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Commander, Deck Doctor, EDH, James Chillcott

Hobbit Banquet: Your Complete Guide to Upgrading the Food & Fellowship Commander Deck

With the Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth Magic the Gathering set now fully revealed it’s safe to say that Commander fans have plenty to be excited about. From fantastic new commanders to excellent new staples in multiple colors, the LOTR experiment seems set to be a great success even without the intense hunt for the 1/1 The One Ring.

Alongside the main set release, WoTC has also tabled the usual slate of four new pre-constructed Commander decks. In looking over the deck lists, one of the decks in particular jumped out at me as being particularly synergistic and primed for easy upgrades. Take a gander at the Food & Fellowship deck over here. And here is my upgraded version: The Hobbit’s Banquet.

It should come as no shock that Wizards wants their Frodo and Sam deck to be popular, but given that Food has been one of the more underwhelming tokens in Commander play to date, the freshly acquired power level of this strategy based on all the new cards may catch many players off guard.

The first key pillar of strength in this list is your access to dual commanders. The partner ability has already proven to be highly effective in strategies like Tymna and Thrasios, and the synergy between Frodo and Sam is much more specific. Frodo’s role here is to leverage consistent life gain from food tokens and other sources of life gain to ensure that you can achieve all four levels of the ring tempting you by the mid-game, and in doing so, generate a ton of card advantage. Let’s review what the temptations the ring has to offer, shall we?

So along the way we get to keep choosing a new ring bearer, and eventually our ring bearer is legendary, can’t be blocked by creatures with greater power, loots on attack, forces blockers to be sacrificed at end of combat and hits all opponents for 3 if it hits a player. That’s a pretty good stack of bonuses, especially when the emblem can’t be interacted with and the bonuses last all game once you have them. Sure, they can keep killing your ring bearer, but the reality is that in this deck, they are going to have other threats to worry about that don’t care about attacking. This means Frodo will often get to do his job pretty well at least into the mid-game, where your combo kill plan can take over.

As the other half of your dynamic Commander duo, Sam is an excellent engine for any food deck. He guarantees food production every turn, and makes all food cheaper to activate by 50%! That’s a very important set of abilities for this deck, so generally speaking you will want to spend more resources protecting Sam than Frodo.


Food Engine Supporting Cast

While Sam and Frodo form the core of your synergy, their friends greatly expand your combo potential and all work together as a finely tuned value engine building towards draining or bleeding out the table.

Merry, Warden of Isengard and Pippin, Warden of Isengard provide excellent food synergy in this deck, and also help further your theme of constant access to key creatures via their partner ability enabling you to pull the missing warden out of your deck when you cast the other. Merry rewards artifact production with 1/1 lifelink tokens, which all of your token doublers interact with and the lifelink on those tokens assists with your life gain synergies. Pippen makes food tokens for one mana while also providing an overrun effect for the mid to late game once you have a pile of food. Both cards being halflings means they are also solid ring bearers and can make good use of Bilbo’s Ring.

Meriadoc Brandybuck provides backup for Sam’s food during the attack phase strategy. Banquet Guests cast into a board with four food tokens would cost WG for an 8/8 that can sac food to gain indestructible until end of turn, marking it as a sneaky Hogaak variant in this build. Frodo Baggins ramps up your incidence of ring temptations and provides an additional ring bearer option.

Rosie Cotton of South Lane makes one or more food tokens and rewards further token production of any kind with +1/+1 counters on any creature other than herself. This was very good in games where she showed up. Peregrin Took both doubles food production AND lets you trade food for cards. Excellent! Treebeard, Gracious Host was a monster in the games we played last night, adding two or more food to the table while immediately providing the threat of growing itself or a ring bearer to massive size in short order.

Lobelia, Defender of Bag End lets you sac your array of artifacts to either cast free spells or drain the table. Bilbo, Birthday Celebrant ramps up the life gain, and provides a ridiculous end game should said gain get out of control. Samwise Gamgee helps crank out food and then turn that into additional redundancy if you need to retrieve one of your many historic cards from the yard.

