Watchtower

Crimson Vow on Release

Crimson Vow only had its paper release over the weekend, but seeing as the set has been out on Arena and MTGO for nearly two weeks already, people have been thinking about the new cards for a while now and we’ve got some good early data to go off. Today I’m looking at some early picks that might not be ripe to pick up yet, but are worth keeping an eye on.

Welcoming Vampire (Showcase Foil)

Price today: $4
Price I want to buy at: $2-3
Possible price: $8

Early EDHREC data has Welcoming Vampire ahead of most of the pack right now, and it’s not difficult to see why. As a mono-white card, this doesn’t only go into Vampire decks but is also a great inclusion in any white deck looking to churn out tokens or other small creatures. Only getting one trigger per turn isn’t the best, but the fact that you’re getting card draw for free makes it situationally better than cards like Mentor of the Meek or Bygone Bishop that you have to pay mana for in order to get your card draw.

In a Vampire deck like Edgar Markov this card shines even more, with Edgar’s Eminence ability giving you an extra card every turn that you cast another Vampire spell, regardless of that Vampire’s power. Especially in white where card advantage can be lacking, creatures like this giving that extra boost can be very important for those EDH decks.

TCGPlayer prices are around $4 for the Showcase foils at the moment (which I think are a better pickup than the regular versions), and I think in a few weeks we should see those trickle down a bit to $2-3. Although it might not see much competitive play, I think that Welcoming Vampire will be ubiquitous enough in EDH that we should see an $8-10 price point 12-24 months down the line.

Olivia, Crimson Bride (Showcase Foil)

Price today: $30
Price I want to buy at: $10-15
Possible price: $30+

Six mana might seem like too much to pay for a 3/4, but when that body is flying, hasty and reanimates another attacker along with it then things change a bit. If you’re running Olivia as your commander then you’ll want her out as much as possible, so strategies to protect her/recast her quickly are probably going to be good; you might also just be stacking your deck with other Legendary Vampires to try and keep your creatures that you reanimated around.

Olivia is proving to be popular both as a commander and part of the 99 – it’s good in Vampire decks and other RB aggressive/reanimator decks, and will likely end up being one of the top commanders from Crimson Vow.

Although the Dracula version of this card (Sisters of the Undead) is really cool, supply on it is much higher than the Showcase versions, and so for people that want the Showcase version prices are going to be higher (and already are). I think we’ll see the Showcase cards drop to around $10-15 in the next few weeks and then pick back up again before too long. As a premium treatment mythic there’s never going to be a huge supply of these so keep an eye on when it hits a low!

Hullbreaker Horror (FEA)

Price today: $13
Price I want to buy at: $8-10
Possible price: $20

I’m sure that any of you who have played a reasonable amount of Crimson Vow limited will have experienced Hullbreaker Horror from one side of the table or another, and it’s been tearing up the new Standard format as well. It’s also the most popular EDH card from the set according to EDHREC, beating out all of the lands from the rare cycle in raw numbers. It’s just a super powerful creature that can go into a lot of blue decks – it can’t be countered and helps to protect the rest of your board/spells so long as you can cast more spells.

I don’t expect this to become as much of a staple as something like Thassa’s Oracle (despite its potential for infinite combos), but it’s definitely going to be very popular nonetheless. FEAs will be a great pickup at their low, and I hope we’ll see them around $7-8 so I’d pick some up if they do hit that mark. I expect you can get $20 for these in 12 months or less, and from there they’ll keep heading upwards until it sees a reprint (which won’t be for a while).

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.

Casual Fridays

Hunting Up Value

I get it, with the release of Crimson Vow we’re all buzzing with the new cards and the hot fun, but let’s not overlook that Midnight Hunt is now at peak supply. As we shift to the new set, vendors and distributors are going to open plenty of VOW (especially if there’s a lottery ticket of foil Kojima Sorin the Mirthless) and that will let the prices for MID trickle even further down.

What I’m looking for are cards that have good potential in Standard (it’s got two years to get good) and easy playability in Commander. If it’s good enough for Pioneer or Modern play, that’s a bonus!

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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: Couldn’t think of a Runo Pun

I really tried. I thought about the Elliot Page movie “Juno,” or Runo the red-nosed Zombie Cleric, or Runo nothing Jon Snow – I probably spent two hours and 45 minutes trying to come up with a good pun for the title of this article so you’d know that I am writing about Runo and also that I am very funny and clever. Disarmed by my wordsmithery, you’d immediately drop any pretense of skepticism and follow my finance advice to the letter. I’m sad to report that I wish I’d spent that time teaching my daughter to read instead and that I’m still no closer to pulling off a decent pun title. I hope that’s not a problem because I’ll be honest, I’m feeling some pretty bad writer’s block, but just about puns. You see, this week I aim to let my specs do the talking for me. It’s an installment of my Pulitzer-prize-eligible series, my babies, and it’s all about Vampire Clerics and the betentacled sea monsters that they somehow make clones of.

First up, why Runo?

