Watchtower

Crimson Commander

I don’t think I’ve written specifically about Innistrad: Crimson Vow in relation to EDH since the set was first released, around four months ago. I think it’s time to go back and see how the set has done since then, and which cards might yet have a bright future ahead of them.

Toxrill, the Corrosive

Price in Europe: €9 ($10)
Price in US: $12
Possible price: $25

Aside from being the most popular commander from the set, Toxrill has proven to be a solid card in its own right as well – 2200 as a commander and 4200 as a card. I think that it would be far more popular than that even if not for one tiny little blue mana symbol in the textbox, which is holding it back from being in all those mono-black and black/X decks that don’t include blue.

A 7/7 for 7 certainly isn’t the best rate going when it comes to pure stats, but that’s not what this card is about. The first line of text is the most important here, because it says at the beginning of each end step – that means four times for each go around your normal EDH table, and those slime counters are going on every creature you don’t control. That’s pretty strong if you ask me, and the fact that Toxrill has a card draw engine attached to it on top of that is just even sweeter. This works equally well either as a commander or part of the 99, and I honestly think that it would already be a $20 card if it were mono-black.

Prices in Europe are, as expected, a little lower for this EDH-only card, and so if you have access to that market then I’d grab some copies under and around $10 there. Over on TCGPlayer you’ll be paying a little more at $12, but I think that’s still a reasonable price to pay for what I think should be a $25 card in the not-too-distant future. There are also the Showcase variants at around the same price, but I think those arts were a swing and a miss. The Double Feature versions are…fine? but not worth paying the extra $4 if you ask me; the regular copies should do well here. If you do want to gamble on some extra arbitrage, there are €55 Double Feature foils on CardMarket – a card which is over $200 on TCGPlayer (last sold copies around $120). I won’t be taking that bet, but if you’re feeling lucky…

Edgar, Charmed Groom (Double Feature Foil)

Price in Europe: €7 ($8)
Price in US: $13
Possible price: $25-50

Now onto a Double Feature foil that I do think is worth it: Edgar, Charmed Groom. I’m nearly surprised at how few Edgar decks have actually been built, but when you have the opportunity to play Edgar Markov as your commander instead then there’s really no competition. Nevertheless, the Charmed Groom has found a nice home in the 99 of lots of Vampire tribal decks, and for good reason. This card is going to be so annoying for anyone else to deal with unless they can just straight-up exile it, because otherwise it’s just going to keep flipping and making tokens and buffing your Vampires and flipping and…yeah, you get the idea.

There are five different versions of this card out there, and so I think the play is to look at the ones with low supply: Double Feature foils. There are only six listings on TCGPlayer and not many more elsewhere, so they’re already getting difficult to pick up. Europe has a few more but not many, albeit at a cheaper price point. We’ve already seen some of the more popular Double Feature foils hit sky high prices (mythics over $200 etc), and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect Edgar to be pushing $50 before too long. People that want the most premium version of this card are going to pay for it, so make sure you’re going to be the one selling it to them!

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

Still Trying To Solve The Mysteries

We’ve had some interesting growth in a set of cards that I’ve written about before, and the time has come to revisit this particular edition: the Mystery Booster Retail Edition Foils. We’ve seen some spikes in cards like Intruder Alarm, Minamo, School at Water’s Edge, and Aurelia’s Fury. All of these have gone up for different reasons, different commanders, but the most important detail is that something cheap is now something expensive. 

Aurelia’s Fury spiked due to the interaction with Hinata, Dawn-Crowned. Sure it’s cute, you get to tap every creature on the board and make every opponent unable to cast noncreature spells this turn. Hard to go wrong!

We saw all the versions of Fury go up at the same time, which is excellent news for the long-term appeal of MYB foils. Mystery Booster foils are often underpriced or similarly priced to their regular versions, and these are mythic rarity (1 for every 121 packs) for a set that wasn’t able to get drafted very much. We’re long past the time where there’s a few pallets worth of product waiting to be opened, so let’s dig in and find what’s undervalued in comparison.

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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: Stranger Specs Have Happened

Readers!

