Tag Archives: EDH

What EDH Can and Can’t Do to Prices

What up, nerds?

I wrote a lot this past year about what EDH can do to prices. With 2015 winding down, I’m looking back at what I’ve written so far and thinking about the series as a whole. We’ve talked a lot about the effect new printings can have on prices, but there are a few nuances I want to really solidify so we can head into 2016 swinging.

What I am going to do for a bit is revisit the basic thesis of this series, and that is:

“Cards that are coming out in new sets can serve as an event that can shift the prices of older cards. “

Unifying Theory

Is This Effect Real?

It’s a pretty simple thesis, and I think I’ve made a pretty good case for it. Not even that—it makes a good case for itself. It doesn’t take a ton of detective work to look at Teferi’s Puzzle Box, Winds of Change, Forced Fruition, Wheel and Deal, and Wheel of Fortune all spiking the same week, just after the Mind Seize deck with Nekusar, the Mindrazer came out, to figure out those things were related.

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Nekusar came along and the card launched an entire deck archetype. It’s a very annoying one, but it’s a very good one. It’s easy and obvious to build, and it’s effective, popular, and everyone who had access to the precon had access to it. With financiers buying up every copy of Mind Seize they could get their mitts on to flip the copies of True-Name Nemesis, some people had an opportunity to get the rest of the cards for fairly cheap after the financiers culled the copies of Nemesis and Baleful Strix. These cards saw their prices affected to a huge extent and the spikes all occuring at the same time, a few weeks after the set was released and people began building with Nekusar and figuring out wheel effects were the gas that made the deck work, prices spiked accordingly.

What Can’t It Do?

That’s something I feel like I haven’t covered as well. It’s important to understand the limitations of this effect. EDH has a broad appeal, and that appeal is growing, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t limited in the effect new cards can have on prices of other cards. The more copies of a card there are, the more the deck will need to be played to affect the price at all. While Nekusar was able to move older cards like Puzzle Box and even a recent-ish card like Forced Fruition, cards that everyone has lying around, let’s re-examine some of these graphs and talk a bit about what happened with the cards’ prices.

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This is the price of Forced Fruition over the last 3 years.

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The arrow points to the point where people started to realize this card was nuts in Nekusar decks. This was a $2ish card—not selling briskly on TCGplayer or eBay or Cardshark, but not shipped in bulk, either. A $2 card isn’t worth putting in a store display case. It’s not worth having in a binder, because it’s too old for anyone to care and not valuable enough for anyone to be after. This card was total trash to all but the casualiest of casuals until it was suddenly the perfect card for a deck that just popped into existence.

What happens when something like that occurs is a weird process. First, the internet gets bought out very quickly, causing a very sharp price increase as the cheap copies are bought out and the people hoping to cash in post their copies for as much as they think they can get.

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Then, people start to dig the cards out of boxes and the supply begins to catch up as copies come out of the woodwork.

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Organic demand takes over and people start to realize they don’t mind paying more than they used to be able to for the card because it’s quite good in the deck, but slowly, increased supply catches up and satisfies the demand. Finally, the race to the bottom begins and the copies sell at a slower rate and prices plateau.

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The price ends up higher than it was before, lower than its peak, and at a place where people are comfortable both buying and selling. The price has a tendency to equilibrate here. But this is pretty unique to cards that are spread out and not concentrated in the hands of dealers.

What would happen if Wizards printed another card like Nekusar, and people who had Nekusar decks built already decided they wanted a second copy of Forced Fruition? Well, we’d see the price basically track to its new equilibrium point. It would fluctuate a bit, overcorrecting at first, but not as drastically. The copies are concentrated in the hands of dealers who paid a fair price for Forced Fruition and overpaid a bit when the price was beginning to equilibrate as supply caught up to demand. Those dealers who overpaid aren’t in a hurry to sell at a small gain, so they are hanging onto their copies and selling one at a rate of one per new Nekusar deck.

That’s a slow rate. That rate would increase if there were a new Nekusar, possibly in different colors and people built the new deck as an addition instead of taking the old one apart. When there are a lot of copies out there in the hands of dealers, the prices don’t go quite as nuts. We are seeing a high percentage of copies of Forced Fruition out of collections, shoe boxes, rubber bands, and dollar boxes, because when the card initially spiked, everyone and their cousin hit their LGS and their closets and binders looking for copies of the card to ship into the frenzy.

