Watchtower

The Moving Modern Meta

The Modern metagame is still looking pretty diverse right now, which gives us some great opportunities for specs to pick up. There are a huge number of different decks vying for the top spot in the format, and what’s more is that there’s a lot of crossover into EDH with those cards, which makes for some even juicier targets.

Thought Monitor (Showcase Foil)

Price today: $7
Possible price: $15

Since its recent printing in Modern Horizons 2, Thought Monitor has been incorporated into multiple high tier Modern decks and stuck around as part of them. Both the updated Affinity lists and the Urza’s Kitchen decks have been using Monitor as a cheap cantrip that puts a body into play – we’re back in the Frogmite era of Affinity, and although it’s not the most popular deck right now it is still putting up good results.

It’s reasonably popular in EDH as well, with 500 inclusions on EDHREC to date – which doesn’t sound like a huge amount but bear in mind the set hasn’t been out very long and there are actually only a handful of cards with more than that from the set. Any artifact-based EDH deck should probably consider playing it; it might not be super powerful but it’s just good value all around.

This is one of the few cards from MH2 that I actually like the showcase versions of – I think that they were very hit-or-miss in general, with some of the sketch arts missing the mark but a few being spot on. There are a reasonable number of the showcase foils around but not loads – 76 listings on TCGPlayer with no big walls, mostly just single copies. They’re a little cheaper in Europe at around $5-6 but so huge margins there, but still a good option if you have access. I think that this is going to be a role-player in lots of Modern artifact decks for a while to come, and should be a solid hold to out in 12 months or so.

Flamekin Harbinger (MB Foil)

Price today: $3
Possible price: $10

I talked about the Elemental tribal deck in Modern a couple of weeks ago, and since then the deck has been putting up more top finishes and generally performing well. Flamekin Harbinger is an integral part of the deck, searching up any Elemental you need when you need it – be it an Omnath, Fury or Solitude. Flamekin Harbinger is an unassuming 1-drop that helps smooth out your hand and keep the Elementals flowing.

There are three printings of this but only two foils – the non-foil-only one being the Planechase printing – and original Lorwyn foils are basically non-existent; only three NM foils on TCGPlayer and only a few more on MKM. That leaves us with the Mystery Booster foils, which are much lower at $3 and in greater supply, with 40 NM foil listings on TCGPlayer. If people want these for Modern though, they’re going to disappear a playlist at a time and so that supply won’t last long at all.

Bear in mind this is also a fairly popular EDH card, listed in nearly 2500 decks on EDHREC and a must-have if you’re playing anything close to Elemental tribal. I think these MB foils are primed to jump soon, and if you can out them in playsets when they’re ready to sell then that just makes life all the easier.

Sanctifier en-Vec (OBF)

Price today: $4
Possible price: $20

Sanctifier en-Vec is another one of those cards that has found its home in the sideboard of many Modern decks – we’ve seen it before with the likes of Burrenton Forge-Tender, Auriok Champion etc., but it looks like Sanctifier might be replacing those as just a better option. It has the classic protection from Black and Red, and on top of that adds a huge graveyard interaction that can shut down or seriously hamper graveyard strategies.

Auriok Champion had a huge spike a little while back, which shows what even just a sideboard card can do in Modern when it’s played across so many different decks. I think that this is going to be a staple in sideboards and possibly even some mainboards of Humans, Death & Taxes and Collected Company decks moving forwards, so if you’re looking for any personal copies then don’t hang around too long.

There are a few different versions of Sanctifier, but I like the retro-frame foils the best here. They’re the lowest supply and most premium version of the card, but can still be had for just $4 at the moment. The art fits super well with the old frame and I think they look great; if I wanted these for my Modern deck then I’d definitely be buying OBFs. There are only 31 listings for NM foils on TCGPlayer at the moment and so I think that the sub $5 copies are a steal right now. Even anything under $10 is probably a safe bet on a 6-12 month horizon, and I expect this to be a part of the format for a long time to come.

