Tag Archives: Standard

Accumulated Knowledge

PROTRADER: Format Review, DTK-EMN Edition

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So I realized two things recently: I didn’t do a set review for EMN; and the world did not end as a result1. When I was finishing up my last piece however, I got an idea for something similar but not quite so well-worn. Welcome to the first ever Format Review!

Okay, so be aware that when I say ‘format’, I mean Standard. The bar for getting into anything larger than that is much more nebulous, to say nothing of financial impacts in more niche situations. Standard is also the format that is going to drive the lion’s share of demand between now and the next format review- unless a card is obviously a multi-format all-star, it usually takes a while for existing lists to figure out what they want to cut. Also, while this article is intended to inform financial decision-making, be aware that it’s not a list of cards to go out and buy. Some of the biggest impacts on a format can made by monetarily inconsequential commons and uncommons. Let’s dive in!

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Spell Queller: Okay, so I’m writing this blurb as the Columbus Open is finishing up, and the results for EMN’s first weekend look about like what I expected. Spell Queller’s presence in the Top 64 was undeniable, featuring 127 of a possible 256 copies. That there were only 12 copies in the Top 8 (albeit 4 in the winner’s circle) is pretty surprising, although the lists that weren’t Bant Company all seem like good decks AGAINST Bant Company. Spell Queller feels like the type of card that will bend decks towards light splashes for the missing color (GW making sure it has just enough U, etc) because Spell Queller is independently powerful.

Here’s how I see it- Spell Queller is the new king of “small ball.” While older, sports-inclined players are often referring metaphorically to this, the term has sort of adopted its own meaning in Magic. If tight, technical deck construction focused on manageable curves and prioritizing things like castability and tempo can be referred to as “small ball”, and it’s theoretical inverse is an EDH deck full of 7 casting cost sorceries and guildgates, then you can see toward which pole Standard players gravitate. In this line of thinking, Spell Queller succeeds at either delaying or blanking entirely anything else in this category. Simultaneously, a 2/3 flier at 3 is certainly respectable, and can therefore play offense AND defense in some situations.

Spell-Queller-Eldritch-Moon-MtG-Art

Since Spell Queller is a rare, there are some concerns with regard to price trajectory. If some combination of Tamiyo, Emrakul, and/or Gisela are long-term players (more on each of these later) can maintain a certain percentage of market share, then EMN is likely to be opened in such quantity that Spell Queller sufficiently saturates the market. If the mythics in this set are ALL terrible (which seems highly unlikely), then this time next year Spell Queller could be pretty pricy (although this is predicated on it being the ONLY good card in the set). I can see the current price of ~$11 going up this week fueled by hype following the Columbus results, but I think the weight of its rarity will ultimately cut that price tag by about half. I’m holding off on getting my personal set until I absolutely need them, although I know that I will undoubtedly be playing a strictly worse deck without them. The possibility of this price maintaining or increasing is based entirely on this card being played at the Pro Tour to such a degree that we see a rare 32 copies in the Top 8. It’s worth mentioning, though, that given the unique demographics of the Pro Tour, this is more likely than at something like an SCG Open.

Collected Company: This was one of the best cards in Standard BEFORE it got access to Spell Queller. I can tell you from personal testing experience that firing off a Collected Company hitting a Spell Queller and a Reflector Mage is one of the best feelings in Magic- and I played Gifts Ungiven in Extended. Unfortunately, Collected Company already has an established place in Modern, so copies aren’t likely to drop dramatically in price, even though the card only has a few months left on the main stage. From the look of things so far though, it’s safe to say Collected Company is going to go out on top.

