Tag Archives: Standard

Five Shadows over Innistrad cards to get excited for

March 24, 2016 Corbin Hosler 3 Comments

It’s that time again, and it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long since Oath of the Gatewatch, does it? Just yesterday, we were gushing about the new Eldrazi cards and going wild over the broken state they left Modern in, a problem I fully expect to be remedied with a banlist update next week.

Okay, with that in mind maybe Oath of the Gatewatch, while hugely impactful on Magic’s history, wasn’t actually that great.

Luckily, Shadows over Innistrad is.

This set looks poised to deliver in a way that Battle for Zendikar and to a lesser extent Oath of the Gatewatch did not. While the BFZ draft format was fun (and got much better with Oath), the block itself didn’t blow everyone away in the traditional sense.

Still, the introduction of the “sixth color,” or in reality colorless mana, was a touchstone moment in Magic’s history, and we’re going to see the repercussions of it for years to come. Whether it’s with a return of Eldrazi or something else, or maybe just making colorless evergreen, Oath will forever change the future of Magic thanks to that step.

Which brings us to Shadows over Innistrad, which must follow up on that set. And while it’s not going to be hard to break Modern “less” than Oath did, the truth is Shadows isn’t just living up to the shadow of Eldrazi – it has to live up to the storied history Innistrad brought to the game.

Namely, that means an incredible Limited format — certainly one of my personal top three since I started in 2009, and for many a top three overall — as well as a pretty diverse Standard meta that despite the crazy powerful cards in Liliana of the Veil and Delver of Secrets was actually fairly diverse with some fun interactions.

All that said, is there any way Shadows over Innistrad can live up to the hype?

I’m optimistic. Here’s why.

Arlinn Kord

Werewolves are back, baby!

I know a lot of people didn’t love what Werewolves did to a draft. And having watched the Top 4 of a Team Limited event have to deal with a double-faced card (Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh), I can understand the trepidation. They give away colors, show power picks and generally just kind of mess up a draft environment.

That said, the mechanic works great once you actually sit down to play. The tension between flipping and re-flipping cards in Limited leads to really interesting games, not to mention how it oozes flavor.

Arlinn Kord is one of those. Our first Werewolf planeswalker, this is the most fun you can having flipping walkers since Garruk Relentless. And the power level might even be higher than that format staple version of Garruk. Arlinn hits the battlefield ready to pump a member of your team to really get in there, or comes down after a board wipe to refill your board and create a blocker to protect herself for the flipside.

And the flipside is nuts. Keeping with the aggressive theme, she can get your entire team in there, or play the quintessential midrange game, gunning down an opponent’s creature and then flipping back to make more wolves. This is about everything a midrange deck could want in a planeswalker, and it happens to come with an ultimate that can end the game when needed.

Olivia, Mobilized for War

Speaking of attacking, very few cards enable that as well as our new, slimmed-down Olivia Voldaren. Whereas the original Olivia was a powerful late-game card that took over by itself, new Olivia brings her friends to the party and makes sure they’re ready to rumble.

Not only does she turn excess lands into haste and pumps — a pretty great way to mitigate flood in aggressive decks — but the real benefit comes from this being an incredible Madness enabler. While some of the other Madness enablers we’ve seen require a mana cost to use, Olivia simply asks that you cast a creature anywhere on your curve. This means you can tailor the cards you’re casting to the cards you’re pitching to Madness, and that means the value is undeniable. Whether it’s a sweet creature like Asylum Visitor or “just” a removal spell like Fiery Temper (and let’s be honest, it’s gonna be Fiery Temper), Olivia does exactly what you want a 3-drop to do.

And, hey, Vampires.

Relentless Dead

One of my favorite things about the original Innistrad was the tribal theme. I’m really glad they kept that around for our return to the plane, because the fact that there was just enough payoff in Draft to go mono-spirits or werewolves added a lot of fun to that format. After all, linear decks are usually fun to build and play — not to mention they are a great guidepost for newer players — but when they’re simply another deck rather than all the decks like in Lorwyn block, it adds a nice touch to Limited.

