, like, an easy thematic way to put this information in the article so I’ll put it here with no explanation other than that it’s a thing.
This card is broken.
It breaks quite a bit, but the 2 big ones I have seen are the new Ob Nixilis which is whatever, and Devoted Druid, which makes infinite mana with Luxior, or can use the infinite untaps to kill someone with a card like Viridian Longbow. Do you yank Viridian Longbow out of bulk?
Trick question, this shouldn’t be in your bulk.
I think Devoted Druid can’t maintain the price and if this combo does anything, it will be in a 60 card format with 4 Longbows, 4 Stoneforges, 4 Urza’s Sagas, etc. I think this is worth knowing about, and it’s likely Luxior breaks more cards the way the handle looks broken on the card (Is it mean to be bent like a fencing foil’s handle or did Rob Liefeld draw this?). Still, there are other places we should be looking. If Luxior isn’t the card to focus on today, what? I’m so glad I asked, here it is.
I will not be accepting any questions at this time.
Fine, OK, in case your hangug-isn’t seuneopeukkaji, this card says
Lands you control have “T: Create a Treasure token.”
and that is a pretty jacked up thing for a Magic card to say. Treasure has been a problem but now it seems like a mainstay. If it’s here to stay, let’s make some money.
First up, there are cards that win the game with Treasure, and they all matter, imo.
Card Kingdom thinks this card is worth $20. TCG Player says $12ish. Who will win? You will, when this is $25 and you paid $12.
Hot off a reprint, this is going to climb. It won’t be $30 ever again, likely, but I bet it’s not $5 either. If I could buy one card, it would be this one, slightly elevated reprint risk or no.
This got a reprint on The List which slowed it down a bit, but not enough. This is a $20 card again soon, bet on it. I mean, barring another reprint, so it’s basically a prop bet at this point since you need to bet on it going up AND not getting reprinted to hit. Sounds hard, but the only thing that’s easy to do in Vegas is apparently just cough up 9.5 mill in extra cap space to activate Mark Stone off of LTIR.
If you want to fight against treasure, or this card specifically, there are ways. Bulk rare ways.
Lol. This isn’t a bulk rare anymore and there are like 200 for sale on TCG Player, but if this shows up on Game Knights or some #$%^ it will be $30 tomorrow and wouldn’t you rather have $30 than an Invasion rare that only works with their help?
This is what a graph looks like when a card isn’t even worth listing on TCG Player. This is a true bulk rare. That’s good; cards where a seller would lose money unless they list it on TCG Player direct “sell out” quickly but are replaced by a wave of higher priced copies. You could be looking at $5 or so on these. It’s a risk but this can’t get any cheaper than bulk and it seems like it’s not much of a risk at all because you can always bulk these back out.
Second spikes are always harder and this is approaching $2 on TCG Player rapidly. Don’t get me started on the $15 foils.
Commander Collection: Green copies of this are $10 but I sort of think that’s because that’s all they’re worth. Gimme this art by Adam Rex any day. That said, more printings on this card than you might think, but they could all be headed to $20.
Ultimately, I think Smuggler’s Stash or whatever the card translates to suffers from some of the same problems as Nyxbloom Ancient and perhaps maindeck metagaming against it won’t be necessary, but we’re talking about the frenzy of prerelease speculation and while that’s a monthly occurrence now, it is still sometimes fun, briefly, to forget what a bad idea it is. If you like that kind of thing, here’s a roadmap. If you don’t like that kind of thing, just know that a roadmap isn’t going to protect you from poor financial decisions. That said, you made a good financial decision when you clicked on this article, so thanks for that. Until next time!
Pioneer is still the hot new thing and it’s still driving prices (crazy), so I’m talking about it more this week!
Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
Price in Europe: €12 ($13) Price in US: $15 Possible price: $30
Kalitas has had its fair share of time in the spotlight, from being a Standard powerhouse to a Pioneer workhorse, and even doing some good work in Modern now and again. Back when Pioneer was popular the first time around, Kalitas saw a huge spike from around $10 up to $40, and I think that we could see something similar happen this time – but perhaps even harder and faster due to the much lower supply around now.