Incendiary Flow: This is pretty obviously one of those things that isn’t a “must buy”, but it represents a crucial element in evaluating other cards. Every standard environment has a key toughness number, typically either 3 or 4, where that number can be viewed as overall safe. With the printing of Incendiary Flow, we can expect creatures with three toughness to be much less resilient than they were a few short weeks ago. This is perhaps the biggest knock against Gisela (who also gets hit by some of the other popular conditional removal spells, like Ultimate Price). Despite being a sorcery, Flow is quite versatile, being able to target players (and therefore also Planeswalkers), exile creatures like Relentless Dead, AND get recast by Goblin Dark-Dwellers. Expect the inherent value of 4 toughness creatures to increase (although Languish is still a very big deal). This card also makes a timely Dromoka’s Command even more of a blowout, since you can either prevent the damage entirely or scale up a three toughness creature to survive it. Incendiary Flow is also the name of my mixtape.

Emrakul, the Promised End: I’m pretty sure that the is the ceiling in terms of finishers in this format. While Ulamog is probably about as good, I don’t think there is anything higher on the food chain than an Emrakul on the stack. Now, we will see if this card actually gets played (or rather, ‘when’), but not seeing it at all would be a very clear indicator that aggro and/or RDW is pulling an above-average amount of market-share in the format.

Murder: It’s strange that we are getting this card back, because I thought Development had issues with it before. It’s possible that I’m just remembering concerns from whatever M-set limited format that was, but it’s also a potential sign that we will see a lot of pushed artifact creatures on Kaladesh. It also reinforces the control decks being straight UB versus Ubx, by virtue of that BB in the mana cost.

Thalia, Heretical Cathar: This is a card that represents an interesting choke-point for the format, although at this point it is largely theoretical. The worst thing going for Thalia here is her mana cost- 3 is already really crowded, and her functionality is largely dependent on unknown information (what types of lands is your control opponent playing? Is your aggro opponent going to try and be the control in this matchup and just block your creatures?).  I think Thalia’s contributions to this format will take longer to become apparent, just because she breaks the fourth wall in a way that requires you to know the environment you expect to be playing in. Unfortunately, after that she STILL has to compete with Spell Queller, Reflector Mage, Eldrazi Displacer, and more for time on the field.

Nahiri, the Harbinger: It’s possible that this is the time where you want to reload on Nahiri. The reason why this card was so good before is because the numbers are (or at least feel) very raw. It’s as if design and development both signed off on the card without giving it the same kind of due diligence that planeswalkers get since the last time the both slacked off on one (Jace, the Mind Sculptor). The only thing that isn’t above average on her is the mana cost, which is in a very awkward WR (although only costing [4] is a great stat!). White and Red are both supporting colors in decks not running Thalia’s Lieutenant, so it’s very often going to feel like you are trying to hit both of your off-colors to get one of your best cards. If Eldritch Moon makes red good enough to not get laughed out of the room, it’s possible that we see a rise in Nahiri-focused control decks.

Dromoka’s Command: Still one of the best cards in Standard, and a shoe-in for the Abzan Hall of Fame when it retires this fall. It won’t be played in the necessary amount to “make the leap” to Modern, even if it sees occasional use. Start to move your extras.

Cryptolith Rite: I think this is a solid pickup at under $3, just because there will always be that critical mass of small creatures that you can dump out and then cast something insane. I suspect one of the big reveals at the Pro Tour will be some sort of Rite into Decimator of the Provinces deck.

Kolaghan’s Command: Speaking of pickups- this card is really cheap right now. I know it’s also about to rotate, but it has a much wider base in Modern than any of the other commands (besides Atarka’s, which I also love right now). Spend Puca Points on these!

Languish: Still disgusting and holding a lot of people back, while also not having an heir-apparent. The Roger Ailes of Magic cards.

In all seriousness, I’m not sure what replaces this in Standard in the fall. Planar Outburst seems like the best possible option, but that’s also giving up a lot of the remaining equity in black. Every aggressive card gets at least somewhat better this fall, even if the percentage isn’t very appreciable.

From all of this information, we can begin to build a frame of what the overall environment looks like. I expect the hyper-aggressive low casting cost decks to remain relatively swingy in terms of consistency, I expect various midrange strategies to comprise the majority of the format as a whole, and the control decks will be making deck-building concessions in favor of Emrakul in about a month. Let me know if you think I missed anything crucial to the format’s identity, and we will talk about more traditional finance stuff next week.