Stranger Things cards are announced as contents of New Capenna. This is great news not necessarily from a finance perspective as it sort of reduces the value ceiling for the Stranger Things secret lair cards in the short term and otherwise doesn’t matter a ton to us. I think if the creatures in New Capenna (not the set? But just in the packs? I think?) are popular, it means that there is long-term value in the “ideal” versions of the cards, which means the Secret Lair Stranger Things version in most cases. The cards are getting a chance to make a case for themselves in the context of a set, they got the Godzilla treatment rather than the Walking Dead treatment and people seem less ideologically opposed this time around. I think WotC miscalculated how popular Stranger Things is, or maybe this was a nice thing for Magic players rather than a cynical attempt to get money from fans of not Magic like the did with Walking Dead. Regardless, the decks are here, we have a lot of data before the cards are even really spoiled and there is money to be made. There are a lot of cards so I’m picking one spec per commander.

I tried to fit more in above the fold, but I’m honestly just sort of champing (it’s not chomping, look it up, if I have to know that, so do you) at the bit here, so let’s just do some mtg finance and worry about the paywall break later, shall we? Let’s get strange.

The order doesn’t matter a ton here. This is Sophina AKA Jim Hopper.

It’s tough to isolate just Sophina decks because it’s usually paired with something like Elmar (Max (the redhead)) but every deck I have seen has Gisela and, if the deck builder can afford it or is willing to lie about being able to afford it, Aurelia. Gisela is much more affordable – it’s currently $1 for every mana it costs. That’s a bargain considering it was never 25 mana.

Elmar aka Max aka Riley Escobar aka Left-handed handshake is a good pairing for some of the other friends forever commanders but also with shenanigans. Here’s a card not to leave home without.

Coolstuff definitely has $7 copies of this card, I checked. This is on its way to $12 on Card Kingdom, that’s enough for me to pull the trigger at $7, but I’ll let you scoop copies first.

Mike, the Dungeon Master is one of the more exciting Commanders from this set.

Sevinne’s Reclamation was in the same precon as Dockside Extortionist, which means a lot of these got buylisted. Walls will be high on retail sites, but when the dam bursts, and it will, they will be slow to restock. This has the potential to double and I’m into it. It’s a VERY good card in a lot of decks and with them committed to making White suck less, more decks will be built that can use this.

Eleven is the sort of obvious Grixis combo deck that runs like 90% of the same cards as Kess, but there is one card I think bears mentioning.

This will be actual money in 18 months and everyone will be shocked. This doesn’t go in EVERY spellslinger deck, but it should go in every deck where the commander is a Wizard OR Shaman, which will almost always contain Red and will keep getting printed. This card is very good but so is every card in the set it’s in and that still matters while the set is in print.

So we clearly need more data.

I don’t think you can go wrong snagging these under $5. They go in just about every deck – it’s always good. Deck makes only food? Well now it makes value. Clue deck? Have some mana. Treasure? You’re going to win anyway because every Treasure deck is stupid and busted. This card rules and like $3 for the extended art version is robbery.

This card is my shit – this is everything I want to do in EDH. It’s bad on webcam, but luckily America decided they were bored letting the truckers and Flesh and Blood players have all the fun and soon we’ll all be giving each other Covid at the LGS playing a long, tedious game of EDH with people we barely know like before Covid when we pretended that was something worth missing.

Unique effect, EDH-specific given mana cost, high degree of relevance in a new deck, previous big spike, low supply, hard to reprint. This seems like a slam dunk to me, but this is also a pet card of mine so I’m biased. That said, I was biased toward Helm of Possession and Ben Bleiweiss just wrote about it so you could be in a position for that to pay off, too.

This is barely Lucas-related, but the price on Thousand-Dollar Elixir has come down quite a bit and I’d say it’s at its bottom. Good time to scoop some.

Uhhhhh. Why would anyone want a worse Dalakos? Now we have 3 versions of this card and they all suck.

Anyway, this card is bad but the specs might not be.

This hurts because I got in at bulk and got out at $3. I must have read “leave the last 10% for the next guy” and added an extra 0 by mistake. No matter, this card is on its way to the moon so buy in at $5 and feel my pain when you sell too early, too.

That does it for me, readers. I think these decks will get built, especially with the cards being in New Capenna packs. Be on the lookout for EDHREC data for every commander soon and the new EDH deck previews start Thursday. Yes, I’m serious. Even in hell the damned get no rest. Until next time!

Watchtower

Uncut Gems

Two weeks on from the Lurrus ban in Modern and the meta seems in reasonable shape, with plenty of different decks running around in the format and many different viable strategies. Today I want to take a look at some of the undervalued cards from these top decks, and what I think their futures have in store.