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, Uncategorized

Graduating from the School of Mages

Believe it or not, there’s still a whole week until we can get the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms cards into our hands. It’s been up on Arena and MTGO for a week now, but still one more week for the paper versions! Granted, we’re not expecting this set to realign everything in Standard, and Modern Horizons 2 still has a lot of our financial attention.

Instead of trying to predict what will happen to Standard or the prices of AFR (hint, everything is going to fall) I want to look at the set that we’re leaving behind and evaluate what’s at its lowest point.

First of all, let’s take a quick peek at the current nonfoil prices, from top to $6:

Yes, there’s a couple of rares and an uncommon on that list. This set hasn’t exactly lit anything up, financially speaking, but that’s where some of the biggest value can lie, especially because paper events are going to take off again sometime soon. If these prices are where they are now, where might things go once an actual GP happens?

Let’s take a moment and look at the graph of Expressive Iteration: 

This uncommon is selling for more than 95% of the set’s rares and mythics. It’s not the first time something like that has happened in Magic’s history, but given the pandemic, and the small number of paper copies opened, and the prevalence of UR spells/tempo/blitz/whatever you want to call it, you’ve got a perfect storm for an expensive uncommon.

Expressive Iteration also has the FNM-type promo, and that’s one of the most expensive Promo Pack cards I’ve seen in a while. The presence of those versions might be what’s keeping the regulars and the pack foils under $10.

Here’s the question, though: What’s going to happen to these prices during the run-up to the first Modern GP? Iteration is a four-of in what looks to be a very popular deck, and a powerful one too, given the results on MTGO. We’re also getting Demilich in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, and that might be the final piece of the puzzle, one more solid and cheap creature for the spells deck.

I think we’re about to be in a world where Expressive Iteration is the most-played card from Strixhaven. Once paper events fire up again, I don’t think any copies will be under $10. Keep in mind that Strixhaven won’t rotate out of Standard until October of 2022, giving it a lot of time to shine. A reprint seems quite possible, but for right now, I think you get your copies cheap. 

The other card that sticks out from this list is Wandering Archaic // Explore the Vastlands. It’s only in 6600 EDHREC decks so far, but that’s a very high number for a card that only came out three months ago. It’s colorless, so can be put into any Commander deck, which means you have to have a reason to leave it out. It requires a tax, or an answer, things that I love doing to other people at the Commander table.

It’s already this popular after such a short period of time, and that bodes well for its future pricing. Archaic is at its lowest price so far, and I don’t think it’s done falling.

I would want to see the price start to trend back upward before I buy in on copies. There was a window to buy foil Extended Art copies around $20, and now those are up to $26. The nonfoil regulars being as low as $6 are a good sign, and looking at the most recent TCG sales, it’s got a lot of velocity. The 25 most recent sales for the regular nonfoils were all yesterday (It’s Thursday as I write this) and that bodes well. Lots of people are buying this, and that eats into the extensive amount of copies available. Give it another couple of weeks, I’d say, and you should be able to get some large quantities at $5 or perhaps even less.

Prismari Command is on here, at least the EA version, and that’s a card not seeing much Modern or Legacy play. It’s a very popular choice in Historic decks playing flavors of UR or Jeskai control. 

There’s a huge question about Historic vs. Pioneer that I don’t want to get into right now. Suffice it to say that Wizards has a strong interest in growing both formats and probably merging the two at some point. Standard will always be rotating and refreshing itself. Modern has a huge variety of decks and multiple sets that combine new cards and new reprints into the format. 

Historic and Pioneer represent a way to keep using your Standard cards even after rotation, which is a bigger deal online in Arena than it will be in paper. Remember at the end of 2019, when Pioneer combos and spikes were happening daily? Wizards would love to recapture that magic.