In Constructed, I certainly had fun playing Werewolves tribal because Full Moon’s Rise was awesome and Immerwolf was absurd, but the rest of the tribes had more success than my FNM deck. Namely, Spirits and Zombies did well, and Zombies in particular was a great deck to have in Standard because it was just so flavorful.

I know not everyone cards about flavor, but I think Magic is in a great place if the think the Zombie deck does is exactly what the average person would answer if you asked them what a Zombie deck should do. Diregraf Captain was a boss, and with Gravecrawler and Geralf’s Messenger the zombies just never stayed dead.

Relentless Dead is the perfect continuation of that. Not only does it reference the art of Endless Ranks of the Dead in an awesome throwback, but it’s a great card on its own. It’s a good 2-drop that’s hard to block and keeps the pressure coming, but it’s also an incredible insurance plan against board wipes or, you know, combat in general. This time around, the dead aren’t just endless — they’re relentless as well.

Drownyard Temple and Warped Landscape

These aren’t the most flashy cards in the set, but I truly believe they’re some of the better designed ones. It shows that even after nearly 25 years of making lands, Wizards can still deliver new designs that make for fun gameplay.

The beauty is in the simplicity. Look at Landscape; it seems incredibly similar to lands we’ve had in the past (Panoramas), and the design is so simple it seems almost surprising it hasn’t existed before. But somehow here we are, with a new land that will not only be an important Limited pick and a great card for new players to fix their mana inexpensively, but something that takes on a whole new light in the wake of Oath of the Gatewatch. All that wrapped in a simple package we’ll be taking for granted in two months’ time.

Temple is more exciting on its surface, and I’m looking forward to digging deeper. Again, it’s a novel effect we’ve only even come close to with Dakmor Salvage, but Temple’s simple design opens up all kinds of room. Will the Modern Life from the Loam deck want it? What ways can we make use of sacrificing lands? Is there a better feeling than sacrificing this to Titania or Dust Bowl? While those last two may only feel good for one side of the interaction, the fact this card has me asking these questions for the first time 20+ years into Magic’s existence has me excited for the possibilities.

Triskaidekaphobia

First thing I thought when I looked at this card: “What the hell?”

Second thing I thought looking at this card: “What the hell, why not?”

It almost seems like a card that should exist in the next Un-set. But instead here it is in its 13 fully bloody shades of glory. It’s true “gimmick” cards like this can cause the community to divide sharply. But truth is these are incredibly exciting to a portion of our community. I figure people who don’t like it can ignore it and move on. At least, they should live with it, because it’s just so darn fun.

It’s probably not even “good” in the traditional sense of Standard power level. With painlands in the format, not to mention the duality of its effect – this won’t be winning any Grand Prix or PT Top 8s anytime soon. But you better believe someone is going to die to it at FNM. And you better believe the wielder of 13 will remember that story forever.

More than that, this card exemplifies all that’s right with top-down design. It’s fun, incredibly flavorful, and every single piece of this card just works. Thirteen bricks, 13 blood stains, 13 words in the lines, 13 logs, etc.

Hell, there’s even 13 words in each sentence preceding this in this section. Spooky.

It goes on and on, and this is sure to be a fan favorite for years to come. And while Triskaidekaphobia will undoubtedly take the title of both “most flavorful” and “most unpronounceable,” it’s just the tip of the 13-sided iceberg when it comes to flavorful cards in Shadows over Innistrad. From Thing in the Ice to Startled Awake to Relentless Dead to Shard of Broken Glass to Sinister Concoction, to the Escape Rooms at the Triple-Grand Prix weekend, to the Avacyn reveal in Detroit with the wonderful Christine Sprankle cosplaying, the ties between flavor and gameplay have never been stronger.

