Watchtower

Would I Lie To You?

Last week I tentatively promised you more Modern content, and nobody would ever lie to you on the internet so here we are. I think that the format is generally in a decent place right now, albeit with a couple of problem cards, so let’s take a look at what’s good and what’s not.

Subtlety

Price today: $12
Possible price: $25

Lots of Modern decks – both new and old – have been putting use to the new ‘free’ Elementals we got in Modern Horizons 2. Living End is using them as extra creatures to put in the graveyard, whilst there are some more fair decks like tribal elementals (notably piloted by one of our own Protraders to multiple top 8 finishes) making use of the cards. Grief was the one from the cycle that was the most hyped going into MH2, but since then some of the others have been picked up as well. Endurance is proving to be a solid card too and is already over $25, but whilst Subtlety is actually in more decks (with more copies per deck) than Endurance at the moment, it’s still only $12.

I haven’t even talked about half of why this card is good yet, and even so I’d be a buyer just based on its trends and play patterns. But if you actually read the text on the card it’s really strong – having a pseudo-counterspell strapped to a 3/3 flyer is great, and the fact that you can evoke it for no mana cost puts it on a level with Force of Negation, which has proven its worth in Modern time and time again. I think that this, along with the others in the cycle, will be a mainstay in the format for a good while at least.

Even the non-foil borderless versions are only $14 at the moment, with the foils starting at around $28 – and I think they’re all great pickups right now. As a mythic in a supplemental set it’s got a great amount of potential, and I have no doubt that Subtlety is going to follow the same trend that we’ve seen from some of the other Elementals too. It shouldn’t take too long to get up there; this is a fairly hot card and so you shouldn’t be waiting around on it especially if you want personal copies, and it’s no cheaper in Europe at the moment either.

Risen Reef (Foil)

Price in EU: €2.50 ($3)
Price in US: $8
Possible price: $15

Speaking of Elementals, here’s another one that’s looking pretty good at the moment. Risen Reef was a big part of Standard for quite a while when it was in the format, but since then hasn’t really had much time in the limelight. It’s seen a smattering of play in tier 2-3 Modern and Pioneer decks (Fs in the chat for Pioneer), but with the introduction of the MH2 Elementals this deck really looks like it might have some decent legs on it.

Multiple top 8 finishes from this deck with four copies of Risen Reef are a good thing to see, and what’s more is that this is also a card in almost 12,000 EDH decks listed on EDHREC. Albeit only an uncommon, these foils have already crested $8 in the US and supply is on the low side. We saw the potential of M20 uncommon foils in Veil of Summer, and with only 17 TCGPlayer listings for Risen Reef foils, this is primed to do similar things. The EDH demand has seen foils slowly dry up over the past year or so but this burst of competitive play is going to keep pushing it higher, but Europe is lagging on foils right now.

Cardmarket has NM foils starting at €2.50 and supply is definitely deeper than that of TCG, but not by a huge amount. Card Kingdom are already paying that in cash on their buylist which is a good sign, and so if you can get these from Europe to sell to the US market then you’re going to be in for a treat. Even buying and reselling in Europe is probably going to work out well for these, be it for Modern or EDH play on a relatively short timeline.

General Thoughts on Modern

Instead of a third pick today I want to talk a little bit about how Modern as a format is looking at the moment, and my thoughts on where it’s heading. The top couple of decks at the moment are BR aggro and UR Blitz, taking advantage of the seemingly infinite number of 1-2 mana efficient threats like Dragon’s Rage Channeler, Ragavan and Monastery Swiftspear. These two along with pretty much half the decks in the format are all just playing four Mishra’s Baubles right now, for reasons ranging from prowess triggers to artifact shenanigans to enabling Delirium, as well as just being a free cantrip on top of all that.

Mishra’s Bauble might honestly be a problem card in Modern, enabling lower land count decks and giving decks higher consistency along with all the previously mentioned benefits it provides. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a ban coming for it before long – it’s just free for almost any deck in the format to play and unintentionally powers up a lot of strategies. The other option here would be to ban Lurrus, because even after the Companion rule change Lurrus continues to dominate in multiple formats, so that’s one to keep an eye on too.

Other than that, I think that Modern is in a pretty healthy place for the time being. There’s quite a lot of diversity in the metagame, which is changing from week to week, and I think that Modern Horizons 2 has hit the right mark with lots of the new cards being powerful and viable without being overly dominant. That’s it for me this week and maybe I’ll talk about something different next week, but we’ll just have to wait and see!

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

Preordering Adventures in the Forgotten Realms

There’s a whole lot of hype around the cool things that are being revealed with Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, and we can do some preordering already! Some of these look like fantastic deals, and some are definitely traps to avoid. Let’s dive in, shall we?

