Specs in the Forgotten Realms

July 13, 2021 David Sharman

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.

Casual Fridays

The Math of Adventures in the Forgotten Realms

July 9, 2021 Cliff Daigle

Yes, with another set comes the need to look at booster pack formulations and see what’s out there. We have an article about how to get the special Monster Manual versions of cards, or the Dungeon Modules, and we’re going to figure out how to get the cards that we want.

For once, this is pretty straightforward, and I appreciate Wizards giving us a break from the wacky things they’ve done in sets to make certain things more scarce than usual. First, the basics: We have 101 commons, 80 uncommons, 60 rares, 20 mythic rares. That’s for the nonfoil, basic frames, and that’s what you’re opening and drafting if you’re doing this in paper.

Let’s start with the Showcase variants for this set, of which there are two: Monster Manual frames and the Classic Module treatment.

The Monster Manual is meant to be a throwback to, well, the Monster Manual from days of yore:

Apparently these really pop in foil, but we will see. There are 16 commons with this look, plus 18 uncommons, 15 rares, and two mythics.

Then we have the Classic Module, which is only for lands:

Since this is a lands-only treatment, it’s on one common, one uncommon, and seven rares.

To go with the Showcase treatments, we get what we’re used to: Borderless cards with different art than their original card (5 uncommon dragons, one rare dragon, and eleven mythic dragons/planeswalkers) and Extended-Art cards (30 rares, seven mythics) to round out the set. Interestingly, the seven rare class cards don’t have any special treatments.

It’s pretty neat that there are four different treatments, but pay special attention to the lack of etched foiling here. We’ve got four treatments, and it’s either foiled in the traditional method or not foiled at all. No in-between of the etched versions to worry about.

Let’s take a moment and reflect on what you can find in a Draft Booster or a Set Booster. You will not find Extended Art cards, but you can get the other three treatments, in foil or nonfoil. Your odds are pretty terrible, though.

We were told that 10% of Draft Boosters will have a rare or mythic with a different treatment. We also know that 33% of Draft Boosters will have a foil of any rarity replacing a common. Your odds of pulling an alternate-frame rare or mythic aren’t just 3.3% though.

First, your odds of getting a foil rare or mythic in a Draft Booster are pretty bad. One in three, multiplied by the collation of rares/mythics to commons/uncommons gives you 5.3%. That’s the drop rate for foil rares and mythics, about one in every 20 packs.

To get the variant foil frame in rare or mythic will be .53%, or roughly one in 189 packs, and that’s for any rare or mythic with a non-EA frame, of which there are 36 to choose from. So that Borderless Foil Tiamat will appear in one out of every 6,804 Draft Boosters, give or take.

If you want another way to talk about these numbers, you’ll get a foil rare or mythic rare in a variant frame about once per case of Draft Boosters.

When it comes to Set Boosters, your odds are improved, but I’m sad to say that I don’t have enough information to give you a percentage. You start with a guaranteed foil, but they haven’t yet published enough information about the collations for me to know how they got the 27% for two rares, 3% for three rares, and less than 1% for four rares.

If more information gets published, I will update this section.

Collector Boosters are the main event, though. First of all, it’s the only place to get Extended Art versions of cards, though as we’ve seen, the foil versions of the Showcase frames aren’t plentiful either.

The big draw is going to be that first slot. A foil rare or mythic of anything special, and this we can indeed calculate:

	Borderless	Classic Module	Monster Manual	Extended Art	Totals
# of Rares	1	7	15	30	53
# of Mythics	11	0	2	7	20

Given that rares are twice as common as mythics, your odds of any specific rare from these four categories is 1/63, and for a particular mythic it’s going to be 1/126.

This is in line with the ratios from Standard sets, but keep in mind that there are often special cases, like a Mystical Archive or a foil Phyrexian Vorinclex messing with our perceptions of scarcity. Let’s do some comparing:

	Odds of a specific rare	Odds of a specific mythic
Forgotten Realms	1/63	1/126
Strixhaven	1/154.5	1/309
Kaldheim	1/64	1/128
Modern Horizons 2	1/126.5	1/253

I don’t want to compare TSR here (no Collector Boosters) or Commander Legends (see gimmick below) but you can see that Forgotten Realms is going to play out a lot like Kaldheim did, only without the Vorinclex to be the chase card.

Also, the way that the Mystical Archive skewed the heck out of Strixhaven bugs me. Just a whole lot of rares crammed into one spot. Should have been 1/159 for mythics and 1/79.5 for rares.

I’ve talked in other recent articles about how this set is going to fall fast, given the lack of truly chase/powerful cards, and I haven’t seen anything in the distribution of the set to make me think otherwise. Commander Legends had a gimmick where in one slot, your Collector Boosters had only a 30% chance to contain a Foil Extended Art card. They have upped that ratio considerably, thank goodness.