We’re slowing unraveling the pages of this mystery as we investigate further. It’s going to culminate with the reveal of who the Shadow is on Innistrad (Emrakul? Marit Lage?) and then we’re going to fully immerse ourselves in the twisted world of Innistrad.

I can’t wait.

Thanks for reading,

Corbin Hosler

@Chosler88 on Twitter/Twitch/YouTube

Jim Casale

Grinder Finance – The Shadows over Innistrad Preorder Article

March 23, 2016 Jim Casale 5 Comments

Hey guys, I’m a little this late this week as I was waiting for the maximum number of cards to be spoiled before putting out this article. Spoilers for Shadows over Innistrad will end Friday so it is unlikely much will change between then and now.

With every set, the pre-order prices for most cards are astronomically higher than they end up. There are some exceptions to that rule (I’m looking at you Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy) but the best bet is usually to buy the least amount possible.

Lands

I’m sure by now you’ve all seen the rare land cycle. I think the pre-order prices for these are a little too high to recommend buying them all but I couldn’t fault you for getting the ones you think you are likely to play for the first month. These should be $2-3 by this summer and then you can finish up your playsets.

Upgrading Old Strategies

Bought into the Eldrazi ramp deck recently? Here are my recommendations for pre-orders:

Deathcap Cultivator easily slots into the same spot as Rattleclaw Mystic and supports a black splash instead of a red one. That might be the best going forward anyway since Kozilek’s Return doesn’t kill a lot of the new vampires or many older creatures.

Drownyard Temple has a great synergy with World Breaker but I wouldn’t recommend getting a whole play set. One or two is probably all the deck can support anyway without cutting into Shrine of the Forsaken Gods or Sanctum of Ugin

With the additional ETB tapped lands, I expect ramp will find some mana earlier to use on Tireless Tracker. It’s obviously a huge favorite to be a huge monster if you play a ton of lands. It will help with some of the problems of flooding and isn’t legendary like Nissa, Vastwood Seer. While this card might not be a slam dunk, the pre-order price of $2 or less is not much to lose.

Stay away from this card. A lot of people are hypothesizing it’s synergy with Ruin in their Wake but the reality is this will often be much worse than Oath of Nissa. At $4 most places, I don’t want to buy into what is likely to be a bulk rare.

Collected Company more your jam? It’s likely that a Green/White based deck will be the bread and butter CoCo deck. There are unfortunately not a ton of great cards to add to those style decks but there are a few that could make the cut.

Collected Company decks are almost always light on removal (the nature of a green/white deck). Declaration in Stone gives you some more flexibility in removing troublesome creatures cleanly and doesn’t require a bigger creature, like Dromoka’s Command does.

Naturally, Hanweir Militia Captain’s flip trigger works well in a CoCo deck. Putting 2 Hanweir Militia Captains into play during your opponent’s end step could spell big game. This one is purely speculative as the next creature.

A deck with a ton of 3 or less drop creatures could be in the market for a reasonably costed flyer to draw some cards. This one unfortunately matches up pretty poorly against Drana, Liberator of Malakir and Olivia, Mobilized for War so we will have to see how the meta game shakes down. If we see a ton of Eldrazi Skyspawners and Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet (which makes Deathmist Raptor worse) maybe this guy gets the nod.

For the mono-red Eldrazi deck I only have 1 recommendation.

I know it looks like a pile of garbage but the truth is this will be a very important sideboard card against “slower” decks. Its great against Ramp and it will probably be great against Esper Dragons (or similarly controlling decks). The worst case scenario is this is a Skizzik (or Ball Lightning, if you prefer that) that can throw off your opponent’s math. Most of it’s text box is largely irrelevant if you kill them with it.

New Archtypes:

Some cards look deceptively powerful on paper but don’t realize any competitive play. For the most part, anything over $15 pre-order price is too high to pay unless you are sure it will be good. Here’s my shortlist of things I have (or would recommend) pre-ordering.

