Readers!

I know I love to do a data-driven series. and you love to read such a series, but 2020 is almost over, and I think it’s time to take a look back at stuff that came out in 2020, will be expensive later, and which you can get for less now. Let’s have the “wait, when did that get expensive?” conversation now that the stuff is gettable for a reasonable price, shall we?

I’m serious, I usually do a few paragraphs of preamble to have something “above the fold” so to speak because we like to tease non-Pro Traders for a few days to incentivize people to buy the membership but I am too eager to get into it, let’s talk about cards I love from 2020.

There was never a “great” time to get this card. It’s going to go up, especially the extended-border versions. The ship has largely sailed on the $40 foil (I didn’t really expect its initial price of $30 to be a bargain, but it never dropped below $30). Beyond Death is a weird, topheavy set that was the first set to have collector boosters, was hit hard by distribution issues related to the pandemic and rares in the set are somewhat overshadowed by the marquee mythics in the set. Theros Beyond Death actually has quite a few cards that I like bordlerless long-term.

I haven’t looked at how the most-played cards from that set have shaken out, and if I was surprised, it’s possible you will be, also.

What is this, a picture for ants?

You can check the page yourself and peruse through the entire set – it’s worth it. The surprises here are Underworld Breach played a lot in EDH, Heliod’s Intervention in the Top 5, Calix in the Top 10 and Nyx Lotus, Athreos and Woe Strider not in the Top 10. I didn’t like Nyx Lotus much, but I thought I was alone.

Focus on Theros – it’s a year old already and prices are flat but demand could catch up to supply soon. EDH is basically the only plague-proof paper format, thanks largely in part to spelltable. You can find some cards I missed, but I’m going to move on.

These are all too cheap. They look great, they’re not curly-ass stupid foils (I like the showcase foils, too, though) and they’re played a lot.

Cards 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in the set are the Triomes. The fact that the showcase versions aren’t just full art but their stylized, sexy, unique art tells me that they are going to be the go-to in the future. I hate foils but I don’t hate making a deck look nice and now I don’t even have to use foils to make my deck look nice if I don’t want to (I don’t).

The extended art triomes are too cheap. They look to me like $1 Rishkar’s Expertise and Aetherflux Reservoir used to. Buying in above $5 is a little loose but it’s reality and is likely a bargain. I don’t know how reprintable these are, but I suspect “not very.” I think there is a lot to like from this set, but a lot of it is “very good” and not “slam dunk” but I think the full-art triomes are and always have been a slam dunk. I don’t see anything in the data to suggest otherwise. All of the top 20 cards in the set are worth looking at extended art, but the triomes are far and away my favorite. I am considering ending the article here so you don’t get distracted by other picks.

Core set 2021 was a real mixed bag. I expected… some of these things. #1 card is Sanctum of All? Granted, it’s sorted by percent inclusion, meaning a significant portion of the 5-color decks made in the last 2 years include Sanctum because a significant portion of them are sanctum decks. It’s generating its own headlines, essentially. Check out this Top 20 – it’s nuts.

At $11 on TCG Player, I think this is a fine pick-up. It might not have the most upside at this price, but it’s been flat for too long and this stupid card draws too many stupid other cards. It’s too good. You know what card I hated and James said on Fast Finance he liked and I said “No, that card sucks” and now everyone is playing it but it doesn’t matter because the price hasn’t changed much?

Could this go to $5? Maybe. It’s a non-mythic rare from a core set, but no one even drafted the set and the extended border gives it so chops. I hate foils, but the foil isn’t unattractive.

As this approaches the price of the non-foil, I more and more relax my anti-foil stance. The card is played a ton in EDH and it reminds me of cards that end up in a ton of casual decks and become $5 overnight, surprising everyone. I don’t want to be surprised, I want to have a lot of copies when this goes up. Let’s all look at the price graph and marvel at how James said it was a great card, I said I hated it, everyone is playing it, and he would have been wrong to buy them in July and I was right not to. MTG Finance is easy when you’re never punished for being wrong.

I’ll do another article like this in 6 months for the stuff printed more recently. We have time for long-term specs to materialize but, until then, stock up and prepare to look smart later. That does it for me this… year, I guess. Thanks for being great readers and we’ll see you all in 2021 where Boston Dynamics robots will become self-aware or a meteor will hit or something will make us all tweet “Man, I thought 2020 was bad.” Until then!

Readers!

We talk about reprint risk a lot but today, I want to talk about the opposite of reprint risk and how a category of cards that keeps making itself obsolete is not only sheltered from reprints, but also benefits from the need to redundancy. Today, we study cards that beg for new and improved copies of themselves that are also cards that are new and improved copies of something else. That sentence will make sense later, I hope.

What?

OK, so you know how one of the earliest things Blue knew how to do was pretend to be something else?

It was a good effect, and a very blue one. Being able to copy their best creature and thus neutralize it, copy your own best creature and thus double it and generally get a ton of value from a card that had a lot of utility in a color that wasn’t exactly known for having efficient creatures was popular early. Doppelganger and Clone both became popular cards and for years, Clone was reprinted into absolute oblivion. Doppelganger was left alone, mostly, but Clone lived on as the de facto, well, Clone effect. Eventually, WotC realized it was a fun design space and started sexying up the clones a bit with new effects, broader ranges of targets and better names than “Clone”.