First of all, we need to get something out in the open: This set, so far, does not have a chase card. The most expensive card is going to be a cool Commander, and do a lot of work for Dragons in general, but we haven’t yet gotten the “HOLY HELL TAKE ALL MY MONEY” reveal that we’ve had: Ragavan/OBF fetches, the Mystical Archive, Phyrexian Foil Vorinclex, and so on.

None of the cards previewed are very expensive as yet, which speaks not just to the power level of the cards, but the artistic choices Wizards has made here. We aren’t going to do anything too amazing…yet. There’s still a week of previews to go, though!

Tiamat ($25) – This is currently the most expensive card you can preorder from the set, at twenty-five bucks! It’s hard to argue with what this card tells you to do as a Commander: Play lots of Dragons (Changelings!) and go find five of them every time you cast Tiamat. That’s hard to argue with as card advantage, and if you want to play some kind of five-color Dragons strategy, you’re either getting these cards or you’re playing The Ur-Dragon for the mana advantage.

I don’t think this price will hold, though. The formula for expensive cards involves being in demand across a lot of formats/decks. The commander is almost never the expensive card, and that doesn’t bode well for Tiamat’s future price. This will fall to $15 easily, more likely $10.

Demilich ($15) – This has real potential in decks that want to play lots of instants and sorceries, though you’ll never pay less than four mana all told. Theoretically with some free spells you can get there sooner, but Gitaxian Probe isn’t legal anywhere and you’ll have to work pretty hard. The ability to recur this card is a big plus for it, and it seems best suited to play with Arclight Phoenix decks. Please note that this doesn’t have flying or haste or anything. It’s just a 4/3 durdle on the ground, easily blocked and killed. This should drop in price by at least half, sadly.

Circle of Dreams Druid ($5) – This is a lot more than an auto-play for Elf decks in any format. It’s a fixed version of a totally busted Reserved List card. We have another fixed version of Gaea’s Cradle to compare with, though: Growing Rites of Itlimoc.

I don’t think I want to buy the Druid at $5, though. Everything has to go downwards, generally speaking, but the value in this set has to go someplace. Long-term, I think this card has fantastic potential and I want lots of copies in my spec box, I just don’t want to buy at this price. I will be watching this closely to see what happens early on–this could be one of the fastest risers in the set because it goes so well into a range of decks and formats.

Sphere of Annihilation (AFR)

Sphere of Annihilation (75 cents or so) – Honestly, this is a card that various flavors of control decks have wanted for a long time. I genuinely think this is underpriced, given the flexibility it offers. It’s going to get a lot of use at an X-value of one or two, and if they go over the top at three, that’s what your targeted kill spells are for. Opponents also won’t play into it, giving you that much more time. Control decks crave time, as they have the resources and per-card power to win the long game. I’m a big fan of what this offers, and while I’m not yet ready to buy in, this is another card that I’ll be watching closely.

Tasha’s Hideous Laughter ($4) – If you think Modern Mill is a viable strategy now, here’s your happiest of days. Lurrus of the Dream-Den decks are all over the place in Modern, and while their spells are not costing two or less, Modern as a format is really getting faster and faster. Everyone wants to cost less, to get under the competition. Tasha’s Hideous Laughter is the punishment for embracing that mindset.

Again, I’m not buying yet, but we’ve seen the legs that some mill cards can have, and this is a spell that will be very popular for people who like to do that. I’d prefer to buy in at a buck or less, but this is a spell that puts stars in peoples’ eyes about what it ‘could’ be, not what it is. Note that it’s ‘each opponent’, for those of you who like to use this strategy in Commander games. Godspeed.

Cave of the Frost Dragon ($1.50) and the other new creaturelands (less) – This has been a banner year for creaturelands, I don’t think we’ve ever had so many in Standard before. Crawling Barrens, then Faceless Haven, and now a cycle of five that are all good at what they do. The white, blue, and black ones all make sense, the red one is great in an all-in attacking deck, and we haven’t gotten the green one yet. Celestial Colonnade and Creeping Tar Pit are still the best around given their pedigrees, but what’s surprising to me is that neither of the colorless lands have made a big impact on Standard. Is it just because control decks aren’t great right now, and we need rotation to make them good again? We shall see. 

You’re going to be able to get these lands for near-bulk prices, and that’s going to be very tempting. Problem is, it’s difficult to predict which of these five colors will be the one that’s played a lot after rotation in the fall. If you feel confident that you can pick the winner, go for it. With seven creaturelands, I don’t think I can snag the one, and the return isn’t worth picking up a brick of each. If they are all a dime each, and you buy 7 bricks of 100 each, the one that hits needs to be bought for 70 cents each for you to just break even. Plus, we’re talking rares, not mythics, and there will be a whole lot of these out there. It’s not worth it, I advocate staying away.

