Tag Archives: EDH

Jason Alt

Prescience – Discussing Commander 2016

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I make  a lot of predictions in my articles as a matter of course and sometimes I really nail it. I don’t like to toot my own horn because I feel like that’s a sign of insecurity. When you point out all the calls you got right, you’re hoping you can distract everyone from the calls you got wrong. I’m not like that, you guys – you all read this column and you notice all the times I nail it.

Still, sometimes it’s worth reminding everyone of the really good calls you make so that they understand why you’re someone they should listen to. If you can demonstrate your usefulness and almost uncanny ability to predict the future, you can build an audience. It is in that spirit that I write this piece today.

In which I demonstrate my predictive powers

Until this week, there wasn’t much known about Commander 2016. We knew what had been in previous sets so we could pretty safely rule out them repeating color combinations before they had exhausted all of the existing combinations. The only two left were four-color decks and the remaining five, two-color (allied) decks. Monday came and buried in an avalanche of announcements was a blurb about Commander 2016.

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Did you miss it? Apparently WotC decided that using their website that people check regularly to make announcements at a steady pace is for losers so they are going to make their announcements quarterly to throw the finance markets into turmoil and have us get all of our excitement out of the way 4 times a year so we can spend the next three months noticing some random twelve-year-old kid opening Hearthstone packs on Twitch is getting 10 times as many viewers as the Magic Pro Tour.

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Apparently we get things we long clamor for. Commander 2016 is going to feature four-color decks. Do you know what this means?

I totally nailed Commander 2017. While everyone was trying to figure out what was going to be in Commander 2016, I already got started with a series of articles delving into the implications of the allied, two-color decks in Commander 2017. I realize it was incredibly prescient of me to start talking about something that’s 15 months in the future, but how are we supposed to make any money if we don’t look ahead? When you fail to plan, you plan to fail, and I am planning years into the future and sharing those insights with my readers. You heard it here first – Commander 2017 will be allied-color deck combinations. You can even read about what is likely to be in the Azorius deck right here on MTG Price. I’ll try to avoid re-posting those same articles in a year.

My brilliant deductions aside, let’s speculate a bit. I’ll open the floor to pretend questions.

“You biffed it pretty hard on predicting what would be in Commander 2016.”

That’s not a question. Next question.

“You biffed it pretty hard on predicting what would be in Commander 2016, didn’t you?”

I mean, I guess. Was it a 50/50 call that I got wrong? Yep. Did anyone lose money? No. Did I say anything that we can’t act on next year? Probably not. Is it still super early? Yes. What I wanted to do was help us think about how to get ready for Commander 2016 and while I didn’t get confirmation that the assumptions I’ve been operating under were correct, I came to a conclusion based on logic, and no one made a compelling case that I missed something major or was thinking illogically. No one challenged my assumption because it was both logical and kind of unimportant. Now we know more information and we can operate under a new assumption. Every time we get more information, we can get more specific in our actions. While I called the coin flip the most wrong you can call it, I’m just too excited to be getting four-colored decks to even give a crap about that.

“You CLEARLY did not have insider information. Did anyone?”

I don’t think so, but there is some evidence that would suggest otherwise.  Travis Allen expressed his opinion as succinctly as is possible.

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I am not so sure people knew, or at least that they knew we were getting four-color decks. It’s always possible that the people who bought hard into the Nephilim were simply speculating. However the price rises are all pretty significant and we need to ask ourselves what they knew and what could happen, here. There are a few scenarios.

  • The Nephilim are in the decks
  • The Nephilim aren’t in the decks
  • The Nephilim are in the decks and whoever is buying knew that
  • The Nephilim are in the decks and whoever is buying didn’t know
  • The Nephilim aren’t in the decks and whoever is buying knew
  • The Nephilim aren’t in the decks and whoever is buying didn’t know

We can discount a few. If you know the Nephilim are in the decks, you’re not going to buy knowing they’re getting a reprint. Is this a case of insider info or just a spec that looks prescient in hindsight? Whoever they are, they’re going to be hard-pressed to find buyers right now. No one is going to buy these copies before they know for sure they’re not in the decks if they’re an EDH player, so they’re hoping to find a greater fool to dump the copies to. This looks like a really bad spec under those circumstances. Do other speculators even have any money left after they spent all of their capital making Steamflogger Boss spike to $15?

What I will say is that we can figure out how high the Nephilim can possibly go if they’re not reprinted.

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This is every card in Guildpact that is worth more than $4. There are still a lot of the lesser Nephilim available but Yore-Tiller, arguably the best one (arguably) is sold out under $3. How high do we see these going? Are you going to be happy you bought in around $3 if they don’t exceed Ghostway, Ghostway being a card that spiked because of Modern and not EDH like everyone thinks. I’d say $8 is a safe ceiling if they’re not reprinted.

