Tag Archives: Commander

Reserved List in Commander

March 3, 2016 Douglas Johnson 2 Comments

So About Those Legacy Cards….

How about that? Magic prices have been going crazy over the past few weeks, and a lot of it is thanks to the Eternal Masters Announcement that I personally haven’t really talked about a whole lot. I’ve been more focused on casual hits and collection grinding recently to worry about that kind of stuff, although I did enjoy the jumps on a few Legacy staples. Thankfully, the market that I want to talk about today moves a lot slower than the more competitive land of 4-ofs. While the wake-up call of “Reserved List is here to stay” has driven some interesting Legacy prices spikes, I’m happy to say that Commander has so far remained relatively untouched. If you’re someone who’s been on the fence about certain Commander staples for a while, let me be one of the first to say that you don’t have a lot of time left.

Why Commander?

First, let me address some of the reasons for speculating on cards when their sole demand comes from singleton formats like Commander, Cube, and Tiny Lea-hahahaha…. Sorry, I couldn’t write that with a straight face. Anyway, let’s say for example that you buy 9x SP copies of Volrath’s Stronghold for $21.29 each. You know that it’s a powerful staple in almost every black Commander deck, and you’ve jammed it in at least a few Cube drafts before. According to EDHrec, Stronghold sees play in 10% of all decks that can support it. While this isn’t close to the numbers of staple cards like Eternal Witness or Sol Ring, it’s still a strong showing and a versatile card.

You did so because you’ve been noticing the supply dwindle on TCGplayer from 48 sellers with no price filters, all the way down to 30 sellers as of 3/1/2016. You want to check vendor confidence in the card, so you check SCG’s storefront and their buylist. They’re currently out of stock on Volrath’s Stronghold at $30, and their buylist for NM copies is $17.50, which is 75% of the TCGmid price today. Starcity wants more Strongholds, so I’m going to follow suit.

One of the problems in speculating on a 1-of wonder is the inability to unload a significant amount of copies relatively quickly. Patience is a virtue when dealing with Commander cards and finding the right buyer for them, because we’re not shipping them out in playsets or selling into the hype from tournament results. We have to accept the slow trickle of sales as they come, and that type of strategy certainly isn’t for everyone. It’s probable that this is not the single best Magic: The Gathering card to buy right now if you’re looking to make a huge amount of money in a short period of time (In other words, it’s not the next City of Traitors where you can easily sell playsets to aspiring Legacy players). However I think it’s safe to say that cards like Volrath’s Stronghold and Earthcraft are some of the safest buys you can make at the moment (Except bulk rares!), especially if you intend to jam them into your Commander decks for the next year or so.

Specsheet Tracking

I sometimes obsess over cards that I speculate on, because I’m that confident in them. Many of the cards that I buy in collections and set aside for later have an “Eh, maybe one day” feel attached to them (Breaking // Entering, Seance, and Aggressive Mining are some of the forerunners in this category). However, the rest are the vocal majority that I’ve chosen to write about. I like to break down as many aspects of the card as possible, and keep my finger on the pulse day after day to check any minuscule change. Noticing the small 2-3% increases in price day after day is often the sign of an incoming spike in the near future.

While this spreadsheet model is far from perfect, I think it’s a decent representation of the factors that I’m trying to keep track of in my single-card case studies. Creating an “MTGfinance” routine in the morning can take less than ten minutes; simply scroll through Twitter, check your mtgstocks interests, and take quick glances at the applicable pieces of information in the spreadsheet above.

So Other than Stronghold….

Oh, right. Volrath’s Stronghold is obviously not the only card that we need to keep our eyes on here.

Is “Buy reserved list cards” going to be earth-shattering news to anyone with a cardboard cutout degree in Magic finance? No, of course not. You all have already made your money on Mox Diamond and City of Traitors, so these singletons are irrelevant to you.

End Step

Breaking news: Wizards just announced the first werewolf planeswalker, which we can probably assume will follow the trend of being a double-sided walker like Garruk Relentless. I would assume that she is able to flip back and forth between forms due to the following line “she can control the transformation, in both directions, with relative ease.“
As we talked about last week in the Werewolf article, the Shadows over Innistrad checklist that was spoiled shows no mention of any legendary werewolf or planeswalker, but it is labeled “CH1/297”. I think this all but confirms that we will receive a second checklist card with a separate set of double-faced cards to represent [Ed note: Wednesday’s Werewolf Planeswalker announcement supports this]
I do not think that Wizards will reuse the templating from the Origins planeswalkers, because “Legendary creature turning into planeswalker” now has the flavor attachment of igniting a spark and having time pass between the two faces of the card.