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: f-icien-c

Readers!

When I first started out writing mtg finance articles, I was checking weekend results on Monday or Tuesday and making predictions based on those results during the week so people could pick those cards up the following weekend before FNM. Gradually, specs started selling out before Monday, then before Sunday, then within an hour of showing up on camera. In a lot of ways, I was lucky I pivoted to non-tournament formats to do my financing because Covid could have put a real wrinkle in my plans. I pivoted not because I saw Covid and WotC’s abandonment of tournament play as an inevitability (I still don’t believe it) but rather because I had to. Mtg Finance, once a very inefficient system had become a very efficient submarket and telling people how to be more efficient at it for money made it get more efficient faster. I say GOOD.

Efficiency is a good thing because inefficiency is just wasted potential. If the market is going to get faster at making cheap copies disappear, we should get more efficient at identifying what’s going to go up before anyone else. Luckily, with EDHREC, I’ve been able to identify the cards that take the longest to start to sell but which sell the most sustainably and give you the longest possible time to get out of them before they tail off – EDH cards.

We don’t have months for the EDH cards to go up like we used to and we’ve had to get a bit more efficient. Luckily, EDHREC, a site which used to wait until the whole set was previewed to build the pages for new sets has decided to scrape the sets every night starting when deck sites start getting decks registered, which means we have days, maybe weeks we didn’t have before. As of Tuesday, basically the second day of previews starting in earnest, we have a lot going on.

It’s not a ton, but it’s more than we used to have 2 days into preview week. 66 Tiamat decks is a lot, but I’m even more impressed that we have 14 Drizzt decks already. Will any of this matter? Maybe, maybe not. I’m going to take a look at these lists (even Nadaar) earlier than I used to and we can see if anything here will matter or not. I feel like Tiamat is as basic Dragon deck that could have any 5 color Dragon at the helm, which isn’t worthless, exactly, but isn’t revolutionary. So let’s start out by confirming that.

Tiamat

Just Dargons here, Dargons as far as the eye can see. That tracks. I didn’t really expect much innovation here – Tiamat doesn’t really have a “new” ability as far as 5 color dragon lords are concerned, so we’re basically an Ur-Dragon deck with a new Commander. That sucks. That said, it’s possible some of the Dragon tribal stuff could bump, but not like it did when a tribal EDH precon set was announced. I’ll keep looking, but Drizzt may be a better use of our time. Let’s enter the next part of the dungeon or whatever the hell that is.

What’s happening right now isn’t Tiamat’s fault. It’s not even 66 builders’ fault. It’s just that Tiamat, for all of its power and prestige, isn’t templated to do anything new. I mean, if we’re going to complain about that, we could complain about every Legendary creature in Modern Horizons 2 beside Chatterfang which barely roped in Saprolings in its Squirrely web (I’m mixing metaphors, I don’t think Squirrels weave webs, calm down). This isn’t a complaining about how exciting Legendary creatures are article, and neither is my article on Coolstuff because I want another preview card someday, so let’s poke around a bit more and call it a day.

Look, I’m calling it. This is basically the list of cards for Ur-Dragon. You think that stuff could go back up? Buy it all, I guess. I’m not telling you it won’t, I’m telling you I’m not excited. I think Drizzt might be more exciting.

Drizzt

OK! This I can deal with.

Barring another reprint, which I don’t think will be soon, Selvala will flirt with $30 again. Jumpstart and Conspiracy 2: Conspiratorial Boogaloo are both fairly low-supply sets and I think Selvala is a pretty good card. How good?

QUITE good. Is Drizzt going to be what pushes this up? No, but it won’t hurt, and digging into commanders makes me find unrelated gems all the time. It’s why all of us should monkey around on EDHREC every day for like 15 minutes.

Cards like Force of Savagery are exactly what we’re hoping to find when we go plumbing the depths of these new decks. It’s very good with Drizzt specifically, not great anywhere else and a card no one cares about. It will take time for the copies to get ferreted out of bulk bins and binders and with no easy way for stores to restock, the copies in the market now are the copies that set the price. This has the potential to get sold out fast and by the time the new copies come in to calm the price down, hopefully you sold into the spike. If there is a spike, in order to sell into it, you need to buy now. I think this is primed for it. This basically puts 5 +1/+1 counters on Drizzt for 3 mana and since it’s a creature, it’s fairly easy to bring back. It’s possible Anthems can also make this like a 12/4 which is cool in EDH if you have equipment to throw on it. In general, I wouldn’t be a ton more excited about a 3 mana 12/4 than I would, say, Woolly Thoctar, a card I’d never play in EDH, but Force has some possible additional utility. This seems like a slam dunk. I don’t mess with foils, but foil people should know this is $10 entirely on the basis of scarcity and that price won’t go down once the hubbub around this card’s utility in a deck people may or may not build dies down.

