Watchtower

A Mixed Bag

I couldn’t really come up with a good theme for my article this week, so instead I present you with a few cards that I think are going to be more expensive in the future than they are now. A bold premise, to be sure, but I think I’m up to the task – read on to see if you agree!

Warping Wail (Foil)

Price in Europe: €4 ($5)
Price in US: $30

Just looking at the price differences here, this is a pretty simple case of easy arbitrage here, but I do want to take a little bit of time to talk about why Warping Wail is suddenly (actually not-so-suddenly) a $30 foil uncommon. It’s been played here and there in Modern Tron decks for a long time now, with people sometimes favouring cards like Spatial Contortion or Dismember instead – but Warping Wail has a great flexibility to it that is currently proving to put it ahead of the rest of the pack.

Being able to exile almost every creature in the Hammer Time deck (before they’re holding a hammer) is huge, and it hits things like Dragon-Rage Channeler and Risen Reef as well. Not only does it hit almost every relevant creature in the format, the counterspell mode can come in handy too, doing away with things like Living End and Crashing Footfalls. I’m not sure how often you’re going to be creating a Scion with Warping Wail but I’m sure it’s going to come in clutch at some point too.

Foils have almost completely dried up in the US, with only five listings for foils of any condition. The card is close to six years old now without a reprint, and I don’t really know where Wizards would be able to reprint a card like this due to the colourless mana symbol. I don’t think we’ll be seeing this again any time soon, and so with foils still at €4 in Europe this is a great arbitrage opportunity to ship them overseas. Supply isn’t that deep in Europe, so don’t hang around on these – and if you’ve got any old OGW bulk to go through then you might be in for a nice surprise.

Esper Sentinel (Sketch Foil)

Price today: $25
Possible Price: $50

Speaking of things that Warping Wail can exile, Esper Sentinel is a pretty good one. It’s been a great pickup for the Hammer Time deck in Modern, and although it’s not seeing a huge amount of Modern play other than that, EDH is where the card really shines. Sentinel blows the rest of Modern Horizons 2 out of the water in comparison, already included in almost 9000 decks listed on EDHREC, with the only other card from the set coming close to it being Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth.

I fully expect this to be close to a Rhystic Study/Smothering Tithe level card moving forwards, and should slot into the vast majority of white EDH decks that can play it. Tax effects like this have proven time and time again to be hugely popular and end up getting pretty expensive, and people are starting to realise that earlier and earlier on, hence this already being a $15 card for regular copies.

I’ve talked about this before; I think the sketch arts were very hit-or-miss, but this is one of the ones that really shines. That’s why my pick today is for the sketch foils – because they’re the same price (actually a tiny bit cheaper on average) than the regular foils, but I think in time will overtake the regulars and command a good premium. Europe has some cheaper copies at around €15 ($18), and a couple of nice stacks still under $25 if you can grab those. I think that 6-12 months out this is easily a $50 card, so make sure you grab your personal and spec copies now!

Dauthi Voidwalker (Retro Foil)

Price today: $17
Possible price: $40

Sticking with Modern Horizons 2 for our last pick today, Dauthi Voidwalker is another card with a smattering of Modern play, but most powerful in EDH. Another of the most popular EDH cards from MH2 in nearly 6000 decks on EDHREC, Voidwalker does an excellent job of interrupting any graveyard shenanigans your opponents might have going on (which there is always a lot of), whilst not affecting your own at all. Its second ability to then cast a card exiled with it without paying its mana cost is slightly absurd, and really turns Voidwalker into a kill-on-sight kind of card.

We have both retro foils and extended art foils for this card, and although both should work out well in the end, I think that the retro foils should come out on top. You can grab a few copies under $20 at the moment and I think that those are good buys to double up in 12 months or so. Supply isn’t too deep compared to some of the other retro foils from the set and I feel fairly confident that this will end up in a lot of EDH decks, and on the off-chance it ends up doing well in Modern that will only make things better.

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

Theros: Beyond Death at Rotation

With rotation just around the corner, it’s time to take stock of a very powerful set and see where the deals are. Ideally we want cards with casual appeal or Eternal demand, and hopefully people will be selling off spare copies when it’s official that they are no longer Standard-legal.

I expect, based on historical trends, that we are near the bottom on these particular cards but I wouldn’t be shocked if they fell a little further over the next month or two. Up to you if you want to buy in now, but I’m comfortable doing so.

Thassa’s Oracle ($9 for the regular nonfoil up to $75 for the Foil Extended Art version) – The most popular card from Theros for Commander, I imagine this is taking a lot of cEDH attention but it’s a solid plan to back up Laboratory Maniac and Jace, Wielder of Mysteries. This is registered in more than 32,000 decks online, and is a win condition that resolves even though removal. Counterspells or bust! Jason did an excellent job last week talking about this card, so I’m going to be brief here.