Jason Alt

Safety

March 3, 2016 Jason Alt 3 Comments

Uncertainty can be a bitch.

Uncertainty makes people regress to their baser instincts and a lot of investment decisions are driven by fear. Don’t buy too late or you’ll miss out. Don’t sell too early or you’ll miss out. Buy a Powerball ticket, ever. If being calm and rational in the face of losing money – real or potential, were easy, everyone would be a cash money millionaire with dolla dolla bills, y’all, drinking cough syrup out of a bejewled chalice and going to jail for tax evasion. Cash may rule everything around you, but your amygdala rules you and it makes you kind of a pansy.

This is why the removal of uncertainty can serve as as much of an event as anything else in EDH Finance. We talked about the last EDH Rules Committee announcement because it gave us a lot of significant events – the changes to the color identity rule that helped us predict a huge spike in the price of cards like Sen Triplets. The banning of Prophet of Kruphix that helped us lose a lot of money on our copies of Prophet of Kruphix. Less blatantly, though, we saw a subtle indication that Prophet was more troublesome than a card like Consecrated Sphinx. The result?

The price went up by 45% in a week. Nothing gives prices a shot in the ass like a little certainty, and nothing says “safe for at least another 3 months, likely much longer” like using Consecrated Sphinx as an example contrasting with a card they did ban. It wasn’t designed to make the price on Sphinx go nuts, but everyone knew Sphinx was a card that people whined about and it was on all sorts of watch lists. It’s hard to spend $15 on a card that could be banned tomorrow. Well, good news – now it’s $25.

A little certainty, even very little certainty, is smashing some card prices.

Safe For a Year is Forever in Finance Years

Back before Commander 2015 was spoiled, I looked at each deck and tried to predict some cards that would be included in those decks and end up being the next Wurmcoil Engine – that is to say what would be the $15 +/- $3ish card that would get reprinted in a Commander sealed deck, lose some value but ultimately retain a lot of it because every copy opened would go straight in a deck rather than hitting the market. In the case of an older card we might see some value reduction just because copies of an Invasion card are much rarer than a Scars of Mirrodin card. Regardless of what the card did after the copies hit shelves, I expected Wizards to target quite a few cards in the same price sweet spot as Wurmcoil Engine and I got, with basically no clues other than what the Commanders did, quite a few right – namely Urza’s Incubator, Black Market and Phyrexian Arena.

That’s not the point – they were guesses and I’m not going to pretend I want a pat on the back when I guess right because I sure don’t want someone to give me a hard time when I guess wrong. It’s that kind of thing that has a lot of MTG Finance people only talking about cards after they go up so they’ll never be wrong. The point isn’t that we guessed correctly, the point is that the stuff was predictable. We nailed quite a few cards in a recent article merely by listing Reserved List cards that were playable in both Legacy and EDH.

The point is if we predicted it once, we can predict it again. And we can also predict what happens to the cards that aren’t in the Commander sealed product because that’s what I want to talk about today.

There sure is, Brian. There sure is.

I bring up the articles I wrote about cards we thought could be in Commander 2015 because Phyrexian Altar was a very good candidate. Its price at the time of the article? $15ish – right in the sweet spot to be the next Wurmcoil. I didn’t know anything except that it would be a good idea to go to the Magic wiki and see what they said the two color combinations did. Golgari seemed to like sacrificing stuff and when I saw what Mazirek and Meren did I felt like Phyrexian Altar was a very good candidate for a reprint. Phyrexian Altar was not reprinted.

Then, this happened.

The price basically doubled. Why? Well, since Phyrexian Altar looked like a very good candidate for reprinting in Commander 2015, it was a risky pickup at the time. But, psychologically, something funny happened when it wasn’t reprinted. The way Commander cards are reprinted is much more predictable, now. There was always the risk of a reprinting in the core set or in something like Modern Masters. With an annual Commander sealed set, reprints for Commander cards are all but relegated to that once-yearly product. With this predictability comes some stability.

