Casual Fridays

Planning for the After-Time

We are hearing about the coronavirus vaccine and the rays of hope are starting to illuminate the future. I’m keenly aware that the virus is still a problem, and it may be super optimistic of me to think this way, but I’m hopeful that things will be back to normal by the end of next summer.

I’m VERY hopeful, because I’m a high school teacher and I would dearly love to be back in school for a fresh new year.

If that scenario holds, and things are mostly back to how things were before, then what’s that mean for Magic? What’s that mean for a collection?

#1: Paper singles for Standard might as well have rotated.

This means that cards from Eldraine, Ikoria, Theros, and Core 2021 are not only a bad idea to pick up, but you should be treating them right now as though they are about to rotate. Between the bannings and the coronavirus, Standard hasn’t been played in person in a while and I wouldn’t expect there would be much to play before rotation hits in late September/early October of 2021. 

Last year, when Theros was coming out and we didn’t know what was going to happen in 2020, I picked up a lot of Bonecrusher Giant, Fae of Wishes, and Murderous Riders. Yes, those are good in Pioneer, but looking at the play patterns online, I don’t think that I’m going to have a chance to sell these before they rotate out of Standard. C’est la vie.

Normally, when rotation is nigh, I plan to be out of those cards by Easter, but that’s probably not going to happen this year. I don’t like waiting for cards to fall too far, and here we are. Prices are already super depressed. Start with the best performing decks from this past weekend’s Zendikar Rising Championship.

Lovestruck Beast is a four-of all over the place, in 40% of decks, and is pretty much a bulk rare.

Traditionally speaking, the best time to sell a Standard card is when it is a year old, give or take. Lovestruck should, at the least, be a $2-$3 card. It was trending that way in January, but around March, when things shut down, the price tanked. 

It’s this way for most Standard staples: Bonecrusher is a buck, Vivien, Monsters’ Advocate is down to $7 despite being the fourth-most-common card in Standard, and even brand-new, free-to-add-to-a-deck Shatterskull Smashing is a mythic at $8 and falling! These cards should cost a lot more than they do.

One factor to consider is that these are the first sets with Collector Boosters. It’s true that foil Showcase Lovestruck Beast is more expensive at $2, but that’s what I would expect from a card with high Standard play and low Commander play. Compare the stats on The Great Henge, a card I’m pretty high on. Sure, it gets some Standard play (especially because it curves out with Lovestruck) but Commander is driving that boat, with nearly 16,000 decks registering it online. 

I’m willing to listen to discussions that with Commander players spending more on chase versions, the regular versions of things will be less sought after and therefore less expensive. 

But 40% of Standard decks playing this as a four-of, yet it’s a quarter? No, this is a demand problem that won’t be fixed until the very end of Standard, and I don’t want to hope that there’s a brief window of crazy Standard demand right before rotation. 

#2: Plan for the frenzy in Modern, Pioneer, and Standard.

I’m thinking of Fabled Passage here.

This is absurd. This is a land that has two printings, yes, but it’s also in 65% of the Standard field, averaging more than three copies each. It’s listed in 33k Commander decks online, and is the only fetchland currently legal in Pioneer, and is in more decks than basic Swamps. All of this is fact, and yet it’s $6 online!

Passage got a reprint in Core 21, and that put the price low enough that no one felt it was a barrier to get in. It’ll rotate out next fall, as both Throne and Core 21 will rotate out together. Very clever of Wizards, and I’d expect a Prismatic Vista reprint before we got a Passage reprint. Getting in at $6-7 and then exiting in 12-18 months for $12-15 seems quite reasonable.

Similarly, I’m in favor of getting in on Ugin, the Spirit Dragon. I’d understand if you wanted to wait till closer to rotation, but the lack of paper play means that there’s a big discount already built in:

Only 11,000 Commander decks have this listed online, and that feels off. Why wouldn’t you play this, when it offers such a backbreaking effect? Still, this was $60 before being reprinted, and is now $20. I wouldn’t be shocked if it went down to $15 by the end of October, but I also wouldn’t be shocked if it stayed where it was. I’ll be watching.