Best,

Ross

1Actual results pending.

Jim Casale

Grinder Finance – WTF is Printing and Collation?

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I’ve decided to start a little mini-series, appropriately titled “WTF is _” to take some time to discuss some topics that might not necessary be the most important finance topics but tangentially related to the cost of cards as a whole.  The first topic I’m going to talk about is collation.

Well if you go look up the word collation, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the way it’s used to describe Magic product so I’m assuming someone made the stretch to fit at some point in time.  I don’t know the etymology of the phrase but I know what it means.  Collation in Magic terms refers to the distribution of cards in a booster pack (or packs in a box, etc).   But before we can really dive into Magic’s collation process and what it’s doing today, we need to talk about the printing process first.

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Sheets

Since the dawn of time Magic cards have been printed on huge sheets of card stock and cut down into the much smaller cards we all play with today.  It’s not uncommon to see foil uncut sheets like these available at Grands Prix’s prize walls.  Generally each set has 3 sheets for each of the 3 rarities.  Generally…

Alpha

As a young upstart company without presumably a ton of financial resources it’s no surprise Alpha was a huge source of printing problems.  You ever want to make a vendor roll their eyes?  Ask them if they have any Alpha Volcanic Islands for sale.  Alpha was missing two cards that were part of Beta (Volcanic Island and Circle of Protection: Black) and that’s not even the worst part.

Here is a picture of Mark Rosewater standing in front of an uncut sheet of Beta rares.  You might not notice it quickly but I count 4 (FOUR!?) basic islands on this rare sheet and I can’t even see the whole thing!

mm45_beta1

In this second picture (of presumably a common, rare, and uncommon sheet) there yet still more basic lands on the uncommon sheet.

mm45_betaAll

The short version of this story is don’t buy an unopened pack of old Magic.  You could get some very bad cards as your rare.

Experimental printing processes:

Have you ever heard someone say something’s rarity is “U2?”  No they’re not talking about the band, but rather another experimental and now defunct printing process (kind of).  Most people assume that the Legends Karakas is an uncommon and so is Mana Drain.  They’re from the same set, right? Well yeah but technically, Karakas is a U2 and Mana  Drain is a U1 which means there are twice as many Legends Karakas in existence than Mana Drains.  The U1/2 distinction is how many times each card appeared on the uncommon sheet.  That also happened with the common sheet which lead to some weird situations.  Hymn to Tourach is a C1 in Fallen Empires but it has 4 different arts so it’s on the sheet 4 times…  Some commons only had 3 different arts (this different art experiment was also a bad idea) which means despite them both being C1, there are more of some than others.  But Fallen Empires also has other problems like it only being printed on two sheets (the other sheet had U3, U2, and U1 cards – which were Uncommons, Slightly more Uncommons, and Rares).  Wizards has since learned something from these mistakes.

Modern Day Printing:

Today, there are 3 sheets.  Commons, Uncommons, and Rares.  But wait, what about mythics?  Well it’s pretty simple to explain.  With the introduction of the colored set symbols to denote rarity, it became imperative that each card at the same rarity was the “same rarity.”  Some cards, like Mythic rares appear slightly less often than other cards in the same slot so they have a new symbol but they are printed on the same sheet.  The rare sheet for modern sets has 2 of each rare and 1 of each mythic – making mythics twice as rare as rare without the confusing R2/1 notations. But wait, there’s more!  Flip cards can’t be printed on the same sheet as normal cards because they don’t have the same backing.  Thus we have sheets that contain only flip cards and they are cut and inserted into the packs later as well.  BUT WAIT – there’s still more!  With Shadows over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon I am going to go out on a limb and make the assumption that they have split the flip cards into two sheets.  One with commons and uncommons (1 goes in every pack) and one with rares and mythics (1 goes in some packs but doesn’t replace the other flip card).  This printing process is different from Innistrad and Dark Ascension where there was only ever 1 flip card in a pack.