Token Doublers

Cards that can double (or quadruple or more!) your token output are fantastic in this deck. Not only are they ratcheting up your food production, but they also have a shot at multiplying incidental creature tokens in the build from cards like Farmer Cotton, as well as clues and treasure from Academy Manufactor or Smothering Tithe. As such, you will definitely want all of Parallel Lives, Anointed Procession, Mondrak Glory Dominus and possibly a Doubling Season in a flex slot. These cards all interact, to additionally multiply token production from 2x to 4x and beyond, so critical mass is a good way to end the game in combination with your drain effects. Chatterfang, Squirrel General is a natural fit here from multiple angles, providing a forest walking ring bearer, a ton of squirrel tokens to double and some creature control on an adorable body.

Win Conditions

This deck doesn’t need to win in combat at all, allowing you to ignore a lot of what your opponents are up to in your average game and just focus on establishing and protecting your engine. Your primary route to victory will typically consist of overwhelming artifact token production leading to mass artifact sac to drain the table.

Agent of the Iron Throne (CLB) can’t be used as a background in the command zone here but it is still excellent in the 99 given that you have two commanders and are likely to have one in play to bleed the table whenever you sac artifacts. Nadier’s Nightblade (CMR) is even better, as it loses the requirement for a commander to be present, and drains rather than bleeds. And of course Mirkwood Bats is the nastiest of all, bleeding each opponent on both your token creation AND sacrifice.

Disciple of the Vault can only bleed one opponent at a time, but it does so whenever anyone sacs a treasure so it seriously punishes a treasure heavy pod for just one black mana.Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose and Sanguine Bond punish a single opponent for your constant life gain. Add in Exquisite Blood to complete the two card combo if you’re into that sort of thing. Bloodchief Ascension furthers your table drain shenanigans.

I prefer Protection Racket in my drain focused decks, but you may decide to find room for Black Market Connections as an alternative. Finally, Felidar Sovereign presents a must kill threat, lest you win the game on the following turn. Aetherflux Reservoir can fill a similar role. I haven’t included Bolas’s Citadel here, but that’s also an option.

Protection Spells

As with most low slung creature combo decks, you are particularly vulnerable to sweepers and given that your action relies heavily on both creatures and artifacts, you aren’t going to be looking to run many sweepers of your own. Instead, you will likely want some efficient point removal, defensive enchantments and a quiver of instant speed protection spells to protect your creature combo engines.

Heroic Intervention, Teferi’s Protection, Akroma’s Will and Clever Concealment provide an excellent core protection package. Given your access to dual commanders, find room for Flawless Maneuver if you like instead of my chosen Shalai, Voice of Plenty. Serra Paragon recovers most of what you might care about ending up in your graveyard.

The One Ring provides a turn cycle of respite from most threats with trailing card draw balanced against life loss you can easily stomach given all of your food tokens.  Bilbo’s Ring does excellent work in this deck full of hobbits and ring tempting, making sure your ring bearer is unblockable and hexproof on your turn and drawing a card per attack cycle in a deck that could care less about the single life loss. When the ring is on Frodo, you get to draw up to 3 cards per attack via the combination of rings and abilities.

Flowering of the White Tree puts a tax on targeting your various legendary ring bearers and combo pieces, while simultaneously turning them into bigger threats and doubling your creature token size. Boromir, Warden of the Tower is a fresh white EDH staple that does double duty here, protecting your team and shutting down cascade shenanigans, pitch spells and any other free spells your opponents are trying to leverage. Samwise the Stouthearted provides additional protection for your key engine pieces while adding a ring temptation trigger.

Removal

I’ve chosen to go light on removal here, but season to taste. For now I’m running just Path to Exile, Swords to Plowshares, and Claim the Precious to deal with key threats. Voracious Fell Beast provides a solid ring bearer that can kill three creatures and make three food tokens. Beyond that you’re looking to race to the end game by draining the table so get your your spices and get cooking.


Life Gain Doublers

Boon of Reflection neatly doubles all your life gain. So does Rhox Faithmender and both cards are auto includes here.

Utility Cards

The Ring Tempts You ensures you max the ring benefits quickly and draws cards everytime you name a ring bearer, again, for life you can generally afford to lose. Lotho, Corrupt Sherriff is a great commander in its own right, and does solid work here generating treasure tokens at largely irrelevant cost of life. Likewise, Orchish Bowmasters is a great new black EDH staple that does the same kind of work here as Lotho, namely via punishing opponents who are trying to do too much by pinging any target and providing creature tokens that can end up doubled if you don’t already have one. Rapacious Guest adds additional synergies between food and the attack step.