Prismari Command might be a key piece of such decks, and there’s a big gap between the FEA price ($11) and the pack nonfoil price ($4). Commander play isn’t a huge factor, at less than 4k decks, so you’re hoping for a lot of decks that want the mana and the draw two/discard two effect. The most basic version of Command was down to $3 about a month ago, so buying in now isn’t as attractive, but I think there’s a lot of room for growth, especially if lots of red-based decks switch to Dragon’s Rage Channeler over creatures with just plain Prowess.

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 Secret Handshake

2 Comments

Readers!

If you’re looking for a way to get a jump on the competition, might I recommend learning how to use your resources to their full potential? If you’re able to have access to information others don’t, you can make better informed decisions earlier, meaning you have an advantage of both time and a larger pool of available cards to try and get the best price from. By now, most people at least superficially know how to use EDHREC to look at the numbers and interpret them to the best of their ability. I see a lot more people using EDHREC data to reinforce their pre-conceived notions, which is not a thing I can easily teach them how not to do if they won’t read this column or listen to me filibuster for an hour on a podcast. If using EDHREC “wrong” is easier than using it “correctly” then hypothetically we all have an advantage if we figure out how to use it correctly. To that end, there is data on EDHREC right now that I bet more than a few of you are waiting on patiently. It’s there, it’s easy to access if you know you’re supposed to and I’ll show you exactly what it says and what I think it means. It’s never too late to figure out how to use a thing better, so let’s stop my meandering and focus in on the value, shall we?

NOW On EDHREC

Currently if you click on the “sets” dropdown, the latest set is Adventures in Forgotten Realms, but not the EDH precons. However, if you click on “All Sets” at the top (something that took me a while to figure out), the page it takes you to is maybe a little bit different…

Nope! Same thing here. Too bad, I was going to look and see what people are putting in the EDH precons to see if there were any specs there, but if there’s no data, there’s no data. OK, that’s it for me this week, everyone! Join me next week for another exciting article full of specs and edutainment.

You’re Still Here?

OK, I kind of promised I’d show you some harder-to-find data and if you insist, I’ll follow through. You see, while the pages for the sets are completed, EDHREC is scraping data for every deck we can find and sometimes that data doesn’t have a page built for it. So where does it go? Well, as it turns out, we build the pages for each commander before we build the overall page for the precon set because that’s easier to do as soon as the card is spoiled and we don’t know how the page will be organized. So the data has been scraped and pages built for each commander. So how do we get there?

The search bar at the top right part of the page.

Yes, it’s obvious, really, but how many people opened up EDHREC looking for the precon decks, didn’t find them, and closed the tab? Lots. If you can perservere where they gave up, you can get access to the information they wanted sometimes days or even weeks ahead of them. You will have to know the names of the commanders and check manually, but there are worse inconveniences to endure for access to complete data. Type in Galea or let me just link the page for you.

We did it! We are magically transported to the page. So is there anything juicy in this deck? Let’s explore together.

Hard to believe this ever flirted with $5. You see it now and think “Yeah, $10 is about right” and being about right now means it might not be the best time to buy in. It’s never hitting $32 again, and you’d need it to hit at least $20 to be glad you bought in now. I think $20 is actually doable if it dodges reprints. Let’s not forget to check the same place I’m getting the commanders’ names from to see if Hammer is in the deck before we make any proclamations about future reprints, though, shall we?

It’s not in there. I don’t think this is the least risky bet of all time, but I think hitting $20 is reasonable. Also, there is only one foil printing of hammer, so let’s look at that.

I… would not have predicted this shape. OK. So the buylist is about to converge with retail on the only foil version of a card that is going to be a shoo-in with upgraded copies of the precon about to release. I’m going to call this a pick-up officially. Again, I don’t know anything about foils so make up your own mind, but, come on. Look at that graph. This trend can’t continue.

I am going to be honest, I’m surprised Shikari recovered. It was buried in a value-dense cat precon and seemed like another bulk rare that got dealt a deathblow. Now it’s half of its pre-reprint price and basically to make money buying now, it would have to flirt with $9 again. We may have missed the boat on this one and we’ll have to use this as a data point when we examine precon reprintings and which cards can recover in a future installment.

