Readers!

You no more need me to tell you that we should be buying cards at peak supply than you need be told to buy low and sell high. I won’t insult your intelligence by wasting ink explaining what peak supply is, when it is, or why it matters. As much as I am tempted to use the limited space above the fold I have to fill, I think I’ll use that space more productively. You all get it, prices are best when there is the most competition to be the cheapest seller. I have some opinions about what the best targets are when that happens and if you don’t think about Magic exactly like I do, I might have some ideas you hadn’t considered. I’m using data to back my conclusions as always, and I think Modern Horizons 2 has some parallels from Modern Horizons 1 we can reference. In short, let’s go into peak supply week with a plan and make some money, shall we?

Right off the bat, I’m struck by a few things I did not expect. I made it a point to say early and often in this series that I don’t plan to argue with data, and while I’m not going to argue with data, maybe I will make that one high pitched noise that sounds like the beginning of a word drawn out that sort of indicates “yeahh…..not so sure about that one…” at a few of these. Here’s why I’m going to make that noise at all.

1. It doesn’t actually matter that much if I’m wrong. If you think you’ll play the card, buy it regardless of what I think about it as a spec and if you were going to spec on it and don’t because I talked you out of it, you spent that money elsewhere so you made money with that money anyway.
2. I think it’s worthwhile to express my personal opinion on the record about certain cards so if I am wrong about cards like it a lot, either I’ll figure out bias may be impacting my decisions.
3. This is my column.

So, looking at the initial (albeit sorted by percentage of inclusions, which matters but not necessarily in a bad way) data, I am making the “dunno about that” noise at a card very high on the list.

I think one of the reasons he may be a bit over-represented as a function of percentage inclusions is that not a lot of the decks being built since this set became legal are artifact-based, but all of the white ones are. That said, I don’t really care if this is over-represented or not, I guess. This has actually ticked up a buck or two since Friday while most things are tanking and I am not sure if that’s a good sign or a bad one. I don’t know if it’s a good buy at its current price and I don’t know if the amount it’s played in EDH is going to fall of long-term and I don’t know if Modern can pick up the slack. There are too many unknowns for me. Gun to my head, I’m staying away but there is no gun to any of our heads, so maybe we should just call an audible here and move on to more obvious money.

This is a $4 foil and I predict this will be an $8 or so non-foil in the future and that’s all I really have to say about that. With Collector booster boxes detroying the price of a lot of the rares, the fact that you get more rares than uncommons in your average collector booster might make these foils retain some value. There are no etched foils, no prerelease stamp foils, no sketch card version, just this and the foil. I like those odds. This isn’t a bad Tireless Tracker, it’s a good Lotus Cobra and I think people are catching on. I DO like this at its current price and predict it will go down more, at which point I feel OK pulling the trigger on 4 times as many copies as I need for my decks, which is a lot of copies to begin with.

This is getting a lot less attention than I had anticipated. Having a lot of decks where my Eternal Witness getting milled stymied its usefulness as an out, I am excited by this card but the format isn’t there yet. I think at its current price, the odds that it tanks more are far less than the odds it gets picked up either when people come around or when something gets printed that uses this. $2 for a foil sketch version or set foil seems OK but I bet it drops more in the near term and I’m watching to see if it does.

This card is the real deal. Urborg is good with Cabal Coffers. Yavimaya is good with Knight of the Reliquary, Quirion Ranger, Llanowar Druid, Patron of the Orochi, etc. If this gets played at all in Modern, its price is headed for the moon. Let’s compare to Urborg, again, a worse card.

Does this make you like Yavimaya under $20? It does me. Extended Art looks better, etched looks worse. In fact, I am avoiding all etched foils until it makes no sense not to ignore them for my decks. People really hate them and I don’t blame them, and prices are tanking accordingly. On Thursday, an etched foil Misty was 130 and a retro foil was 150. Today the etched foil is 65. Gross. Buy Yavimaya, and focus on the Extended Art imo.