If they are reprinted, the money is going to be in the foil copies, but EDH players don’t really foil stuff out like the myths about EDH players would like everyone to believe. Your Commander still won’t be foil, and the rest of a four-color deck is going to be ridiculous to foil out. Sure, you snapped up that sweet $4 Witch Maw Nephilim with your inside info/ballsy gamble. Good luck on the foil Chromatic Lantern and Coalition Relic. I think the odds of getting blown out on a reprint are much greater than your odds of doubling up. If you can’t get in at a low-risk buy like $1 (and you’re not doing that online, but locally is still an option) stay away. Original printings aren’t coveted over new printings in EDH the way they are in Legacy or Cube; the cheapest version is.

“What are we going to do for mana?”

The question on everyone’s mind is about Chromatic Lantern. It is ridiculous at turning mana issues into “I’m just going to tap the number of lands this spell requires” and that’s a great feeling. Lantern is a big unknown right now.

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This spiked to $10 when they announced you could pay mana of a color not in your deck in the corner cases where you’re playing your opponents’ spells. It was already a card that would have been $10 eventually and a small amount of people saying “We should look at this” gave it the nudge it needed. People are buying these at the new price even if vendors haven’t caught up in raising their buylist price quite as quickly. If they do, this could be potentially very bad for the price. A second spike would be higher and harder because there aren’t loose copies in binders to soak up the demand like there are during an initial spike and dealers holding most of the copies means there is less of a race to the bottom. If Lantern is confirmed not in any of the decks, we could see it flirt with $20, which seems absurd for a recent non-mythic, but, have you read Chromatic Lantern? It’s so good.

The bad news is that if Lantern is in one deck, it probably won’t be enough to do much to the price.

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This is after 6 printings, 5 of which were in supplemental product.  I see three scenarios for Lantern.

  • It’s not in a deck and it hits $20
  • It’s in one deck only or maybe two and stays around $10
  • It’s in all 5 decks and comes down a bit

Before we conclude that there is a 66% chance you make money or break even buying in at $10, we should weigh the probabilities. I don’t think it will be in only one deck, personally. The other decks will have identical mana issues. Does one deck get lantern, one get Coalition Relic and the rest get something like Commander’s Sphere? I feel like Lantern is going to be in most of the decks or none of them. There is always the possibility that they print a new card that’s even better than Lantern and is specific to Commander, but even that wouldn’t make Lantern obsolete. I see a lot of scenarios where you lose money waiting and not too many where you lose much buying now. I hate to say it, but my analysis is maybe don’t wait on Lantern. That said, know that if you don’t buy now, you’re going to get something to help out with your mana issues. It may be a new card, it may be lantern or relic, there will likely be a land to help, too. Help is coming.

“Are the commanders going to be 4 color or mono-color with off-color activations?”

That’s half of what I think is the eternal question. The other half is “are we really getting 15 brand new four-color legendary creatures?” In the past we have gotten two new commanders and one reprint of a legendary creature in those colors who could sub in for the other two to take the lead. Are we getting three commanders per deck? 2 commanders and a reprinted Nephilim that can’t be the commander unless you play with a cool playgroup? Will they errata the Nephilim? Because they said they never would.

Fifteen new Legendary creatures would be just so many. 10 is a lot, but 15 is 50% more and that’s a lot of work for them. The good thing is that if we just have 5 more mediocre ones that usual, the people who want to build that deck can and it won’t affect much. Build your Arjun the Shifting Flame deck, kiddo. But if there are more good commanders than normal, that could have implications if more decks are built than normal. I honestly think that won’t be too much of an issue – the market can withstand a little pressure from more decks being built, otherwise The Gitrog Monster (which seems like it could have been designed for Commander 2015 but not fit in) would have spiked the price of Sol Ring or something equally silly.  So when people ask if we’re getting a 4-color creature or a mono-colored creature with off-color activations making it four-color via the Thelon of Havenwood rule, I say I think we’re getting both. One of each, and I think maybe a second of one of the two or maybe only two new commanders. It’s hard to know, but we’re looking at broad strokes right now.

“What else are we going to do for mana?”

Really quickly, pop on EDHREC.com and look at what goes in the mana base for a 5-color Commander because I bet people use something similar to solve their mana issues for 4-color decks.

Check out Reaper King, for example.

I see Vivids, which makes sense since they’re free. I see tri-lands, which have their own challenges vis-a-vis a three color deck. If you’re 5 colors, you can run every tri-land. If your deck is every color but red, you run every tri-land that doesn’t have red in it. Well, only 3 don’t have red and the same obviously goes for every other color. You’re limited to three tri-lands but this should still put some pressure on those prices. If you’re a three color deck, you can only run one tri-land, so in a way, a four-color deck is three times as effective at pulling tri-lands off of store shelves. Reflecting Pool, City of Brass, Mana Confluence all have upside, but they all also have reprint risk, especially as cheap as cards like Exotic Orchard are. Shocks and fetches have some upside, but other formats need those and the blip from EDH demand shouldn’t move the needle on those.

  • Stay away from Nephilim
  • Maybe get your Chromatic Lanterns, and maybe your Coalition Relics, too. If you can’t live without them, that is, and if you’re ruling out the possibility we’ll get something better.
  • Mana bases need help. They’ll get help, but a lot of the lands we already have could help out.

