Watchtower

Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions

Due to the current global pandemic I’ve generally stayed away from talking about cards for competitive formats, other than cards that I like for longer holds and big potential gains. With vaccinations being rolled out worldwide though, we may start to get in-store play and maybe even some smaller tournaments by the end of the year.

With this in mind, I think that it’s a good time to start taking a look at some of the cards that are going to be in high demand, short supply or both when players are wanting to buy new decks or change and upgrade old ones. Modern is going to be the main format affecting card prices here, but Pioneer is a consideration to bear in mind as well.

Monastery Swiftspear (Foil)

Price in Europe: €6/8 ($7/$9.50)
Price in US: $11/$16
Possible price: $20

Monastery Swiftspear has pretty much been a Modern staple since its first printing in Khans of Tarkir, all the way back in 2014. Since then we’ve seen it utilised in all sorts of different aggressive decks, from Burn to Death’s Shadow to Prowess Blitz, and as such it’s been the number one most popular creature in Modern for a while now. A hasty one drop that stays relevant even late in the game and is pretty much always a good top-deck is very strong indeed, and I find it hard to imagine a Modern metagame where this isn’t at the forefront of the format.

Since the first printing we’ve only had one other foil in IMA until very recently, where we’ve got the new Secret Lair printing (with new art) and the old-border foil that’s coming in Time Spiral Remastered. However, despite there now being four different foils, there are caveats that need discussing. The TSR old border foils are going to be incredibly hard to come by and very expensive because of that, and so acquiring the playset that you need for Modern is going to set you back a fair bit, and isn’t going to be a viable option for a lot of people. The Secret Lair copies are the only ones with a different art, and will definitely be attractive to some people but others won’t like the style so much.

That leaves a lot of people choosing between the KTK and IMA foils, both of which are in rather low supply. If we look at TCG there are only ten listings total across both versions, with IMA lowest at $10 and KTK lowest at $16. Over in Europe supply is a little bit deeper and prices a bit lower, so I think that this is a great arbitrage opportunity for a short-term flip. Bear in mind that if someone wants foils of these for Modern (or Pioneer) then they’re going to be buying four at a time, so supply will disappear in chunks when it does. Pick up a playset or two in Europe for under $40 and you should easily be able to get $70-80 for them in the US.

Collected Company (Foil)

Price today: $20
Possible price: $40

It took a few months after its release for people to realise how good Collected Company was and start playing it in both Standard and eternal formats, but since then it’s been another staple in Modern that hasn’t left the format. It’s also been a large part of Pioneer since the format was created, but due to the lack of paper play over the last year we’ve seen Collected Company drift downwards in price a fair bit.

Once a $50 foil, you can now get original KTK foils for as little as $20 on TCGPlayer. There aren’t many around that price though, and with only 25 listings there’s a steep ramp towards $40. The only competition for these is the Secret Lair versions, but I don’t think that those are really going to hinder the price of the original foils too much. Original set foils always have a premium attached to them, and will command higher prices than subsequent copies.

These aren’t any cheaper in Europe, but if you can pick some $20 copies up in the US then I think you’ll be doing just fine in 6-12months. Collected Company decks should remain a good part of both Modern and Pioneer for the foreseeable future, and if Historic ever emerges as a paper format then that’s yet another swathe of decks that will be using the card.

Supreme Verdict (Foil)

Price today: $9/$13
Possible price: $25+

UW control decks have been doing quite well for a little while in Modern now, consistently posting strong finishes in Modern challenges and leagues and generally sitting in the top 5 decks of a very diverse metagame. Supreme Verdict has pretty much always been a staple in this deck, with the uncounterable aspect of it being much more important than the anti-regeneration of Wrath of God.

The Buy-a-Box foils have a worse art and foiling than either the original RTR or the reprint IMA foils, and so I think that the latter two will be the most desirable versions by far.. There are 29 IMA foil listings on TCGPlayer and half that for the RTR version, with both printings forming nice ramps up to and over $20. They’re around the same price in Europe so no big bonus there, but I think both markets are going to be moving upwards before long.

Don’t forget – this is also a card in nearly 23,000 EDH decks listed on EDHREC, quite a sizeable number for the few foils left on the market here. With Modern most likely picking back up a bit later this year combined with the strong EDH backing, I think that this is easily a $20+ card in 6-12 months.

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 Old Country

Time Spiral Remastered is a set aimed at reprinting cards that have had a low supply and maximizing player nostalgia. As part of this, Wizards gave us a whole sheet of cards that were timeshifted backwards, a move foreshadowed by the old border Sword of Fire and Ice that was a judge promo a while ago.

This old border sheet of 121 cards is going to drive a lot of the value of the set. Foils are silly rare, you’re getting 1.3 of those per box. The nonfoils offer some intriguing opportunities if the prices drop low enough. Let’s talk about where those prices will go, and when I want to buy in.