Dryad of the Ilysian Grove ($17 to $77) – The Secret Lair that just ended, with Special Guest: Fiona Staples, had a reprint of this card with some sweet art. That’s being sold for $30ish but won’t be available until October. The announcement of the SL version did absolutely nothing to slow the trajectory of this card:

Not only is this a card with EDH chops (30k decks and counting), it’s also a card present in Amulet Titan and Scapeshift decks in Modern. This will need a serious reprint soon or it’ll be a $40 card. The better deal would have been to get in on these during Ikoria’s draft season, when they could be had for a whole lot less, but the rise is real and it’s definitely time to snag the Commander copies you might need.

Destiny Spinner ($3 to $8) – As an uncommon, this has just the regular and the foil, but the Commander demand for a two-mana, make-your-favorite-spell-type-uncounterable card is VERY real. It’s not just that creatures can’t be countered, but your enchantments too, and that’s an overlap players love. I don’t imagine this gets activated all that often, but this is the whole package and while the reprint risk is real, the foils are a most attractive opportunity.

Calix, Destiny’s Hand ($2 to $5) – You can get the borderless foils for under $5, with random copies reaching to nearly $3. That’s a lot of disrespect for an archetype that gets a lot of support: GW enchantments. Clearly the demand hasn’t been there yet, with Calix not even breaking 5k, but I love this as a buy-low spec. This will end up being one of the first cards players go to with a new deck. 

Setessan Champion ($1.50 to $25) – That FEA price is a real one, reflective of the demand for this card, and this theme, in enchantment-based Commander decks. That’s a huge multiplier, far more than what would be expected, and a clear sign of where the money is going. This is a prime candidate for a Commander deck reprint, when they inevitably do some enchantment theme again, and so I’d stay away from the cheapest copies. 

Over on TCGPlayer, there’s almost no copies of this in FEA or even plain EA, making those where I’d prefer to put my money. The recent spike and the subsequent lack of inventory doesn’t faze me here. The next time a good enchantment general comes along, this will crack $40 and maybe $50.

Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath ($14 to $125) – Banned everywhere but Legacy, the casual demand for this card is still very strong, being Cube-worthy and in 8k decks online. Simic is widely known to be the best color combination in Commander, and spells like this are why. It’s a pretty easy thing to do, to use this as a ramp spell and then get your value in a little later. The graph shows us when the bans hit, and hit hard:

We’ve pretty much missed the window for the FEA versions, but the basic ones are a good choice, as are the Kaldheim-style Secret Lair versions that are out there for around $30-$40. Putting them in a Secret Lair so quickly means this is probably safe from reprints for a while, but there’s no guarantees. 

Ox of Agonas ($6 to $30) – The Commander demand isn’t there, but this sees just enough play in Dredge lists for Modern and Legacy that I’m thinking about buying a few copies if the price trickles a little further south. It’s got everything you want for that archetype, and as a mythic, there are that many less copies out there. I’d prefer to have a stack of the basic versions, as compares to the fancier EA and FEA, but you do what works for you.

Nyx Lotus ($4 to $32) – Devotion decks tried real hard in Standard, but never really got there. Commander, though, is where this card shines. More than 15k people have registered this online, and I imagine almost all of them are mono-color decks. Depending on what you’re playing, this might give you a lot of mana, or a boatload of mana. The FEA version was available for around $20 a while ago:

Would be nice if we’d bought in then, but the downward trend is what I like to see. Be patient and when you see the price flatten out, grab your personal copies and a couple of spares.

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:The Ikoriarticle

Readers!

Last week I wrote about Theros: Beyond Death and promised that this week I’d write a very similar article about Ikoria. I think Ikoria is likely even more packed with value, both real and potential and I also think Ikoria had the misfortune of being overshadowed by Covid the most of any set. What in Ikoria still has some room to grow? What’s doing better in EDH than we expect? Join me as I write the same article as last week but this time about a different set, which makes it a completely different article, I promise. Let’s get started!

Ikoria gave us a ton of powerful cards, a ton of very hard to understand cards, some format staples, a sick cycle of cycling tri-lands that are fetchable(!) and some stuff for other formats that I didn’t care about even before no one played them in paper for 2 years. Focusing on EDH, the set is sort of bonkers.

Gross!

It wasn’t Ikoria that got us started with having 20+ legendary creatures every set, but Ikoria sure didn’t pull any punches, adding 10 companions on top of a more than adequate number of legends and giving us a Commander set on top of it all. I’ll focus on the Commander set in another installment, which is just as well since there are 22 creatures to talk about (Lutri was banned before the set was even legal). The order they’re in doesn’t matter a ton for finance reasons, but let’s look at what’s popular and what’s not….ular.