She’s cheap, she’s got reasonable stats, and she turns every spell you play for the rest of the game into an insane return. Olivia’s ability to curb your flooding while still putting pressure means it won’t be hard for her to find a home. I’m fine with pre-ordering these up to $15 if you are going to play them.

This is the best Serra Angel ever printed. Glowing endorsement, right? Well if you played with Restoration Angel during the first Innistrad block, you would know how powerful large flash flyers are. Avacyn is really big, at a great rate, and doesn’t need much help to be effective. She is largely immune to Reflector Mage. Combined with Ojutai’s Command, Avacyn delivers the same lose/lose situation as Cryptic Command and Mistbind Clique did. This is a card I’m not worried that we won’t find a deck for.

So Arlinn is definitely very good on paper. Probably the best planeswalker in the set. But I don’t think she will find a home. Be on the lookout for when she drops. I can’t imagine she stays anywhere over $20 in a month.

Traps

Don’t buy these cards. They’re too hyped and probably won’t be good enough to maintain their price tag for more than a month.

All of the Planeswalkers have the Planeswalker tax. Anguished Unmaking is fine but it’s also the Game Day promo and I’m not sure it can be played as a 4-of like Hero’s Downfall. Sin Prodder is a glorified Boggart Brute. It’s “fine” but on average it will draw you less cards than Abbot of Keral Keep. Thing in the Ice is purely an eternal card and as such will drop like a rock. It’s unlikely to see too much play in a Standard format that has Ultimate Price, Grasp of Darkness, Silk Wrap, and Reflector Mage.

Accumulated Knowledge

PROTRADER: Recalibrating

March 18, 2016 Ross Lennon 8 Comments

I am really excited about Shadows over Innistrad. The cards are all extremely evocative in terms of flavor, Madness is one of my favorite abilities, and moreover I love playing my games out of the graveyard. I’m also the kind of person who gets really excited by big swings in Standard, and I think that the new rotation schedule is going to be a huge benefit to the game in the long-term. Today is not going to be my end-all preview (because we are still missing way too many cards), and from what I’ve heard, we ARE going to be divvying up the eventual set reviews (I called dibs on Green a few weeks back, hopefully that pans out). I want to talk about a couple of the new cards that we have seen so far, as well as some older ones that may benefit from the change in scenery.

Before we get going, I want to make a clarification that some of these cards will not themselves be cards worth buying low on, but rather they may be indicative of larger trends. Cards shape Standard regardless of rarity- things like Lightning Bolt can have a huge ripple effect regardless of the fact that the card itself may never go up significantly in price. These elements are tough to predict (unless they are super obvious like with Lightning Bolt), and often don’t present themselves until the entire set is revealed and played with for a little bit (typically around PT time). Assume that any commons or uncommons that we discuss today fit somewhere into this discussion.

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Casual Fridays

Four Simple Rules

March 18, 2016 Cliff Daigle 9 Comments

I have been trading magic cards for 20 years.

It pains me to say, but I’ve made some terrible trades in my lifetime. TERRIBLE. Like, Onslaught fetch land for brand-new-shiny-mythic bad. I was 33, it’s not like I was a teenager who didn’t know better. (The teenage trades were more “my Tropical Island for your Lord of the Pit and its new best friend Breeding Pit.” Sigh.)

Today, I want to share with you four simple rules that if you follow them, you will never lose money at Magic. These are my safe rules, rules that will prevent you from losing significant value. I’ve never been one to speculate on cards or act in fevered response to results.

Rule #1: Trade all opened cards away at a pre-release or release event.

I have mentioned this rule in the past, but it remains a basic tenet of my philosophy. Supply is at its smallest, demand at its greatest. People lack the patience necessary to save money, all they see is the new hotness.

This is especially true for the brand-new mythics. The price on everything is going to go down (more on that in a moment) and even the bad mythics have a certain number of people who have to have the card. Fill that need for them. Trade them a bad card for the current premium price.

