Uncut Gems

March 21, 2022 David Sharman

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.

Casual Fridays

Secret Lair: Single Drop

March 18, 2022 Cliff Daigle

The Street Fighter Secret Lair has come to an end, and I hope you picked up a few. The IP is good, the value will be there, these are sweet cards, and now that we’re getting reprints of the Universes Beyond in The List, I’m all aboard new cards.

One thing I’ve been noticing about Secret Lairs is how the singles are acting. Especially right after people get their drops, they are in a huge hurry to crack it and sell those individual pieces of cardboard. My guess is that there’s two groups doing the early selling: speculators who are trying to get their 20-30% gains locked in and move on, and then the people who wanted just some of the Secret Lair cards and are selling off the rest.

As a result, there’s some Secret Lair cards with impressive singles prices, especially when compared to the set prices. Part of this is that the bonus cards are often in high demand, like the Hadouken Lightning Bolt or the mirror-image Viscera Seer. They’ve added a chase/gamble aspect to these drops, and those cards can soak up some of the value. Let’s talk about some Secret Lair singles we can buy for a great price and get some value.

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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.

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Unlocked Pro Trader: New Capennculation

March 15, 2022 Jason Alt

Readers!

New Capenna is close enough for Wizards to reveal that they’re giving everyone fake crank to pretend to do bumps of between rounds, so you know that that means! It’s time to play the baseless speculation game!

It looks like some of you are already playing it already.

Is this because it’s on the Reserved List (yes) or is there something else going on? People who speculate about speculators have speculated that speculators are speculating on Wandering Mage because it’s New Capenna shard colored and there will be mages in New Capenna? Because Wizards are known to hang out in cities? And one of Wandering Mage’s 3 absolutely abyssmal abilities references Wizards directly? I don’t know, I think this is one of the dumbest rationalizations I’ve seen anyone make for a Reserved List card going up a few bucks. Anyway, let’s do the same dumb things.

We already got the first set of Triomes in Ikoria, so we know that since they’re finishing the cycle (Gavin said so but I don’t remember where – it literally might have been a thing he said to me when he was playing EDH on our stream), we’ll have the Alara Shards colors in Streets of New Capicola.

We don’t have a ton of info beyond knowing some of the creature types represented in the tribunal of “brokers”

If I were a complete dumb@#$% I would probably be buying up every Bant Rhino card and making a mint but my brain doesn’t work that way. I don’t think that every time a creature is featured that a tribal deck will come of it, I don’t think random old rhinos will be played in the deck if it materializes and I don’t think I have enough time to get out of them or want to cast a wide enough net to hit everything. I’ve been left holding the bag a few times in my Mtg Finance career, and while that isn’t the end of the world, it’s still avoidable.

I don’t think I want to say to buy Rhino, Bird, Cat and… I want to say Flapper Elspeth (?) cards, but maybe you should – not because they’ll get played in a deck, but because we’re like 2 weeks away from people with more money than sense having the conversation we’re having now. Depala can make people dig through bulk bins at the LGS for Dwarven Thaumutergist, but can’t make people actually play the card.

What I WILL do is look at the 5 Shards’ most-played cards and comamanders to see if anything sticks out.

Esper

Esper doesn’t look super Artifacty – there’s no real guarantee they’re doing artifact stuff again.

I won’t lie and pretend I’m not jazzed to have Fritz Lang’s Bioshock as a Magic setting. That said, the top Esper cards are very much format staples.

The top Commanders tell us some things, though.

If I had to pick any card to speculate based on what Raffine’s gang likely uses in what I assume is a deck based on Raffine (there will be 35 Legendary creatures in this set but there will be a gang leader that will be popular for flavor reasons), besides Esper Sentinel, I’d say this.

This is starting to go, and since it’s a Brawl deck card, it might be a little tougher to reprint or at least mitigate the drain that demand will cause on the meager supply. This has demonstrated the ability to hit $10 before and I think it will again.

Grixis

This feels like a bit of waste of time. There’s nothing to glean from this art. I don’t know what I was hoping to see, but this isn’t it. Also, I hate these full-art Triomes, which sucks because the Ikoria Triomes are the best-looking Magic cards ever made and these are them squandering the entire concept of art deco aesthetics which are objectively incredibly pleasing and, I would have assumed, difficult to screw up.

Grixis before was “Undead” and I can’t imagine anyone built an Opulent Lounge to let the dead hang around in. Is that a stretch? Look, I am very aware of how hand-wavey this is, but at the same time, I feel like it makes sense and therefore I’m relying on it.

Grixis is bound to have a treasure theme, Ken and other Secret Lair cards might make use of this in 6 months when we get our Street Fighter secret lairs, and this has flirted with $4 before. It’s reprintable but if we didn’t want to live dangerously, we would have bought basketball cards 2 years ago and retired.

Jund

ziatoras-proving-ground - Card Kingdom Blog

Jund seems like there will be fighting. Let’s check out the fight theme on EDHREC.

As you can see, it’s already a thing.

It’s cheating to pick Ignoble Hierarch, but buy those for sure.

EDH players LOVE Brash Taunter. This is a $15 card waiting to happen, and the extended art treatment mitigates a bit of reprint risk. I love this card, and I love paying basically buylist on them right now.

Before you ask, I always check.

Can’t beat it.