The only surprise for me in the Top 5 is Obosh getting nudged out by Illuna, a commander I have never seen played and forgot existed. Why don’t I have an Illuna deck – that card is really powerful. My personal bias aside, this is about what I expected. I think the Companions are under-performing a bit because you don’t need to run them as a commander if you can run them as a companion instead and make your own Kirkland brand partner combination. Is that a point worth making? I mean, maybe? But the relative popularity of the commanders is interesting even though it probably doesn’t impact any financial decisions we make since we identified what was likely to go up a year ago.

Prepare the be shocked even less by the next part.

If you bet anything other than 5 Triomes in the Top 5, you were metagaming, assuming by virtue of asking the question I was hinting that it was something other than the expected outcome. Of course the Triomes are number 1 through 5 with… I assume 5 bullets. You can’t be 1-5 with a bullet, can you? The point is, cards 1-5 with 1-5 bullets is the Triomes, which are just too good. I bought a LOT of them – showcase foil and non-foil mostly, hardly touching the set copies because they’re kinda meh. The problem I see is that I think there is a lot of reprint potential and we need to figure out when to get out. In fact, I think Ikoria has the most cards that “feel” reprintable to me of any set I’ve covered in these retrospectives. That could be a problem.

Ikoria is full of cycles and cycles are more attractive but harder to reprint, sometimes. Occasionally, a card in a cycle will get reprinted without the rest of the cards, in a commander deck or something else. The issue with Ikoria is that the cycles are 3-color which means the EDH deck it goes in has to be at least 3 colors and has to be exactly those three colors. That mitigates reprint risk significantly. I think if a card is especially reprintable, I’ll make a note, but I think we should consider the 3-color cards relatively safe enough that we can talk about them and their price over the next 2 years or so. Let’s begin.

In general, if you see a card that is selling on TCG Player for below Card Kingdom’s bulist price and the graph looks like this, that’s probably a safe place to park some moolah. If you buy the premise that the specific Mardu coloration can mitigate reprint risk, which is an educated guess at best, this feels solid.

Things get murkier when you add in the relatively anmeic growth on the extended version. EDH players seem less hype about these than players in other formats but I also think the prices are going to diverge eventually, and the extended border is even more attractive if it’s reprinted but with the regular border. In general, I like the extended borders, especially with the collector boosters relegating set foils to trash tier status. This already flirted with $12 for a minute and now it’s half that on TCG Player, I say rock and roll.

That said, to an extent, perception of price is more real than what the market is doing right now, and I think I can prove it.

These are much closer in the amount that they’re played than they are in price right now, and I think that’s due in large part to how good Bastion “seems” relative to Recon Mission. Bastion is being compared to cards like Zulaport Cutthroat while Reconnaissance Mission is being compared to cards whose prices seem based on scarcity rather than efficacy like Coastal Piracy. I don’t think being in 3,000 more decks means a card should cost 5 times as much and I don’t care who knows it? Which price is wrong? I don’t know, but they both seem reprintable, so maybe the foils are the place to be.

I think the foil lends some credibility to the conclusion that Bastion may be a bit overpriced, but I think they both go up from here. I don’t love buying uncommons from very recent sets, but I also think $5 was pretty reasonable from Bastion and though neither card will g et played outside of EDH, these are future sub-staples. I don’t call everything a staple, I think the top 100 cards in the format are staples and little else, but I think these are going to both be ubiquitous. Ubiquitous enough to get reprinted, but also enough to shake off a reprinting, especially in foil. I like Recon Mission under a buck a LOT.

This is going to approach $15 until it’s reprinted in my view. I don’t love buying in at $5.50 on a rare, especially one that could get reprinted, but this is a pretty harsh card for a precon and I expect that to mitigate the risk as much as 2 more colors would.

I’d say don’t hesitate to snap these off under $10. This card prevents people from playing their commander, which is mean against Pheldagriff decks but necessary against Food Chain decks, so mind your pod, I guess. The only cards in the set played more than this are the Triomes, 2 Ultimatae and a creature that can go in a 5 color deck and taps for WUBRG. This is going to be good forever* (*until they print a 1 mana 2/5 version of it next year.)

Remember, when you are looking at a set like Ikoria on EDHREC and it’s sorted by % inclusion, the mono-color cards are going to look way worse than the multicolored ones. A card like Ominous Seas which is in nearly 10,000 decks is way below a card like Whirlwind of Thought, which is in half as many.

Foils of this under a buck seems decent considering it’s part of a combo with Greater Good that could be one card away from being a whole deck archetype outside of EDH. I meant to just mention this card in passing but then I looked at the graph and I’m encouraged. This is the foil and I surprisingly think it has decent fundamentals. Don’t prioritize it, maybe, but I think its metrics are encouraging.