I want to reiterate something I said before: about 1-2 weeks after release is your target timing. Regular folks will have gotten their boxes and cracked them, looking for value. Given the premium on the foils, I am expecting everything else to take a dive. Today, though, I want to look at the preorder prices for the old border cards (from now on, abbreviated as OB and OBF) and decide when I want to be buying.

Generally speaking, since these are preorder prices, you can expect prices to go lower as more of the product gets opened. Right now, the people buying are the ones who literally don’t care about price and have to have this card ASAP. Lots of these OB cards are between $5 and $10, and will drop to $1-$2. 

One more item to consider: OB cards that are tournament staples may represent a real shift in how tournament players make their deck unique. Until the introduction of Extended Art and Showcase cards, players had to decide if they wanted to foil out their deck to make it more their own, to have that level of showing off. This involved risk, though, because an incompletely-foiled out deck can have some glaring differences between the foils and nonfoils due to warping/curling issues. If tournament players start moving in on non-foil but special versions of cards, you may see jumps across the board for those once in-person play begins again.

Thoughtseize (OB is currently $65) – Thoughtseize is a staple in Legacy and Modern, and the behavior of this card will be the clearest signal about tournament players’ behavior. There are a lot of options for this, including borderless versions and an Invocation. Should the nonfoil special versions move significantly, other staples won’t be far behind. The 2XM nonfoil borderless is at $30, but that doesn’t have the iconic original art. I think this drops some, but probably not as far as $45. Tournament players who need a full playset are going to keep this card higher than that.

Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker ($40) – This is going to come down a lot. Mystery Booster copies are $15, OG Kamigawa copies can be had under $30. Iconic Masters and Modern Masters versions are also under $20. There will be some demand to go old-border for Cubes and such, but not enough to keep the price high. I’m expecting this to fall to $25 or less.

Panharmonicon ($23) – This is about double the price of the original nonfoils, which have been trending upwards nicely, even as it was put into The List:

With foils still in the $20 range, we’re at an interesting question: Will players seek out OB versions before foils in the new frame? I can’t answer that, but I’m exceedingly curious about the answer. I’m confident that the OB versions will fall down to the $10-$15 range, but will they stay below the pack foils? I love the look of these timeshifted cards, so I’m biased, but my guess is that we’re a little too conditioned to chase foils. These will probably stay under $20 for a while. In the same vein of ‘will pack foils or OB foils be more expensive is Vanquisher’s Banner, a card I’ve long loved as a tribal spec. I’m expecting the Banner to fall much farther, though, down into the $5 range when supply is at its peak. That’s when I’d like to acquire more than a few copies.

Arcades, the Strategist ($20) – I have to admit, I thought this was WAY overpriced, and then I looked at the graph:

Seems this ‘backbone’ sort of thing has legs, and this injection of new copies has come along at the perfect time. Arcades’ growth has been slow but steady, and while the price will take a dive in the short term, it’ll bounce back over time. I don’t expect any movement on the foils, though. This should travel down to being $10 before starting the climb back up. Every new Defender creature or memes like a Giant Ox should see a blip in this price, too.

Wastes ($8) – Speaking of memes, players who need colorless lands are a class all their own. Full-art foils from Oath of the Gatewatch were nicely positioned to be the growth target, and now this. Nonfoils are definitely going to drop a bunch, and I’m not sure I’d want to have a lot of these around. The full-art foil versions were about $15 at release in 2016, and never really got expensive. In fact, after a spike around the time of War of the Spark, the full-art foils are now cheaper than they were after release.

For Wastes to become expensive (any version aside from the most basic) there’s going to need to be a new colorless commander, or other colorless cards that inspire Wastes-based decks. Keep in mind that the decks which play Thought-Knot Seer and Reality Smasher don’t run many basic lands: the Modern versions play the full set of Tron lands and the Legacy builds use Cloudpost & friends. If Wizards made a new colorless commander deck, there would be some number of basic Wastes in there too. If this version got down under $1, I might spec on a few but generally, I’m 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: Time Spiral Recovered

2 Comments

Readers!

I know you don’t love baseless speculation and last week I speculated on a baseless basis based on – yeah, I’m done with this bit. If you didn’t like last week’s article, this is the opposite of last week’s in a way that you will like. If you did like last week’s article, this week’s article is the opposite of last week’s in a way you will probably still like. I’m going to make everyone happy except the people who liked that bit I was doing where I said different variations of “base” which I then abandoned midway through a sentence, but to those people I say, it’s better to have loved a weird comedic bit I was doing and lost than to have never loved one of my weird bits at all. For more base-based bits, google “Zero Wing meme” and relive the late 90s.

