Tag Archives: Shadows Over Innistrad

Corbin Hosler

PROTRADER: Catching up on a Busy Week of Finance

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Things just don’t slow down, do they?

Not only do we have the Pro Tour fast approaching, with (hopefully) less Bant Company making the rounds, but there was also a triple Grand Prix weekend, some big Standard movers and even some rather big Modern news you may have missed.

This is one of the busier times in Magic finance, and the interesting part is that it hasn’t always been this way. In fact, the spring-to-summer part of the year is typically a big lull that I’ve termed in the past the “dead zone” of Magic finance thanks to a Standard format being settled and not much else going on as everyone enjoyed the nice weather rather than slinging magical cards.

It turns out the new block structure may be changing that. There’s been no shortage of interest in Standard since Shadows over Innistrad released, and the Modern unbans have shaken up that format as well.

So on the eve of the Pro Tour, where do things stand?

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Jim Casale

Grinder Finance – Best Bulk Practices for a Player

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By now if you’ve been playing the game long enough to know what a “bulk rare” is you know the rest of pack is just “bulk.”  The reality of it is if you leave those cards on the table you’re probably incrementally costing yourself a bunch of money.

bulk

There are so many names for the other 14 cards in a booster pack.  Sometimes it’s bulk, sometimes more caustically known as “draft trash,” but most of the time it’s just a bunch of quarters, dimes, and dollars people often leave behind or throw in the garbage.  Picking bulk is a hard thing to do and people pay for bulk because they assume it hasn’t been picked to it’s fullest potential.   I’m not going to teach you how to pick every card out of bulk that can be sold for some amount of money.  What I will suggest is just picking your own bulk for cards you know you will probably need at some point in a set’s lifetime in Standard.
spirit_awakening_riley2

Saving Some Dollars 

So I took a look at the orders from my LGS (I usually buy them online and then pick them up in store) is over the course of the 15ish months that Fate Reforged was in Standard, I spent close to $5 on Arashin Clerics (mostly due to losing them).  It might not sound like a lot when  Standard had $200 mana bases but a few dollars here and there can make a big difference at the end of the year.  If you’re a serious Standard player that doesn’t play the same deck for it’s entire life in Standard sometimes you need a pile of commons and uncommons you weren’t using.  Sometimes those are cards you already owned and forgot where you left them.  Laziness is a real problem and cost me at least $5.  Picking your bulk cards can help ease the problem with finding the right cards to play with while also not costing you a ton of time or money.

Magnifying-Glass-Shadows-over-Innistrad-Art

What To Pick

The biggest question is what do you pick.  If you don’t want to sort literally every card you own there must be a threshold for a card to be worth setting aside.  I have a few rules of thumb that I follow when figuring out what to pick:

  • Is it first pickable in draft?  A lot of very powerful limited cards find there way into Standard.  The poster child for this is rares like Pack Rat and Citadel Siege.  In more recent sets even commons have become constructed all stars.  How many people expected the top 8 of Pro Tour Oath of the Gatewatch to include Eldrazi Skyspawner in Modern?
  • Does it cost 3 or less?  Cards that cost 3 or less are more likely to be constructed playable.  When they cost a low enough amount of mana, even basically vanilla creatures like Dragon Hunter and Expedition Envoy become constructed playable.
  • Does it do some situationally relevant thing very well?  Commons and uncommons that I’ve found myself unlikely to have are weird niche sideboard cards.  This is the category for cards like Clip Wings, Arashin Cleric, Negate, etc.  When they’re good, they’re very good.  But when they’re bad, they’re almost unplayable.
  • Is it a land?  Lands are always playable in some capacity. Although you may never play most of them, it’s a small price to pay to own a bunch of weird lands just so you don’t have to spend a few bucks to buy them.  This is also especially important when a land is in it’s first print cycle (like the Shadows over Innistrad enemy colored tap lands and Warped Landscape).
  • Is it an uncommon?  I’m much more liberal with pulling uncommons than commons because the more playable uncommons are typically much more expensive.  While most constructed playable commons from recent sets don’t typically get more than $0.50, very good uncommons can be $3 or more (like Monastery Swiftspear).
  • Does it kill things?  Cheap, efficient removal is almost always one of those things that finds a way into constructed formats.
  • Does it do a similar thing to a card you already know is playable?  I know this is a little hard to describe so I will give the best analogy.  Flaying Tendrils is a lot like Drown in Sorrow.  Drown in Sorrow was very playable when it was in Standard so I would assume Flaying Tendrils has a higher than average chance of being played.  Biting Rain would also be picked under the same context.