The one juicy opportunity I see here is Counterbalance, a card currently plummenting and currently in one of every five Galea decks in the database. I think the supply is low enough that EDH can pick up the slack.

This is sort of an ugly wedge of the page to show off, but I did it for Galea and thought I might as well keep it up. Here’s Vrondiss’ page.

I am going to come 100% clean here – when the original Ixalan dino hype around this card died down and the card plummeted sub-$2, I sort of stopped paying attention. This is baseline at the pre-plummet price and it’s on its way up. This is due a second spike and without the cheap copies everyone hoovered up last time it popped, the supply is in the hands of dealers and it’s going to flirt with $10. Do we have time to make money?

Yes? Sure? If Citadel, a card in one deck that was 6 months and 12 expansion sets ago can maintain value, Pyrohemia, a second spiker, is in great shape.

Dragon’s Hoard is in the deck and is currently solidly $5 on Card Kingdom. If Hoard goes to bulk, do we see a return buying bulk copies of a card that quintupled in a 2 year period? I don’t hate it when it tanks, and M19 will have the only foil copies, something not getting reprinted.

The foil isn’t much more than the non-foil, maybe both deserve a look.

Here is Sefris’ page on EDHREC, although I’m sure you could find it yourself by now, right?

There is basically nothing I could find here. It’s all pretty standard reanimator stuff that’s evergreen good and then new cards, a lot of which are in the precon, to help you dungeon crawl. I think the dungeon thing is cool and a subgame that gets you value only you have access to is fine. I’ll likely build Sefris and keep the deck together, but I don’t see opportunity here.

Can you find Proper on your own? I’m sure by now you can – can you tell I’m weaning you off of my help? You might have attributed it to laziness or forgetfulness on my part, but, no, I wrote a whole paragraph which took longer than linking would have. I just want to teach you to fish.

Old? Low supply? Popped already so the dealers have most of the copies? Included in a majority of the registered copies of a new deck that hasn’t come out yet? Yeah, this hits all of the beats I like to see. I’m going to call this a buy, especially since it’s like $2 lower than the price it already established it was capable of hitting. The supply here is dwindling and I like it very much. I’m much more bearish on the $30 foils, but you knew that.

It seems like TCG Player is lagging behind and currently has robbers for half of what CK has them for. Take advantage.

Or kick it old school and save even more, provided you find enough underpriced cards in those sellers’ inventories to justify what is likely $10 for shipping.

Of everything we came across today, I like Uba Mask the most, but we’re not done delving into these decks. There is still the matter of the other decks possible from the precon, built around the new Legendary creatures in the decks. There isn’t a ton of data on those or time for me to write about it this week, but since no one will know how to access the lists except you, it can wait. That does it for me, until next time!

Watchtower

Specs in the Forgotten Realms

Magic’s new D&D set, Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, isn’t out in paper for another 10 days, but it’s already released on Arena and MTGO and people have been building decks with the new cards. Preorders are up and so today I want to take a look at some of the cards I think might be good to either pick up early or keep an eye on for when prices hit their lows.

Treasure Vault

Price today: $8 in US/$4 in EU
Price I want to buy at: $2
Possible future price: $10

In general, preorder prices in the US are always too high because not enough vendors put copies up (especially on TCGPlayer), whereas over in Europe, MKM tends to have a lot more preorders up early. As such, Europe has Treasure Vault (along with most other things) priced quite a bit lower than the US, with plenty of copies available around $4.

Treasure Vault is a kind that looks fairly unassuming at first, but the fact that it’s an artifact land changes things up quite a bit. I’m looking at this from both a competitive and EDH perspective, as I think it’s going to have legs in a lot of formats. The original artifact lands are famously banned in Modern, which just left us with Darksteel Citadel (and Inkmoth Nexus I guess?) for a long time until we got the artifact duals in Modern Horizons 2. These enter play tapped though, and as such haven’t seen much play in Modern – but I feel like Treasure Vault is going to do a lot more than that. As well as it just being an artifact land to boost your artifact count for free, you can pump mana into it for a surge of new artifacts when you need them as well.