I think I am going to look more in-depth at what I expect to see in the decks and now that they’ve revealed this much, I expect to see a bit more revealed in the weeks to come. They need to hurry if they’re going to be at all gradual in how they give us information. Still, I’m happy we’re getting four-color decks, if only because it allows me to show off how good I am at predicting the (distant) future. Until next week!

Jason Alt

Azorius Basterds

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I told you last week I was going to write about the cards likely to be in the Azorius deck so we could sell them if necessary or at least be thinking about cards likely to pair with them that have low reprint risks. The good thing about this is that it’s essentially a thought exercise to move the really obvious stuff. Anything subtle won’t matter as much because the prices won’t likely move that much and selling and rebuying usually isn’t all that worth it unless the price is going to move a lot. Basically what we’re doing is preparing for the decks to come out and recalibrating our expectations based on what we saw with Commander 2015 since I expect Commander 2016 to be a lot more similar to that than it will be to Commander 2014.

I was thinking “Why did I commit to write this stupid article in May when the set won’t be out until October? What was I thinking?” and I almost concocted some excuse to get out of writing it this week. Isn’t it way too early to be thinking about this stuff now? It took me about an hour of procrastinating coming up with a new topic to realize that there is no such thing as too early. We’re predicting based off of no information, remember? We don’t even have the spoiled Kalemne like we did last time to tell us that there were going to be things called “Experience Counters” and also that Boros was going to be hot garbage because Boros is always hot garbage.

Seriously, why does Boros always suck? It doesn’t even make sense flavor-wise. Gruul is the knuckle-dragging, cave-painting, feces-throwing throwback group and their slogan is “Not Gruul? Die!” but when you ask them “Hey, what do you as a clan do?” they have a good answer. “Me am so glad ask. Gruul smash monster with big club and make die. Gruul am also big mana rampy big monster time. Gruul am best clan landfall and burny face and Gruul monster am has best power and toughness to casting cost ratio for big smashy smashy. Mostest trample. Bestest haste. Most spell punish with Ruric Thar and Vexing Shusher. Not Gruul? Eat a $^%” If you ask Boros the same question, the answer is something like “We at Boros like to either attack with soldiers or put equipment on our soldiers before we attack with them. Either way, really. Sometimes we attack with angels and soldiers.” Boros sucks. “Am carry tree branch for use as wand. Am important to keep it touch with deep Gruul Shamanic tradition pass down 100 generations. Why Boros no have Shamans?”

Barring any sweet spoilers (If someone else spoils it, it’s a spoiler. If you get it early and you’re asked to be the one to reveal it, it’s called a preview. Brainstorm Brewery got to preview Fevered Visions. It was a way better preview card than most of the other spoilers) we don’t know much about Commander 2016 except what we know that the last few weeks I’ve assumed we’re getting the ally-colored decks and we’re operating under that assumption. So yeah, Gruul are the stupid cavemen of the Magic world but they’re still richer and more interesting than Boros. But let’s spend the rest of our limited time together for the week talking about Azorius because I said we would do that last week and I made a really lazy pun for a title but if I change it I’ll have to come up with another lazy pun and just because it’s lazy doesn’t always mean it’s easy. I can’t be making up all kinds of pun titles all day willy nilly. I’m sticking with the pun which means I’m sticking with the title and that means sticking with the indicated subject matter.

Who’s Your Azorius and What Does He Do?

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That’s sort of legible, right? If not, here’s the wiki page I got it from. You may recognize it from being linked by me on a weekly basis.

Azorius has fliers, things with flash and like, birds and wizards and shit. It’s pretty cool, I guess.

Before I go into what I think is going to be in the decks, a brief aside. I’m up at like 6 AM EST, usually writing this article and that means it’s like noon or something in the Netherlands so Sander Van Der Zee is always tweeting at me while I’m writing. He mentioned that it was possible we’d see either a flicker theme or subtheme. I didn’t really think that was the case and I’ll get into why in the next paragraph. For now, though, let’s stick to what I was talking about.

You know what, no. Let’s start that next paragraph right now and address why I don’t think we’ll see too much flicker. First of all, they did it already. The Evasive Maneuvers precon featured Roon, Derevi and probably some terrible dragon (I don’t remember and I don’t care enough to google it. I spent over a minute trying to find the name “Evasive Maneuvers” because when I google “Derevi precon” the results that come up are other people calling it the Derevi precon because that’s how few shits anyone gives about the name of a precon) whose name I don’t remember because all I can remember is the name Arcades Sabboth but I know that’s not right. Arcades Sabboth was terrible. Nicol Bolas and four turds, that’s what that cycle was. Anyway, they already did a pretty heavy flicker theme there. There were great cards for it and Derevi has been terrorizing people since, although he got banned in French because he’s just that annoying and linear.

I think a subtheme is pretty unlikely because Azorius has unique attributes and it can stake a claim separate from what Bant was up to by emphasizing some of its core strengths like flying creatures and really stupid, clunky counterspells like Overrule. Some of the best creatures to flicker are green, although Brago is a fine commander in his own right. If there is a flicker theme or subtheme like Sander thinks, I expect Brago to be the third commander.