However, keep in mind that if a set is viewed as underpowered or low value, then less people will open it, making it more scarce. That’s a fine line to walk, and I think we will have our chances at buying AFR at very low prices. Just be aware of the complications, which we will address with individual cards as we go forward.

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: Venture Into THe Dungeon

July 6, 2021 Jason Alt

Readers!

This week, confronted with a set that has a lot of commanders but none that do anything new, I’m a bit stuck. In the past for this series, we have looked at how new commanders will make older cards go up in price as a new archetype makes previously less played cards played more. I thought I would have my work cut out for me, frankly, since there are like 900 new commanders in this set and they’ll all require new, unique builds with tons of opportunities to speculate. Is that really the case?

Ur-Dragon, Sen Triplets, Griselbrand, Thrasios, Tolsimir Wolfblood, Edric… None of this is new. Modern Horizons two gave us a bunch of tribal commanders so I guess buy Coat of Arms?

I think we’re going to have to really nitpick to find some specs here. I will do it because I want to, but I don’t think we can do a whole article about one commander anymore. Wizards doesn’t have original ideas for new commanders but they also want to make 10 times as many as they used to before, so of course they’re going to just recycle ideas, or make them hyper set-specific.

Why did 2 people build this deck? Are there more out there that EDHREC hasn’t scraped yet? One of these decks is probably Brian Canada, but who is the other lunatic?

The point is, we could look at what goes into a Hama Pashar deck, but even if there were hundreds of them, a lot of the cards involved will be in the D and D set and nowhere else, so anything older isn’t really going to pop as a result of people building it.

Instead of doing a deep dive on Tiamat (look at the Ur-Dragon page, it’s the same deck) or even Xanathar (everyone is bafflingly building a mill deck, I guess to optimize what one card you get?), I think I’m going to do a real shallow strafing run through everything to get the big hits out of the way first. We can get granular on Osawld Fiddlebender later, but I’d hate to make you wait 2 weeks for me to even mention something obvious that already popped while we were struggling to find anything to talk about for commanders with more decks. Let’s do a quick hits article and call it a day – I’m sure I’ll find enough that you care about.

It’s Birthing Pod for artifacts. While that means some obvious stuff will get played in this deck, some stuff that isn’t obvious goes in, too, and I think there is money to be made.

Doing this for years has taught me to notice when a card costs more on TCG Player than on Card Kingdom out of the corner of my eye and focus on the card before I even realize why I’m doing it. Not every instance checks out based on how the prices can sometimes be reported and not every instance shows you an opportunity to make money, but the cheaper version on CK is the foil from The List and that card is like $9 on TCG Player, so someone is wrong. CK should never be cheaper than TCG Player and when they are, something is going to get corrected.

I wish I had noticed the trend sooner. This is currently the third most expensive card in Nemesis after Moggcatcher and Kor Haven. This is worth less than Kor Haven, a card with multiple printings (not that this doesn’t have an FTV printing) that basically used to see EDH play. This shouldn’t be worth less than Kor Haven. It would have been nice to pay $2 on these, but I think these are fine at 8.

Wish I had gotten some foils of these before they hit $25. I think Liquimetal Coating was a card that was underplayed for reasons that included just one copy stranded somewhere in your deck wasn’t enough to bother building around. With the addition of Liquimetal Torque, you have twice as many copies, and you have a commander like Oswald that rewards you for playing them like no commander before. That’s a recipe for this hitting a few bucks.

It seems like there is a consensus on what the best creature to use Minsc’s ability on will be.

Two out of every three Minscketeers agrees- this is a Hulk deck. Hulk is a card not a ton of people like very much but it’s not illegal and people are going to jump at another chance for it to be relevant. Being able to sac this for 0 mana is solid.

Erstwhile $40 card dips to $21 and is beginning to show signs of recovery? I’m listening…

Erstwhile $9 foil with only 1 foil version over its 3 printings is relevant again? I’m listening. This didn’t drop to 0 on CK, they sold out of NM foil copies. CK doesn’t report the price of lower-than-NM conditions when NM sells out, so you need to check the site to make sure there are MP and worse copies available (there are) but this is selling out at $4 and that makes me think it could be $9 again with some help. Printing non-foil versions makes the foil better, not worse.

This is basically Thrasios, so “put a Training Grounds in the deck” isn’t new advice, but Training Grounds has been put on “The List” and maybe we should look at its graph.

Can you show me on the graph where this was added to The List and copies started becoming available? Gretchen won’t be the reason Training Grounds soon hits $50, but it did make us look up the price and now we’re convinced it will.

These commanders don’t represent a ton of new ground being broken in EDH. It’s possible that’s not really a thing anymore, though. Re-introducing an old mechanic in an EDH deck will likely move the needle on one or two specific cards from a specific block, but have the good old days of the printing of Teysa Karlov making people realize Massacre Wurm is broken passed us by? I don’t know, but I do know that I’ll be paying attention so you don’t have to. Until next time!

Watchtower

Would I Lie To You?

July 5, 2021 David Sharman

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.

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