With that stability comes confidence. When Phyrexian Altar wasn’t reprinted at the $15 price point, people who were on the fence pulled the trigger, just as they did with Consecrated Sphinx. Altar isn’t going to ever be banned and with it escaping reprinting in the Commander 2015 set, it was safe for at least another year. That made it relatively safe to scoop up the 20ish copies on TCG Player, trigger the 1 or 2 copies on sites like Card Shark and Strike Zone to be snapped up and basically pegged the new price at $30.

Suddenly a card that was risky as a $15 staple that made sense in sealed product was a less risky card that had another year to grow and had people’s confidence. The same reasons (great in Meren and Mazirek decks, for example) that made it an obvious choice for printing in those decks makes it a great pickup for people building those decks. Demand increases, confidence increases. The farther the price gets from $15, the more sense it makes to invest. The card is hot, it’s not getting reprinted for at least another year, and what are the odds they print a deck next year where it would slot in so perfectly? And if they’re trying to find a $15 Wurmcoil analog to jam some value in, are they going to print a $21 Phyrexian Altar in a product with $35 MSRP? What about a $25 Altar? What about a $30 altar? Suddenly the reprint risk is gone. Suddenly Phyrexian Altar looks very safe indeed. What better place to park $30?

$15 Commander staples that escape reprinting in sealed product and get better with the new set basically miss their reprint window. Altar is much tougher to reprint than it was a year ago and with the contents of Commander 2016 getting close to being finalized if they’re not already, what is Wizards to do? Jam Altar in FTV: Lore? Unlikely. Conspiracy 2? It would have to work with the set- it couldn’t just be jammed in there willy-nilly. Another Commander’s Arsenal? That is the opposite of helping. They’re backed into a corner, basically, and another EDH staple becomes unaffordable for the average EDH player. A functional reprint or slight upgrade is a more feasible option than putting a $30 card in a $35 product unless there is no value in the rest of the cards and that makes the deck weak relative to the other decks. They’re handcuffed.

As bad as it is for the game, it doesn’t hurt us to be able to identify a few cards that could be the next Phyrexian Altar since Phyrexian Altar wasn’t the next Wurmcoil Engine.

What are Our Criteria?

First of all, the card can’t be on the Reserved List. Don’t get me wrong – those cards are great targets and a lot of them are starting to go up. But that’s a separate article. Like, to the extent that I already wrote that article.

Second of all, they should be cheap enough that reprinting the cards in an upcoming Commander set makes sense and failing to reprint them will be seen as a mistake. How good Phyrexian Arena is in Daxos decks could have pushed arena up in price the way Serra’s Sanctum is climbing but it got the reprinting and the price is reasonable, now. Altar wasn’t so lucky.

Thirdly, it can’t make sense to reprint the cards anywhere else. We’re not looking at the same kind of pressure that was on Phyrexian Altar if the card makes a lot of sense as a reprint in Eternal Masters or Conspiracy. $30 isn’t too much for a reprinting in a set that doesn’t have a set MSRP the way Commander stuff does but rather tends to enforce the total price of the set around the price of a redemption set on MODO. Phyrexian Altar would be clunky to jam in Conspiracy 2 or Eternal Masters but Shardless Agent wouldn’t.

With that, I have a few cards I want to discuss.

In case you thought Phyrexian Altar was an isolated incident, think again. All things Phyrexian got a second look lately and Tower followed the same behavior. Tower was a reasonable inclusion in a Commander set at $15, synergizes well with the Golgari deck and escaped inclusion in Commander 2015. Tower is not on the Reserved List because they needed to make room for Argothian Wurm and Opal Archangel (Funny how no one complained a decade ago about the color-shifted printing of Argothian Wurm that circumvented the Reserved List) and renewed confidence in it as a spec on top of how good it is with the most-built new deck means it missed its reprint window. This price is going to be tough to reign in, and if people start playing Nic Fit, a deck that is pretty strong in Legacy and which can get away with fewer duals since you want more basics than normal, this could see even more upside due to the additional exposure. I feel like this effect is very real.

Candidates

This could be nearing its reprint window. This gets played in Ayli, the second-most-built deck and synergizes well with Felidar Sovereign which is much more affordable, now. I’m not sure what the themes of the Commander 2016 decks will be, but lifegain usually features and this could be $22-$25 soon if not reprinted and that will make it much harder to reprint later. This is much newer than Phyrexians Tower and Altar but this is also cheating in EDH since it’s a 1-mana Baneslayer. If this isn’t reprinted soon it probably never can be.