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I’m graphing the $14 foil here because the $1 non-foil is boned if it’s reprinted but the foil could have upside if people play it more. Brago is shown in the literature for Conspiracy 2 getting shanked in the neck, but that doesn’t mean he’s not in the set which means there is a slight reprint risk for the foils if you ask me. This is basically an all-downside scenario. If Brago isn’t in Conspiracy 2: foil hat boogaloo, the foil could have upside but only if Brago is in Commander 2016. I think that is an unlikely convergence of realities.

Sander could be right and there could be flicker in the deck, but I’m banking on Azorius doing something new which means we have to look at what it actually does.

Flash and Flying

Luckily I think there is a card in real need of a reprint which is decent in EDH, fits the theme of a deck like this and which would be a good candidate for the new price-point for reprints, which is quite a bit lower than the $47 or whatever Wurmcoil was at when it was reprinted in Commander 2014. They’re not doing one big, huge reprint like that, or at least they didn’t in Commander 2015, preferring a lot of $8ish cards. That being the case, there is still a card that needs more printings and is afforded the perfect opportunity by an Azorius deck in Commander 2016.

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Bliggedy BLAM. This seems like a slam dunk reprint. The price isn’t quite out  of control like it was during its $15 days, but then you need to try and remind yourself that this is a freaking uncommon. Are there even loose boxes of this set laying around anymore or is everyone playing the foil ‘Goyf lottery? I remember being upset I had to pay $4 for one of these at a GP. It’s an uncommon. But “It’s an uncommon” isn’t a good defense for Modern cards anymore. Inquisition of Kozilek is uncommon, too. Uncommon is the new chase mythic. Or something. Look, this is an $11 card and it would be a good inclusion in the precon if there is a flash/flying theme or subtheme. Azorius likes making them not able to do stuff and this stops stuff. The only issue I worry about is that it may seem slightly dead in a precon-on-precon matchup since they likely don’t have a ton of ways to search the deck so that may disqualify this. It feels a little “off” in that respect, but diminishing demand coupled with any amount of reprint risk makes me think you might want to look at offloading these if you have any, no matter how slight you think the reprint risk may be.

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This guy has mostly recovered from the Modern Masters reprinting and is at or around the right price point for inclusion in the deck. This is a staple in Brago decks if you believe that subtheme is possible, but this is also a decent flier that rounds up other fliers in its own right. This is a possibility whether or not flicker is a factor.

If they go deep on fliers and put a ton of birds and Kangee, Aerie Keeper in, we don’t have to look at lists very hard to see it won’t matter much. The new cards will matter financially, but there is basically nothing in the current Kangee builds of consequence. Like, the most expensive card outside the mana base is Battle Screech from Judgment which got popular during Legacy Masters drafts online and people wedged it in the cube (I guess?). Like, Adaptive Automaton is expensive and that’s basically it. I am not even graphing anything from this contingency, that’s how little it matters. I mean…

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This, maybe. Did you ever in a hundred years imagine this was more than like a buck? I get these in bulk rares all the time. If there is a flying theme or subtheme, this seems likely to be in there. It’s slow but it scales nicely with you slowly amassing a ton of flying dudes and just smish smashing their face with a flyin’ lion. Seriously, they’re the pride of the clouds because they’re a pride of lions. In the clouds. They’re elementals. Some elemental zephyr wanted to manifest itself as something fierce so it chose something that doesn’t even fly because that’s how lame most sky creatures are. There are more geese featured on Magic cards than Tarmogoyfs. Let that sink in.

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I don’t know at what point this stops being speculation and starts being a wishlist, but this is a great inclusion in a deck with fliers. It’s a little harsh, but it’s also pretty easy to deal with, even by precon deck standards. Not only that, there is precedent for reprinting Magi in the Commander decks with Magus of the Wheel, Arena, Vineyard and Coffers already seeing print in Commander precon sets. I’d like Magus of the Tabernacle but this will do fine. It’s cheaper than a real Moat although not as good. Oh well, this has a shot at being in the precon and at $6ish currently, players won’t mind the price relief. Solid inclusion, should they actually include it.

There are some fringe possibilities like a heavy artifact/enchantment theme but recent Daretti and Daxos decks sort of lean toward ruling that out. This deck likely carves out a unique niche and gives us some new toys that play well with old toys. There isn’t much money to be made an lost if it’s a deck where they reprint Hanna, Ship’s Navigator (which isn’t on the reserved list though Orim and Eladamri are) and there is some sort of theme there since they can’t reprint Replenish, etc. All the cards we really want to see like Venser the Soujourner are too clunky to print. Most likely, we’re getting a sweet deck with lots of flying creatures and some new cards that will be very good commanders to build around and include that theme. It’s not the only possible outcome but it seems like the most likely. We’ll know more when cards are spoiled but for now, consider getting out of the riskier stuff and think about what pairs with it. Once it’s ruled out as a reprint, you’ll be ready to buy while others are still discovering the synergy.