Unsettled Mariner (Foil)

Price in Europe: €5 ($5.50)
Price in US: $11
Possible price: $20

Unsettled Mariner isn’t much talked about any more; it used to be a very useful tool for the UW and Bant Spirits decks in Modern, as well as often appearing as a favourite for Humans decks. Those archetypes aren’t particularly prevalent in Modern at the moment, but another deck has picked up the slack and you can instead find the five colour Elementals deck playing a couple of copies of the Changeling. That’s what brought it to my attention, and a little look at the stock levels across Europe and the US showed that foils are in a nice position right now if you can grab some from CardMarket.

Mariner may not be in all the top tier Modern decks, but that’s the point of today’s article – cards that you might not look twice at normally. With the medium amount of play it sees in Modern plus a reasonable 6330 EDH decks on EDHREC, foils are in a good spot to make some solid gains over the next few months.

With foils sitting at around $11 on TCGPlayer, that’s not a bad price if you’re just looking to pick up some personal copies, but if you want to spec on these then I suggest hunting across the water. CardMarket in Europe has them available from around €5 ($5.50), and with supply as low as it is right now I think this card should be set to hit $20 before too long. Only 33 listings on TCGPlayer (almost all single copies) isn’t many, and I wouldn’t expect a reprint any time soon – the number of times we’ve seen Changelings printed is few and far between, so another foil of this card might not be on the cards for a little while yet.

Memory Deluge (FEA)

Price today: $11
Possible price: $25-30

UW Control has been seeing more and more play as a top deck in Modern over the past couple of weeks; whether that’s a product of the Lurrus banning or not, it means we’ve got some more cards to look at. March of Otherworldly Light is still going strong in the deck (I hope you bought some when I told you to a few weeks ago), and another card seeing a reasonable amount of success in the deck is Memory Deluge.

Dig Through Time this card is not, but honestly I think it comes closer than you’d guess at first glance. Both the normal casting cost and the flashback are fairly reasonable, but the instant speed of the card means that it’s a fantastic option to cast either early or late in the game at the end of your opponent’s turn to dig for an answer to something or just more card advantage. I think it’s the best four mana card draw engine that the archetype has at the moment, because of the added flexibility with the Flashback, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it remain a staple in the deck for a while to come.

I’m inclined to look to Shark Typhoon as a comparison for Memory Deluge – a card that was a big part of Standard when it was in rotation, and has since been a staple as a one/two-of in Modern control builds. FEAs of that card are now around $45 (having been even higher previous to that), and I don’t see much reason why Deluge shouldn’t follow a similar path. It might not prove to be quite as popular as Typhoon in EDH, but at around 2500 decks listed on EDHREC it’s certainly not doing too badly and should continue to see a decent amount of play in that format. It’s also a popular choice for control decks in Pioneer for what that’s worth, which should help to drive the price at least a little.

Otawara, Soaring City (FEA)

Price today: $15
Possible price: $30

Otawara, Soaring City might not be the first land from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty that you think of; it might not even be the second one either – but it’s definitely worth taking a closer look at. All the hype so far has been around Boseiju, Who Endures, and that’s definitely not been misplaced – Boseiju has been showing up in a lot of Modern decks since it came out, most notably in the Amulet Titan and Omnath decks. Otawara, however, has also proven to be a very popular choice as a one/two-of in quite a lot of decks…and I mean quite a lot. Murktide, UW Control, Living End, Omnath and Crashing Footfalls decks – to name but a few – have all been playing a copy or two in their lists, and I think that Otawara is here to stay as a flexible land choice in Modern.

I spoke about Takenuma a couple of weeks ago and the same logic applies here – this is a land that comes in untapped without restriction, taps for coloured mana and has a strong ability tacked onto it – what’s not to love? You can play around with this bouncing your opponent’s threats in a control shell, or your own haymakers in Elementals and Omnath decks.

Foil extended arts of this card are much cheaper than the Borderless foils, (almost half the price in fact) and I really quite like the look of them. I think that the art is much better than the Borderless version, and supply is currently a little lower on top of that, so it seems like a win/win to me. With continued Modern play and as the second most popular EDH card from the set (nearly 8000 decks on EDHREC already), this should be an easy win to double up in the next 12 months or so.

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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