This effect is going to be attenuated greatly for a newer card. How do I know? Let’s look at a card that’s played in a much greater percentage of Nekusar decks. This is a card that, according to EDHREC, 61 percent of Nekusar decks play compared to the 49 percent (can that be right?) that play Forced Fruition.

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There was some initial hype surrounding Whispering Madness when people tried to couple it with unblockable creatures in an attempt to mill opponents to death. Casuals are always going to try to play Dimir mill; they just are. When this card proved that it couldn’t carry a whole archetype on its back and the supply began to overwhelm the dwindling demand, the price suffered. Want to see something really interesting? Let’s look at what the graph did when Mind Seize was released.

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That little dip may or may not have been caused by the Nekusar frenzy. There’s not much of a mechanism for new demand to cause the price to go down, but if you ignore the dip and just look at the average price since the deck was being built, you’ll see it’s on a decline, on average—pretty similar to the slope of the buylist price.

Why would we see such a profound effect for one card and such a different one for another card? The answer seems pretty simple to me: recency.

Whispering Madness is in every bulk bin, every binder, every shoe box. It was less than a year old when the Commander 2013 decks came out, and copies were everywhere. Anyone who wanted a copy of Whispering Madness to jam in their Nekusar deck probably had one already, or had a friend who would give them one for free. It was a bulk rare, and therefore, it was everywhere. The card wasn’t concentrated in the hands of dealers, but dealers still had more copies of Whispering Madness than they likely had of Forced Fruition, despite having a smaller percentage of the total number of the available copies.

A new event can clearly move the needle on older cards with relatively fewer copies printed. Magic has gotten continually more popular, so the further back you go, the fewer copies of a card there are. With fewer copies of old cards in the hands of dealers and more scattered to the four winds, cards have time to spike in price as people slowly unearth their buried copies and gradually feed them into the machine. Are there ways we can mitigate this and make some smart buys in more recent cards?

Can Recent Cards Move?

They can, and there are a few things we can do if we correctly predict a new card is going to make a new archetype that people will want to play.

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Sage of Hours is pretty busted with the new Ezuri. Once you get him up to five experience counters, he can dump five +1/+1 counters on your Sage of Hours, allowing you to remove said counters and take an extra turn. If your opponent(s) can’t interrupt this with an instant, you take every turn and kill them with your creatures and win the game.

Despite it being a mythic, there are quite a few copies of Sage of Hours out there because it’s recent and not in high demand from Standard players. Most of the copies of this card are just sitting in store inventories, and the new Ezuri deck hasn’t been built enough to move the needle. The threat of a reprint is always present, also, and no one seems super willing to gamble on this card. Store inventories haven’t moved much, either. There wasn’t really money to be made predicting this would pair well with Ezuri as soon as he was spoiled. Or was there?

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This went from a Vorel of the Hull Clade spec to a bit of a bust to an Ezuri staple, in foil. Foil copies are less prone to a reprint, especially in a Commander-series deck which doesn’t have any regular-sized foils. Foil copies have higher upside, since there is usually a multiplier that will drive the two prices apart as the non-foil increases. There are fewer copies of the foil, and for cards that are printed in event decks and such, the set foil is even scarcer compared to the non-foil. The relatively few numbers of copies make it easier for buying behavior on a small scale to signal the market that the price is moving, and when the card is merely twice as expensive as the non-foil like we saw here during Sage’s lull, you can still buy effectively, getting half as many copies but experiencing four times the upside.  Currently sitting pretty around $13, this card could go back down, but with Ezuri’s current popularity (it was the second most-built deck last week according to EDHREC), that may take a while.

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Moving very nicely up in price for years, Contagion Engine seemed like a good way to proliferate experience counters with the new commanders in Commander 2015. It’s colorless, allowing it to go in any of the five decks, and it serves as removal, something that is important in decks like Simic that lack a ton of ways to kill things without bouncing them or turning them into tokens. Still, the slope of the graph doesn’t really increase with the printing of Commander 2015. It seemed almost a shoo-in in one or more of the decks, and while it’s getting up there, it’s nowhere near the popularity of a card like Darksteel Plate, a card from the same block whose price is higher than you might think. Was there any money to be made on Engine?

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Apparently there was money to be made on the card in foil, where the price tripled overnight, and while it’s returning to equilibrium, it’s equilibrating much higher than the price was before experience counters made us pay attention.

The Future of This Series

I plan to continue identifying upcoming archetypes made possible by new printings as well as identifying staples that don’t necessarily need events to drive the price up. There was no real event other than EDH being a fun format that caused Chromatic Lantern to climb like it has, but every once in a while, the price corrects higher due to adjustments in dealer buying behavior and player buying behavior.