We have a set coming out called “Time Spiral: Remastered” which sounds and looks like a Masters set but which they swear isn’t a Masters set. It’s not a limited print run but it has some of the hallmarks of a Masters set. Splitting hairs matters very little – we are getting some meaningful reprints and some of the cards will be in a new border for the first time ever which is very exciting. So obviously, cards played in “Prestige” formats like Legacy and Vintage where people will spend real money to make the deck look as good as possible, are going to be in play. I don’t need to tell you that day 1 of the set being opened, foil old border Ponder will be money. However, some of the stuff will tank and its recovery depends very much on how much it’s played in EDH and how it’s used. I want to take a look at a few cards I think we should buy at their peak because they’re bound to rebound nicely.

When Iconic Masters came out, we identified a ton of cards that were bound to rebound very nicely and a lot of those predictions were borne out. In particular, strong EDH cards that, despite not being mythic, also didn’t have a ton of supply, really shrugged Iconic Masters off.

Look at Austere Command recover from that printing. It didn’t just recover, it crested above where it was before the reprinting. These sets can’t give us copies as fast as the format is growing and while the format can’t continue to grow unbound, we’re still seeing opportunities. I didn’t tell you about Austere Command at $10 on the way back up telling you it could hit $15 either, like I sometimes do (you still make money, sheesh), I told you about it when it was $10 on the way down, reminding you to get in at $7 or $8. Predicting what will recover and what won’t is a simple matter of looking at how and how much it’s used and EDHREC gives us all of the data we need. Why not take a look at Time Spiral Remastered through that lens? Here are some cards I think will recover.

While we used to call Eternal Witness the poster child for shrugging reprints off, too many printings has caused the price to lag from around $7 where it normally equilibrated to about $4. That said, the new art on the old border is going to be pretty popular and I think when that printing specifically bottoms out, you should consider buying. There aren’t many cards in the list of timeshifted cards that see more play than Eternal Witness – Farseek is the only one.

We might not see Eternal Witness’s Fifth Dawn printing recover, but the new one should be different enough that it will have its own price trajectory and I see it being a real gainer. Compare it to the FNM foil which is currently $50ish.

The new Solemn Simulacrum is novel enough that I think we can ignore the old price graphs. Despite Wizards attempting to keep this at like $2 by coming up with a ton of unique ways to reprint paranoid android four times a year, there is only one Jens art and seeing it with a brown border is going to make a segment of the population snap it up.

1 in every 5 EDH decks runs this card, and even if there is one in every box of Time Spiral Remastered, there will be a lot of demand, both from new decks and old ones. This has the potential to be a real money cards despite literal $1 copies of this card existing.

It’s not just the Time Shifted cards I like, however – the regular set has a ton of great reprints and I think the EDHy ones have some real upside once they bottom out.

I also think Beast Whisperer could see some upside with the new border given how much play it sees in EDH.

EDHREC is nice enough to rank all of the commanders for us to show us which ones get played the most, so take a look at that for sure.

Just click the link I provided to be taken to the site to peruse the whole list. I think maybe the new borders on some of the commanders will matter, but in general, I don’t look at commanders, I look at decks. Let’s scroll down a bit more where the cards in the set are ranked by percentage inclusion which is very helpful.

You can peruse the entire list yourself, but I think it’s worth diving into the greatest hits and talking about some cards that matter to me.

Looking at the rest of the set, it’s pretty clear that there isn’t much in Time Spiral Remastered that doesn’t have a new border that matters much in EDH or price-wise. Krosan Grip isn’t getting a new border but it’s a $2 card with six printings already. Aven Mindcenser is like a buck. Return to Dust is bulk. Damnation may be the first card worth looking at and when you sort by percent inclusion, Damnation is ranked 30th. Still, let’s take a look.

Despite being literally given away to people for playing FNM at one point, Damnation climbed to peak near $75 and stayed there until 2017 when Modern Masters kicked its feet out from under it. Despite hitting a low of $25, it rallied back to $50 where it’s mostly stayed. Damnation could get a lot cheaper but I expect it to rally back up to at least $40, maybe $50 again, meaning you could get in for easily half or less if you wait for prices to bottom out. Damnation barely needs help from other formats, but it will get that help regardless, making Damnation this set’s Austere Command. Expect a full price recovery and buy accordingly – Damnation seems like a sure bet, and the fact that it’s not in the top 20 cards in the set ranked by % inclusion doesn’t matter as much as you might think. It’s still in almost 24,000 decks and sees play in other formats. I’d have liked to see a classic border around this, but I’ll pay basically retail on these when they crater.

Look, I know I’m embarrassing both of us by putting this graph up here but we both know I basically have to. Don’t forget Sliver Legion will go up in price, basically no matter what you pay for it out of TSR boxes. You will make money here. I don’t know how much or over what time period, but it’s $50 pre-sale on Card Kingdom. I have to imagine this will be worth more than $50 in a year, two tops.