This promo is both at a historic low in price and stock at the same time and that doesn’t make much sense to me.

This is also in a low-stock, low-price situation and with how good this card is and how many times I’ve called it a buy in the past, I think anything under $15 is cheating. This is a very unfair card and I don’t know how reprintable it is.

I’m puzzled by the decline in price of this card, but it looks like a buck was its all-time low and it’s currently sitting at $2 which seems fine to me. If you can get these under $2, that HAS to be the floor. 4,000 decks isn’t a ton, but it’s in almost 10% of this last year’s Abzan decks and that’s a popular color combo, so I think this has potential going forward. I see this hitting $5 and staying there eventually.

Ikoria has a lot going on, and with the value spread out over the set, I think there isn’t a ton of pressure on any one card, which means the entire set can grow slowly together. That’s not as sexy as one card going up 1,000% overnight but it beats bad sets every time. It may be too late to buy Triomes, but Whirlwind of Thought, Genesis Ultimatum and Mythos of Snapdax are all under a buck, just waiting for the supply tipping point on TCG Player to tilt. Until then, I’ll be watching last year’s cards. Until next time!

Watchtower

Another Happy Landing

After last week’s venture into wild speculation territory, I thought I’d bring us back down to earth this week with some solid lands that I think are going to do well for us in the short to mid term.

Botanical Sanctum (Foil)

Price today: $10
Possible price: $40

Spirebluff Canal had been climbing for a while and recently spiked, both foils and non-foils alike. It’s seen a good amount of use in Modern over the past few years since it was printed in Kaladesh, and we haven’t had a reprint since then. Botanical Sanctum sees a little less competitive play than the Canal, but all the same looks primed to be the next one to spike.

Living End is currently playing a playset in Modern, with the Crashing Footfalls and Urza’s Kitchen decks playing occasional copies as well. It’s a popular Pioneer card and in nearly 10,000 EDH decks on EDHREC (incidentally around 2500 more than Spirebluff Canal), so there’s no doubt it’s a popular card. Foils have been draining hard, especially in the US, and so if you want any personal copies then now is the time (unless you want to wait for a reprint).

It’s entirely possible that we could see these lands reprinted in one of the upcoming Innistrad sets this fall, but I think that there’s still enough time to be in and out on some of these for a tidy profit before then. Europe has a good number of copies around $10 too, and so if you can shift those over to the US market then you should be able to realise some quick gains from those. There are only fourteen NM foil listings left on TCGplayer, most of which are single copies, so it seems like a strong movement similar to that of Spirebluff Canal is imminent.

Waterlogged Grove

Price today: $8
Possible price: $20

Waterlogged Grove is by far the cheapest of the dual lands from Modern Horizons (the first one), and I think that it’s due for a price correction pretty quickly. It’s being played in multiple Modern decks including Elementals, Humans and Crashing Footfalls, as well as being a popular EDH card in nearly 20,000 EDH decks on EDHREC. Albeit not quite as popular as most of the other lands in the cycle, it’s definitely still up there and so being so much cheaper than the rest of them isn’t going to hold up for long.

There’s still a decent amount of supply on most of these non-foil dual lands from Modern Horizons, but seeing as we didn’t get a reprint of them in MH2 along with some of the others that got the old border treatment, I’m not really sure where we might see them printed again. With that in mind, I like picking up a stack of non-foils here to hold for a little while and look to either buylist or sell playsets on TCGPlayer etc a way down the road.

Hall of Heliod’s Generosity (Retro Foil)

Price today: $6
Possible price: $20

Staying with Modern Horizons, looking at the dual land cycle also had me looking at Hall of Heliod’s Generosity. This one did get a reprint with the retro foil treatment in MH2, and although it brought the price of the card down across all versions, I don’t think that’s going to last very long. Original foils from MH1 are still holding around $14, whilst these new ones are down at $6 for the time being, both in the US and Europe. There aren’t too many copies before the listings hit $10 though, and I think that’s a good sign that we’re going to see upwards pressure on this card as more people pick them up and upgrade their old copies.

Hall of Heliod’s Generosity is in over 26,000 EDH decks on EDHREC – a veritable staple in enchantment-based decks and a highly playable card in any deck that can put it to use. It sees a smattering of play in Modern and Legacy, mostly in Enchantress decks, but EDH is where it really shines, and I think will continue to be a very popular card moving forward. Enchantments will always be a big part of EDH and so this will always be useful, and I think that these $6 copies are far too cheap. Give it 6-12 months and I think we’ll see $20+ on these – and don’t sleep on the rest of the retro foils as well, because the popular ones are likely to see similar patterns.

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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