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.

Casual Fridays

What I’m Doing Differently In 2022

Last week, I shared with you the things I did right and wrong during 2021. So given that it’s New Year’s Eve, here’s the things I’m going to do differently.

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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: Lessons from 2021

Readers!

2021 was pretty nuts and I’m frankly glad to be rid of it. Covid got way worse but restrictions got way looser. They made a bunch of good books into bad TV shows. They made another season of Tiger King. It was bad, people. It’s tempting to throw out the entire year, but the truth is that I wrote 51 dynamite articles and I’m going to spend this one telling you about whether any of them taught me anything about how to do a finance.

I wanted to wrap the year up by highlighting new techniques and breakthroughs we had this year. I’m constantly refining my technique and I seem to be getting better at it – someone on reddit accused me of buying out my own podcast POTW picks because I’ve been getting so many right lately, which is kind of a compliment if you think about it. I AM going to think about it, and I’m also going to think about what I did this year and how we can improve on it even more. Let’s do it to it!

My first article to review was titled “5 cards that cost more on TCG Player” and the title is the description. The premise was simple – Card Kingdom (and Coolstuff Inc, to an extent) are not marketplaces where there is internal competition between sellers to bring prices down. As a result, TCG Player should be cheaper than Card Kingdom. When it’s not, I take a look. Is the EDHREC algorithm scraping different versions? Is one of the sites sold out and therefore the price is frozen? Is it ACTUALLY cheaper on Card Kingdom? Questions like that can knock out quite a few of your candidates, but the ones that don’t get knocked out are usually mispriced. Why is the card mispriced? Figure out which site has the wrong price and you can find some real opportunities the people miss until it’s obvious to everyone and then you’re in a feeding frenzy. Catching prices about to move is a vital skill and any clues we get, we should use. I tried the technique again a few weeks ago and got a spicy spec out of it. This time it was cheaper on Coolstuff than on TCG Player, and there were quite a few copies left before this happened. A lower price on Coolstuff or Card Kingdom doesn’t always means it’s a good spec, but it means it often enough that you should train your brain to notice when TCG Player is the most expensive option.

Everyone knows Tatyova is a pretty absurd commander, but it’s far beyond that. Tatyova is an Uncommon from a set less than 5 years old and it’s nearly $5. Could we see more cards like that? I tried to devise a set of criteria for other candidates and I think the only from the last 5 years is Ser Konrad, a very reprintable (and reprinted) card. Bala Ged Recovery has a shot but that’s not even a Legendary creature. With 25 Legendary creatures a set, it’s rare that they’ll jam something as absurd as Tatyova at Uncommon again, but we’ll be ready when they do and we’ll be buying $0.50 foil copies on preorder.

I called my shot pretty early on which cards from Time Spiral Remastered had enough EDH play to recover from the reprinting. The article is pretty dense and it’s tough to summarize, but this is something I should do more often for reprint sets. There are always cards that recover and people say “when did THAT go back up?” because they don’t check the prices of everything or even that often. I like to tell them what to buy when the price is at its lowest. I followed up in May.

I think the funniest gimmick of the year was the time I wrote a 20,000 word article – provided you buy the conversion rate of 1 picture being equal to 1,000 words, that is.

In June, I got a crazy idea about picking cards that had good growth potential but not so explosive that WotC would notice the card needed a reprint, thus shortening our window. If you like to get out of cards at a leisurely pace, pick cards you can get into at the same pace. I explored the concept in-depth in this article.

This is the epic banner art I chose for my article where I discussed using EDHREC to find data that’s a little tougher to find on the site. Any time someone from EDHREC offers to show you how to use EDHREC better, it doesn’t hurt to pay attention. I’m a resource, make use of me.

Controversially, I tried to come up with my own metric for quantifying demand. The results were a bit fuzzy and I won’t be sure for a year if what we calculated will bear out, but I wrote a couple of articles where I outlined how I calculated the card’s DPI score (Dollars per inclusion) and how I used it to identify cards that were going to change price soon. I am pretty proud of the results but I won’t be adopting the metric permanently.

“The best commander in the set” only works when comparing specs to other specs from cards that came from that same set and it’s important to remember that. Not all “Most popular commander in the set” are created equal. There were only 2 or 3 from the whole year who even made the top 100 list for the last 2 years and those deserve extra scrutiny.

Using a list comparison tool I found online, I compared the top 100 cards from the last 2 years with the top 100 cards from a given week. Doing so can tell you which cards are going up hard and fast enough to displace format staples in the weekly top 100. It’s easy to do and the article shows you how, you just have to remember to do it and I haven’t thought of trying this technique again after I wrote the article even though I think it’s a good one. That’s why we do this annual wrap-up.

Treasure is an evergreen mechanic that is getting leaned into quite hard lately. Will treasure be a player in EDH forever? It seems very likely, and even if there is a lull, it will come back and those treasure-enablers will pop off again hard. What should you stock up on? Luckily, I have strong opinions about that.