Saffi’s EDH inclusion is very modest, but if it gets any help from other formats, this could be a bulk rare that ends up worth a couple of bucks in a few years. Don’t bulk these out – the new art alone gives it a fighting chance.

All in all, I think the money is going to be made by Damnation and timeshifted staples versus anything else, so it’s worth it to buy expensive booster packs of the set imo.

This is a weird set – the most played cards are pretty cheap uncommons with lots of reprintings that could be very valuable with the time shifted border and the cards from Time Spiral proper aren’t really that interesting in EDH. That said, there are some very interesting cards here, and I recommend going to the TSR page on EDHREC to see how things are ranked and make your own conclusions. I have my opinions, but it’s your money and you should feel good about where you park it. That does it for me this week – thanks for reading. Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 03/08/21 – A Second Pass At Kaldheim

As everyone is looking forward to Time Spiral remastered (and I’m crying over how difficult it will be to get the foils I want for EDH), I think it’s time for us to take a little look back at Kaldheim. I say “look back at” like it didn’t just come out a month ago, but the product cycle is so fast these days it feels like we’re already seeing it in the rear view mirror.

Anyway, now that Kaldheim has been out for a little while and people have had time to buy their cards and build their EDH decks, I want to take another look at the set and find some good cards we might have missed the first time around.

Toski, Bearer of Secrets (Showcase Foil)

Price today: $8
Possible price: $25

Toski creeps into the top ten Commanders for Kaldheim at number nine, but if we compare it to the other rare legends at the top of the table (that have Showcase variants), we can glean some interesting data. Toski may only be at number nine as a Commander, but is in more decks as part of the 99 than any of the others above it – i.e. Tergrid, Magda and Jorn. Those three are popular in their own right as generals, but when it comes to being part of the main deck they don’t stack up to the power of the little squirrel.

Toski is uncounterable and indestructible, a combo which can make it very difficult to deal with. It fits perfectly into more go-wide strategies like tokens or Edric style decks, and the card advantage it can get you just makes it an excellent addition to most green EDH decks.

Showcase versions of Toski can currently be had around $8 on TCGPlayer, but for a rare that’s only just come out, 37 listings is not a lot. Tergrid has double the number of listings than Toski does, and yet is double the price – starting around $15 for NM foils. That seems pretty off to me, and I think that the Toskis are way cheaper than they should be. Grab some of these under $10 and I think you’ll be very happy with your purchase in 6-12 months.

Binding the Old Gods (Foil)

Price today: $1
Possible price: $5

Binding the Old Gods is the most popular uncommon from Kaldheim for EDH in terms of percentage inclusion, and it’s another one where I want to take a look at some more numbers. At around 470 decks it’s in 11% of possible decks registered since Kaldheim came out, with the next most popular uncommon being Saw it Coming at 10%. Both foils are going for around $1 on TCGPlayer, but Binding has less than half the listings Saw it Coming does – this implies much greater demand for Binding.

It certainly feels like the kind of card that people are going to want to foil out more than a counterspell – it’ll stay in play a few turns and the foils really do look great. Apart from that it’s just a great card in its own right; the fact that it can hit any nonland permanent rather than just a creature makes it much more powerful than it otherwise might be. On top of that you get a bit of ramp plus a probably favourable combat step, so I can see why people are putting it in their decks.

I like grabbing a stack of these around $1 and would even go as high as $2 if you can pick them up in larger quantities. I think it’s a card that will most likely retail over $5 in a year or 18 months, and buylists will probably not be far off that as well. If you can buy for $1 now and buylist for $4 in 18 months then I’m totally happy with that.

Doomskar (FEA)

Price today: $9
Possible price: $20

You might see Doomskar as just another five mana wrath for EDH, but I think it’s actually a lot better than that. Yes, you have cards like Wrath of God and Day of Judgement at four mana, but to get the best out of Doomskar you’re going to be Foretelling it. I think that Foretell is actually really powerful in EDH, because although there isn’t often a lot of direct hand attack going around, there are almost always going to be people casting Wheel of Fortunes et al., along with other discard effects to boot. Foretell gets around that really nicely, and so to be able to stash away effectively a three mana wrath, safe from almost every angle, is a really powerful thing to do.

Clocking in at over 650 decks registered on EDHREC, Doomskar is up there with some of the most popular cards from the set and is the most popular white card by a very wide margin. You need to pick and choose your wraths in white decks because there are a lot of options, but I really do think that this is now one of the best ones there is – especially when you consider the fact that you can Foretell something on turn one off a Sol Ring or Mana Crypt (etc.).

You can currently grab foil extended arts at around $9 on TCGPlayer, and although there are 63 listings, only a couple of those have 4 or more copies. Supply isn’t super deep, and given 12-18 months I think that this could easily see $20-25 or 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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