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This was a card everyone knew was good basically just in EDH, but which no one really talked about. This went up calmly, behind the scenes, and keeps surprising everyone with how high it continues to go. I plan to spend a lot of time talking about event-driven upcoming price increases next year, but I also want to spend some time identifying staples that are going to march solidly up in price and which will be great cards to stock a binder with.

Remember, EDH players are who we want to trade with. They want a much larger range of cards from us, and they’re more likely to undervalue (maybe not money-wise, but to just generally care less about) Standard staples and other cards we can instantly sell on TCGplayer, much faster than we can sell EDH cards. I hope you’ll join me next year, where we’ll keep looking at the fascinating world of EDH finance and chart some uncharted territory while we do. See you in 2016.

Commander 2015 – Legacy Initial Thoughts

Now that all the Commander 2015 spoilers have been revealed, I can’t help but notice that this year’s set is feeling pretty underwhelming to me. In fact, all things considered I can’t think of a previous Commander product that had less desirables from a Constructed standpoint. The Confluences are the closest thing to Legacy playable – if they weren’t all four mana or greater in casting cost.

I mean, think about it – even the red Confluence (Fiery Confluence) would be INCREDIBLE in Legacy if it cost just one mana less at three mana, even if that cost were 1RR. For its effect and limited amount of formats it sees play in I don’t think it would have been much to ask. However at four mana it might not be able to get there. Out of all the Confluences, I think it has the highest chance of seeing Legacy play but the jury is still out on the Confluences until results roll in.

Other than the Confluences, I’m not seeing anything pop out to me immediately as Legacy format staples like we have in the past releases (Containment Priest, True-Name Nemesis, Flusterstorm). These cards were all built with Legacy in mind, and everyone knew it even as the cards were being spoiled. I’m sure something from this set will make its way into Legacy or Vintage, so let’s take a look and see if we can make the case for any other cards in the set. First though, I want to finish my thoughts on Fiery Confluence.

Fiery Confluence

If any card makes the cut in Legacy, I think it is going to be this one since it is the cheapest. It is extremely versatile in the format and will shine best in Burn decks alongside of Eidolon of the Great Revel, though maybe out the sideboard more than the main deck since this card has more options for handling a wider range of decks. I’ve briefly mentioned some of my other thoughts on this card (and all the Confluences in general) above so let’s move along to my next pick on power level in Constructed from this set.

Karlov of the Ghost Council

This card feels like it is going to get out of hand very fast in the right deck. Unfortunately, Legacy ‘life gain’ isn’t really thing – yet. I wonder if it might slot into something like Deadguy Ale and totally transform the deck around the incredible ability.

Not only does the card get bigger, but you can eventually use those +1/+1 counters later in the game to get rid of any creature on the battlefield! All for two mana. Definitely feels like Legacy to me.

The downside to Karlov is his Legendary status, so that limits the amount of copies you could see in a deck. Still though, Karlov interacts with cards that randomly gain you life like Umezawa’s Jitte and might slot into Death and Taxes in the right metagame. I really think you need a deck built around him to make full use of his ability. Only the future will tell!

Scourge of Nel Toth

This card seems like it takes too much work to get online, but you never know. Dredge might be able to take advantage of a card like this in the right situation.  It reminds me of a cross between Tombstalker and Delraich, though better in both cases. Not only is this card a 6/6 flyer, but you only need to sacrifice two creatures rather than three black creatures.

It does take some work to get online, so Legacy might not appreciate this card immediately. We may not see it in the format, but if more support in the future is printed we could very well see this in a deck at some point.

Centaur Vincrasher

Yes, I realize that this card isn’t Dark Depths however I still feel like it could fit into Life from the Loam strategies quite well in Legacy. Lands might even be able to make use of this card, maybe out of the sideboard if the opponent still expects the Dark Depths strategy to take over the game.

Actually, now that I think about it this card could also probably fit into other green Legacy decks as well – the centaur’s recursion triggers when any land is put into any graveyard, and fetchlands are so rampant in Legacy that it might be worth it for slower green decks to play. This guy quickly becomes huge while also having built-in recursion, which isn’t something we see very often.

I’m sure people will experiment with this card, and I really hope this breaks into Legacy because Loam decks should be able to capitalize on the card’s great recursion, along with other decks that seek to create grindy matchups where there is a ton of removal.