I am torn, here. Damn is the real deal but it also goes in way fewer decks than people might think. The decks that will play this already have access to a billion wraths and they’re annoying to play and to play against. While Damn is very good, it’s also a bit of a solution with no problem. Does that limit is adoption more than it is already limited? I don’t think so, but I also think the demand is a bit overstated. That said, I wouldn’t mind a control player just killing a problem creature rather than killing every creature when they draw a wrath and need to kill something to stay alive, so maybe I should be encouraging more decks to run this.

It won’t be today, but at some point, people will realize that this gets played in more than just Squirrel decks and it’s quite good. It’s a $1 foil and the sketch foil (which sucks) is even cheaper, but for good reason. I might get a little aggressive on these when they get a little cheaper.

You get about 5 bridges per collector booster box which means you get 0.5 Rustvale or Silverbluff Bridges per box. That’s a highish supply, but is it high enough to keep the foils under a buck? I am not so sure. The RW and UR ones are the only targets, imo, but I like them around $0.50 in the long term.

I think this is a bad Draugr Necromancer but I have been mostly keeping that opinion to myself. I am not going to argue with data today, so let me say that this is in a lot of decks, a lot of those decks are Chatterfang which is the most popular commander and people didn’t read the text on Draugr Necromancer while they did read the text on this card and would rather sac their leyline of the void to not have to pay the mana cost of a card than keep their leyline and pay the mana cost on those cards. Are they wrong? Am I? I don’t know, but I do know this is played a ton. So how many rares from Modern Horizons 1 would have been a good week 1 buy at $15? Just Prismatic Vista and Fiery Islet, I think.

I am not saying don’t get Voidwalker at $15 or even at $10, I’m saying there isn’t much data to support doing one thing or the other and I’m parking money elsewhere.

What card do we compare this to? Is this better or worse than Faeburrow Elder? It seems really situational, doesn’t it? Faeburrow can’t go in non-white decks and maxes out at 5 mana while this can’t get bigger, and needs you to run a lot of enchantments.

I thought Faeburrow was a slam dunk at $1 and while it’s doubled since then, it wasn’t quite a slam dunk, either. I think Weaver is much more narrow but also has a higher ceiling. I also watched Faaeburrow go from $5 to $1 then take a year to get back to $2, so either way I think we wait out Sanctum Weaver for as long as we can.

I think EDH is going to impact the prices in this set a lot and I also think with a few exceptions, Modern and EDH are focusing on very different cards with little overlap. EDH players don’t seem to care about Grief or Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar as much as Modern players do, although Ragavan and Urza’s Saga are great in both. Pick 10 cards to pay attention to, watch their prices and when they stop being in freefall and bounce a bit, leverage your format knowledge and make some money. It took Hexdrinker and Pyromancer over a year to get to where we thought they should be, so be patient. Until next time!

Readers!

It occurred to me recently that perhaps the best way to judge reprint risk is to assume that Wizards has access to the same data that we do. I think that they do because of course they do, but also they sometimes remind us that they do.

If the first thing that comes to Gavin’s mind when someone asserts that a card needs a reprint is to check EDHREC, whether or not he understands how many decks 1% of every deck in the database is, it stands to reason he has checked EDHREC before. If there were some secret WotC way to gauge card adoption in EDH, would he have? Did he not because it takes too long? Does he not wanting the unwashed knowing he has access to better data? Or does WotC base their decisions partially based on EDHREC? I mean, that’s what I do, so like, on the one hand it’s cool that I’m doing a thing that people at WotC do also which means I’ve figured out the best way to do it, but also, yikes, a little?

If Wizards is operating on the same info we have access to, they might be basing what they deem is worthy of a reprint on raw EDHREC data. If Gavin is saying “only 1% of decks” play Champion’s Helm (3,450 in the last 2 years, or about 500 more decks than run Godsend, a $17 card) to scoff at the idea of Helm needing a reprint, what else doesn’t need a reprint in their estimation? There are a lot of cards that can live in a sweet spot of too niche for a set like Commander Legends which they insist on making draftable, isn’t a format staple, is too expensive to put in an EDH precon or is “only” in 1% of the half a million decks currently displayed on EDHREC. If they’re looking at EDHREC to decide what needs a reprint (or a sexy new retro frame), we should look at what they’re looking at to see what is hiding.