On top of its competitive potential, Treasure Vault has already been picked out as a popular EDH card. Any deck that has anything to do with artifacts is going to want this, as well as any strategies just doing things with Treasure tokens (or even just tokens in general). Albeit very early days, it’s already the number one card from the set going by raw numbers played on EDHREC, and I think that bodes well for its outlook. Yes, it’s only a rare and so there will be a lot around, but I want to look for the low point on this ($1-2 would be nice but we’ll have to wait and see), pick up a bunch and sit on them for a bit. If it pops off in Modern then you might be looking at $10+ quickly, but otherwise this is a prime target to out to a buylist in a year or two.

Circle of Dreams Druid

Price today: $5
Price I want to buy at: $3
Possible future price: $10

Now onto what I think is purely an EDH card, Circle of Dreams Druid is the Magus of the Cradle we never knew we needed until now. Okay well, some people have probably wanted it for a while but that’s beside the point – we’ve got one now and a lot of folks are going to be wanting it for their green EDH decks. It’s a tad more fragile than a real Gaea’s Cradle and costs 3 mana more, but apart from that it’s all upside…right?

Jokes aside, Gaea’s Cradle is an $800+ card now and this is approximately $800 less than that for the same effect, just a bit slower. It’s also an Elf so you have synergies there, and it’s definitely going to be a big hit with the casual players. The triple green cost does make it slightly restrictive even in EDH, but it’ll still be viable in 2-colour decks and any mono-green deck would likely be foolish not to run it.

We’ll have to keep an eye on the prices for FEA copies, but I think that if we can get a good price on them then they’ll be a great spec as well as the regular non-foils. Sub-$10 is likely good for the FEAs and we could well see them push lower than that, but it depends how quickly the EDH and casual market is to react to the card and grab their copies. Europe is well stocked on regular versions around $5 at the moment and I expect to see that mirrored in the US before long, with them probably dipping down to around $3 where I want to pick them up.

Tasha’s Hideous Laughter

Price today: $5
Price I want to buy at: $1
Possible future price: $8

Back onto a cross-format card for today’s last pick, I’m looking at Tasha’s Hideous Laughter. In terms of any competitive play this is purely a mill card, and although it could have some other uses in EDH and casual it’s likely to just be milling people out there as well. Modern Mill has always been a bit of a fringe deck, sometimes spiking tournaments here and there but never being consistently at the top of the metagame. Now I’m not saying that Tasha’s Hideous Laughter is going to completely change that, but it is a card that mill decks have started playing four copies of almost immediately.

The majority of decks in Modern play low cost spells to try and maximise efficiency, which makes this card all the better for trying to mill out as many cards as possible – if you’re playing against an aggressive deck like Blitz or Hammer Time, then it’s entirely possible that you’re going to be able to hit 15 or so cards off this for just three mana. That gets things going pretty speedily, and so I think that mill could be a more real contender in the format.

Aside from that, mill has always been a popular casual deck, and the templating that Wizards are using on cards like this nowadays (“each opponent” rather than “target opponent/player”) makes cards like this a lot more viable in EDH. When you’re using one card that hits all three or more of your opponents at the EDH table, you’re getting way more out of your cards than you used to, as well as the added benefit of a single player not feeling targeted and so perhaps not coming after you in retaliation.

All of that means that I think Tasha’s Hideous Laughter is a great pickup when it starts to hit bulk-ish prices below $1 (which I think it will). FEAs could easily go under $5 as well which could be good too, so keep an eye on those and grab them at their lows. Buylists for regular copies should look great a year or two out – maybe less if the Modern deck picks up a bit more.

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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