Watchtower

Underrated Midnight Hunt

There have been some obvious winners from Innistrad: Midnight Hunt in terms of EDH play; cards like Vanquish the Horde and Augur of Autumn were always going to see a lot of play, but I think that there are some underrated cards a little further down the popularity standings that could easily be good gainers over the next few months as people start to realise their value.

Adeline, Resplendent Cathar (Showcase Foil)

Price in Europe: €1-2 ($2)
Price in US: $5
Possible price: $10-15

Adeline feels like a callback to Hero of Bladehold, except it’s a mana cheaper and generates an extra token (albeit without the Battle Cry effect). You’re also getting Vigilance on it too, and the fact that you can play it as your Commander has made it quite a popular choice both as a General and part of the 99. Combined it makes nearly 7000 decks on EDHREC, and is a favourite in token decks and humans decks that packs a punch once you get some creatures in play.

The foil Showcase versions are surprisingly sparse, with only 21 NM listings on TCGPlayer from $5-10. Over in Europe you can snag copies as cheap as €1, and with a few more listings than you’ll find in the US it’s a good opportunity to grab some cheap ones. I think that Adeline will have an easy push to $10 in the US over the next few months, and could head towards $15 if it sees continued popularity in EDH.

Triskaidekaphile

Price in Europe: €0.05 ($0.05)
Price in US: $0.50
Possible price: $2

I hadn’t intended this to be an arbitrage-based article, but here we are. Triskaidekaphile is a surprisingly popular EDH card, clocking in at around 4650 decks on EDHREC, and whilst it may seem like a bit of a meme card on the surface, it’s actually quite useful. No maximum hand size on a 2 mana creature is pretty nice, and it’s not imposing enough to be something that your opponents instantly need to remove, which means that you’ll likely get some decent card draw out of it as well. The win condition strapped to it is nice to play to, and is likely to make it a popular card amongst the more casual players.

With that in mind, I like picking up stacks of the regular non-foils here as cheaply as you can get them. Casual players often don’t bother with premium versions of cards, but still drive prices on non-foils when a card is popular enough. I’d be looking to get in on these under €0.20 in bulk, with a view to buylist them to CardKingdom or similar a year or so down the road.

Lier, Disciple of the Drowned (Showcase Foil)

Price today: $10
Possible price: $25

Finishing things off with a spikier card that isn’t actually much cheaper in Europe, Lier, Disciple of the Drowned has been picked up as a potential cEDH card as well as being a solid Commander and 99 inclusion for regular EDH too. Five mana is a high price to pay when you’re trying to cast lots of cheap spells quickly, but if you can ramp it out fast enough then Lier is a hugely powerful protection point for all your spells, as well as being a permanent Snapcaster Mage for your entire graveyard.

As a Showcase foil mythic, there aren’t ever going to be too many of these around and so if you’re wanting any for your collection or to play with then now is the time. In terms of speculating on this, I think that anything under or around $10 is a solid buy to hit $20+ in the next 12-18 months – demand for this isn’t going to be huge, but supply isn’t exactly on the high side either and so as people upgrade their copies, the price is going to get dragged upwards.

David Sharman (@accidentprune on Twitter) has been playing Magic since 2013, dabbling in almost all formats but with a main focus on Modern, EDH and Pioneer. Based in the UK, he’s an active MTG finance speculator specialising in cross-border arbitrage.

Casual Fridays

Post-Credits Of The Double Feature

I know it’s a little premature to be talking about ‘after the double feature’ when we’re so close to getting Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty previews, but we’re going to be on a very short window for the Double Feature cards. There is a preview event at stores on January 21, and the cards are officially on sale on the 28th. Neon Dynasty previews are going to overshadow that event pretty badly, and the prerelease is February 11, with full sales happening on February 18. That’s just three weeks between the sets!

It helps a lot that we already know what’s in Double Feature, and can use the Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow cards as a guideline for what is likely worth buying.