I admit I’m more hesitant about Modern cards, given that we’re getting Modern Horizons 2 at some point in 2021, but whatever isn’t reprinted in that set, you’ve got a green light from me to go wild. I’m most interested in Force of Negation, because a reprint will either drop that to $20 or a lack thereof will send it heading for $75+. There’s not much room for middle ground there.

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: I Went to Jared

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Readers!

As Obeka begins to wane (though not out of the top spot), naturally something else must wax for the balance to be maintained (I don’t know what the balance is, forget I even said that, stupid STUPID, focus Jason) and today what the waxer is became clear. It’s someone who clearly knows a lot about waxing.

Jared Carthalion, True Heir

Look at this smooth-chested, Glenn Danzig-looking rejected Manowar album cover. If you’re not impressed by the time he spends every morning, shaving the part of his body not covered by his leather karate gi, you’ll be impressed by how he’s climbing the leader board.

Shoving decks aside like he’s actually Glenn Danzig and the other decks are a fan who wants an autograph, Jared is making a big splash in the format, and a few (viking, on fire) ships have sailed already on the basis of this cartoonish 80s throwback of a Magic card. I’m sorry, I know you want me to get to the specs part of the article, but read his flavor text. “I’m here for what’s mine” like he’s Glenn Danzig in the promoter’s office asking for his check before the last note from “Long Way Back From Hell” has finished reverberating in the speakers onstage. Man, I do NOT like Danzig, apparently.

Unlike Danzig who coasted on the success of the Misfits (last one, promise), Jared Carthalion is out here doing real work.

Jared doubled the price on this card just like Glenn Danzig doubles as a poor man’s Henry Rollins. Don’t expect to get these for under a 10-spot on CFB, either, folks.

So with the “Carthalion effect” (that would be a sweet name for a band) moving prices, why are we even bothering to dig through at this point? Hasn’t every ship sailed? Hasn’t ever boat been launched? Hasn’t every mother told her children not to hear Danzig’s words by now?

I don’t think so, I think there’s still plenty of meat on the bone. I think Jared is the Nikya to Obeka’s Vannifar and since it’s a non-obvious commander, I think there are some non-obvious specs. Pariah’s Shield was some low-hanging fruit but I think there is more fruit, higher up, but I’m mixing my metaphors now. Let’s do the spec part of the article now.

The Fruit Still On The Bone

I like this for a lot of reasons. I spiked hard because of a deck in Modern with Hardened Scales and while that wasn’t sustainable, we have a second spike incoming. When a second spike happens, there is no more opportunity for people to pull loose copies out of the binders at the LGS because those all evaporated the first time the card spiked. Copies are concentrated in the hands of dealers, meaning players have to pay whatever those dealers want for the copies. When that supply sells out, there is no way to get more supply in the hands of dealers without them raising the buylist price, so they do that. That’s how we get back out of them, usually. It’s a fun cycle of people paying each other to hold onto copies of cards.

Are we close to the card selling out?

With Card Kingdom out of NM copies and about to sell out of damaged and Coolstuff (where we have about 8 people who write about EDH every week) and CFB being sold out means that the card is about to pop. It’s not just Jared, by the way.

Neyith was printed this year and Marath was just reprinted in etched foil in Commander Legends. That’s quite a bit of interest just this year and the finite copies that were in the hands of dealers who probably paid like $2 to get these when they were selling for $5 are running out. With lots of people vying for the copies at once, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jared finish what Neyith started. If people could actually get Jumpstart to build decks with it, Neyith might have been even more popular. Oh well, still plenty of fruit on the bone. Let’s move on.

This keeps flirting with $14 on Card Kingdom and when it goes back down, it never stays there for long. This is tough to reprint and does a lot of work. It also just wins the game, which is cool. I am looking forward to CFB figuring out whatever is wrong with their Crystal Commerce page – this is not $6 on CFB.

This is about to sell out at $11. If you find these for… you know, not $11, that’s a deal. Card Kingdom has 8 of these at $11, and the other number we care about doesn’t suck, either.