Next week we’ll talk about some other color combination. Probably Dimir, I guess. Do you think it won’t be a ninjas/unblockable thing? Do you think it will be mill? Got any other wacky ideas? Bounce them off of me and we’ll see what we come up with next week. Until then!

Jason Alt

What to Expect When You’re Expecting (Dual Colored Decks)

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I’m operating under the assumption that Commander 2016 will be a series of ally-dual-color decks, which I think we established last week is a very fair assumption and is well supported by logic and evidence. Instead of waiting around for them to confirm, something that may take a pretty long time, I decided to get a jump on the “What’s likely to get reprinted” articles because by the time we know anything about Commander 2016, they’ll be previewing cards and we’ll have to deal with that. Being proactive means we can ship or at least take a second look at stuff likely to be reprinted and use reprint risk to gauge whether we should hold off on certain pickups. This worked pretty well last time and we made a lot of bold predictions like Phyrexian Arena, Urza’s Incubator and Black Market that ended up coming true.

I decided to go back to the wiki article that lays out what they expect the different two-color guilds to be good at because they love the color wheel over at WotC and they’re likely to stick to it. We have evidence of that in Commander 2015 – the Golgari graveyard, Izzet instants/sorceries, Boros beatdown, Simic counters/growth and Orzhov enchantments decks all were predictable just based on looking at the wikipedia article last time around. Let’s try our hand this time around and see if we can’t figure a few things out. Once we can guess what’s in the decks, knowing what isn’t in the decks but could be will tell us where to invest our money.

What We Want to Know

We’re at an advantage this time around. Last time my hypothesis was that they were going to try to do a Wurmcoil-esque card in each deck or at least that they could since it was not their intention to have another True-Name Nemesis scenario where one deck sold much, much better than the others. This time we know approximately the value of cards we expect to be in the deck, roughly how strong to expect the new cards to be and what kind of reprints we saw last time. I’m going to look at whether we can pair up the color combinations and try to look at whether we can (or can’t, more likely, but you never know) glean anything. This is half science half art but we’re just getting a feel for the kind of decks we expect and that can usually gives us some clues about what to buy.

What We Learned Last Time

We can extrapolate roughly how the deck will be composed based on a little analysis of the decks from last time and that’s what we will handle this week. I will go into specific color combinations next time, but this week we will look at what we expect based on the decks from last time. Extrapolating that each deck would have roughly a $15 card in it based on the Wurmcoil in the red Commander 2014 deck wasn’t too bad a guess. We got a few cards like Blade of Selves and Mystic Confluence, but there was value in reprints. Observe.

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The reprinting tanked a lot of the prices, some more than we’d expected, but the MSRP was mostly made up of reprints before and the new cards surged to make up the values. We expect the same value flip-flops this time around so we know how much we expect cards to tank. That’s pretty important.

Based on Commander 2015, we know a few things that are likely to be true of Commander 2016 as well.

We’ll Have 3 Commanders

Any of these three cards could be the Commander of the deck. The “main” one listed prominently on the packaging will have the mechanics that are unique or peculiar to this set and there will be a “backup” new commander that fits the theme of the deck and also a reprinted creature that does the same. It would be good to be able to guess the reprint based on what we expect the deck to be. Off the top of my head, I’m expecting Trostani in the Selesnya deck, for example since I expect GW tokens and also expect that Rhys would be too expensive. The reprint commanders from Commander 2015 were Teysa, Melek, Jarad, Gisela and Zegana. Of those, only Gisela was really worth anything and it was included because it needed a reprint and the rest of the deck sucked. There will be no shortage of places to jam value in the GW deck this time around so I don’t expect an expensive reprint.

The Mana Base Will Be Mediocre

The manabases are pretty average. I thought we might see some two-color utility lands like Alchemists’ Refuge and instead we got the uncommon cycle last time and for the most part, the mana bases sucked. One deck got both High Market and Command Beacon making it the most expensive mana base by far but for the most part, there isn’t much to write home about. I don’t expect Commander 2015 to buck this trend. I expect a bounceland, a guildgate, 2 vivids, a Command Tower, a Reliquary Tower in a few decks and a lot of basics. It will be hard to predict if we’ll see something like Command Beacon or Homeward Path but it won’t be hard to predict something like Boseiju is somewhat unlikely, although not out of the question. I expected something like Miren the Moaning Well in Commander 2015 more than I do now, for example. It would still be nice, so let’s not rule anything out.

The Theme Will be Predictable

Last time we predicted the theme would be predictable and now we know for sure. That’s an advantage, although last time I was pretty cocksure and just charged ahead with the assumptions mostly because we couldn’t do much else. Now that we have a lot more reason to be sure, we can be a little ballsier with our predictions.

Last week I guessed at the themes:

  • Azorius fliers
  • Rakdos hellbent
  • Gruul fatty ramp
  • Selesnya tokens
  • Dimir Unblockability/ninjas/maybe mill?