This is very recent to be in the spot it’s in, but price-wise, this is on the bubble, I feel. This is a shoo-in for Karador decks and Karador is still being built a ton, especially with the new goodies from, you guessed it, the Golgari Commander 2015 precon. This may be a little easier to reprint in the new Innistrad block but I don’t see that happening. The lore will likely progress, making it tougher to reprint a Legendary creature at a very specific point in his life than it is a card like Thoughtseize. I’d say this is still tricky to reprint and if people start buying more aggressively, it will become even tougher.

This was always a great pickup, but with the changes to Rule 4 governing the colors of mana a rock like this could produce, this got even more attention and it’s going to need a reprinting soon before its price gets too high to touch. There are way more Lanterns out there than Phyrexian Altars but this goes in way more decks. This could be the next Sol Ring – reprinted into powder every cycle to make it accessible so it can go in a ton of decks or this could be the next Sensei’s Divining Top.

Conclusion

I will revisit this topic in a few months. The examples I gave are strong ones, but they’re also based a bit on a false paradigm – I selected cards that are in decks being built the most now but new archetypes may emerge with the printing of Commander 2016 which will make us focus on different cards. The criteria won’t change but they will be easier to find. I’m not advocating buying up these cards but I am suggesting that we can predict something very similar to what happened with Phyrexian Altar. You don’t want to be the guy who didn’t pull the trigger at $15 now faced with the grim reality of having to pay twice that. We can predict these jumps very nicely and we’ll do so when we have more information.

Am I off-base with this new theory? If not, what should I name it? The Phyrexian Altar Effect? Something pithier? Wittier? Hit me up in the comments section, nerds. Until next week!

Corbin Hosler

Let’s Get Supplemental

February 25, 2016 Corbin Hosler 2 Comments

Back in December, I decided to have some fun with an article. With Standard largely solved at the time and Modern in a lull, I took the opportunity to look ahead to 2016, and made some bold predictions. Looking back at that article, things turned out pretty well, as Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger went from the $15 I called it at then to $30. While I hope I saved or made people money with that call, it’s actually the less interesting one to talk about today.

“The Summer 2016 Specialty Release will be Multiplayer-focused

Let’s take a brief walk through history.

2009: Planechase

2010: Archenemy

2011: Commander

2012: Planechase 2012

2013: Modern Masters

2014: Conspiracy

2015: Modern Masters 2015

The Modern Masters sets throw it off over the past few years, but if you look back at the history it’s pretty clear that Wizards highly values a multiplayer-centric release during the summer. The annual Commander decks have taken some pressure off of this trend and made room for Modern reprints, but I have to believe that 2016 takes us back to multiplayer land.

My prediction? Archenemy 2. The inclusion of Surge — and multiplayer-centric cards in general in Oath of the Gatewatch — is not a coincidence, and I don’t believe that Matt Tabak’s seemingly-random reference to the Archenemy in this article is either.

Archenemy 2016. Maybe.”

Okay, so I get half credit here. While we didn’t receive Archenemy 2, we did get our multiplayer set in Conspiracy 2, though it remains to be seen what the set’s full title actually is (IS BRAGO KING ETERNAL OR NOT?!? I NEED TO KNOW). Or maybe I only get a third credit because they also announced Eternal Masters as one* of our summer sets. I don’t know; it’s all confusing in 2016.

If that were all there was to this, I wouldn’t have approached the topic of supplemental sets. But I’ve been kicking around this article for awhile and Conspiracy 2 is simply the latest in the line of supplemental sets. And while they may not all be of equal interest to us, the fact is they are becoming more and more important financially. I’m going to focus on the Commander series today, and circle back next week to handle the Planechase, Archenemy and Conspiracies of the world. I’ve been posting about a lot of these cards in the ProTrader forums over the past few weeks, and there’s been some great discussion about the future of some of these there, though the following card took us all by surprise.

As you can see, this is a seemingly random buyout, but it’s far from the first when it comes to these sets. Take, for example some of the other cards in that set. We saw major price corrections on Damia, Sage of Stone, Skullbriar, the Walking Grave and XX a while back, and it seems Magmatic Force has joined them.