I’m going to start by heading to EDHREC, going to Top Cards from the dropdown and clicking on Last 2 Years. That will take you here if you can’t figure it out from that description. It displays the Top 100 by default, but you can click “load more” at the bottom, which is what we’re going to do. A few times. If 1% of decks doesn’t warrant a reprint, let’s see what’s hanging out around that number.

Does 5% of decks seem like a lot? Because here is what I found when I drilled down to 5%.

Second Harvest could probably use another printing, but maybe that’s just me. At this point, I’ve hit “load more” 5 times and scrolled down to the 500th-most-played card, Whir of Invention. We’re still in the territory of stuff that seems like it deserves a reprint, but we haven’t run out of good cards, yet.

Only 3% of decks.

Clearly we have drilled down enough, because it’s at 3% of the nearly 300k Blue decks on EDHREC that we run across a card that warranted a “The List” printing but not an actual one. They don’t seem that worried about a card that was flirting with $50 getting an actual reprint, so we should check a bit more in this area.

Training Grounds was on a great trajectory and it hasn’t been harmed overly much by the inclusion in “The List” printings, which is a relief. I think cards similar to Training Grounds are good places to park money – even if they do get a reprinting, it will likely be a The List printing, which we’ve seen knock maybe 20% off of a card’s price but still leave it on a mostly upward trajectory. What else reminds me of Training Grounds?

I found a few decently expensive cards in this category but they all overlapped with Modern in a way this does not. I think it’s possible something happens in Modern to break Training Grounds, but that’s less a repudiation of my thesis and more, I don’t know, a sick opportunity for people who had a playset of Training Grounds to make some quick scrilla? I think Aesi is on its way to $20 so why not ride the Serpent all the way to value city? The metaphorical city where you get value for your cards, not the furniture store.

There may just be too many of these to nail down a good version to buy. Do you get the $70 foil Mothra with the Godzilla treatment? The $14 promo pack foil? The $18 Extended Art non-foil (probably)? Cards Ikoria and after have some special consideration we need to take and maybe we avoid them until it becomes clear what the move is. All I know is that Luminous Broodmoth feels like cheating and it’s too cheap.

I don’t expect to find a ton of $50 cards down here in the sub 5% inclusion pile, but I also don’t expect this card to stay below $10 on TCG Player for much longer. This hits $20 if WotC continues to ignore it, and given how expensive it is to cast and how feel-bad it can be to very new players, this seems like it gets left alone. I want a brick of these.

After scrolling down a lot more, I came across the card that reminds me the most of Training Grounds so far.

Oh yeah, that’s a Training Grounds, baby. Look at the year it came out, the price, the “mere” 2% of Black decks. If they reprint this, it will be on The List and then so what? If they don’t throw it on The List, GOOD.

It’s suffering a bit of a post-Tergrid hangover, but who doesn’t want to catch it all cheap and easy on the rebound?

I like Quandary a lot, especially if the price continues to drop a bit due to the post-Tergrid glut hitting the market. The next spike will be even harder and I would like to have a bunch in hand the day it does. This is a brutal card, much too brutal to put in a lot of the precons where they reprint cards and yet it’s durdly, much too durdly for a set like Modern Horizons. It’s hard to reprint this, and with it being in “only” 7,000 decks, (albeit twice as many as Champion’s Helm), I think it’s pretty safe.

I’M NOT DUNKING ON GAVIN.

He wasn’t saying anything a lot of the people in the Pro Trader Discord don’t also say regularly. Without context, a card’s percentage or even raw number of inclusions doesn’t really mean anything, but if WotC has a better way of determining what in EDH needs a printing, they aren’t tweeting like it. I don’t think relying on this tweet from Gavin to make all of our financial decisions is prudent, but I think noticing that someone at WotC in a position to decide what cards end up in these products seeming to echo common sentiment that I have made a lot of money from knowing better than presents an opportunity. If the people in a position to reprint cards tell you they’re not going to reprint something, listen. Anyway, that’s my stupid article for this week, I hope you like it and I hope we make some money. As always, Pro Traders get a 48 hour head start before I even think about buying any of these cards. Until next time!