Between Umbris and Toxrill, it’s insane how much money Dimir Commanders made me in Q4 of this year. I hope you all got as hype as I did.

If I had to summarize what I learned this year, I learned to use EDHREC data and filter out old staples to find emerging ones. I learned to catch when TCG Player was the most expensive and figure out if a price change was incoming. I developed my own way to calculate if a card was under- or over-priced relative to how many EDH decks it was in. I even figured out how to get EDHREC data that hadn’t migrated to the front page of the site. It was a good year, I had a lot of fun writing some of these and I think I gave a lot of great advice. All I can do is promise to keep improving and I hope you keep reading. Until next year!

Watchtower

One Year On

We’ve come to the end of another year, and instead of looking back on what we’ve been buying in 2021, I want to look forward to 2022. The past year has been a decent one for buying cardboard and a bad one for most everything else, but thankfully I’m here to talk about the former and not the latter. Today’s picks are going to be aimed at a one year trajectory, so we’ll check back in with them at the end of 2022 and see where we landed!

Kaldra Compleat (Showcase Foil)

Price today: $10
Possible price: $30

For a deck full of pretty bad cards, Hammer Time is still tearing up the Modern format every week, with a few different iterations and variations being played around with but the core remaining pretty much the same. One of the ‘fun-ofs’, a sometimes food for the deck, is Kaldra Compleat – it doesn’t quite pack the same +10/+10 punch as the Hammer itself, but has a whole slew of keywords that can help to push damage through where the Hammer fails.

You’ll find it here and there in Hammer lists and is also a relatively popular EDH card, found in around 5000 decks listed on EDHREC. I like the look of its supply levels and price ramp on TCGPlayer at the moment, partially because the Showcase foils are actually cheaper than the regular foils right now by a few bucks. Showcase foils are starting at $10 whereas regular foils are up at $14, and I think that’s due for a correction. I think the Showcase versions look pretty good, and don’t deserve to be lower than the version that has more supply.

There are a decent number of $10 around at the moment, but it’s not long before it jumps to $15 and then $20, and given a year I think that this MH2 mythic will see a nice jump once supply really dries up. We won’t be seeing this Showcase version again for a while, and so picking these up now seems like a good move for an easy double or triple up.

Katilda, Dawnheart Prime

Price in Europe: €0.20 ($0.25)
Price in US: $0.50
Possible price: $1

Onto something a little less exciting for my next pick, Katilda, Dawnheart Prime (not to be confused with Katilda, Dawnheart Martyr from Crimson Vow, because those names in subsequent sets were obviously a great idea) is the fifth most popular commander from Midnight Hunt and a reasonably popular card in the 99 as well. The protection from Werewolves ability probably isn’t what you’re playing this card for, but turning all your Humans into mana dorks is pretty great and having an anthem effect on top of that is even better.

I don’t think that this will make its way into Modern Humans anytime soon (not that that’s much of a force in the format at the moment anyway), but should be a fairly popular EDH and casual card for a while. Playing it as a two mana commander that can help ramp you into bigger spells quite quickly is strong, and the third ability keeps it relevant into the late-game as well, especially if you’re playing around with +1/+1 counter synergies.

It’s close to bulk prices at the moment, especially if you’re shopping in Europe, and I think that it’s going to be a good buylist target a little way down the road. 12 months out I expect to see this buylisting for $0.80 – $1; CardKingdom will often pay close to retail for strong casual cards in non-foil and so that’s where I’ll be looking.

Damn (Old-Border Foil)

Price today: $4
Possible price: $10

Jumping back to Modern Horizons 2 for my last pick today, I think that Damn is underpriced at the moment. It’s the 3rd most popular card from the set in terms of percentage inclusion, and I don’t see a good reason that it shouldn’t be in almost every black-white EDH deck that you build. Strong spot removal with an option to board-wipe attached is fantastic flexibility in one card, and at two and four mana, spells really don’t get much better than that.

In terms of different versions, the retro foils and FEAs are the ones to look at here, and although it’s currently the cheaper version, I think that the retro foil is the one to focus on. In my opinion you can’t really beat the look of the old frames and the foils just look excellent, so at $4 I think they’re a steal. At $7 the FEAs aren’t too bad either and it might be worth grabbing a couple of those too because they’ll likely be following a similar trajectory, but my pick for today is the OBFs.

They’re actually more expensive in Europe at the moment so no luck with arbitrage there, but the $4 copies on TCGPlayer are definitely good enough to pick a stack up. A year down the road I can see these cruising to $10 and maybe higher, especially if it starts to see play in Modern (which is highly possible given the power level of the card).

That’s all from me today, and I’ll see you in the new year with more pieces of cardboard to spend your money on. Happy holidays!

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.

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