My personal experience: The Return to Ravnica prerelease. I opened a Vraska the Unseen, and within ten minutes of the end of the event, I’d found someone to trade me a Guildpact Stomping Ground and $15 in cash for it, since the planeswalker had a price at the time of $30.

Current example: Arlinn Kord. If you’re able to trade this away at $35-$40 or so (its preorder price) then you’re going to be far ahead. Only one planeswalker has kept that sort of price recently: Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy. Arlinn has the chance to be good, with tokens and targeted damage as only two of her five abilities, but as history shows, she’s more likely to be $20 in a couple of months.

Rule #2: Never pre-order cards.

This is closely related to Rule #1, because no one wants to lose money on a preorder. What people remember is the one that got away, the Jace, the chase mythic, the surprise rare. Our memories are not as good at recalling the mistakes, the ones we bought at too high a price and did not make money on. Somehow, mentally, we accept those mistakes but tend to fixate on the opportunities we didn’t take advantage of.

I’m here to tell you that because almost all prices drop over time, there’s no financial benefit to preordering cards. Their prices are going to go down. Look at Oath of the Gatewatch. Kozilek was preordering for more than double his current price. Oath of Nissa was $8, now it’s a little over $2. You might hit it big on the one or two that are more expensive, but mostly, preordering will leave you in the red.

My Experience: Thespian’s Stage. I bought ten of these at $4 when it was first revealed, and I traded for them at $6…and then at $4 again…and then at $2…and then at $1…and now it’s finally back up to $2, three years later. Don’t be me!

Current example: Thing in the Ice. $15-$20 for this card is just silly. It can’t protect itself, and Reflector Mage is going to make you so very, very, very sad. Don’t preorder this. Don’t trade for this. Just wait. Please.

Rule #3: Do not buy singles until at least one month has passed.

This is one of the simplest concepts to get: Cards are most expensive immediately after release, and they are going to trend downward after that. Even when Standard cards spike, it’s rare that they maintain that spike, especially for a rare. Here’s Eldrazi Mimic:

Even as a four-of, even in the hottest deck in Modern, this has not been able to keep its price. Ten dollars that weekend, and trailing downward since. The vast majority of cards are going to lose value as more copies are opened. If you have to have a card for the new deck you’re playing, understand that you’re paying an extra premium for it. If you needed Gideon, Ally of Zendikar in the first month, you had to pay $40 or more! Now it’s down to $20, a more reasonable and manageable price.

My Experience: Prophet of Kruphix. I picked up a lot of these at about $4 soon after it came out, because a card this good just had to eventually find a home. It never did, and they went into long-term storage, where the Clash Pack and then the Commander ban keep shoveling dirt on my dreams.

Current Example: Jace, Unraveler of Secrets. He will have a big initial price, because his abilities are very strong. As time passes and more are opened, he’s going to drop. No one is going to play four of a Jace that costs five mana. Even the Jace, Memory Adept version was a one- or two-of in control decks as a finisher, and this Jace is defense and card advantage.

Rule #4: Stock up on things at the end of their block.

This is the time to buy stuff from Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch. It’s no longer going to be opened at Grands Prix, at Preliminary PTQs, or even at Friday Night Magic. There’s a new set getting all the attention and now is the time that the supply is at its greatest. This is when supply is highest, value is at the lowest, yet the power is the same.

My Experience: Jace, Architect of Thought

Look at this graph for that Jace.

During the time of Dragon’s Maze and Magic 2014, you could get him for $10. When Theros came out and devotion to blue became relevant, his price spiked hard to $30. Picking up cards when they are moving on to a new set is the perfect time to build value to be released later.

Current Example: The Battle for Zendikar lands. Especially because no one is playing this as a playset, they are primed to go up when fetch lands rotate out of Standard. You have been given a fair chance to get it cheap!

These are my rules, but come to the forums and share your financial rules!

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