They say not to grab a falling knife, but this is a falling knife I’d keep my eyes on and grab as soon as it… bounces? And I’m not saying I wouldn’t keep my eye on basically any falling knife… look, I’m done with this bit already but this card is good and when the price stops going down, I’m into grabbing some.

Bonders’ Enclave is a good card and I wish I’d bought way more copies way sooner, but I blew all of that money on full art triomes.

No regrets; I’ll take a double up, but Enclave is up 5x over the same period. I’m starting to think I should be investing in cheaper real estate in the future.

Bruenor

Bruenor is to RW Equipment decks what Tiamat is to dragons.

1 deck isn’t enough data for Nadaar, and I’m not really excited about a creature that hinges on a set-specific ability that likely won’t get any support in the future, though I think the dungeon subgame is pretty sweet. We had a few other Legendary creatures spoiled today and I’ll hit you with some picks next week. For now, really look closely at the stuff in Drizzt because I think it has the most potential. I’ll be back next week with more picks, but in the mean time, don’t grab any falling knives. Until next time!

Watchtower

All Modern All The Time

Last week I talked about Modern, this week I’m talking about Modern, next week…I may well be talking about Modern again. It’s a great format and there’s so much diversity in the meta right now with all of the new cards from Modern Horizons 2 – nothing seems completely overpowered or dominant (but the Urza decks are certainly close to being top dog right now), and so there are a lot of opportunities for us to explore.

Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger (Secret Lair)

Price today: $40/$45
Possible price: $70/80

Kroxa has been a relatively important part of multiple formats for a while now, and has made its way into a few different Modern decks along the way. Most recently, a new evolution of the BR aggro deck has made its way to the forefront of the meta with Dragon’s Rage Channeler and Ragavan at the helm – both of which have been separately heralded as the best red one-drop of all time (although we know that Magic players are a little prone to hyperbole).

Either way, Kroxa is doing well in this deck alongside some others as well and on top of all that it’s quite a popular EDH card to boot. 1100 decks as the commander and a further 3000 in the 99, and we only have two premium versions of the card at the moment – the original EAs from Theros Beyond Death, and the Secret Lair versions. The FEAs are over $120 with very low supply now, but both foil and non-foil Secret Lairs are around $40-45, which I think is a decent entry point considering the card’s popularity now.

Especially since Uro got banned from multiple formats, Kroxa is the Titan of choice now and if you want a premium copy – either foil or non-foil – then your options are starting to run thin. I think that these non-foils should be good to run up over $60 before long at all, and the foils driving higher still. Prices are fairly similar in Europe, as expected, but supply isn’t much higher there either and will continue to drain.

On Thin Ice (Foil)

Price in Europe: €5 ($6)
Price in US: $13
Possible price: $20

Now that Sterling Grove has been printed into Modern in MH2 along with the new cards Sanctum Weaver and Sythis, Harvest’s Hand, it seems that Enchantress might actually be a real deck in the format. It’s been a Legacy deck for quite a long time – never dominating but always there at tier two-ish, and now it looks to be doing similar things in Modern.

Taking a look at the different iterations people have been playing, there are a reasonable number of flex slots in the deck and a few cards that remain consistent. One of those is On Thin Ice, a card that we only ever had printed in MH1 and so supply is really on the low side. It’s a four-of in the deck and is very efficient removal that keeps your enchantment count high over something like Path to Exile, and so is perfect for the deck.

Foils have already started to pop off in the US where paper play is a little ahead of Europe, where foils are dragging behind a little at €5-6. I think that this is a good arbitrage opportunity that might not be readily apparent, as it’s not a particularly flashy or exciting card – but it’s good all the same. There are only 29 NM foil listings left on TCGPlayer, and if the Enchantress deck remains relevant in Modern I think this is a sure thing to hit $20 in the next few weeks or so.

Æther Vial (The List)

Price in Europe: €25 ($30)
Price in US: $45
Possible price: $50

I don’t want to harp on about arbitrage opportunities too much, but stuff like this is just too good to pass up, especially when you’re likely to be selling them in playsets. There are multiple Æther Vial decks doing well in Modern at the moment, including Humans, Merfolk and D&T/Stoneblade, and they’re all running four Vials. We’ve had a few different printings of Æther Vial now and they’ve all been trending upwards, but copies from The List in particular have been dragging their heels in Europe.

There are only 17 NM copies left on TCGPlayer, and this is the cheapest version out of Europe at the moment so I think this should just be some good clean arbitrage. Holding for a little longer could well net you even more profit as well, but either option looks pretty solid right now. If you’re thinking about getting into an Æther Vial deck in Modern any time soon then you’ll want to pick your Vials up sharpish, because they’re only going up until we see another printing.

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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