We could be looking at subthemes on a few of these, though. Azorious, for example, could be a sort of lockdown deck with Lavinia of the tenth as the reprint Commander and whose fliers include Archon of the Triumvirate and Lyev Skyknight. Grand Arbiter Augustin IV could be the reprint commander of a pillowfort deck with fliers in the deck just because that’s sort of what blue/white does. There could be a bird subtheme with Kangee, Aerie Keeper as the reprint. We don’t have to nail it exactly to know that Pride of the Clouds is likely in any of those decks and that Intangible Virtue could have some upside. Getting close on the themes can tell us a lot, and for the decks that don’t have as many options we can already pick out a few individual cards to take a look at.

Some Stuff is Safe

By virtue of the decks being likely to be two-color, there are a lot of cards we can rule out. While being able to rule out tens of thousands of cards looks fairly useless, it becomes a little more useful when you look at certain cards that are going to grow steadily absent a reprinting and which are cards that are somewhat clunky to reprint outside of Commander sealed product.

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Look at this $10 beauty that doesn’t belong in a two-color deck. When’s this getting reprinted? If they do 4 color decks next year? Will it be in every deck or just one or two? Could this end up in Conspiracy? There is a lot of uncertainty around this card but there is also some certainty. Is this going to be in Commander 2016? Certainly not. The removal of reprint risk gives it some upside if that fact occurs to people and it could give you some time to get ready to unload yours when we’re more certain a reprint is coming, because a $10 mana rock from a recent set is sort of untenable considering how important this card is and how easy to reprint this somewhere it would be. Being able to rule it out and cards like it means we have some more time to experience some growth before we get wiped out, and this gives you ample time to divest yourself if that’s your aim.

Not All Reprints Are Created Equal

Something happened in Commander 2015 that I hadn’t really taken into account when we guessed at which cards would get reprinted. It seemed fairly obvious that High Market was a great choice for a reprinting. It fit in very well with the Golgari theme and seemed like a shoo-in for that deck. That is why I was very surprised to see High Market in the list for the Simic deck. What gives? I realize it’s not totally off-theme to grow a Simic creature very large by granting it a ton of counters and then sacraficing it for enough life to keep us alive, so I guess it made some sense. I was still a little confused. Why wasn’t it in the Golgari deck? It wasn’t until I checked again that I realized – it was in the Golgari deck. It was in both.

Some of the reprints in Commander 2015 were in multiple decks, which doubles the effect of the new copies on the price. This isn’t always super relevant information because we’re trying to figure out what’s going to get reprinted so we can sell ahead of it or make plans to buy when it bottoms out, but knowing how slowly it is going to recover based on how many copies were injected is useful if we plan to buy back in later. A card like Phyrexian Arena wasn’t going to be in multiple decks. Lightning Greaves? Reliquary Tower? Solemn Simulacrum? More likely, right? We need to remember to calibrate our expectations based on how many decks the cards we expect to be reprinted can be in. High Market taught me it’s not always the most obvious deck, at least it’s not always just the most obvious deck.

The Plan for Next Week

Next week I’ll be diving into the colors specificially, starting with Azorius. I have some ideas about what the deck could look like and what we expect to see reprinted and what we don’t necessarily think will be in the deck and which could see some upside when people want copies later. If you have any specific cards you think might be in an Azorius deck and you want a second opinion about reprint risk or want to bounce ideas about what to do with the cards off of me, hit me up in the comments.

Final Thoughts

Every time someone builds a new deck, they build a new manabase. There are a few lands that could see some upside based on the time elapsed since anyone thought about them and some additional upside.

Some cycles I kind of like.

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These are never getting cheaper. I’m not suggesting drop $500 to buy out TCG Player, but I am saying these should go in almost every two color or three color deck you build and with them costing barely more than a Ravnica bounceland, you’re going to be glad you got this utility in your deck, and if you buy twice as many as you need, you’ll likely end up profiting in the end and getting free land. These have to head up eventually.

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I’ll bet you had no idea these were trending up. I didn’t either. Low supply, long time since printing, good utility in a two-color deck – these do everything but tap for true colorless, which sucks, but no land is perfect. With the much better filter lands from Lorwyn overshadowing them, these have just chugged upward, undaunted.

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Some cards in this cycle, particularly Underground River, spiked for no reason other than speculation that maybe some weird Eldrazi combination would play these. This can work to our advantage. A lot of these copies are now concentrated in the hands of dealers. If they come down, which I expect now that Eldrazi are significantly attenuated in Modern, they will spike much faster because the effect won’t be attenuated by people discovering cached copies instead of buying them from the relatively small number of retail sites which will have them in stock. Watch these. The ally-colored ones have more printings, they’re good in EDH and people will be looking to off-load them.

I feel like I already wrote a conclusion paragraph and a bonus section doesn’t warrant a second one.

 

 

Jason Alt

The Gods Must be (About to go) Crazy

9 Comments

I am basically sick of waiting to know more about Commander 2016. At this point, we should have heard something, anything. Sure, last time some dingleberry snapped a picture of the RW deck and posted a pic online which let us know quite a lot of information. We learned that the deck was only Boros meaning we’d be getting the 5 “enemy” color pairings. Kalemne himself told us we’d see the experience counter on that card at the very least and likely at least one commander per deck. It also told us that Wizards hadn’t figure out how to make Boros not boring.