Ulvenwald-Mysteries-MtG-Art

What does this all look like?

To give you a better idea of how I pick my bulk, I’ll give you the list of cards I took out:

Commons:

  • Catalog
  • Deny Existence
  • Just the Wind
  • Nagging Thoughts
  • Pieces of the Puzzle
  • Alms of the Vein
  • Dead Weight
  • Murderous Compulsion
  • Shamble Back
  • Dual Shot
  • Fiery Temper
  • Insolent Neonate
  • Tormenting Voice
  • Clip Wings
  • Fork in the Road
  • Loam Dryad
  • Root Out
  • Vessel of Nascency
  • Angelic Purge
  • Thraben Inspector
  • Vessel of Ephemera
  • Warped Landscape

Uncommons:

  • Biting Rain
  • Call the Bloodline
  • Indulgent Aristocrat
  • Olivia’s Bloodsworn
  • Pick the Brain
  • Sinister Concoction
  • Compelling Deterrence
  • Essence Flux
  • Invasive Surgery
  • Ongoing Investigation
  • Pore over the Pages
  • Rise from the Tides
  • Topplegeist
  • Groundskeeper
  • Weirding Wood
  • Dance with Devils
  • Geistblast
  • Gibbering Fiend
  • Incorrigible Youths
  • Lightning Axe
  • Ravenous Bloodseeker
  • Forsaken Sanctuary
  • Foul Orchard
  • Highland Lake
  • Stone Quarry
  • Woodland Stream

The last thing I picked was all of the double faced cards.  I’m not sure which ones will be good or bad but there are so few that if I ever need any of them I will likely be short as it is.  As the case was, I didn’t have 4 Duskwatch Recruiters to make the Bant Company deck.  At any rate, I figure I will find myself taking these cards out of the fatpack box they now reside in and thanking my lucky stars I picked them.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go through my sorted picks from Magic Origins and get my Bounding Krasi (Krasises? What’s the plural of krasis?) and feel good I won’t pay $1 for them.

Corbin Hosler

PROTRADER: What You Weren’t Watching

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How about that Bant Company deck? Or those Human decks? Or even the Eldrazi menace making its appearance in Standard?

It’s true that we had a wild first weekend of Shadows Over Innistrad Standard last week, and the results from the Star City Games Open in Baltimore give us our first starting point for this format, with Jim Davis and his Bant Company deck taking down an event that even saw the unlikely rise of Pyromancer’s Goggles.

PyromancersGoggles

It makes sense that everyone is infatuated with Standard at the moment. After all, we’re now officially out of the “four-color midrange” land that was Oath of the Gatewatch Standard, and with Rotation comes new life, new thrills and new opportunities.

I was going to write about those opportunities this week, but then I read Jim Casale’s excellent piece on Standard that ran on Tuesday. It covers basically everything I would say about the format, and there’s really no need for me to repeat what he said so well.

But Standard wasn’t the only thing that happened last weekend. If you have forgotten so quickly, there was a little bit of a shakeup in Modern. Eye of Ugin is gone and a couple cards you may have heard of named Sword of the Meek and Ancestral Vision were unbanned. So while SCG Baltimore marked a turning point in Standard, it also marked a brand new Modern format, one that’s been a bit lost in the shuffle this week.

But there was plenty there to like, so let’s dig in.

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Jim Casale

Grinder Finance – SCG Baltimore Analysis

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If you haven’t watched all of the Magic on Shadows over Innistrad weekend and don’t want to be spoiled go watch it now and stop reading!

Spoiler warnings aside, congrats to fellow New York Rangers aficionado Jim Davis for his win with Bant Company.  If you played a Rally deck before the rotation this one is pretty similar make up (largely a backbone of Jace / Collected Company deck) so a switch would be easy.

Archangels and Lieutenants

Let’s take a look at the decklists from the Open and see what  information we can glean about the future:

craig wescoe

Thanks Craig!  Yes, half of the Top 8 of this event was some version of a white Humans Aggro deck.  Nine of the top 32 decks were a flavor of Humans Aggro deck.  Some decks stayed to the tried and true mono-white while others splashed blue or green for some exceptional main deck humans and additional sideboard flexibility.  What all of the decks have in commons is this base:

thaliaslieutenantknight of the white orchidalways watching

White-based human decks are likely to become a mainstay for people who really like to put on the beatdown.  That being said, I think the current price of $2-3 for these rares is unsustainable for a deck that was 29% of the top 32 meta game.  I expect these cards to creep up slowly because they’re not very flashy.  However, if a humans deck does get a win they will probably spike.