The Great Henge isn’t at it’s best here, but as The Party Tree box topper, it still is likely to cost 4 mana or so in the mid-game and provide card advantage, mana ramp and consistent life gain. Shadowspear helps ensure you have consistent access to lifegain and trample for your ring bearer, with the side benefit of letting you remove hexproof and indestructible from opposing threats, and can be searched up with Urza’s Saga.  Revive the Shire gives you a regrowth effect that also incidentally makes a food. Delighted Halfing provides an additional Cavern of Souls style protection from counterspells on key legendary spells, of which this deck has plenty. Gilded Goose doubles as mana and food production, so it’s a no-brainer. Trail of Crumbs ties everything together, both generating food and allowing you to turn food into cards.

Blind Obedience slows your opponents down while letting you leverage spells cast into additional table drain. Shelob, Child of Ungoliant might be a hot new spider commander but she also does solid work in this deck as a massive threat with built in protection and the ability to significantly upgrade dead utility creatures from your opponents into food with upside. Denethor, Ruling Steward provides additional table drain, and his creature replacement ability interacts really well with your token doublers. Sheoldred, the Apocalypse bleeds your opponents for card draw while boosting your life gain and providing a solid ring bearer.

War of the Last Alliance searches up two key legends out of your deck and then sets up a big attack phase while tempting your ring bearer. Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit grows a creature, draws a card and makes two food, capping off with a big creature token payoff. Dauthi Voidwalker does its usual thing here, keeping opposing yards in check while also presenting a nasty ring bearer. Angelic Accord rewards your constant life gain with 4/4 angel threats that can present an alternate win condition. Inkshield goes a step further, heading off a potential killing blow from an opponent and likely unleashing a devastating torrent of tokens from your token doubler effects. Kambal, Consul of Allocation provides additional incidental drain and Esper Sentinel draws cards for minimal cost as per usual and Smothering Tithe does the same for treasures that might get doubled. Necropotence cleanly draws a ton of cards given your life gain potential.

Nasty End and Deadly Dispute both allow you to trade up easily on cards in a deck with so many cheap Legends and artifacts. I’ve been trimming tutors from my decks lately, but clearly Worldy Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Eladamri’s Call, Demonic Tutor and so forth can all boost your consistency in high powered pods.

Key Lands

The Shire offers additional food production which is perfect here. Minas Tirith provides optional card draw during your frequent attacks and rarely comes into play tapped.

Because you’re gaining so much life, you can absolutely lean into the pain lands in this deck and run Mana Confluence, City of Brass, Horizon Canopy, Ancient Tomb, Brushland, Caves of Koilos and Silent Clearing.

Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth and Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth auto fix for two of your main colors. If you’ve got them, the full suite of fetch lands and shock lands are a lock. Add as many of the CMR/CLB duals as you have on color. Urza’s Saga can get half of the Cat Oven combo or Shadowspear, Sol Ring or Mana Crypt. If you’ve got a Gaea’s Cradle it will do work here. With so many powerful enchantments in the deck, Hall of Heliod’s Generosity is likely to do work. Volrath’s Stronghold does the same for your key Legends.


The Specs

Now from an MTGFinance perspective, speculators and players should likely focus on cards with lower supply, less printings and a high chance of being added to variants on this build.

A couple of key options include:

– Academy Manufactor FEAs, $16 and climbing with plenty of existing EDH demand being expanded upon with the advent of this food deck
– Boon Reflection, last seen in Double Masters and available near $5 in both foil and non-foil though it could see a reprint in a Secret Lair or Commander Masters this year
– Rhox Faithmender foils, single printing from 2013, currently near $10 but headed to $20+ if it doesn’t catch a reprint
– Feasting Troll King is a solid threat in this deck if your mana base can support it, and FEAs are single printing, low supply and sitting at about $10.
– Angelic Accord hasn’t caught a reprint since IMA, and foils are sitting hear $6 with very low supply
– This deck generates pressure for Parallel Lives, Anointed Procession and Doubling Season, but that pressure base is already large, and at least some of those have to catch a reprint in Commander Masters.

Here again is a link to my upgraded version of The Hobbit’s Banquet, all ready to serve as a jumping off point for your own culinary delights. Bon appetit!

James Chillcott is the owner of MTGPrice.com, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy art fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994. He has been producing MTGFinance content since 2012.

Accumulated Knowledge

PROTRADER: Week 1 Plans

1 Comment

Before anything else, sell your Saheelis.

…Like, right now.

…As in “Stop reading, open a new tab, and go to your preferred buylist”.

…I’ll give you permission to wait until FNM if you prefer to stay local, but THAT’S IT.

You good? Okay cool. So now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about our gameplan for the next couple of weeks. For those of you who are newer (or are self-taught) in the realm of modern-day Magic finance, this is a somewhat volatile time. We are right now in Week 1 of a new Standard (despite no old sets actually rotating), meaning that we don’t know the shape of format in full. We have a couple weeks until the Pro Tour, which has traditionally been the first key definition for a format, despite the tendancy of PT metagames to be very clearly standalones. I’m not going to try and predict the Pro Tour this early, but I want to try and key in on everything prior.

There are two kinds of new format spikes- ones predicated on speculation (Saheeli! Did you sell those yet?), and ones informed by the format as it shapes and develops (Boros Reckoner). The former tend to be planeswalkers, which probably speaks more to the difficulty in evaluating the “new” card type. Finding the next Boros Reckoner is more difficult, but there has historically been a longer window of time for discovering it- Aetherworks Marvel could probably fit into this category also.

Since we aren’t losing any cards, the evaluation process is a little more concrete- we know what most of the playable removal spells are, meaning we only have to compare new ones to preexisting options. Of the new class, Shock and Fatal Push are probably the only new cards that see significant play in the future- other than maybe Battle of the Bridge. With that in mind, we have a slightly easier time figuring out what threats can get past the existing removal- knowing now that there’s an upside to having a converted mana cost of 5 or more.

One of the cards I like, that will serve as an example of what I’m talking about, is Herald of Anguish (the only thing that I don’t like about this card is its current $9 price tag). The toughness is higher than 3, the converted mana cost is above 4, and it has both a free incremental effect and an activated ability. While we don’t know yet how much Improvise will reduce costs, we can assume that Herald will not often cost the full 7. This feels like one of the better finishers in the format, even in a deck without a heavy artifact theme. I’m not saying that Herald is the only good card, just that it is important to go through all of the stats when evaluating a card. I will say also that this set has been underwhelming to me personally, but if you see a card you like let me know in the comments.

This is not a Boros Reckoner, but it sort of is.

Looking through the set as a whole, I don’t see much else that can’t be evaluated entirely in a vacuum. One of the reasons why Revolt as a mechanic is appealing in older formats is the compatibility with fetchlands, something we don’t really have access to currently. If Thopter tokens (or, for the time being, Clues) are something that have a wide proliferation, then some of the fringier options may rise in stock. Likewise, a seemingly bulk option like Aethergeode Miner could very sneakily be an engine for Revolt or energy. Clues feel like the missing piece of the puzzle in that they are artifacts that can die at will, so start to watch for Tireless Tracker to have a late career surge.

My last piece of advice for this weekend is to be aggressive starting Saturday night or Sunday. If you watch the prices on Friday you’ll see them start to come down as stores flesh out their inventories and smaller shops and individuals try to undercut each other on TCGPlayer. They are doing a 3% kickback this weekend, so if you find something you like, wait until early Sunday (as in, before the Falcons beat the Packers) and pull the trigger then. It’s likely that the SCG event this weekend features mostly old decks (as well as some amount of Saheeli Combo), so I don’t expect a new card to blow up on coverage this soon. As the weekend goes along I’ll post what I’m seeing on the forums, so look for that. Til next time!

Best,
Ross

PS- The reason you REALLY need to sell Saheeli is that the card has basically tripled in price before this deck has had any play time- the strategy will need to basically occupy the entire Top 16 of this weekend’s event to justify the increase. If the deck is somehow that good (and can maintain a high level of success), then a piece gets banned in a few weeks anyways.

Accumulated Knowledge, Unlocked ProTrader

UNLOCKED PROTRADER: The Aftermath

7 Comments

Holy.

Crap.

Bannings are tricky things. A ban in Standard is different than one in Modern or Legacy, both in terms of tone and player response. “Older” formats inherently carry the risk of bannings as a check against unforeseen interactions between new and old cards (this is the essential crux of the Golgari Grave-Troll re-banning, new cards like Cathartic Reunion just made Dredge “too good”). It’s possible that this is because formats like Modern are created with some bans already in place, so some of the bloom is off the rose from the get go. Standard, however, is a much more volatile situation. Standard is sold in part as a balanced environment, and bannings, even intended to preserve the greater good, are considered in part a failure.

BRIEF COMPARATIVE ASIDE: The immediate aftermath of a Standard ban kinda feels like when an interim head coach takes over a football team. Yes things are different with Umezawa’s Jitte gone, but nobody thinks that Dan Campbell is really going to stick around. Then again, the Jags hired Doug Marrone, so who knows?

My guess is that bannings in Standard ultimately take some of the romanticism away- players (bad ones) assume that THEY will find the missing piece of the puzzle and vanquish the scourge of whatever deck they keep losing to at FNM and then some how win a Pro Tour. I want to get to the meat of these particular bans (the Standard ones, mostly), but I will say that the addition of a second B&R announcement is an early check against Saheeli Combo disguised as a good idea. I don’t know how the Magic population writ large will respond to the idea of a more policed format philosophy, but I do think it will help prevent player bleeding in the event of a broken format.

Emrakul, the Promised End: This is quite possibly my favorite ban- Emrakul was the de facto top of the format in terms of size and effect, and it warped card choices and game plans towards it. Killing Emrakul (or rather, imprisoning her on the moon) opens up endgame opportunities for cards like Ulamog, Kozilek, or new cards like Herald of Anguish. More importantly, decks that were homogonized in certain forms can now branch out and specialize- Green Black doesn’t NEED to be Delirium anymore, if they find a finisher better than Traverse for the next best thing to Emrakul, although that’s still an option. That trickles down to mean that early game plans don’t have to be the “self-mill while trying to stay alive” tactics that they were before. I don’t know if there is a clear best winner in this situation, but there are several smaller ones.

My personal favorite finisher.

Smuggler’s Copter: Actually, this might be my favorite ban. Copter had the same deck-building effect as Emrakul, but on the exact opposite archetypes. There will continue to be decks that want to include a mix of Vehicles and creatures, but I don’t expect there to be a 1-for-1 replacement (not even the impressive-looking Heart of Kiran).

Golgari Grave-Troll: Dredge is tough to balance, and GGT is just way too good to exist in Modern. Early impact has been a spike on Golgari Thug, although that card doesn’t have the potential to close out games like Troll does. The only Dredge cards that should be allowed in Modern are Life From the Loam and Moldervine Cloak, as they are the ones I like best.

There’s now way this card is coming back. Plan accordingly.

Reflector Mage: The UW decks have a lot of congestion, and so losing Reflector Mage makes the construction of those decks more streamlined. That’s to a degree the opposite effect that the other bans are expected to have, but it also eliminates some of the weird issues that Reflector Mage had on the formats it was in (namely, Eldrazi Displacer). I think UW is still a deck after losing Mage and Copter, but I don’t think it’s a major player.

Gitaxian Probe: I can’t pretend to know everything about how this impacts Modern, but I definitely get that it’s a big deal. I’m going to pass on this as there’s way too much contextual determination on what replaces it where, and I’m not sure that there is much financial upside given that most of the replacements are things like Serum Visions and Sleight of Hand. Combo decks get some degree worse, although mostly because they can’t have a Peek before attempting to go off.

To close, here are my favorite cards ahead of this weekend’s prerelease!

Yahenni’s Expertise: I think there is a real possibility that the next few months are dominated in part by Liliana, the Last Hope. That’s not to say that there won’t be other decks (we know Saheeli Combo will be a possibility for at least the first eight weeks), but I do think that Lili could stand to serve as a pillar of the format. In that situation, Yahenni’s Expertise seems INSAAAAAANE. Planeswalkers are graded in part on how well they can defend themselves, and having the opportunity to package a Languish in for [1] seems incredible. At $6 I still really like these, but I would rather trade for them than buy them outright.

I really love this card. “Free” is the most dangerous word in Magic.

Sram, Senior Edificer: Big IF here, but if Puresteel Paladin Combo is a deck, then this feels like a critical 4x. Definitely a high-risk situation, but Modern has been shaken up considerably. I don’t think THIS is the card that sees a tremendous price spike, but I think this is the card that makes the deck work. Key pieces that COULD see an increase include Mox Opal, Monastery Mentor, and Puresteel Paladin itself.

Greenwheel Liberator: I read this a few times to make sure that it counted my Windswept Heaths. It does! Definitely going to try this in Modern with Experiment One and Burning-Tree Emissary. Hidden Herbalists and Narnam Renegade are interesting options also- although these are all pretty narrow.

Lifecrafter’s Bestiary (foil): These feel like a sneaky-good pickup, but definitely for the long term. Most of the decks that want this have access to green already, so color identity isn’t an issue. Long term hold.

I love this long-term.

That’s all for today, good luck at your prerelease!

Best,

Ross

Accumulated Knowledge

PROTRADER: O Brave New World

Today we are going to talk about Frontier, and I am going to be VERY critical of it. I want to state a couple things off the bat, in hopes that it will help both of us take the most from this that we can:

  1. I have long been advocating for a reboot of Extended. However, I have no financial interests in that “format” outside of the miscellaneous cards acquired as a consistent Standard player of the last several years.
  2. I do not want Frontier to fail as some sort of emotional vendetta. I believe that Magic is good when there are lots of popular formats, and tournament-level constructed Magic TRULY needs more options to cast the wide net that Organized Play wants.
  3. Similarly, I do not intend to target Frontier as either a boon or detriment to Modern. I’ve been pretty vocal in my complaints with that format, and (spoilers!) they are present in my assessment of Frontier’s flaws.
  4. I flew on Frontier Airlines once, and it was a pretty subpar experience, and if we are being totally honest, like 8% of my dislike of Frontier comes with mentally auto-associating it with crappy flights.

Let’s start by describing what Frontier actually is. Frontier is a format that started popping up in Japan several months ago, and began to gain traction there as an alternative to Modern. The starting point here is M15, in part because that set introduced new card frame changes (including that little holographic oval on rares/mythics). The similarities to Modern don’t stop there, however- Frontier is non-rotating, so the cards that are already in are only leaving through bans. It also only includes Standard-legal expansions, so things like Commander products don’t have a significant impact. Let’s talk about what the selling points of Frontier have been so far:

CARD ACCESSIBILITY: In this sense Frontier is advertised as a cheaper alternative to Modern, rather than a new experience. Some Modern cards, like Blood Moon and Dark Confidant, have not been made easily available since they were last in Standard. Things like Tarmogoyf serve as permanent representations that if you haven’t been playing Magic for a very long time, you will have a harder time participating now.

This is something that I definitely sympathize with, and I don’t think that making the jump from Standard directly into Modern is feasible anymore (if it ever truly was). The problem, of course, is that Frontier only solved the symptom, not the cause. If Frontier is still around in ten years, then cards from M15 and Tarkir will still be old cards. They are accessible now the same way Cryptic Command was accessible when Lorwyn was the newest set out. It is mistaking recency for availability, and that’s a long-term issue.

One of the problems with Modern is that it has baked-in issues created by turbulence in Magic’s past. Tarmogoyf’s price is reflective of the fact that it was printed at a time where Magic’s active player population was possibly a third (or less!) of what it is today. Modern is a set of rules for play but not a means of itself providing for that play. If Magic’s boom times are coming to an end, or we see a large enough shrink in players that print runs decrease, then those fluctuations will be forever encased in amber in Frontier’s availability. The graph below represents Modern’s accessibility problem because that inequality is unchangeable (reprints that aren’t in Standard legal products have yet to meet the required numbers to address this issue, by virtue of their scale).

THAT LITTLE FOIL OVAL: It’s not a major selling point, but it’s nice to know that there is an extra security measure against counterfeit cards. I don’t actually have an argument against this, so I’ll give them points for this. See? Fair and balanced.

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY: Modern’s tentpole exists on the basis that the card frames changed, not a clear and consistent development philosophy. Modern simultaneously operates in a reality where Blood Moon, a rare originally printed in THE DARK (!!!!), exists alongside several sets where Stone Rain was deemed “too good to exist anymore”. Magic design and development is not static, and so effects and functions evolve over the course of time. This is why some effects, like “Destroy all creatures” (originally found on Wrath of God), have crept up in cost and mutated in functionality. These fluctuations serve as a complex system of balance beams in Standard, while at the same time narrowing in on theoretical ideals of cards/effects (Day of Judgment probably costs a theoretical 4.5 mana). Of course, when you compare these new cards to Blood Moon, a card so old that “The Adventures of Pete and Pete” WAS STILL MAKING NEW EPISODES, they fail to come close to making an impact.

The assumption Frontier makes is that Magic is in a much healthier place now than it was when 8th Edition came out, and in that respect they are correct. The crux of that argument is backward-facing however, rather than anticipatory. Frontier, by never rotating, is cementing its own roster of “Best Available”- sure, that new card is good, but is it better than Siege Rhino? Is that new one drop really better than Monastery Swiftspear? If WotC ever decides to get aggressive with certain reprints (think Lightning Bolt in M10), then you have that card in Frontier FOREVER.

Frontier’s fatal flaw, as you may have pieced together by now, is a small thermal exhaust port right below the main port with a shaft that leads directly to the reactor system that it does not rotate. That is ultimately a long-term problem. If Frontier goes the way of Tiny Leaders and fails to mature into its role (that’s my bet), then that won’t be an issue ever- but if it succeeds, then it is going to be the crux that makes some hard to reprint cards mini-Tarmogoyfs. I’m going to close with some of the cards that stand to benefit from Frontier’s success- but be aware that buying into this format is definitely risky at this point.

Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy: This guy has to be the most obvious starting point. Well actually, my instinct was to start with Thoughtseize, until I realized (for like, the hundredth time) that Theros isn’t in this format. Jace is #1 because he is insanely difficult to reprint- he’s a flip card (expensive on the production side, requires a product with enough flip cards), he’s a specific character (can only appear in a set where Jace makes sense OR is flavor-neutral), and is a narrow iteration of said specific character (can only appear in a setting where Jace gets his spark like Origins OR is flavor neutral). Essentially, “Baby Jace” is going to have to be in a supplemental product that can afford the front end cost of including flip cards, even though almost all of the flip cards are from Innistrad, so there is no flavorful throughline for something like a Duel Deck. The best case scenario is the Modern Masters iteration that goes up to Origins, which is going to be several years away. Even if Frontier died tomorrow, it’s easy to see why this is a steady play at $45. Oh, and the Grixis/4c/5c control decks love this card, so it’s actually pretty good in the format. I’m not going to cite too much in terms of past results, but there are some decklists at mtgdecks.net that I’ve been scoping out. It’s too small a sample size to say what decks are “best”, but it’s still real data. If you have an appetite for more expensive “specs”, this is a good one even if you don’t like Frontier’s outlook.

 

Collected Company: If Jace is #1, then CoCo is #1A. Company gets better any time a creature that costs 3 or less is printed, and is easy enough to splash in any color aggro deck (we have literal fetchlands). These are down at about $10, which may be the lowest since DTK came out- this card is good in Modern and (very) fringe in Legacy, so snapping some up in trades is extremely appealing. This will be a pillar of the format if Frontier blossoms.

Emrakul, the Promised End/ Ugin, the Spirit Dragon: These two are roughly the tied for best in the “biggest thing” category, so I could see either (or both!) being the premier topper of the format. Emrakul is still in Standard for a while, but Ugin is pricy despite being playable in almost nothing else. I say hold off on both of these, but watch them- the success of either one (if any) will help dictate which playable support cards may see secondary spikes.

Dig Through Time: LOL there’s no way this format makes it. But this frustrating garbage is apparently legal, so expect at least modest gains if Frontier survives.

What would I play if I knew I’d face Dig Through Time every round? Civilization 6.

Obelisk of Urd: Elves is a deck, and there is probably some tribe (humans?) that is on enough of the white weenies to make this functional. Goblins is close but probably not close enough.

These are the sort of “Level 0” cards that caught my eye, because I’m not sure if we have a stable enough environment to begin metagaming off of it. The issue will for now be supply, because everything (other than maybe M15 and Origins) has pretty big market saturation. Things like Kalitas that are currently good in Standard AND Modern are interesting plays, but probably won’t see too much percentage increase as people who already play Modern won’t have much issue oscillating to Frontier.

That’s all for this week, let me know your thoughts on Frontier, my assessment of it, and what cards you like, if any.

Best,

Ross