Umbris is last week’s news, this week we’re all about Runo. And Grolnok? @#$%ing Grolnok? There are like 6 total frogs in Magic, and it’s just another boring self mill- you know what? I’m not going to let myself get angry at data today. I don’t get paid to be angry at data or I’d be a climatologist. I’m someone who has to digest and regurgitate the data for my hungry spec babies and if I don’t like how some of the data tastes, it’s not my job to pass that info on. I just look at it and say “Oh wow, I guess Umbris isn’t as popular as a stupid tribal Frog deck that doesn’t even make the Frogs harder to kill in combat, which is great because they’re all like 5 mana 2/2s. Let’s all buy Xenograft since, you know, no Frogs.” The data has me mad enough to dump on a Simic deck. Jason Alt is disrespecting a Simic deck.

Toxrill at #2 seems legit to me, it’s a -1/-1 counters deck that doesn’t interact with any of the previous cards that gave creatures -1/-1 counters, so that’s neat. I hope you own Swiftfoot boots because Dimir decks do not have a good track record when it comes to paying 11 mana to get their commander out of the command zone. Dimir also doesn’t have a good track record of supporting Krakens and Sea Monsters and Leviathae (I assume that is the plural of Leviathan). No color combination supported it, until a Vampire came along and did it for us. I bet the high synergy (played in a large percentage of Runo decks and a small percentage of decks in general, meaning they’re overrepresented here) cards are going to be a trip.

I know I normally like to look at High Synergy cards first, but in this case, it’s going to be a lot of garbage cards under a buck. I think foils might be in play, and maybe some alternate art versions, but in general, we’re going to look for cards that can give us some more help.

A lot of the high synergy cards that were going to pop because they’re obvious have. Sure, Wrexial is good in the deck, but it’s not something you think of when you think “Sea Serpent tribal” the way other cards are.

Wow, you just straight cannot even blame Runo for this. If anything, this is actually a good buy at $5 since it has flirted with $9 without any help from Runo. I have to assume Koma did this? Imagine having a deck where you can tap all of their blockers and paying 6 mana for a card that makes some of your creatures unblockable. Maybe I’m the one who sucks at building Koma? All I know is that people complained when I play the deck so I took it apart. That’s right, I’m THAT guy, I’ll build any Simic deck, and even I don’t get Grolnok. Calm down, Jason, you said you weren’t going to do this. Just bring it back around to a spec and stop losing your cool, you can do this OK everyone I think this is actually not a bad buy under $5 but I bet there are better picks. File this under “maybe” and I’ll show you something remarkable.

You can be forgiven for seeing a $6 serpent that looks like it should be a bulk rare sitting there and thinking “Oh man, all of the good Serpent cards spiked already” and abandoning this page entirely, but I think that despite Quest for Ula’s Temple (BSB potw) popping, people just don’t know what goes in a Sea Serpent deck and don’t all know how to go to EDHREC and check. Also, there wasn’t a ton of data last week. We knew less than, so obvious stuff like Quest and SOYD for short popped but the meat and potatoes of the decks were tougher to sus out. Know how I know there is more money to be made than there is money made already?

You see it? Just in case you don’t, let me help.

This isn’t that unusual, though. You see this a lot when a card sells out on Card Kingdom. They went out of stock at the old price and it never updated, meanwhile TCG Player has been getting cards back in stock all day as individual sellers, responding to the spike, list their copies for more. If you click the link and go to Card Kingdom, you’ll see they’re out of stock.

OK, then. I’m stumped. It seems like there wasn’t actually a run on this card yet, despite it being in a third of all of the instances of the most popular deck from this set. Surely this is the only example.

OK, this is really shooting a lot of my holes in the “we missed the boat” hypothesis. We missed the boat on 2 cards, both of which went up when Maro wrote that teaser article and we went through it. Didn’t I even call Quest for Ula’s Temple IN THIS ARTICLE SERIES like 3 weeks ago? I want to say I did. If it was obvious to a dip#$% like me who didn’t notice that the wording on Necroduality was NOTHING AT ALL like the wording on Parallel Lives, it was obvious to savvier people who scooped up those obvious Leviaspecs. Eww, that doesn’t sound good to me, give me another crack at it. 3 colorless and 2 Blue chips. Eww, no. Krakenvestments. This is hard! The point is, there are more cards to make money on, so let’s do that.

These are at an all-time low, Gyruda is actually kind of good in Commander even if you don’t run him as a commander or companion, and this is collectible (within reason, come on). Gyruda is good in this deck and in general. Does the existence of a $0.50 copy or a $3 extended art foil dampen things?

Sure does! Extended art foils may be a better play. Gyruda is very good in the deck, but there are a lot of copies and there are a lot of cheap ones before the good ones go up. What is older than Ikoria? How many more cards from the Teferi precon that’s already insanely expensive can hit $10 this month?

3 printings, already went up in January and one of those printings is “The List?” *audible fart noise*

Who’s next?