Mizzix’s Mastery

This card blows Past in Flames out of the water! Being able to straight-up cast all the instants and sorceries in your graveyard rather than give them flashback is so, so much more powerful. The best part is that you can also cast it for the regular cost if you need to recast an instant/sorcery in a pinch.

I definitely think that Storm now has a new tool to play around with, and I believe it will replace the single Past in Flames copy in the deck since it is so much easier to re-cast your whole graveyard once you overload this pseudo-Yawgmoth’s Will.

An Aside – Legacy’s Future

With SCG restructuring their tournament series, in both rebranding the series and cutting back on Legacy events, it is starting to feel like more and more like Legacy is slowly going away.

Not only are the events being cut back, but we also constantly have to worry about counterfeits entering the community. I feel like we’re going to see more announcements like the one that happened this weekend at GP: Seattle as the counterfeits continue to enter the market and community at large. How many people do you think were playing with counterfeits and didn’t get caught? How many people do you think weren’t even intentionally playing with counterfeits and went unnoticed, and are even unaware of it themselves until someone with a discerning eye gives them the unfortunate news? It’s definitely a wake-up that yes, your older, reserved list cards are being created as knock-offs for fractions of the price. With such easy access to these proxies and the improvement of the creation process, I feel like more and more players are going to start to become attracted to playing with proxies as the price of the reserved list staples increases.

I think this is why Star City Games is cutting back on Legacy, as players will have less incentive to purchase these proxies if they don’t need them for a tournament setting. It sucks to think about but I think it makes the most sense. Even if it decreases the market prices of cards like dual lands, the rise of Modern as the eternal format of choice (which guarantees reprints) and the continuation and improvement of Chinese (and other) proxies means that less Legacy support makes sense in order to prevent the mass purchases of these cards for tournament play.

It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out in the future, but problems always have creative solutions. I’m sure if Legacy is demanded by enough players then exceptions will be made, one way or another, to keep the format alive. Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Enemy of the Fish Crabs

Are you joining this series in the middle? That’s cool, but be apprised that you’re doing that. If you want to catch all of the references I’m referring to, you can always catch up really quickly if you are so inclined: part one introduced the series and talked about Orzhov and part two discussed Golgari.

Today, I get to talk about my favorite color combination: green-blue. This is going to be a real bummer, because Simic always seems to suck. It’s usually the worst of any given cycle and the mechanics we get are always seem disappointingly slow for Standard. Have fun dicking around with graft—Dimir just stripped your hand and then transmuted for its combo pieces. Still, there are some things that Simic does well, and Kruphix and his Prophet all but made up for the degree to which it seems like Simic has been pooped on. Besides, it’s not always bad: Pygmy Hippo is way better than Mundungu. Well, in EDH, anyway.

What is Simic good at according to the Wiki article I’ve been referencing these last few weeks?

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I’m far from overwhelmed, here. Still, with a lack of probable effects to build a deck around comes increased certainty vis-a-vis the cards likely to be in the deck. The choice is literally almost just, “A +1/+1 counter deck that has card drawing, because of course it has card drawing—there’s blue in it.”

So what are we likely to see if these are the abilities that the deck is built around? Is there a Wurmcoil equivalent here?

+1/+1 Counters

A lot of these cards are pretty bad, frankly. I may end up retreading some cards I’ve already talked about, but we’re trying to judge them with respect to their likelihood to see a reprinting, so why not mention them again?

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I don’t think Hangarback Walker is at all likely.  The event deck took care of this reprinting and sent it “plummeting” to $15 down from $20. As much as this would be a solid card in a deck like we’re expecting, and as much as this might be an interesting Wurmcoil corollary, I have to imagine this is safe. Copies should be pretty stable moving forward.

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I was always as bullish on this card as a person could possibly be, but I didn’t anticipate it hitting $5 this soon. This might be a nice card to reprint into mush and it wouldn’t hurt a deck with a counters theme, either. If you have these, I think you ship them if they start to tail down a bit more—quintupling up in a week usually means the growth is gassed, at least for a while. This card is going to make a small splash in Standard, but it would need to be a staple to be worth enough money that you regret shipping these for $5. If you got these cheap, shipping to a buylist for $2.50 seems fine and no one would blame you. I’m glad I got prerelease-stamped copies for personal use by trading for them, since everyone seems to be sold out of foils, which is odd to see when a Standard card spikes. That smacks of speculation rather than organic growth.