Collation

Okay so now that we’ve had that history lesson on what printing is – let’s talk about collation.  In the oldest years of Magic there was no collation.  The cards were printed, packed, and shipped.  Many cards appeared in the same order in booster packs and the same rares in the same order.  I vaguely remember in my earlier years, while drafting Onslaught, that there were some cards that often appeared before or after Sparksmith on a sheet.  With this information I was able to tell if a Sparksmith was likely in the pack and base my further decisions on that.  If you didn’t draft Onslaught you probably don’t get why Sparksmith is so important.  Basically it’s like opening a Pack Rat at common.  Maybe not quite that bad, but whatever – I’m getting off topic.

Recently

There have been strides made in order to limit the ability to know what rares would be in what packs.  This is also called “box mapping” and while I don’t do it or endorse it, many people try.  Some boxes are especially susceptible as a few years ago there was an app you could download to help you do it.  I don’t want to say it was box mapping for dummies, but it was.  As you can see here, it only took 8 packs to map out the entire box’s contents.  This is obviously very unsettling to people and had gone on through Gatecrash and Dragon’s Maze. Theros introduced new colation processes that had some packs shift and/or columns move that made it much harder to do.  As far as I can tell, going forward it has been pretty hard to map boxes.

Problem Packs

On more than on occasion we have seen some colation failures and it’s almost always at the expense of the player.  Modern Masters 2015 had a comical number of errors.  I experienced two different drafts where the number of cards in the packs was not correct (missing foil, missing rare, extra foil, or extra rare).  Then you have weird stuff like this box where every pack had a mythic.  This also happened in Fate Reforged where there were a number of people that opened a fetchland in every pack.

Eldritch Moon

So we have another problem this time.  “Box Mapping” has become too easy for the average player.  As you can see in this video, you are able to tell which art packs in a case has all of the non-flip mythics in that case.  While it’s not quite as bad as knowing where every card is in a box of a set, you can find most of the mythics pretty easily across multiple boxes with this technique.  In fact, after you find one mythic you are very likely on your way to finding them all.  This is a big colation problem and might be a result of using a different colation process from Oath of the Gatewatch which weirdly had 4 booster wrappers instead of the usual 3 of a small set.  It might also be a problem with how they decided to package flip cards from this set and it was masked by the 5 booster wrappers in Shadows over Innistrad.  The short version of this story is don’t buy loose packs.  The long version of this story is all of the words it took to get here.

Final thoughts from Last weekend

  • So, Spell Queller.  Who’s ready for a year of this guy?  I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the next few days since it’s already a $10+ rare but man there are so many Spell Quellers in the T64 of SCG Columbus.
  • Moving forward I think there will be an uptick of 1 mana ways to kill Spell Queller (Aerial Volley, Fiery Impulse, etc) but I feel they may fall short of killing the rest of the Bant Company deck.
  • Not a big splash of Eldritch Moon cards in Modern.  I wouldn’t give up on your Allosaurus Riders / Eldritch Evolution deck but I’m not saying it’s likely to happen.
  • Pro Tour is a few weeks away.  If you see cards under performing don’t ditch them yet.  You have a good chance to cash out during a weekend of spikes.  Last Pro Tour I was able to sell all of my Dark Petitions for far more money than I should have been able to get for them.
Casual Fridays

The New Pattern?

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We are three months away from having the old pattern of Standard be gone completely. It’s a new and exciting time, as we try to figure out what effect there will be on our favorite cards.

Let me introduce you to how things used to be:
elspeth price

Do you remember her? Tokens all over, fetches finding battle lands, her sick combo with Wingmate Roc, where you could minus her to kill their Rhinos and keep your birds? How about with Devotion strategies? Remember when you had to have a plan for her?

Elspeth was a staple at first, her price dropping down slowly, but spiking when the new block was released. This is a trend that had been well-established, going back more than a few sets, where the next big set would introduce mechanics or decks that played very well with the cards from the previous sets.

Then, when the rotation was about six months away, the card would begin to lose value, as people got rid of extras and tried to keep no more than a playset. Elspeth was hit extra hard, as her Duel Deck vs. Kiora came out about the time of Fate Reforged.