The question is, if Clone had 0 reprints after, say, Unlimited, would its price be higher because of scarcity or lower due to being obsolete? I realize it’s an unfair question, but the question itself isn’t that important, it’s how I’m framing the rest of the article. We should be thinking about how a format like EDH with 100 cards that are 1-of effects is so profoundly different from a format with 60 cards that are 4-of effects that being “the best” Clone effect doesn’t matter, and being “the worst” doesn’t even matter some of the time. Sometimes you want to do your best Ash Ketchum impression and leave home 10 at to go engage in a bunch of what is basically legal dogfighting with no parental supervision catch ’em all.

Sakahsima is very popular right now and while there are a lot of decks pairing Sakashima with other creatures to amplify those effects (Krarkashima is blowing a lot of other decks completely out of the water, which has been a nice surprise and is why I didn’t try to guess which combinations would be the most played because I would have guessed wrong) people are also going mono-Blue Sakashima. Why? To load up on Clones, baby! And why not?

If you have enough clone effects, you can copy the same creature with a powerful (or hell, even a weak) ETB effect every turn and make opponents feel a sense of deja vu that ends with their death. It’s a silly deck but people like it and if people like it, they’re going to buy the cards.

If the deck needs basically all of the good clone effects, it doesn’t matter which is the best or worst, but merely how many the deck has room for. Since Clone effects, for whatever reason, are cards they’d rather redesign than reprint, the reprint risk on them is very low, making them appealing targets, and the fact that a deck can come along and make swaths of them relevant again all at once and could do so again in the future, makes them also appealing targets. Let’s look at the Sakashima page on the ‘Rec and try to find some good ‘uns.

The harder-to-get and less-printed ones have already begun to tip. The thing about Commander 2015 is that after everyone grabbed the one obvious card out of the deck, they sort of stopped caring about everything else and a lot of those cards started to pick up steam in EDH. Everyone was so focused on Containment Priest and Teferi that they didn’t realize that a lot of the decks have $3 cards in them. A lot of $3 cards. A lot of the Black deck has these 7 mana spells that most players didn’t even read that are pretty powerful effects in EDH. Gigantoplasm is still gettable for $2 on sites that didn’t get the memo and it’s unlikely the card ever gets printed again. It’s not flashy like Clever Impersonator, but there is something to be said for not being Clever Impersonator and therefore not getting reprinted. I like these at $2 and I don’t even hate them at $4.

So what will it take to push a card like Cryptoplasm out of bulk rare territory?

It seems like, with a similar amount of play for both cards, we’re waiting on supply to dry up. There are simply more copies of a bulk rare from a regular set than a card from a Commander deck. The demand for the Blue deck didn’t really materialize until it was far too late to print more – Teferi decks became a cEDH staple, Cyclonic Rift hit $20 and climbed more and we don’t need a third thing, two things is enough when those two things are the two things, but you were expecting a third thing.

So if Cryptoplasm doesn’t get there, are there cards that can?

Are we better off waiting for a card we know will recover to do that, buying when we know we’re at the absolute floor because the price has rebounded ever so slightly and the set it’s in was 10 products and 2 months ago?

Do we buy on the basis of a huge price disparity between two sites because we know that Card Kingdom slings a lot of EDH product, we’re not likely to get a reprint soon, the card sees play in a lot of formats because it’s not just a big, durdly, 4-mana clone?

Do we buy somewhere between the floor and ceiling because we know there are additional factors that make a card difficult (but not impossible) to reprint and we know once it goes out of print the price will go up?

It’s hard to know exactly what to do when we see data like this. Personally, I think if we were going to target a card like Gigantoplasm, the time to do so would have been before it started to get bought up a bit, buying in at the floor. A card that is a bad version of a good card and therefore obsolete can lay dormant for years, waiting for the deck to need enough redundant copies of the effect to spike it up and when that happens, the price spikes hard. You want to be the one selling into that first wave because a second spike isn’t guaranteed for a card with medium demand and 0 supply the way it is for a card with high, sustained demand and medium supply in two waves.

I don’t know if I like any of these Clones other than Gigantoplasm which appears to have some room to grow and some supply at the old price, Phantasmal Image which has grown a lot but isn’t done and Spark Double which has additional utility but less reprint risk. You don’t HAVE to target any of these, really. But what we can do is use this case as a lesson because while tribal cards are obvious when a new tribe is announced, you’re not always the one holding Louvisa Coldeyes, sometimes you’re the one trying to buy Bitterblossom because WotC announced a fairy tale set and you stopped listening when you heard the word “fairy.” “Clone tribal” turned out to be a thing, if you apply a very loose definition of what tribal decks are. But hear me out – the people applying the same loose definition of what cards should be grouped together in a deck the way players are going to are the ones who will be prepared for the next thing that is a little less obvious than “they spoiled a Minotaur, you know what to didgeridoo about it.” Until next time.