This one came as a particular surprise because I’ve kept a pretty good eye on Commander over the past few months, and it didn’t look like any more of the cards were primed for a spike. Even those with a little growth still had a ton of stock left, so this came as a bit of a surprise to me Tuesday morning. That said, it only reinforces my standing theory: these spikes are due to scarcity more than anything else. Yes, they’re good cards that see a decent amount of play, but the truth is there’s just not that many of these cards out there in 2016, a full five years after the first Commander set released.

Commander sets are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to supplemental products over the past five years, and today I want to do a deep dive into these to discover any potential opportunities.

Commander (June 2011)

Not exactly Wizards’ first foray into this market, but the original Commander set was one of the first times they experimented with putting major new cards into a supplemental product. The results were enlightening, if not ideal.

Scavenging Ooze may be super affordable now (on that note, it’s showing some momentum and is likely headed upward before too long – fair warning), but when Commander came out ScOoze was pushing well past $40 and sold out everywhere. Wizards didn’t anticipate that the set would be as popular as it was, and it sold out very quickly and led to shortages.

At least, some of them did. The deck with ScOoze was the first to go, and not long after was the Angel deck with Kaalia. Meanwhile, Political Puppets set on the shelves for months. As players flocked to pick up the “good EV” sets, the others were ignored. Which, in my opinion, is a big reason why Flusterstorm is now over $60 and the most expensive card in the set.

But it’s far from the only card from the set to undergo some movement recently. We’ve seen price corrections in the past year on stuff like Collective Voyage, Skullbriar, the Walking Grave, Damia, Sage of Stone and more.

Which begs the question – is there anything left from this set to invest in?

Riku is the most striking of the bunch. Seriously, this thing is going to see a correction up to at least $15 in the next two or three months. There’s too much momentum in the graph and dwindling supply for it to stay sub-$10 long.

But RIku isn’t the only one worth looking at. The following cards all have some things in common: steady demand, slowly increasing price and shrinking supply. Sooner or later these things converge and hit a breaking point, and a major price correction of 20-30% or more occurs.

Aura Shards
Martyr’s Bond (this one has moved a decent amount already, but keep an eye on this as it could go higher).
Homeward Path
Propaganda
Wrexial, the Risen Deep
Champion’s Helm
Austere Command
Zedruu the Greathearted

I’m not saying to go out and buy these cards and watch them spike in the next two weeks. But I am saying that almost all of these (some more than others) fit the Magmatic Force profile, and could easily spike in the same way over the next six months. If you’ve considered picking any of these up, now is the time.

Commander 2013

Apparently Wizards didn’t learn from the Scavenging Ooze debacle, because they repeated it with True-Name Nemesis. Everyone’s favorite Merfolk (just kidding, mine is Silvergill Adept) came out of the gates at $50 as it completely reshaped Legacy, teaming up with buddy Stoneforge Mystic to wear all the equipment and wreck opponents.

Then again, maybe Wizards learned something, because this time they flooded the market with copies of Mind Seize, the deck containing both True-Name and Baleful Strix. This had the effect of lowering True-Name to $15, though it still messed up the dynamics of the full release on the market.

True-Name itself seems fairly constant at $15, but what about the rest of the set?

Primal Vigor. Spiked a while back in the most obvious-to-predict jump ever, and has recovered from where it settled to near an all-time high again of $8. While I have no doubt this can double in the next year or two, it’s also got to be on Wizards’ list of a reprintable targets. Still, nothing not to like in the short-to-medium term.
Thousand-year Elixir. There’s definitely something to like here. This was pushing $10 when it had only one printing, and it’s currently sitting at its highest price (just under $3) since its release. Stock is there for both printings, but there’s a lot of momentum here and that stock won’t last forever. Maybe looking at a year before the true “spike” on this, but worth picking up now if you want them.
Sanguine Bond. At $2, this is finally rebounding from a mess of reprints. For those who don’t remember, this was $10-15 five years ago, and after being pushed to near-bulk by reprints in the last few years it’s starting to rebound. This is one of those you can nearly guarantee will be $5-8 within 18 months.

This is moving as well. We can use the original Commander as a baseline for a lot of these cards, and like the original set this set seems apt to experience some spikes as well, and soon.
Bane of Progress. Hurt by a second printing, this is near-bulk right now despite being enormously powerful. Don’t lose these in your bulk box.

Commander 2014

Another Commander set, another one with low-print run cards with rising prices and dwindling supply. Here’s the highlights.