Naya is garden-themed? I won’t pretend I can figure out more than that, but I assume wild animals. Not that tame animals aren’t in the Bant mafia. This set would be weird even if they didn’t pass out fake mob planet meth at the prerelease.

I can’t think of a single deck that doesn’t want Mirari’s Wake in Naya since it helps you do both things Naya is good at better, and I can’t think of a better time to buy than when it’s at its historic low. I just hope they stop printing it.

Bant

I did Bant last because we have a card to speculate based on.

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I don’t think that there will necessarily be a Superfriends Legendary creature, even with 59 legendary creatures in the set. However, Superfriends is primarily a Bant (well, Atraxa, which I like to call “dirty Bant”) thing, with Black and Red contributing nothing but Planeswalkers. However, there is no Bant commander that lends itself to Superfriends, and we don’t have a data set on EDHREC. We do have a general Superfriends page, though, and it’s not like Atraxa decks won’t just run Brokers Ascendeancy. I am going to put an apostrophe in Brokers that shouldn’t be there every single time I try to put this card in TCG Player, aren’t I? Why isn’t it Brokers’ if not Broker’s? Whatever, if I could change one thing, it wouldn’t be an apostrophe, it would be making the other 4 Triomes look as good as this one.

This is at a historic low and it is already starting to creep up. This has never been above $5, but if it spikes, it will not be doing so for the first time and it seems very likely we could see $5 minimum. I’m excited for what this does.

Are these 5 cards 100% justified by what few Streets of New Leave The Gun Take The Cannoli that we’ve seen? No, not really. Are these 5 cards I believe in and I’m grateful for the excuse to highlight them? Yes, and that’s a good article in my book. ~~You’re welcome~~ OK, maybe that’s too aggro. I should get out of here anyway. Until next time!

Watchtower

Modern: A Week on

March 14, 2022 David Sharman

We’re a week on from the banning of Lurrus of the Dream-Den in Modern (and Pioneer), so I want to revisit the format and see how much it’s changed since then, and what kinds of decks we’re likely to see doing well over the coming weeks.

As expected, the Murktide Regent decks have seen a decent uptick in play, and in price. The dragon itself is up to around $24 now from the $18 I called it at last week, and I expect it to see further gains towards $30 over the next few weeks. The Death’s Shadow decks have definitely taken a back seat without their cat in the sideboard, although I think that this could be more of a product of people trying different things, rather than the deck actually being significantly worse than it was before.

Cultivator Colossus (EA)

Price today: $21
Possible price: $35

As predicted in last week’s article, Amulet Titan (amongst other more mana-intensive decks) has pushed its way to the forefront of the Modern meta – for now, at least. I’ve wanted to talk about Cultivator Colossus for a little while now but haven’t quite found the right space, so instead have just been keeping a close eye on the price and play patterns of the card.

Now though, I think the time is right to take a closer look at this card. Since people started testing it when Crimson Vow was released, it’s been a consistent 2-of in most Amulet Titan lists that we’ve seen do well across mono-green, green-white and green-black variants. I think that it’s likely to be a mainstay in the archetype going forwards, and Titan decks seem to be in a healthy place right now so I wouldn’t expect any bannings any time soon. It’s effectively Primeval Titan copies five and six, with the added benefit of being able to churn through your deck if you get lucky and have a bunch of lands to put into play with it. A point to note is that you can’t go infinite with bouncelands, but that doesn’t stop them from still being great here.

I really like the look of EA non-foils at the moment, because they’re only a dollar or so more expensive than the regular non-foils, and could be an attractive option for Modern players. There are only around 40 listings on TCGPlayer, and Europe already has these a decent chunk more expensive at around $26. That’s a good indicator that this is a strong Modern card, and being a premium treatment mythic there aren’t ever going to be too many copies running around.

It’s worth noting that this is also a 5k card on EDHREC, putting it solidly in the top 5 cards from Crimson Vow if you discount the land cycle (so top 10 anyway if you don’t). I think that this is a solid pick for both medium and long term speculation, and would be happy grabbing a stack around $20-22.

Omnath, Locus of Creation

Price today: $8
Possible price: $20

Omnath has been a reasonable force in Modern for quite a while now, never really dominating the top tables but putting up solid results nonetheless, between a few different flavours of four/five colour Yorion piles and the dedicated Elementals deck. Even after the Uro banning, the Yorion variant of the deck has continued to perform and be popular, and we’re now seeing somewhat of an Elemental/Yorion hybrid version emerge into the metagame.

Pretty much all of the decks in Modern playing Omnath are currently running four copies, and I like the look of regular non-foils right now. Since the spike around September last year this is currently the lowest price the card has been, and I think it’s a good time to pick some up. As well as being a Modern playset, it’s an EDH favourite to play as a Commander and likely a popular casual card too. CardKingdom are currently paying $6.75 cash/$8.78 credit which is a good sign that they’re reasonably high on the card too, and I honestly believe that this could be a $20 not too far down the road.

I think that the only danger of a reprint for this card would be in a Commander deck, but even then I really think that they would prioritise a new four colour legend over reprinting this one. I’m betting that this Omnath will be safe for a little while, so I wouldn’t be particularly scared of picking these up right now – and hey, we might even see a five colour version of Omnath at some point before this one hits the printers again.

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