Lots of midrange and aggro decks have been picking up Kalitas as both a maindeck and sideboard card, and it does a lot of work against multiple archetypes. The graveyard hate on it is pretty strong, and that coupled with it being a Lifelink brick wall against aggro decks has, somewhat unsurprisingly, made it a popular choice for black decks in the format.
We’ve seen the price tick up very slightly over the past week, but supply on both non-foils and foils is very low now, and I expect to see a hard push on the price over the next couple of weeks. Pick your copies up now if you want to play with or spec on these, because I don’t think non-foils will have too much trouble hitting $30, and foils could also double up to $60. Both versions are available slightly cheaper in Europe if you can get them, but it’s not a huge difference and the $15 copies in the US should still do you just fine. Maybe we’ll even see $40 from Kalitas again if it remains a popular format choice, but that depends on how the meta continues to shake out over the next few weeks, so grab yours now and keep a close eye on the price movement.
Winota, Joiner of Forces
Price in Europe: €12 ($13) Price in US: $22 Possible price: $30
I hate to do it to you, but the opportunity is just too good (and the previous pick is honestly very nearly as good in the US as it is in Europe, so I’m not counting as a full arbitrage pick) – so here you are, Winota arbitrage (if you’re quick!). Just as it’s had success in Standard and Historic, Winota is here to dominate in another format – Pioneer. The bizarre Human/non-Human tribal card is doing exactly what it’s always done best, putting a silly amount of power into play in a sideways fashion and beating your opponent to death with it. As it happens, the deck works very nicely with the Daybound/Nightbound cards from Midnight Hunt, because Winota enables you to put creatures into play on your turn without casting any spells – you’ve advanced your boardstate but can still flip your Werewolves over in your opponent’s upkeep, making them even more powerful than they were before.
Winota has already seen a price jump in the US due to the reinvigoration of Pioneer, but Europe is still lagging behind a little on this one. There are plenty of €12-13 copies available on CardMarket, which you should be able to flip quite easily for $30 or so once you get them over to the US. If you are on the other side of the pond (the US side that is), then it might still be worth hunting around for any sub-$20 copies you can find, because supply is getting so low on these that I don’t think $40 is out of the question in the near future and so making money on $20 copies isn’t out of the question.
Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger
Price today: $20 Possible price: $40
Not an arbitrage pick! Yay! Rounding things off today we have a card that has been prolific in quite a few formats over the past couple of years, and I’m actually a little surprised that the regular copies can still be had for $20. Kroxa has, and still does, see play in multiple Modern decks (Death’s Shadow, Jund), and appears in multiple top Pioneer decks as well as being a reasonably popular EDH card. Although it might not quite live up to its fallen brother Uro, Kroxa still packs a punch and does have the advantage of not having been banned in multiple formats.
FEAs of this card are hard to find under $100, but non-foil EAs and regular non-foils do seem to be lacking a little in comparison. Regular copies at $20 and EAs at $30 makes me think that they’re primed to be on the move quite soon, especially if we see continued success for the card in Pioneer. I don’t think that it’s in any danger of going the way of the blue-green Titan, but is still of a high enough power level that it should see cross-format play for months and even years to come. There are around 50 regular non-foil listings on TCGPlayer right now, but most of those are singles and no vendor has more than four copies, so it won’t take too much to move the needle on these. I think given 12 months we could see $40 or more on Kroxa.
David Sharman (@accidentprune on Twitter) has been playing Magic since 2013, dabbling in almost all formats but with a main focus on Modern and EDH. Based in the UK, he’s an active MTG finance speculator specialising in cross-border arbitrage.
We’re getting the first Streets of New Capenna previews in, and while my first impulse is to dive into those cards and immediately start speculating, there’s been a development that caught my eye:
I warned of this two weeks ago, because the stock was low and the card is fire, but I didn’t expect to be that right so quickly. Retro border cards from Time Spiral Remastered are difficult to reprint, and there wasn’t all that much to begin with. Modern Horizons 2 also gave us some OBF cards, both of reprints and brand-new cards.
The MH2 cards often have more stock, mainly due to the use of Collector Boosters, but both these sets offer us some opportunities to buy cheap now and sell when more expensive. Let’s get into it!
The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.
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
ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.