Freyalise, Llanowar’s Fury. Not the most powerful planeswalker objectively, Freyalise is nevertheless a solid option in most decks that can play her, and has been showing some growth this year. Not perilously low on supply or anything, but it also doesn’t feel like this will be cheaper than the $6 it is now ever again.
Ghoulcaller Gisa has actually already gone crazy, and I doubt there’s a ton of short-term upside left at $5. But this is an excellent example of what other cards in this set could do over the next year or two.
Emeria, the Sky Ruin. Solid growth on this over the last year, and it shows no signs of slowing. If this doesn’t get reprinted, there’s almost no doubt it will be $10 within the next two years, and if things break right it could get there even faster.
Caged Sun. I went very deep on these when they were first printed in New Phyrexia, and they represented strong and safe money. The reprint came to me as a chance to pick up even more copies on the cheap, and I love picking these up around $3.
Rite of Replication. I’ll hit this one here even though it was also in Commander 2015, but this represents a chance to grab this previously $10 card at a buck. It’s a long-term hold, but a sure bet at current prices.
Arcane Lighthouse. This may actually be one of the best targets on here. Available at a dollar today but with dwindling supply. Much like Myriad Landscape experienced a big price correction a few months back, this is likely the next in line.
True Conviction. This was a card that saw strong growth in the year before a reprint, and it’s showing some rebound momentum after that reprint. Another dollar rare, another great medium-to-long-term hold.

Commander 2015

As the most recent Commander set, there are some good and bad things about this edition. One of the biggest pros is, of course, the price. With these so recently released and is even still available on shelves, the price on most of these cards is rock bottom.

The downside is that we don’t know which ones will do well over time. Sure, in many cases we can make accurate predictions, but it’s a lot harder for me to sit here and predict a card will rise than it is to study charts and let the data do the talking for me. Still, let’s see what we can find.

Command Beacon. As the most expensive card in the set and a hugely popular land, I imagine this will almost certainly see a reprint in 2016, and 2017 if not. At the current buy-in of $11, I’d rather just stay away from this.
Blade of Selves would fall into the same category, except it has a set-specific keyword. While they could put this into another product, it doesn’t seem easy for them to do so. I don’t necessarily want to buy these to hold, but if you need to pick one up for yourself you should probably do so.
Meren of Clan Nel Toth. I love this card, and have been on the lookout to pick one up for my Karador deck. At $9 and with another set-specific mechanic, I don’t see this falling either.
Coldsteel Heart. This was a $2.50 mana rock before the reprint, and is a random uncommon I see forgotten about these days. Great pickup at current prices.
Eldrazi Monument. Not only are our new Eldrazi overlords everywhere and this is on theme, but it was a $10 before the reprint. Cards like that are certain to start the climb back to those heights within a year, and $4 is the ground floor on these.
Gisela, Blade of Goldnight. The climb back up has already started on these, and there is no reason to think it will stop anytime soon. Don’t forget this was a $15 card before the reprint, and available today at $4 for a Mythic Angel with a huge effect on games. This is the stuff mtgfinance dreams are made of.
Lightning Greaves. It’s had a lot of printings, and for a long time those printings were $7-8. It’s been reprinted a lot so expectations can be tempered, but I’m mentioning this because it is at a floor.
Blatant Thievery. This one is a little more narrow but still incredibly powerful, so at $1.50 there’s a lot to like for a previously-$7 card.

There you go. That’s a lot of cards, but I warned you in advance it was going to be a deep dive. Truthfully, these Commander sets and other supplemental products have been great on the finance end, as they make cards that were moderately priced available cheaply for players, and “reset” the copies out there for people looking to hold onto theirs for the long haul.

Come back next week when I dive into the rest of the supplemental sets!

Thanks for reading,

Corbin Hosler

@Chosler88 on Twitter/Twitch/YouTube

Jason Alt

Going Deep in EDH with Eternal Masters

February 18, 2016 Jason Alt 13 Comments

I would be remiss if I didn’t address the fact that Eternal Masters was announced this week. This is going to be one of the most significant MTG Finance events of 2016 so we can’t pretend we won’t be affected, can we? Legacy as we know it is going to change as staples like Force of Will and Wasteland go down in price (We know this because these cards were announced) and cards like Underground Sea go up in price. And why not? Cards that aren’t safe from reprint could easily be in the set and their prices as volatile and unknown while Reserved List cards are safe from reprint and therefore subject to price increases based on increased confidence from buyers. We’re already seeing consequences of the announcement and at the time of writing this piece, it hasn’t even been 24 hours.