I want to get a real jump on Commander 2016 since we should be able to reasonably work some things out based on what we’ve seen in the past and the success we had working things out beforehand for Commander 2015. We basically proved last year if we approach things logically we can have a relatively high degree of success in predicting what will happen (broad strokes – we’re not going to guess the abilities of the new creatures in the decks but we may be able to guess at the sorts of strategies they will employ). Using the themes for each 2-color combination that Wizards likes to use from a Magic wiki article we correctly guessed that the Golgari deck would deal with the graveyard, the Orzhov deck would deal with enchantments, the Simic deck would deal with +1/+1 counters and the Izzet deck would deal with Instants/Sorceries. If that sounds pretty obvious, you’ve never been on any forum where EDH players discuss their predictions. They were sure the Izzet deck was going to be artifact-based. Why did they think that? Because they assumed Wizards would give them what they have been missing, not what they’re going to do predictably.

I’ve been looking at a different wiki page these days and I think there’s some information we can glean from it. First, though, I should deal with how I came to the conclusion that we’re on the right track.

Why Allied 2-Color Decks?

How many different combinations of 5 decks can they even do?

  • Between 1 and 5 five-color decks
  • 5 four-color decks
  • 10 three-color decks
  • 10 two-color decks
  • 5 one-color decks

So far they have done Commander sealed product a few times

  • 2011 – “Khans block” three-color decks
  • 2013 – “Shards of Alara block” three-color decks
  • 2014 – One-color decks
  • 2015 – “Enemy color” two-color decks

It seems pretty obvious based on 2011 and 2013 being the three-color decks back-to-back and how reluctant Wizards has been to tackle the four-color decks that we’re going to get “allied-color” two-color decks. This fits their pattern of doing the batches of five back-to-back and it leaves the four-color decks for 2017. Again, I have no confirmation but I’m very confident that we’re going to get the “allied-color” decks this time around. Confident enough to see if there is any loose money to be scooped up before the people who are waiting for confirmation get wise.

Operating under this assumption, I’m going to do what I did last year, writing an article for each of the five entries into the wiki article regarding the different themes of each deck and which cards are likely to be reprinted giving us ample time to dump the copies or otherwise prepare ourselves. Not all reprintings are created equal, though and sometimes knowing what’s likely to be reprinted could help us figure out which cards pair well with those likely reprint targets but are unlikely reprint targets themselves and are therefore good pickups. It sounds more exhausting than it is. We went through this last year and we nailed quite a few cards simply on the basis of their price and a vague correlation between their effect and the themes of the two-color guilds represented by each deck.

I’m going to go much more in depth for each of the five themes much like I did last year, giving each of the five decks a deep look to see if we can’t figure out cards likely to be reprinted, which doesn’t make us a ton of money. I would like to try and make some money at some point, so this week I am going to just poke around a little bit and see if there are any safe cards that are likely to experience upside on the vague basis of the color wheel. I think there is a non-zero amount of opportunity and I think applying the same logical approach we’ve adopted up to this point is going to serve us well.

Opportunity

The wiki about allied-color guilds is a little vague for some of the combinations. Nearly all it said about Boros was “combat” which doesn’t seem like something that’s exclusive to Boros, but what do I know? I’m a Simic guy. That said, I suppose I know a few things since we were able to make the very simple leaps in logic to predict that we’d get a Golgari graveyard deck, an Izzet spells deck, an Orzhov enchantments deck, a Boros beatdown deck and a Simic +1/+1 counters deck. If we have to guess what we’ll get this time around, the wiki page actually isn’t that bad. My guesses?

  • Azorius fliers
  • Rakdos hellbent
  • Gruul fatty ramp
  • Selesnya tokens

Finally, my “safe” pick for Dimir is that we’ll get some sort of “unblockable” creature deck, potentially with ninjas if we’re super lucky. My ballsy pick is mill, but mill is pretty terrible in EDH, not because it doesn’t work very well since your opponent’s starting life total is 92, lots of people run Eldrazi and you have to concentrate on milling one person while the rest of the table just kills you. Wait, did I say not for those reasons? Well, I meant for those reasons, but also because every card in the deck will need to be devoted to the strategy and that seems unlikely.  People like mill, so I can’t rule it out given the fact that we could get some cards like Nemesis of Reason and Consuming Aberration which technically get better with mill but can actually do some damage.

If you look at the relevant planechase decks for guidance, we see what could be. The Selesnya deck was voltron last time, but the Dimir one was ninjas which I see coming back and the Gruul one was devour-based. I don’t see the decks being built around mechanics like the planechase decks were (cascade, devour, totem armor, ninjitsu) and instead being built around the things those colors do vaguely well. The Dimir one could very well give us some sweet new ninjas although Planechase makes that seem sort of unlikely.  Can the Dimir deck really ignore mill entirely?