Neither at an all-time high nor low. Maybe we can look at another graph for comparison to see if we see a similar shape.

Cryptbreaker, a card with many more copies out there, suggests the ceiling for Kederekt Leviathan could be as high as $10 a copy on Card Kingdom. Is that good?

Paying $4 a copy for a card you can flip into $6.50 in credit isn’t sexy, but it does seem safe, and I’ll take safe sometimes.

I have buylisted Heartless Summoning for $3 more than I paid on more than one occasion. It seems only right that it should happen again. Heartyboi would be a little tricky to reprint, synergizes well with the raft of expensive creature tribal decks we’ve been seeing lately, is popping up more and more, is between its historic low and historic high and is one weird Modern card away from being $10 again. This isn’t as sexy at $2 as it was at $0.50, but it doesn’t suck at $2 if you ask me.

You know I don’t like foils, but I don’t hate them, either, especially since a lot of this deck outside of “tribal deck” staples is $0.39 cards, making it an attractive deck to try and foil out.

If this stops at its historic high, it will hit $6. I am not sure it will stop at its historic high. That said, there are a ton of copies of the Commander Legends foil out there – I singled out M11 because the first printing is usually considered the “best” foil, but that stuff barely applies here. That said, stock is very low. Not trying to trigger that Fight or Flight response some human brains have to FOMO, I’m simply, as they say, sayin.

This is a lot of specs, I did a good job this week and I had fun doing it. Did you have fun reading it? Who asked you? Rude. Anyway, your homework for the week is coming up with 3 specs of your own and posting them in the comments section. I bet there is a lot that I glossed over. Always remember to investigate every instance of Card Kingdom being cheaper than TCG Player and don’t take any wooden nickels. Until next time!

Watchtower

A Diverse Format

Modern content? In my articles? It’s more likely than you’d think. I love Modern and I think that it’s always got some good opportunities for specs, especially with so many viable strategies in the format at the moment. Week to week there are different decks on top, and it leaves a lot of room open for brewing and building variations on established decks.

Conspicuous Snoop (FEA)

Price today: $5
Possible price: $15

I wrote about the Goblins deck in Modern a few weeks ago, and although it hasn’t quite taken over the meta yet it’s still been putting up decent results here and there, and deserves at least some of our attention. Munitions Expert foils have been drying up and Boggart Harbinger foils are already over $20, so it’s clear that some of these foils with fewer printings are popular enough across Modern and EDH to drive prices.

Conspicuous Snoop FEAs are close to 18 months old now, and although you can still pick a few copies up around the $5 mark, there aren’t many of those left and the ramp up to $10 doesn’t take long. Snoop is in around 5000 EDH decks listed on EDHREC as well, unsurprisingly in almost all of the Goblin tribal decks, and with cards like Skirk Prospector that can generate a load of mana you can just churn through all the Goblins in your deck, not to mention Snoop enabling combos off the top of your library.

The Modern deck can go off as early as turn three by casting Snoop and then tutoring Kiki-Jiki to the top of your deck with Boggart Harbinger, creating infinite hasty copies of the Snoop to attack for lethal. This of course works in EDH as well but might lose you some friends if you keep doing it, but either way Snoop is an important part of any Goblin deck now and the FEAs are going to be heading up in price soon.

Grief

Price today: $14
Possible price: $30

Solitude has arguably been one of the top cards in Modern for a little while now; it may technically only be the fourth most popular creature in the format, but it’s such an important part of so many decks at the moment that its impact cannot be understated. Grief isn’t quite on the same level but it’s not far off, and I think that it’s set to be on a similar price trajectory to Solitude before long. It’s become a staple in the Reanimator and Living End decks (with the new Reanimator deck becoming more and more popular over the past couple of weeks), as well as featuring in various Yorion and Rakdos midrange builds.

Early hand attack is super powerful in a fast format like Modern, and doing it for no mana is even better. Regular versions of Solitude are $45 and up now, and with Grief only at $14 I think it’s got a decent run ahead of it. A Mythic from MH2, I think it’s in the same boat as Fury at the moment, and both cards look like they should be set to reach the $30 mark in the next 12 months or so.

Prismatic Ending (OBF)

Price today: $10
Possible price: $20

I’ve written about Prismatic Ending before, but I think it’s worth revisiting now because you can still pick up some OBF versions for around $10, and for the most played card in Modern (yes you read that right), I think that’s just too cheap. 43% of decks are playing an average of 3.3 copies of this card right now, and honestly those are some wild numbers for a removal spell. Ending deals with so many relevant threats in the format at the moment, and although it’s only sorcery speed it’s still much better than Path to Exile; it doesn’t ramp your opponent and can remove things like Æther Vial, Chalice of the Void and Sigarda’s Aid rather than just hitting creatures.

Europe already has these closer to $12 and so I think that anything you can snag under $10 is a sure thing, whether it be personal or spec copies. We probably won’t see the OBF version reprinted for a long time and so you should get a good run out of these foils, as I doubt its popularity will dip much in Modern any time soon.

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.

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