Well, we’re deep into Crimson Vow, and prices have mostly settled down.
We aren’t having a lot of paper events still, and so the casual cards are going crazy. This is because lots of people are buying the cards right away for their pet decks, and we aren’t getting a lot of Standard movement as yet. It’s interesting, the big events so far have all been Modern, not Standard.
So let’s take a look at where some cards have gotten to, and where they might be going, based on Modern, Standard, or Commander appeal.
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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.
This week, I’m not feeling the stuff from Crimson Vow. It’s not that I have over-written about the topic, but I think EDH is in a bit of a rut it may never recover from. There were 14 Legendary creatures released in 1997 and today, there are 24 new ones every 2 months. There simply isn’t the design space to come up with novel commanders at that pace. The result? They come up with exactly as many novel commanders as they used to and have given us tons and tons of filler, recycling commanders quickly. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s Gretchen Titchwillow.
Toxrill is very cool and gave us what we like to see in this column – old cards in low supply that will spike quickly as soon as people realize they’re indispensible in the deck, which ends up being popular. The specs aren’t obvious so that people who don’t plan to build the deck buy en masse, giving you ample time to track down copies, but since the cards actually go in the deck (and the deck is actually good) you won’t have any issues selling the cards given the organic demand. Let people claw each other to pieces fighting over $20 copies of Abundance, a card that combos with a 7 mana creature that isn’t even the deck’s commander – we’re over here paying $4 for Hunted Horror (which doubled since we wrote that article, by the way). We get 3 Toxrills a year, though, whether we get 10 new Legendary creatures or 100. Once you write about Toxrill, what else is there?
Well, it turns out I have done a bit of a “yadda yadda yadda” with some of the precon cards lately. We’re still figuring out how we want to separate things out over on EDHREC, so we (I) didn’t talk much about AFR commander specifically, but since the supply is basically set on those, things are starting to move. Let’s look at what is moving and what’s next.
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It’s been around seven months since we had the Mystical Archive cards released along with the Strixhaven set, and it’s very possible that we’ll get another similar set of cards at some point in the future, but until then I think that there are still some good opportunities to be had with the Mystical Archive cards we’ve got at the moment.
Chaos Warp (MA Foil)
Price today: $10 Possible price: $20
Until we got the Mystical Archive version back in April, Chaos Warp had only ever had one foil printing in Commander’s Arsenal, and being the most popular red EDH card of all time it moved up to around $30 before we got the fresh foil printings. I think that both the global and Japanese art versions are superior to the old art/foiling, and we should see prices rise over the next few months as people upgrade old copies and buy in fresh for new decks etc.
Global art MA foils are around $10 on TCGPlayer at the moment, and I think those should be good for a double up over the next year or less. Japanese art foils are already $25+, but with only 27 listings on TCGPlayer and a reasonably steep ladder, I think those could even hit $50 in a similar timeframe. Prices in Europe are similar or higher, so not much arbitrage opportunity there, but still a decent buy-in if you’re in the market.
Demonic Tutor (MA Foil)
Price in Europe: €47 ($53) Price in US: $65 Possible price: $80
Moving on from the most popular red card of all time to the most popular black card of all time, Demonic Tutor is undoubtedly one of the biggest EDH staples there is. Compared to Chaos Warp it’s had its fair share of premium printings, but they’re all well over $100 and so this Mystical Archive version might be the one a lot of people turn to for a more affordable premium option.
In the US, TCGPlayer already has the global art MA foils starting at $65, whereas over in Europe they can be had a decent bit cheaper for €47-50 ($53-58). I think that in time this version could get over $100 in line with the other premium copies of Demonic Tutor, but should be good to get up over $80 in 12 months or less. Arbitrage from Europe is pretty good right now, and although the immediate gains aren’t huge, it makes for a better profit over time if you can get them.
Blue Sun’s Zenith (MA Foil)
Price today: $5 Possible price: $15
Finishing things off today with a slightly less (but still very) popular card, the global art version of Blue Sun’s Zenith is criminally cheap at the moment. For a card that doesn’t have a premium version other than the original Mirrodin foil, $5 for a card in over 26,000 EDH decks seems wrong to me. It’s had plenty of non-foil Commander printings plus the original foil and A25 foil, but they’re all the same art and the MA foils should outclass them all.
I think the global art versions at $5 are a better pickup than the Japanese arts at $20, and should be set to crest $10 pretty soon and continue up towards $15-20 not long after that. CardKingdom are already paying $4.50 cash/$5.85 credit on the global art foils, which should be a very strong sign that these are going to play out well, and could be a good buylist option down the line when you’re looking to out your copies.
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 and a new writer for MTGPrice in 2020, he’s an active MTG finance speculator specialising in cross-border arbitrage.
I like planning ahead, and figuring out what I can do ahead of time. Sometime I have to move fast on things, like Zombies getting a whole deck of goodies during the Werewolf set. We can plan ahead, though, and make some plans with regard to Neon Kamigawa.
I’m going to look at the themes that we got in Original Kamigawa, see what we can glean from a return to that theme, and dive in.
The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.
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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