The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.

To learn how ProTrader can benefit YOU, click here to watch our short video.

expensive cards ProTrader: Magic doesn’t have to be expensive.


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: Just Being Thorough

Readers!!1

We talked a lot about Ninja, and some we expected to pop popped, some didn’t and some cards we did not expect to pop did pop and if this were that easy, everyone would be doing it. I did manage to get quite a bit right, but now, for the sake of being thorough, we need to talk about Samurai.

Will Samurai be supported in Kamigawa: Ready Magic Player One? Maybe. Will that support make it a good tribe? Doubtful. Even if the new Samurai are all really good, the old ones are not and they won’t contribute much beyond filler. Samurai is, however, a tribe that has never really been supported and now that it looks like it might be, expect people to react like they did with Squirrels. Besides, once you add all of the 5 mana artifacts that make every tribe’s creatures bigger, you won’t have room for more than 15 creatures and you won’t care that they’re 2 mana 1/1s with Bushido. Besides, they don’t need to be good, they just need to be Samurai. Some of the obvious stuff has popped, but what else would you need to buy to actually build the deck? Maybe EDHREC has an answer.

Start off by locating the list of tribes.

Click “tribes” to open a new page.

Then scroll about halfway down. Of the 100 tribal themes recognize by EDHREC, Samurai is number 48 – ahead of Myr and just behind Ninjas. If you think Ninja re more popular than Samurai because there is way more support, there is a good commander, there are Ninja cards in multiple sets and people think Ninjitsu is a much better mechanic than Bushido (all objectively true, by the way) remind yourself that none of that matters to EDH players. They want to build Samurai decks, so they do.

This list is legitimately wild to me at first glance. Saskia makes sense, kind of since there are Samurai in every color but Blue for some reason. The 2 mono-White Kamigawa commanders make sense. Alesha makes sense when you consider the Samurai are all Grizzly Bears with glorified Flanking. Iroas says combat go BRRRR. And Queen Marchesa rewards you for zerg rushing them with Devoted Retainer into Samurai of the Pale Curtain (and actually super underplayed hate bear in EDH). So all of these commanders make sense when you think about it. The benefit of seeing already what people spent the last decade and a half figuring out makes me think I’m smart for understanding why people did what they did, but I’m not sure I could have spit out this top 6 if I had to, blind. Luckily, I don’t. I’ve got 6 lists worth of cards to look at. Is anything in play? Let’s dig in!

These have jumped a few bucks but since there is plenty of supply on TCG Player, still, no one has really noticed. When that happens, sites like Card Shark and other random forgotten gems will have 3 or 4 copies. It’s not much but it’s still gettable at old retail even as Card Kingdom begins to sell out.

It’s hard to tell if this graph shape means it’s too late or if it means that TCG Player and CK are way up but you can still grab these for under a buck where they deserved to sit for years. I don’t like a Green Samurai since it limits which decks it can go in, but if you’re playing some 4 color Saskia pile, you likely need this. At least this interacts with other samurai, unlike…

This is pretty meh in a Samurai deck but it’s no worse in any other White deck since it doesn’t interact with Samurai at all but does have a decent ability. For a car that doesn’t say “Samurai” on it anywhere to have its price tied to speculated Samurai support in this set is baffling, but this kind of buying behavior isn’t rational which is why I’m hesitant to do articles like this one.

Make these inclusion to price ratios make sense.

I don’t think Shared Triumph is good, at all, but I also don’t think a card that’s in a lot of Samurai decks and stands a chance of being in more later should stay this cheap. Share Triumph will never be $30 in the future, but I bet it’s never $4 again. How much do I bet? Eh.

I almost accidentally typed “Oathbreaker” instead of Oathkeeper in this paragraph, but I caught myself. This card isn’t Oathbreaker – people are playing it.

