Watchtower

Pioneer Plus

I’m branching out from just talking about Pioneer this week, and whilst I’m still looking at the Pioneer metagame and how it’s evolving, I’m focusing on cards that are seeing cross-format play to back up their newly found (or already well-established) fame.

Dark Petition (Foil)

Price today: $10
Possible price: $30

As I alluded to a couple of weeks ago, it’s been hard to take down Hidden Strings as one of the top dogs in Pioneer. The new mono-red deck featuring Chandra, Dressed to Kill is doing its best to dominate the metagame right now and certainly doing a pretty good job of it, but after the past couple of weeks of people trying out different decks, Hidden Strings is still firmly one of the best decks in the format.

Dark Petition has long been a staple of this combo deck, not necessarily as a playset but almost always there as 1-3 copies, helping to find your combo pieces whilst generating mana to help you go off. This tutor is also (unsurprisingly) a very popular EDH card, in over 11,500 decks listed on EDHREC – tutors have always and will always be highly prevalent in that format, and the fact that Spell Mastery isn’t particularly difficult to achieve makes it that Dark Petition will effectively cost two mana the vast majority of the time.

What really makes this a great pick, though, is the fact that it’s never had a reprint outside of promo pack copies, which means it’s been nearly seven years since a proper print run of this card. Foils and even non-foils have been slowly drying up, and it’s getting to a point where there really aren’t many around any more. Foils are hard to get under or around $10, and will likely see $20 in the next couple of months – there are only nine listings for NM foils on TCGPlayer right now, and whilst there are a decent few more over in Europe I don’t think that will last too long. Non-foils are looking pretty ripe at around $5 too (more like $2.50 in Europe if you can get those), and should be headed for $10 pretty soon. Even though there aren’t a huge number of decks playing this card in competitive formats, the low supply combined with EDH popularity is definitely going to keep pushing Dark Petition upwards until we see a reprint. It might be something that we get in a Commander deck at some point, but likely not in foil so that’s a safer bet if you’re worried at all.

Stormwing Entity (FEA)

Price today: $2.50
Possible price: $10

Another deck that’s been putting up the numbers recently is Izzet Phoenix. Back in the very early stages of Pioneer, Arclight Phoenix decks were some of the best out there and dominated the top tables week after week – and the card hasn’t really gotten any weaker since then. If anything, it’s better than ever before due to the steady influx of new cantrips and cheap burn spells we get with every set. Stormwing Entity has seen some play across multiple formats in different variants of Arclight decks, and most recently has popped up in some of the Pioneer lists that have been doing well. Stormwing has seen a reasonable amount of price fluctuation over its time in Standard, Modern and Pioneer, but all versions are currently at a price floor and now is the perfect time to pick them up.

The best kind of setup with this card can look something like dropping it on turn three, and following up on turn four with one or more Arclight Phoenixes from the graveyard. That’s in Pioneer, mind you – in Modern you can do all that a turn earlier with free spells like Gutshot and Manamorphose.

With Stormwing as low as it is at the moment, I think it’s a great time to be grabbing some of these cheap. The deck is on the upswing in Pioneer and it’s sure to have some more time in the sun in Modern as well, so I think that this card should be primed for another spike soon enough. The FEAs have seen highs of around $30 before, and we could see that again with enough success from these styles of decks. Regular non-foils are very cheap right now, around $0.50-$1, so if you can pick up a brick of those at a decent price then that could also be a good option.

Knight of the White Orchid (Foil)

Price today: $5
Possible price: $20

Perhaps a slightly more under-the-radar card for my last pick today, I’m looking at Knight of the White Orchid and its use in a relatively new mono-white deck in Pioneer. There isn’t too much of this deck around at all, but it has put up some very strong finishes in recent Pioneer Challenges and I think is worth taking a look at.

Knight has never seen a huge amount of competitive play, but over on the EDH side of things it’s another story. Nearly 40,000 decks registered on EDHREC means that this is a very popular card in white decks, and we all know that EDH players love their foils, which is likely a big part of the reason supply is as low as it is.

Knight has had a lot of non-foil printings in Commander decks, but the foils are currently limited to the original Shards of Alara print, the Origins reprint and the Origins pre-release promo. That’s not a lot of supply with the last foil version already being nearly seven years old, and that’s reflected in the listings we can see across TCGPlayer and other vendors. Original Shards foils are practically non-existent if you want NM (although still a few around €6-7 in Europe if you’re quick…), whilst Origins foils can be had in a small amount for $5-10. These aren’t going to hang around much longer, but if you’re quick then I think you’ll be rewarded nicely for it.

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.

Casual Fridays

Digging Up the Treasure!

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. 

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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: All That Glitters

Readers!

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! 

seuneopeukkaji
hangug-in
Watchtower

Pioneer Again

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.

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