Goggles in the Ice

If you watched the Open you get to see StarCity Games’ writers a lot if they’re doing well.  Well, Todd Anderson was doing pretty well this weekend with this monstrosity of a deck.

thingintheice

Thing in the Ice was definitely a very important part of this deck as it let Todd go from defense to offense very quickly and close out a game almost immediately.  That being said, it’s price is still very confusing. The diverging buylist price and average sell price have me concerned that the player demand is not actually there.  I am still of the opinion you should sell these cards until we can see if it does anything in Modern and Legacy.  From the results this past weekend it doesn’t look anyone is trying it besides the “fun of.”

PyromancersGoggles

The price on these have already gone crazy (TCG low is $10 as of Sunday, up from about $2 on Friday) so I wouldn’t buy them until it all settles down.  I tried to play a Pyromancer’s Goggles deck a while back but it always ends up being frustrating when you draw the wrong half of your deck.  Lightning Axe might be the removal spell it needs to make Goggles consistent enough to play but I don’t think this card can really carry a $10 price tag for long.  I’m a seller.

fallofthetitans

Boom flavor, right?  This was played in Todd’s deck and is still a bulk rare.  If you’re really intent on playing the deck I can’t imagine these being cut.  It uses all of your extra mana and works great when forked with the goggles.  This is the kind of card I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets played in larger quantities later and goes up to a few bucks.  Right now you can buy in for a quarter (and worst case scenario sell it back for a dime) so there is little downside to picking up a personal playset.

avacyn

White is really good

Roughly 85% of the top 32 deck lists at SCG Baltimore played basic Plains.  Of the five decks that didn’t, only one was in the Top 8, and only one more in the Top 16.  Turns out all of the white spells are really good right now.  Declaration in Stone, Archangel Avacyn, Archangel of Tithes, and Gideon, Ally of Zendikar showed up in multiple different types of decks this weekend.

declarationinstone

Declaration in Stone showed up as a 4-of in the 75 of six of seven Top 8 decks it could be played in.  The seventh deck was Jim Davis’s which only played a paltry two.  It’s clear this is a real show stopper for a lot of decks and allows the rag tag human army get past anything with ease.  I’m going to say this is going to end up a lot like Hero’s Downfall.  It has the potential to hit $15-18 for a week or two and then fall down to a more reasonable number once MTGO redemption starts.

archangel avacyn

This card has a real chance to be another Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy.  I’m not sure yet if it can keep climbing (it’s already $30 on the cheapest places on the internet).  There wasn’t the full four copies in every white deck because some of them played 22 lands and having consistent 5-drops is overly optimistic.  The casual angel appeal will also keep this card high so I’d expect it to follow Declaration in Stone’s trajectory and become cheaper once MTGO redemption starts.  Right now I’m selling my extra copies to lock in profit.

Tokens

westvale abbeySecure the Wastes

Westvale Abbey was definitely really good in the decks it was good in.  That sounds pretty obvious but Dragonlord Ojutai was really only mediocre in the decks it was good in.  Token decks that can dedicate whole turns to flipping the Abbey will be a real factor in Standard.  Their ability to chump humans until they can assemble a 9/7 haste lifelink to catch them up is huge.  Going forward this style deck might morph into a more all-in version with Cryptolith but time will tell.  I think this deck will be most affected by testing and tuning done at the Pro Tour.  All that information aside,  I’m super not interested in hanging onto Abbeys or Secure the Wastes with their current price tag.

 

Final Thoughts

  • Ancestral Vision probably won’t be as good as people want it to be.  I didn’t see very many in the Top 8 of the last Modern Classic
  • If we are going to see great innovation in Modern I would keep a close look at GP LA/Charlotte weekend.  We will see big movers then.
  • Shadows over Innistrad EV is very high right now. I’d sell everything you are not actively playing with while you still can.
  • If you want to meet up I will be making the tournament grind the entire month of May, hitting up GP NYC, SCG Indy, GP LA, and probably GP Minneapolis in an effort to secure two byes for the next year of Magic