The non-foil caught up to the foil. I don’t think that makes the foil more attractive, but I do think it shows that this is a card that casual players like and which may have underpriced foils in the future. I don’t like EDH foils, you all know that, but once they become the same price, the foil looks better and those have a higher ceiling.

I don’t think Jared has enough juice to move the needle on a card like Pariah with 4 printings (it was also in a Saga precon that I bought a bunch of because there wasn’t a better way to get copies of Worship when you don’t have a credit card). That said, there is a tiiiny bit of movement in the price that is outside the typical noise, so it’s trending up, for what it’s worth. 4 printings means less when those sets are Saga, 7th, 10th and Conspiracy. It was basically printed in Conspiracy. I don’t love this, but they exist. It’s also a 7th Edition foil, which probably will see a bump just because it’s due one.

I like Bear Umbra a lot. We saw a nice dip and we’re starting to see the very beginning of that reverse-J shape that is the start of a nice U shape. I think this goes above $10 pretty easily and I could see CK going from selling for $7 to buying at $7 within a year.

Whenever a card costs more on TCG Player than it does on Card Kingdom, I investigate.

Well, THAT is good to know. I wouldn’t have thought to check every card to see if they’re all in-stock, but I was alerted by the TCG Player price being higher. That’s a big red flag to me. Sometimes it’s legit, but with Card Kingdom being an established Seattle store that charges more but has a super generous buylist and which, to my mind, is the flagship EDH price site, CK can usually get away with charging more than a marketplace like TCG Player. When CK is cheaper, I take 2 seconds and check. Card Kingdom sells a lot of EDH cards, if they’re sold out of all conditions, TCG Player could be the next domino to fall. We’re about to see some movement. It won’t go to $10, but it could go to $5.

That does it for me this week. Next week we may be out of commanders to talk about and with there being a lull between now and Kaldheim, I might write a treatise on why I trust Card Kingdom so much. Until then, stay safe and don’t build anything I wouldn’t build. Until next time!

Watchtower

The Watchtower 12/07/20 – Bring a Friend

Another week, another Watchtower, another loosely themed article. I don’t know if doing them like this is better or worse for you as a reader, but it definitely helps me to write them and nobody has told me they don’t like it yet, so I’m gonna keep going! (Please do shout at me on Twitter if you feel strongly either way). You can probably take a good guess at the kind of cards that I’m going to be talking about today, but I do like to bury the lede just a little bit to try and keep you interested, which means I can’t be too specific with my article titles. Anyway I’ll stop rambling – let’s jump in.

Obosh, the Preypiercer (FEA)

Price today: $7
Possible price: $20

I was flicking through some of the Standard decks that are being played at the moment, and something caught my eye. Almost all of the Temur ramp/adventure decks that are being played at the moment are playing Obosh, the Preypiercer in the sideboard as their Companion – it’s effectively a free-roll as you really don’t have to exclude many cards to get it to fit in, and you’re still able to cheat a little bit with it by playing cards like Bonecrusher Giant and Brazen Borrower that have odd converted mana costs but even costed spells attached to them.

This led me to looking at where else Obosh is being played right now, and it turns out that the current version of the Prowess / Burn decks in Modern are doing exactly the same thing (and even including the Bonecrusher Giants to boot). Being able to play a Companion without needing to significantly warp your deck around it is a great boon to any strategy, and we’ve seen Lurrus and Yorion decks still performing very well even after the change to the Companion rule. I think that Obosh is going to fall into a similar pattern, perhaps not being quite as prevalent as the other two but a decent role-player nonetheless.

I and others have talked about Lurrus in articles and on the podcast before now, as we’ve seen supply dwindle and the price going up and up. Yorion has done the same, and I’m absolutely sure that Obosh is going to do the same thing. You can currently get some outrageously cheap copies around $7 on TCGPlayer at the moment – bearing in mind that Lurrus, which sees around three times the amount of play in Modern, is over seven times that price. There aren’t too many under the $10 mark though, and it ramps up pretty quickly with only 29 FEA listings on TCGPlayer. I think that this will very easily be a $20 card in a few months, and probably head towards $40 before too long (given that I doubt we’ll see it reprinted any time soon).