Underground Sea is STARTING at $300. Who knows what we’ll be paying in a few weeks? How could this happen? More importantly, are there decks that don’t need duals and other crazy Reserved List cards to work in Legacy?

Well, I don’t care about that last question. Let other nerds write articles about decks that don’t need Reserved List cards. We are interested in EDH cards and if the Reserved List overlaps with cards we want, we’d better get them sooner rather than later. I wrote about EDH/Eternal overlap last week and while I’d like to write about something entirely different this week, I’m not gonna. We should look at cards that overlap Legacy and EDH, but this time with respect to the Reserved List specifically because Legacy is about to change and we don’t want EDH to get left behind. Are there cards that see play in both formats that could go up? Probably. Let’s look.

The Reserved List

This is a list of cards WotC has promised it won’t reprint. It is in their legal best interest to abide by the promise and a lot of us have money tied up in cards that would be hurt financially by a breaking of this promise. Put simply, this list is a way for us to have some confidence in our investments in older cards so we can avoid another situation like Chronicles where reprints pantsed prices on a lot of cards and undermined confidence in the rest. While some cards on this list are baffling (I’m looking at you, Sorrow’s Path) what we have is a good list to base future buys off of. A lot of the cards on this list aren’t EDH-playable, but the ones that are can be relied on to go up in value, steadily due to the fact that they can’t have their value hurt by a future reprint. There isn’t a huge sense of urgency on every card, though, so the impetus of this article is to identify the cards that could go up if interest in Legacy increases the way they expect it to with the advent of Eternal Masters.

The obvious first cards to discuss are Legacy Dual Lands.

These are all bound to go up. Force of Will will likely go down or stay the same in value but people who have Force of Will for the first time by virtue of picking up Eternal Masters packs will want to build Legacy deck(s) and they’ll need these. Not only that, speculators are already going after these, hard. Since a non-zero number of EDH players pack these, it’s worth watching. Grab the ones you need now because supplies are drying up.

Geyser is a great way to use X colorless mana, although players tend to use Blue Sun’s Zenith more, this is a card that could see a bump. Zenith tends to get Legacy play more as well, and three printings of this limit its upside farther.

At $7 for its cheapest printing can attest, this card is actual money. Used in a significant number of artifact-based decks like Sharuu, this also sees play in Tezzerator Legacy decks and has been creeping up steadily for a while. It’s always been a good pick, but its reserved list status can only help its upside.

Fringe EDH play and Fringe Legacy play combined could spell upside for a card that has held steady in price but could go up in a Tezz deck in the new Legacy, especially if someone figures out how to cut down on the number of expensive Underground Sea in the deck.

On the other hand, this is fringe EDH and mainstream Legacy, but those fringe EDH decks better get their copies while they can.

This is useful in decks like Zedruu and Legacy Enchantress both. At $300ish this is a high buy-in but I feel like soon $300 may seem like a bargain. I don’t know how much money there is to be made here, but I’d feel remiss if I ignored it.

This is part of an obscure combo that hasn’t seen much play lately, but this is a card that sees play in decks like The Mimeoplasm as well. There is upside here and with this card having already demonstrated the ability to be $5 and the copies being concentrated in the hands of dealers making a second spike easier, I think this could be a winner.

Nekusar decks as well as Hellbent decks want this little trinket which is too bad since Legacy has made this a $120 card already and threatens to take it even higher. This is a card you may want to eschew in EDH if you can since you don’t have that luxury in Legacy.

This gets more EDH play than you might expect and its current pricetag is on the low end of historical date, which I don’t expect to hold since Eldrazi Mimic has made this a much more attractive target. Stiflenought is a real deck and with 4 more ways to make this a savage 1-drop, this has real upside. This can be $40 again and you want to be holding when it gets there.

A long-time sideboard staple is making a splash in decks like Gaddock Teeg and other “Uh uh, you didn’t say the magic word” type decks in EDH as well. This is a card that we may see on creatures or other ways to avoid making a straight-up functional reprint that violated the Reserved List but it’s unlikely we see a card as perfect and perfectly-costed as this. This is at a historical high but that doesn’t mean it will never be higher.