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The Modern Masters reprinting didn’t really make much of a dent in Doubling Season‘s price, did it? I realize this isn’t all that likely, but this would be a good way to bring this price down, provided that’s even something Wizards cares about. Primal Vigor seems even less likely to me, because there is no precedent for reprinting a card originally printed in a Commander deck in a subsequent one. However, I did say it wasn’t out of the question to see a reprinting of Scavenging Ooze in the Golgari deck so maybe this isn’t out of the question. There’s not a ton of money to be lost by not selling, because I expect the Simic one to be the worst-selling of the this year’s five decks—unless it gets a very good Legacy card (which is possible given how good blue is in Legacy). Thus, Doubling Season and Primal Vigor might be safe-ish price-wish, even if reprinted. There just aren’t a ton of cards that help the strategy. The bulk of the stuff is going to be creatures rather than spells.

This article talked a bit about similar cards and I feel like I’ve talked about hydras as well. There are cards worth mentioning, since we’re very likely to see a deck that has a new commander, has Vorel of the Hull Clade in the 99 and takes enemies to hydra town if we’re trifling with +1/+1 counters.

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I have no strong feelings one way or another. This seems like a solid choice in a deck with counters, but it’s by no means the best hydra when you are trying to build a synergistic deck. I imagine Wizards will insert a few hydras, all of them around $5 now, or maybe one more expensive hydra. I’d like to see a lot of them, but that would take bulky hydras and make them true bulk, which isn’t necessarily good. Besides, there are a finite number of rare spots in the deck and they can’t all be hydras. Still, this is a fine inclusion that is very good and gets out of hand fast.

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Kalonian Hydra seems like a better choice. Around the same price as Primordial Hydra, this doesn’t have multiple printings, but it does make your creatures with counters on them get huge. If this doesn’t end up in the precon, I would expect renewed interest in the card. This is a very, very good creature, and since it can buff the rest of your team, can get out of hand quickly. I would like to see this.

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As much as a reprinting could nip this in the bud before it even got started, this would be a fine inclusion. This plays a lot like Taurean Mauler, which is an EDH staple, and also happens to benefit from having trample. While there is no real actual hydra commander for a hydra tribal deck, we could see that in this year’s Simic Commander deck—and that would make hydras more popular. I think this would be hurt by a reprinting, but I don’t think Wizards cares about that, and getting these out there in the deck would be fine. This is a solid card and seems a likely inclusion if the deck cares about counters.

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There’s no money to be made or lost here either way, but how good is this with Hardened Scales?

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Again, how likely is it that Wizards reprints a card that was originally in a Commander product? Last year’s at that? There seems like a zero-percent chance of this being in the deck, but I think this could get even more popular as people want to build decks where counters matter.

There are other cool hydras, and I am sure a few of them are decent candidates. However, hydras aren’t the only creatures that care about +1/+1 counters.

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This card with a few counters on it soon gets pretty saucy. I have this in my Vorel deck, and I’m never upset to draw it. Adding extra counters because of Hardened Scales or Doubling Season feels even better. I don’t see a reason not to put this in the precon, so I guess it’s all a matter of which rares Wizards thinks need to go in. There isn’t much money to be saved by selling these now, but the reprint kills it as a spec, so be careful. I don’t see it getting a ton cheaper, so the time to buy these may be soon if this escapes a reprint.

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If you can add counters and get rid of the persist counters, this might be a good inclusion. Will Wizards want a combo like that in its precon? Either way, this is a good card going forward, and while this would be a third printing, I don’t know that I want to 100-percent rule this out. This has room to grow if it’s not reprinted.

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Right? This seems like a shoo-in to me, which is good since uncommons shouldn’t necessarily be this expensive. The spread has increased radically since I last wrote about this card, but I am still bullish about its long-term growth potential. This is a very good inclusion in the deck but should we not see it reprinted, I like it long-term. Set-specific mechanics like untap abilities narrow reprint potential, after all, but that wouldn’t exclude it from consideration in a Commander precon, so it feels a little unsafe right now.

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I have written about a lot of these cards before, but in the context of a UG deck that almost has to deal with counters, some of these seem less safe than they did a few months ago. How would you build a UG precon deck if you had to? What would you put in it?

Card Drawing

How broad. Blue draws cards and every time green helps out it’s either based off of creatures or is a functional reprint of a blue card. The times they combined the two, we get a card like…

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Bulkomantic Mastery.

Are we going to see Shamanic Revelation or some other relatively color-specific card, or are we going to see cards that combine blue and green together to draw cards? There are some that aren’t terrible.

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There’s no money to be made or lost with Fathom Mage, but this is a solid card that combines the elements of blue and green, draws cards, plays nice with +1/+1 counters, and is really fun to use.