Akroma, Vision of Ixidor (Foil Etched)

Price today: €8 ($9.50)
Possible price: $30

Come on now, you didn’t think we could get another Akroma printed without a good bit of keyword soup, right? Give it a few years and the next version will probably have so many keywords that the text is so small you need a jeweller’s loupe to read it. But until then, let’s take a look at what we’ve got to work with for now. Aside from just being a decent body with a bunch of relevant abilities, the fact that this new Akroma has Partner strapped to it as well makes it a whole lot better, and we’ve already seen it being paired with other keyword-endowed cards like Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh, which is quite neat and fairly amusing really.

So it’s a popular card from Commander Legends – great. But what I want to focus on here, as is hopefully evident by the fact that I’ve given you the current price in Euros, is that these are way cheaper in Europe than in the US at the moment. It’s the age-old adage (I think that’s a tautology, but oh well) of EDH cards being cheaper in Europe, and yes I’m going to keep hitting you over the head with it.

Now let’s be clear here: the etched foils from Commander Legends can be found in regular draft boosters, unlike the EA cards that only come in Collector Boosters. That means that there’s a decent chunk more supply of etched foils in general, but Akroma here is a mythic and there really aren’t too many copies going around (in the US at any rate). Prices start at $17 on TCGPlayer, almost double what they can be had for on MKM, and even after you’ve taken into account the arbitrage gains I think this card is heading upwards if you hold onto it for a while. EDHREC is showing us that it’s one of the most popular new Partners, and that’s mirrored on TCGPlayer with it having much lower stock levels than the other etched foil Mythics. I think we’re onto a winner here.

Giver of Runes (Foil)

Price today: €18 ($22)
Possible price: $50

I’m rounding things off with another arbitrage pick, and want to give a shoutout to one of the Protraders in the MTGPrice Discord for putting this on my radar last week – it’s a good find. I’m stretching the ‘friends’ theme a little bit here, but don’t worry, it’s worth it! I reckon that Giver of Runes could definitely be your friend, given the ability and flavour text on her – after all, friends are the family that we choose.

Either way, this is a card that’s been consistently performing well in various Modern decks since the release of Modern Horizons, as well as showing up in around 5000 EDH decks listed on EDHREC. Highlights include Heliod Company decks, Devoted Devastation builds and the more classic Death & Taxes lists; it’s really great at protecting combo pieces as well as shoring yourself up against removal-heavy strategies.

There are a grand total of nine NM foil listings for Giver on TCGPlayer at the moment, which start at $45 and don’t exactly go down from there. That makes the $22 copies on MKM an absolute slam dunk, great for immediate arbitrage and even better to hold onto for a little while. I can’t really think of anywhere that this could be reprinted soon other than Modern Horizons 2, which isn’t hitting until Q3 next year anyway (and even then I’m kinda doubtful that we’ll see it again there). On that kind of timeline this could be a $75+ foil by that point, especially if paper play has started to pick up again, even just at an LGS level.

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.

Casual Fridays

The Bottom On Commander Legends?

I know that there are realities to the coronavirus that far, far outstrip Magic and drafting. I’ve eschewed family this holiday season and my kids haven’t seen their grandparents in more than a year. 

That being said, the virus took away quite the run of sweet draftable products. We lost out on months of Mystery drafts, there haven’t been Jumpstarts cracked all over the place, Double Masters was a delight…but the pinnacle of things for me have been the Commander Legends drafts I’ve done on MTGO.

This set is awesome to draft. It’s pointed right at players like me, with the combination of politics, drafting synergies, and good reprints. Unfortunately, we’re not able to draft this set in person in the US, and so our supply of cards has been through the Collector Boosters. 

We are approaching the maximum of supply for Commander Legends, though there is some more product undoubtedly coming. I don’t think there will be enough to depress prices more than ten percent or so. 

I’m still going to be patient until after Christmas for buying quantities, but I’ve moved in on personal copies for my Cube and my Commander decks. Let’s talk about the best deals and what they might get to.

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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.

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