This is a card that has demonstrated an ability to be $10+ and is super good at shutting down creature strategies. Its toughness means it’s relatively easy to remove and Abrupt Decay being everywhere doesn’t help and you still have to find a way to kill them with this card out there, but don’t be discouraged. This is a solid card and EDH wants it as well as Legacy. This could be $10 again and you will be glad you paid $3. When Merfolk and other beatface decks prevail rather than decks like Sneak and Show, this is a real card and Eldrazi cards showing their head in Legacy to an extent show that people may be swinging with creatures more in the future. Keep this in mind.

Speaking of Eldrazi in Legacy, this budget Workshops is a real mana generator and it is no slouch in EDH, either. Anything that generates this much mana is bound to turn heads and this card is creeping up on its own. Any nod it gets from Legacy will send it upward.

Aluren itself isn’t the limiting factor in the eponymous deck, it’s Imperial Recruiter that keeps this deck that can kill people with Lobber Crew if you want (I want) from being played more. This spiked before when Recruiter was announced as a Judge printing and while a dealer or two who had advanced knowledge acted on this and bought all of the Alurens out, this play is largely acknowledged as a huge failure and brought up a a cautionary tale regarding buyouts. The good news is that failed buyout concentrated copies of Aluren in the hands of dealers meaning the price will stay higher for longer if the card spikes again. If Imperial Recruiter ends up in Eternal Masters, and I don’t see why it wouldn’t, Aluren becomes a very affordable and fun deck to play and Aluren itself with its Reserved List status will only go up, possibly back to the $30 a few people thought they were going to get a few years ago.

When I bought a bunch of these at $10, I expected to make more money than I did. I didn’t lose money here but I wasn’t happy with how I did. I could do better.This card could do better. This card will likely do better if Show and Tell decks persist. Sneak Attack and/or Show and Tell being printed in EM could drive popularity up and this is a great board card in those matchups as well as a nasty card for enchantment EDH decks. All in all I like this card a lot, even at its current price.

This has always been a fine card and people wanting to jam this with Hedron Alignment in Legacy won’t make the price go down, that’s for sure. This does a lot of work in EDH and this price tag is at a historic low for the last few years. All signs pointing to this being a pretty tasty spec.

Why did this card ever stop being $20? The deck is still fine, it lets you run out a very early Omnipotence, it makes cards like Conflux playable and it’s great in EDH. This can be $20 again and the current buy-in is pretty tasty for that contigency.

If you want this for EDH, I think now is a good time to pick this up. Its price plateauing is predicated on Legacy demand staying the same. How long do you think that will last? This won’t be in Eternal Masters but will be in decks going forward. This is also an EDH staple and just does a ton of work. This price will be higher soon and if you buy now, you’ll be glad you did, I imagine.

This card demonstrated the ability to hit $100 and I think it can get there again, especially since the first spike concentrated copies in the hands of dealers meaning copies won’t come out of the woodwork to bring the price down. This taps for 2 mana, and 2 true colorless mana at that. Sounds good to me.

I wish I had been writing this column back in 2013 when they changed the Legend rule so I could have written an article about how Cradle and Mox Opal were getting better with the ability to play a second copy and sac the tapped copy giving you more mana on that turn. Legacy players got the message, then Elves took off in Legacy and even Vintage got in on the act, running Cradle in some shops builds since it’s not restricted in that format. This price isn’t going down as more people join Legacy, is it? EDH demand will keep the price high and this is a perfect crossover example.

I told you to buy this at $30, I don’t know what more I can do. Legacy Enchantress is a deck and will continue to be a deck. Add how good this is with the new Daxos and you have a crossover card that could give Gaea’s Cradle a run for its money. I mean, no it won’t, but it could. Either way, this was a good buy at $30 and I’m not sure it’s the worst buy at $50, even. Imagine that.

Rector? Damn near killed ‘er!

This list is, in my estimation, the cards that are EDH-playable and could be impacted by increased Legacy play. The Reserved List ensures they can’t be printed in Eternal Masters and when the cards that get played alongside them go up, we can expect to see some sweet gains.

There are other Reserved List EDH goodies but since they aren’t played in Legacy, I decided to leave them alone since there is no urgency in their price. Events are what drive prices up, and more Legacy demand is an event. It remains to be seen how many of these cards go up, but since they aren’t likely to go down, all of them should go up eventually.

That does it for me this week. Stay tuned next week where we’ll likely have some other insane event to discuss. A new format? New cards? Anything can happen with this wacky children’s card game.

MTGPrice Blog