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Modern Masters reprinted this card into powder, and it hasn’t recovered yet, given how its inclusion in Legacy decks seems to be a thing of the past. Still, this is how blue and green draw cards and islandwalk makes this a threat, especially if you put equipment on it. Still, how much money do you lose if you don’t sell these in anticipation of the precon? None, that’s how.

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There are two ways to get Edric in foil and those may be a better bet. This card doesn’t need a reprinting but I can’t rule it out.

Should I list card drawing stuff in EDH? Rhystic Study is basically the one to watch: everyone knows it’s good, and I don’t know how likely it is to get reprinted. Instead, I want to devote the rest of my word count (and probably like 200 or 300 words beyond it) to talk about Simic cards that I think might be good in the deck but don’t necessarily deal with +1/+1 counters or card drawing. I’m going to do that in the most confusing way possible, by starting with a card that does deal with counters.

Miscellany

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This would be included just to give us something that worked well with +1/+1 counters. That said, this also works well with just about anything. This card is expensive because MTG financiers convinced themselves Tiny Leaders was a thing. When is the last time you heard anyone mention Tiny Leaders? Forever ago, right? Well, just being wrong about a format getting traction doesn’t mean there won’t be real consequences, and the consequence for this card was that it reached $15 a few years too early. It would likely have hit $15 without intervention eventually, so a reprint is not unwelcome. Rings of Brighthearth could be this deck’s Wurmcoil, although it would be tricky to justify it if it doesn’t work pretty intimately with the theme of the deck. A lot of the abilities on the creatures and enchantments are triggered. Strionic Resonator does a lot of work in my Vorel deck, although this does double planeswalker loyalty counters, Vorel himself, and some other key abilities.  I’d like to see a reprinting of this card, but only if it makes sense with the deck’s theme.

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…and Consecrated Sphinx deals with card drawing. I could easily go back and change that paragraph where I said I wasn’t going to necessarily name cards that dealt with those concepts. but I’m not going to, because it’s way funnier to me not to.

This is controversial for another reason. This card is discussed as bannable because it’s stupid. You either kill this, steal it, clone it, or lose to the player that has it. Still, this is expensive and this deck makes more sense as a reprint venue than the UR deck. Still, I think this is safe for now.

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This seems like a good candidate. The reprinting would curb its price and increase its availability for one. This isn’t exactly Wurmcoil tier, but bringing the price down forever would be okay. The good thing about EDH cards is that a lot of the people who have the cards play with them every week and likely won’t even notice the price went down. If they do, they will be happy they can afford more copies for other decks. I think this seems like a decent choice to jam in the Simic deck.

The Difficulties of Being Simic

It’s hard to identify cards in Simic that were like Wurmcoil Engine in the red precon from last year: $15 plus or minus a few bucks, played a lot, unlikely to tank largely in value even after the reprint, and cards that players need. I have mostly UG decks, and while I could rattle off cards like Black Market quickly for the Orzhov and Golgari decks, I’m at a bit of a loss here.

The problem with Simic? It has two types of cards: cards that aren’t very good and cards that are so good they’re unfun. Are we going to see Deadeye Navigator and Great Whale? Palinchron? Prophet of Kruphix? Consecrated Sphinx? There are so many cards that are controversial due to how good they are and how every player that plays those colors seems to use them, and Simic has a lot of those cards. I think it means the cards I do have somewhat of an inkling they could see printing could be more likely due to a smaller field of candidates. It also means they could skip all of those cards and the Simic deck could be total trash.

Will we see any hydras at all? Will there be a Momir Vig type theme with mutants rather than +1/+1 counters? Will Wizards not reprint anything over $5 and put all of the value in a card that is new and will be good in Legacy? Will something from a previous precon be reprinted, like Shardless Agent, Scavenging Ooze, or Lifeblood Hydra? It’s hard to say.

I almost did this color combination last since, it’s the trickiest, but I’m going in the order of that stupid wiki and that’s how I live my life. I expect a lot of disagreement on this one, and I welcome it this week. I may play too much Simic to see around my own biases, so let’s hear what you all think.

As always, it’s been a pleasure and I’ll be back next week with Izzet—and we will likely have some spoilers to discuss also. Until then!

PROTRADER: Everything I Care About for EDH in Battle for Zendikar

I’m diverging from my typical weekly boat pun format where I talk about how a card from a new set is going to cause old cards to go up. I’ll probably be back to my old tricks soon. Today, though, let’s look at the new set and see if anything is going to get pushed up.

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