Can the way the Born of the Gods gods fit thematically in with how we suppose the color wheel is supposed to work at the intersections of these two color combinations tell us anything about future upside?

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Near its very bottom, Phenax can only benefit from basically any card that makes mill more viable in EDH. That’s trickier than we may think because making mill viable in EDH means giving us more creatures like Consuming Aberration that get bigger the more you mill them which in turn lets you fuel Phenax, or Eater of the Dead which goes infinite. Speaking of which –

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Those spikes and subsequent declines are copies getting concentrated in the hands of dealers. People who had tons of boxes of old The Dark lying around suddenly felt like rummaging through them during that brief few days when this card hit $10 on the strength of the very few copies that were lying around. People finally figured out this card was dumb with Phenax and people bought out the internet – very slowly. Remember the piece I wrote last week about how EDH players give us approximately a million years to pick up the cards they’ll want before they spike? I’m going to put an arrow on the graph that indicates when Phenax was released.

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Talk about ample time to get one’s act together. This was a weird tangent to get onto, but I can’t tell which of my thoughts deserve a paragraph and which are only funny to me at this point. EDH finance really is too easy sometimes, but it’s only because it’s so much harder to figure out card interactions sometimes and almost no one is publishing “tech” articles or tournament reports for EDH and there is no urgency like there is with standard. This is good as far as I’m concerned. The more gradually a card spikes, the more likely it is to find price equilibrium sooner.

If we get anything that benefits a mill deck in the Dimir deck, even a card that is seemingly agnostic to the concept and only accidentally good in mill or specifically in how it ineracts with Phenax (basically the only viable EDH general where milling them is your win con rather than doing something like Lazav or Szadek shenanigans or the Mimeoplasm or Sidisi where you mill yourself. Hell, even Bruna is a “mill” deck if you think Traumatizing yourself to find goodies to strap onto your beatface angel is a “mill” deck.) we could see some real upside for the cards in the deck, but Phenax specifically. I’ll address the other cards more specifically later.

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Karametra doesn’t seem like she has as much upside at the helm of a deck based on getting new tokeny cards from Commander 2016 since she triggers on casting but she has always been a strong albeit inexpensive commander. She has a lot of upside, but I feel like others do as well and it may take a lot of nudging to get her to go up. I’m not super excited about anything to do with her, but that obviously could change. She sure is good in a Trostani deck and I expect Trostani to go up and also the cards in her deck, provided Trostani herself isn’t reprinted. I’m betting heavily we get a token theme or subtheme. Trostani encompasses two of Selesnya’s key abilities – tokens and lifegain so I think there is a strong possibility we’ll see her reprinted in the deck but the cards in her deck like Parallel Lives and Giant Adephage could experience some upside. I’d say pass on Karametra potentially.

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The sentient Blood Clock has mostly defied my expectations. It’s been flat for so long you have to wonder why the distance from its printing hasn’t put upward pressure on the price or lack of demand hasn’t put downward pressure on it. This is kind of an annoying commander to play against, but Rakdos seems like a better choice, or Olivia. This theoretically goes in more decks as part of the 99 than almost any of the other gods, though, which could account for the price. However, most of them aren’t Rakdos-specific and therefore Rakdos goods aren’t likely to influence his price much. I’m pretty bearish, here.

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It’s hard to know what to expect from the Azorius deck. They’re almost certain to have one of the Legendary creatures be a reprint so it’s up to us to figure out if it’s Lavinia, Grand Arbiter Augustin, Ojutai, Isperia or any number of cards. Personally, I think we could see some sweet new bird tribal cards. I remember reading that the future future league expected Pride of the Clouds to define Standard and it was a bulk rare almost immediately. Could more fliers be the theme? I don’t know that it matters with respect to Ephara. This is a very cheap creature despite going in quite a few decks, especially ones like Brago where it’s pretty easy to get her to trigger almost every turn, drawing you x cards per cycle where x is the number of players. This has a ton of room to grow but, like Mogis, there isn’t much movement on the price. Do we have any reason to expect movement?

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How about yes? It’s a bit hard to see, but Xenagos is on the move.

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Equally effective as a Commander or part of the 99, Xenagos is almost certain to have a ton of new cards to interact with. Players have been waiting for a Gruull Hydra Commander and while they don’t always get what they want (Like an Izzet artifact commander), it seems fairly likely the Gruul deck will have ramp and fatties and Xenagos will be put in that deck when it’s out and the cards from it will go in existing Xenagos decks. Since the price is already on the move and I’m estimating it has the most upside based on his abilities coinciding perfectly with nearly every Gruul contingency we can reasonably expect in Commander 2016, this is my pick. I have a lot of confidence in this card and since it’s already on the way up, it’s hard to lose here.

I’ll start looking more in-depth at each likely deck theme and the cards likely to be reprinted next week. Until then, I feel like Xenagos and maybe some of the cards with a high affinity rating with him are going to go up when we start getting cards spoiled. We don’t know what’s in Commander 2016 for certain, but we’ve been right before taking a logical, analytical approach and I don’t expect it to fail us, now.