It really seems like the people who paid like $4 for foil copies of cards like Takeno and Lizuka were the big winners, here. The real move is to just buy obvious garbage foils very early and sell out when the tardy folks get around to buying 15% of the cards they think they will need for a deck they’ll never finish building. That or just avoid frenzies like this altogether, which is what I normally do. With the new set being spoiled later this month, we’ll have a ton of real data to look at but, until then, either research turtle tribal or buy some sealed product. Until next time!

Watchtower

New Year, Same Content

It’s about time I changed things up with my articles, so I thought that for my first article of 2022 I’d talk about some Modern cards. Ones that are also semi-relevant in EDH. Ground-breaking, right?

Ice-Fang Coatl (OBF)

Price today: $5
Possible price: $15

Ice-Fang has been a relevant card in Modern since its first printing back in Modern Horizons 1, and the current flavour of its inclusion is in the 4/5 colour Yorion Blink decks, many of which are running the full playset of flying snakes. Previous to this Ice-Fang has been played in a variety of different Uro (RIP) decks and Omnath decks, and will continue to see play in these sorts of builds in Modern.

Old-border foils are currently available for around $5 on TCGPlayer, but there aren’t too many copies under $7 or so before the price starts to ramp up. It won’t be long before we see $10 for this card (Europe is there already), and I think it will continue to rise towards $15 within the next 6 months or so. At a little over 4000 on EDHREC it’s not a huge EDH player compared to some of the other MH1 cards, but there will definitely be some demand for OBFs coming from that sector of players, which should help to push prices up a little bit.

Neoform (Foil)

Price in Europe: €4 ($4.50)
Price in US: $12
Possible price: $20

Speaking of two mana cards that cost GU, here’s another one for you. Neoform had its time in the sun back when the Neoform Griselbrand deck was a thing in Modern, but it’s currently seeing some play in an incredibly interesting Craterhoof Affinity deck. Yep, you read that right, Craterhoof Affinity. The deck tries to power out an early Myr Enforcer, Sojourner’s Companion or Thought Monitor which it can then Neoform into your Craterhoof to push through silly amounts of damage with huge Frogmites and Ornithopters.

It may be that this deck is just a flash in the pan, but the point stands that Neoform is a flexible card that will see at least some Modern play for the foreseeable future, on top of it being a very popular EDH card. At over 15,000 decks on EDHREC it’s easy to see why foils of this card are already $12 on TCGPlayer – but never fear, we can get cheaper copies in Europe.

Supply isn’t very deep but if you snag some copies around $5 then they should be great to either hold in Europe or ship over to the US. Even if you can find $10 copies in the US I think that they will be good to hit $20 before we see a foil reprint, as supply just isn’t high enough to keep up with demand.

Turntimber Symbiosis (FEA)

Price today: $10
Possible price: $25

Continuing with some of the more niche Modern decks being played at the moment, I wrote about Goblin Charbelcher a few weeks ago, and I hope that you bought some foils when I suggested to do so, because they’re a lot more expensive now than they were! Charbelcher is still putting up some decent results here and there in Modern, and it’s got me looking at some other cards from the deck.

Turntimber Symbiosis is seeing roughly the same amount of play in Modern as Shatterskull Smashing, and is in close to the same number of EDH decks (11.6k vs 14.7k), and yet the FEAs are half the price. I think that this should be due for a correction before long, and so Turntimber FEAs at $10 seem pretty attractive right now. Any “Oops, All Spells” decks like Charbelcher are always going to be playing four of these, and they’re a strong EDH card that can replace a land in your deck – something that EDH players love. 12 months out or less I can see this hitting $20-25, if not sooner to bring it more in line with Shatterskull Smashing.

David Sharman (@accidentprune on Twitter) has been playing Magic since 2013, dabbling in almost all formats but with a main focus on Modern, EDH and Pioneer. Based in the UK, he’s an active MTG finance speculator specialising in cross-border arbitrage.

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY