Tag Archives: oath of the gatewatch

First Looks at Oath of the Gatewatch

December 14, 2015 Jared Yost 3 Comments

We’ve slowly been seeing more and more pieces of OGW flow in and they have been very interesting, especially from a financial perspective. Let’s take a look at the spoilers that have been revealed so far and see what possibilities lie in store for us as January approaches.

New Basic Land

First and most importantly, we are now receiving a new basic land (not type, just land – your Tribal Flames are still going to be burning people for only five damage max) – the Wastes.

This land means a whole, whole lot from a financial perspective. Since this is a basic land, nearly ever Magic player out there is going to want to have some of these, and the only way for them to get them is going to be be in Oath packs, Fat Packs, and other products. Looks like we could be seeing a fat packs fiasco all over again. At least initially.

I’m not trying to be the bringer of doom and gloom here of Wastes’ future price, but what if Wizards starts printing these lands in land packs that are distributed at tournaments along with the rest of the other basic lands? Right now I think that many of us are under the impression that we will only be able to get these through OGW products, but since this is basically the “purple” color that everyone has theorized that Wizards was ultimately going release I think that they are going to heavily support it moving forward so that players aren’t shelling out multiple dollars per copy of basic land that they need for a deck. This could just be wishful thinking on my part, but I’m not sure if I’m going to go out of my way to pick up massive amounts of Wastes for $0.25 or more a piece.

Foils on the other hand are a totally different story. For all the people that want to make fully colorless Commander decks a thing (which they have been in the past, however you couldn’t play any basic lands in the deck which makes it significantly harder to build especially for newer players) foils are going to have a decent premium going forward, and with the different arts for the Wastes I think that the more popular arts will easily maintain their value through the years. I’m not going to be looking to pick up the foils immediately after the set comes out but as soon as I sense that a lull has been reached I’ll be sure to pick up my own copies of foil wastes for the Karn, Silver Golem Commander deck that I run.

Early Expedition Information

Expedition information has slowly been trickling in and we have pictures of Mystic Gate, Forbidden Orchard, and Ancient Tomb as revealed cards.

What this tells us is that we’re going to have the filter land cycle, but also that Wizards is throwing in one-off’s of lands that they wanted to include as part of the elusive expedition collectables. I mean, no-one was really clamoring for Forbidden Orchard (even though the art is really, really sweet in the expedition!) but Ancient Tomb is a welcome sight and means that we might get a few more Vintage and Legacy playable expeditions… could we even see a Wasteland spoiler eventually?*(12/14 Edit – Yes, we do have Wasteland! And Strip Mine! see the full reveal here) Is asking for a Rishadan Port, Dark Depths, or Grove of the Burnwillows too much? Probably, though to to keep selling more and more packs I wouldn’t be surprised to see popular Legacy/Commander lands being included as expedition in this set.

In terms of price and collectability, I think we’ll see the same trend in the new expeditions as we did with the Battle for Zendikar ones. BFZ expeditions hit their lows in November and October, a few months after the set was released, but now that Oath is approaching shortly the supply for BFZ is going to dry up and the prices of expeditions will also go up since they won’t be getting cracked in packs as often anymore. I also expect Oath lands to follow this trend, and maybe even accelerate it a little bit since Shadows Over Innistrad is also closely approaching on the horizon.

All in all, expeditions will be collectable for years to come, as they were included specifically in Battle for Zendikar block as a way for Wizards to sell more packs while also providing players with awesome Cube and Commander collectables that the player base has always gravitated towards. First in the form of judge foils, but now that judge foils are getting rarer it seems that special foils like expeditions are going to replace them. Yes, this reminds us of the Secret Rarity of Yu-gi-oh!, but at least here it is only reprints and the cards are not required for Standard or other tournament play.

Continuing Spoilers

Kozilek, the Great Distortion is the premier card that Wizards gave us showcasing the new Wastes mana. I think they’re just calling it colorless? It will be produced by all spells moving forward and any other ability that taps for colorless mana will produce the diamond symboled mana that is displayed on Wastes. For example, the first ability of Shivan Reef will be able to be tapped for diamond mana.

All in all, it could be an interesting card for Standard since it rewards you for ramping and dumping your hand since when you cast him you can refill back up to seven cards. Having Menace and free counterspells available is also a huge bonus, so at the very least he will be hugely popular in the casual crowds for years to come.

Like Ulamog, initial prices will be high (especially in light of the Wastes release) so wait a bit for prices to die down to pick up your copies.

While this card is somewhat underwhelming by itself, the Surge mechanic is going to either be extremely dull or entirely broken, similar to Delve. As long as they don’t go crazy with Surge in the set I think it will border on boring rather than format defining. Still, keep an eye out for any interesting Surge cards since they might have a ton of casual appeal for players like to play a ton of 2HG.

This card has great applications for Standard. There is already a sacrifice deck that exists, and this card will slot very nicely into that shell since it already is a cheap 2/3 with deathtouch for only two mana. I’ll be watching the price, especially foils, since I believe this will be very popular in Commander too since the cmc is sooooooo low for the stats and it is a legend.

This land… is gonna wreck people in Commander, and nowhere else. I mean, sure it could see Standard play, but I think it is really slow and would take too long to get online. Looks for foils, and wait for the price to drop a bit before picking them up. I think that since this land isn’t legendary, it could fare nicely in Modern and other eternal formats as well since being able to copy instants, sorceries, or creatures is versatile. However, I believe that versatility is better suited to casual formats since the time and mana investment it takes to get this land online is quite steep.

That’s all this week. Let me know what you all are looking out for as OGW approaches.

Jason Alt

What a Waste

December 9, 2015 Jason Alt 7 Comments

So that Wastes card is all but confirmed, isn’t it?

This guy. The card that is *wink wink, nudge nudge* unconfirmed. I am not going to 100 percent say that we know this card is real, but I don’t think it would kill us to pretend it is.

This card actually matters a great deal even if it’s not real, because it’s going to drive buying behavior for a little bit, and if it is real, everyone who was waiting for confirmation is going to act and only those who bought before they got confirmation are in a position to benefit. Let’s look at every possible consequence of this card within an EDH-finance perspective and try to see how much this card matters and how likely we think it is to be real.

I think it’s probably real. I’ve heard from a few people who design proxies, most notably “Proxy Guy” (@theproxyguy) that if this card is a fake, it’s flawless. For a while, the odd symbol on the card appeared like it might be a dreaded sixth mana color. Players who are optimistic like me when I’m drinking (but only the right amount and the right stuff—like, Whiskey Jason is only optimistic about his ability to beat school buses in fights and Tequilla Jason blacks out and tells people he invented time travel, but only a few hours into the future and your pants can’t travel into the future with you) will tell you they think this is just a basic land that taps for colorless mana.

How do we explain Newzilek (Newlamog rolls off the tongue so much better) and the fact that he has colorless mana in his casting cost?

Being charitable, we’ll assume the two diamond shapes are colorless mana that originated from a source that produces colorless mana and the other eight mana can come from colored sources. You can tap eight forests and two wastes, for example, but you can’t tap ten forests. That seems a little bit clunky and unintuitive, but the alternative is living in a world where Wizards of the Coast took all of the design work Johnathon Loucks did plus all of the feedback they have gotten from EDH players with colorless generals, put all of those things into a pile, and peed on them. Just peed right on that pile of mostly intangible concepts.

I don’t want to live in a world where Wizards of the Coast pees on concepts. I want to live in a world where I can play Evolving Wilds in my Karn, Silver Golem EDH deck, should I ever hate winning enough to build that kind of deck. Although, maybe I will build it, because the idea of using Liquimetal Coating to assassinate their lands one by one or attack them for seven with Spine of Ish Sah makes me laugh.

So maybe it’s not just wastes that produce this diamond mana. Maybe other lands tap for it and maybe it’s just a new and totally unnecessary way to denote colorless mana. Did we have other clues? You bet.

There’s that symbol again. So, either only lands from this set produce this mana (stupid) or this is the new way lands that tap for only colorless will denote that (stupid, but less stupid, so it wins).

Let’s ignore how totally hot sex Mirrorpool is in EDH for a few weeks, even though this card is. It’s hot, hot sex. Can you think of a deck that doesn’t want to do any of those things? Oh, you can’t? And Crucible of Worlds is a card? Interesting. I hope this card’s real. You know what else I hope is real? The last piece of the puzzle.

There’s that fugly diamond again. I could kiss you, fugly diamond. I could kiss your fugly, foil f$^%*@# face.

I don’t want to talk about the price of a Mystic Gate Expeditions land will cost, because I just started thinking of the analysis I could do to figure it out, and correctly predicting the price of something that the market will dictate the price of before any of us can preorder them and no one can make any money from short of buying packs and busting them is a lot of work to show off, maybe be wrong, and not talk about what I wanted to talk about when I started writing this article.

Let’s stick with the task at hand. Still, if this is real, we’re getting foily, fantastic filter lands in EDH, and maybe some other formats, too, I guess. It also confirms the diamond symbol. There will be DIRE CONSEQUENCES.

Card with Symbols

I did this in MS paint because I was out touching girls’ boobs when the rest of you nerds were learning how to photoshop boobs onto the Facebook pictures of the girls in your homeroom class. The point still stands: if they’re committed to the stupid diamond thing outside of this block, and therefore for the rest of the time this wacky card game keeps selling, this is how the next Sol Ring might look. Why is this important? Well, it’s new. And new could matter.

Oh, the plateaus and plummets of our old friend. Every time it looked like the card might get back on its feet, another reprint came and kicked the legs out from under it like old Brooks kicked the legs out from under the chair he was standing on when he carved “Brooks was here” in the support beam in the room in the halfway house where he was staying after getting paroled from Shawshank. Who’s going to feed old Brooks’s crows, now? Are you? No, all you care about is yourself.

Maybe you want to think about other people for a second, though. Because people have different opinions. Some people think Shawshank Redemption wasn’t one of the greatest movies of all time. They’re wrong, but since we can’t put a snubnose .38 in their face (the very same gun that was use to frame old Andy Dufrense) and force them to buy a DVD copy, we have to tolerate their points of view.

The point is: preference could come into play. I can’t guess at the exact distribution, but there will be people who prefer the new double diamond look of the Sol Ring from Commander 2016 which, let’s not pretend we all don’t think is happening, and the people who prefer the classic circle deuces look. People will prefer one or the other, and the new look could mean the price won’t be quite as cheap as we expect, even though there will be a Sol Ring in every deck. The price of the new, diamondy Sol Ring is likely to finish above the many different printings of the older ring, and the price divergence could stabilize the price of the older versions, as the preference players have for the different versions could have a stabilizing effect on the supply and demand curve.

Ditto here, and maybe moreso.

Colorless Cards

There are EDH staples and then there are narrower staples. It’s the manabase pain in the ass that kept people from building a deck with a colorless commander. There are a lot of colorless cards with upside if people start to build more decks with colorless commanders, made easier by Wastes. Maybe Newzilek would be a sweet commander.

An artifact that is less useless in mono-artifact decks all of a sudden? Be still my beating heart. The Commander 2015 version of Marvin the Paranoid Android is hovering under $3 and has some real upside at that price. I don’t see it getting any lower. It’s a damn Solemn Simulacrum. True, there is a chance it’s reprinted a year from now, but I bet it goes up enough from $2.50 that you’ll be glad you bought in. Besides, being able to fetch Wastes is unprecedented for this card, and when people realize how much applicability it will have in a type of deck people weren’t building before, I see real upside. The original version is still the most expensive because it looks the coolest (why have an Invitational and do a portrait of the winner on the card they designed if you’re going to change the art later? It’s dumb) and because it’s super rare compared to the rest. It’s also got a foil version.

The new applicability in the colorless decks could be the kick in the ass frowny Jens needs to climb the charts again. You could get an ugly 2012 version in foil, but you could also join the Hare Krishnas or pierce your own nipples with that kit you bought on Amazon because the directions looked so easy, and that cute goth chick in your computer programming class said “tight” when you mentioned you thought you might get a piercing (and you didn’t mean it), but maybe this could be your in; you could be like “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” and maybe the piercing she shows you won’t haunt your nightmares. The point is: don’t buy ugly foils and don’t pierce your nips. That chick’s getting back together with her ex, everyone knows that.

The third printing, even though it was at mythic, brought this card down to a new low. According to EDHREC, this is a +47% synergy rating for Karn, Silver Golem, a commander with upside with Wastes. This can’t get cheaper barring a reprint, and it could be turning the corner already.

This thing is almost impossible to reprint, and it’s already doing what we expect it to do. Dealer confidence could be higher, but you never know what caused the behavior which was following the plot to tail off. What we do know is this card is nutter butters with artifacts.

It’s not just artifacts that could benefit here. A new Kozilek and new Ulamog give us a chance at having sicko Commanders, ready to come out of the Command Zone and get into trouble. Although Wastes may figure into the mana base, it won’t be the only thing.

Can we agree this card isn’t going anywhere but up?

At first glance, there’s no money to be made here. Bulk rares in in-print sets that are non-mythic in the post-mythic era aren’t going to be significantly buoyed by EDH alone, but wait. Let’s look at another graph.

Foils under $3? Thanks, generous multiplier stymied by a low non-foil price. If this card preserves this multiplier (it can’t) this could be a $50 foil as the non-foil grows, but I’m thinking we’re seeing a divergence due to the high desirability and low relative availability of the foil versus the non-foil, and I expect more divergence is possible.

We can explore a few more examples later. I have a final point I want to make.

Wastes Themselves

Awwww, yiss. Playing with Wastes is going to be sicko. How do we evaluate the price of Wastes? Are they in every booster? Are they inserted as a sixth basic land? Do they replace a common? Are they mixed in with commons? Will this be the last set with them? What I think is important to know is that these will likely be discarded by Limited players and are worth jamming in a box if you get them for free. I think it’s unlikely they will be printed again soon, and if they are, I doubt it will be full-art. This is free money.

Here’s a card to look at. Four printings have beleaguered its price, but it’s still hanging in there. Imagine only one printing of this card. I realize it’s uncommon from a much older set, but it’s also a card that everyone who wants them wants a lot of. Foils are $4 to $7 depending on the set. Want a closer example?

I feel like Wastes are$1 (or more!) cards waiting to happen. Snow-covered lands are cool, but Ice Age gave us a ton of them so the two printings limit the upside.

Here’s a price you should have memorized as we go into preorder season:

Is $10 unreasonable for foil Wastes? I don’t think so. If you can get them for very cheap, imagine what a foil, full-art Wastes could go for very easily in a year or so. Will Wastes be in every set? Return to Return to Zendikar only? Will they never print them again? All I know is that we have some decent price corollaries and we should be mindful of them going into “busting packs of Oath of the Gatewatch” season. There will be full-art lands in the fat packs again, there will be Expeditions lands again, but there will also be foil Wastes. As far as I know, that’s worth paying attention to.

After my article last week went a little bit long, I was told my article this week would have a hard cap at 2200 words and that was non-negotiable. No matter what I was talking about, 2200 is the cap, so I need to work on being a little pithier. I understand the need to be more succinct in my writing and respect the decision to cap me. I’d like to thank you all for reading and I invite you to join me next week when the topic of my article will be

Jim Casale, Spoiler Coverage

Spoiler Coverage – Oath of the Gatewatch Initial Peeks

November 17, 2015 Jim Casale 18 Comments

Note: I will preface this by saying any of the cards here MAY BE FAKE. Official spoilers for Oath of the Gatewatch has not started yet. I will analyze cards for the possibility that they may be real.

Well, I’ll let you take that all in. In my personal opinion, these cards are probably real. Kozilek has long been an expected card in Oath of the Gatewatch. It was implied by the flavor text in Ugin’s Insight that the other Eldrazi are on Zendikar.

Checks for Kozilek being real:

It has a cast trigger just like all other Eldrazi Titans.
It draws cards similar to the old Kozilek.
It is not indestructible. Ulamog was the most durable Eldrazi the last time.
He has the same power and toughness as the old Kozilek (12/12).
His activated ability “distorts reality,” as has been implied by various story articles.
Aleksi Briclot is an artist frequently used for face characters (look at how many planeswalkers he has done)
Template is very good (menace doesn’t have reminder text, terminology is clean, abilities appear in the correct order)

Marks against Kozilek:

There is a lot of homage to the old Kozilek. A convincing parody is a lot easier than a convincing new card.
We don’t know what that star mana means, this card’s credibility is almost entirely predicated on Wastes being real.
This is an incredibly good quality scan of the card. It is extremely difficult to get this quality of card so early.
Most spoilers this early are text-only (from people who have seen the cards but do not have a picture of it)

My final thoughts are that you can think whatever you want about this Kozilek, but even if it is real, there are not a lot of financial implications here. It doesn’t solve any problems decks had previously, but it looks like it would be a great, flashy mythic to sell a small, winter set.

Wastes

Wastes is an interesting one. As I type this up, the jury is out on what this land actually even does.

Checks for Wastes being real:

Avoids the Barry’s Land dilemma. This is a basic land with no basic land type. This is likely to keep cards like Tribal Flames from scaling more.

This is a common, not a “basic land” rarity. It lends it to a similar scheme to “Snow lands” in Ice Age.
Raymond Swanland is known to do important face cards. Most recently, he did Haven of the Spirit Dragon and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon.
The rocky formations are similar to the rock formations on cards from other Kozilek cards. It will be interesting to see if we get 2 more pictures with the dusty landscape (Ulamog) and the web landscape (Emrakul)
If this makes colorless mana, then it is the much-desired basic land that people wanted for colorless EDH decks.
Colorless mana as a “sixth color” was part of a design for the Great Designer search at one point in time. We have seen a lot of mechanics from the search be used in later sets (evolve and battalion among them)

Strikes against Wastes:

Wizards has never done another basic land other than the five originally in Alpha.
Maro has stated there is a lot of rules baggage that comes with another basic land and color
This basic land would be incredibly parasitic and unlikely to ever be seen outside of Oath of the Gatewatch.
It’s a common and not a basic land rarity. It’s likely an oversight of someone making the fake.
It’s the last card in the set but it’s unlikely there is only one picture. If there is one for each brood, Kozilek’s should be 183 instead of 184 because Ulamog comes after Kozilek alphabetically.

Financial relevance is a lot higher for Wastes than Kozilek. If this card is a common and not a basic land rarity, it will be extremely coveted. A new basic land would be extremely desirable for many. I would be unlikely to trade or sell any foil Wastes that I open, because there is no precedent to where its price tag may end up.

While this very early for spoilers, it has a lot of people talking, and if these cards are real, then there could be a lot of interesting interactions in Oath of the Gatewatch. If this is another set with very parasitic mechanics, we could see some very expensive cards long-term from this block.

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