That’s the old way. What harbingers do we have of the new way?

hangarback

Go ahead and look up how many GW Tokens builds are playing Hangarback. I’ll wait. It’s a long list. This card is a four-of all over the place, it’s seeing some Modern and even Vintage play, and yet here it is, south of $5 for a card that reeks of value! It’s gone down ever since its release!

Maybe it’s because of Magic Origins, maybe because it’s a rare. There are a lot of factors at play and I am not pretending to have all the answers. One card does not define a trend, but good grief, this is a powerful and commonly-played card to be so cheap and to have consistently fallen in value.

Here’s another card I’ve been watching closely:

gideon
Gideon is the first planeswalker in some time to be an automatic four-of, because his emblem is an easy out for extra copies. He is just as ubiquitous as Hangarback, and is a mythic! Despite all that, he is staying stable. The rotation for him is in 2017, so he’s got three sets to create a new pattern.

But will he? I like stability, but what I really like is the chance to go up. Unfortunately, that’s all it is right now: a chance. If there were more time to go, I’d like his chances more, especially as he’s BFFs with Nissa, Voice of Zendikar. That’s a combination I would like to put serious money on, except that the window for profit is a lot smaller.

Avacynprice

Avacyn is still being opened. She’s in one pack of Battle for Zendikar and we’ve got three months of EMN-EMN-SOI in front of us. She hasn’t hit maximum supply yet, but she’s so good and played so frequently that you might expect her value to be trending upward. Not at all, though, not at all.

I’m looking around, and I’m seeing a pattern of cards that are fantastic in Standard not growing in price as they used to. I’m not sure if it’s the timing, or increased awareness, or greater supply, but Standard doesn’t seem to have the big gains it used to.

Sure, we get spikes on Demonic Pact when Harmless Offering is spoiled, or Day’s Undoing gets a couple bucks thanks to a new prison-style deck, but those are small and don’t appear to be sticking around. Plus, those are rotating when Kaladesh arrives, and no one is going to buy more than the fewest possible.

So if Standard isn’t where we find the chance of increasing value, where do we look?

kalitas

Kalitas is not nearly as commonly played as Gideon or Avacyn, yet he’s worth more. He’s a small-set mythic, true, but look at where he’s seeing consistent play that the other two aren’t: Modern.

I’m also paying attention to Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger. He’s golden in Tron, a turn-four play if you get the set plus an extra Tower. Oof.

Want another example? Look at Nahiri, the Harbinger. Same set as Avacyn, played in a lot less decks, worth about $5 more. She’s a two-card combo that takes a little time and has some potential for disruption, but the power, and the price, is worth the attention.

I’m not saying this is the pattern for all time in the future. I don’t have enough data to make that prediction.

What I am doing is keeping an eye on these cards, and others, in order to make sense of things. Maybe Gideon will spike in Kaladesh. Maybe Kalitas falls off the map. We will have to see, but these slow decreases for very good Standard cards may be the new normal.

I think Gideon and Nissa are going to tell me the pattern for the new Standard. If they go up during Eldritch Moon or Kaladesh, and then drop like rocks during Aether Revolt, that would mean the old pattern is still in play, just on a condensed timeline.

What I suspect, though, is that people have learned their lesson about the value of cards as they approach rotation. No one waits to out their extras anymore, and that could mean a whole new pattern to learn.

Accumulated Knowledge

PROTRADER: The Next Big Move

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Okay, so today is the street release for Eldritch Moon, but we aren’t going to spend much time talking about that set. Instead, I want to talk about Kaladesh – or more accurately, the rotation accompanying it.

I can’t tell you how many times I was asked last week at FNM about “what’s rotating out”. Okay, so it was probably somewhere around four or five times, but still– that’s a lot of times to be asked the same question by a small crowd of people, especially when the answer is a pretty simple “nothing”. For whatever reason, the new (simplified!) rotation schedule has not yet trickled-down from the enfranchised players at the top to the lower-information players at the bottom1.

This really got me thinking however, and I think this is the best time to begin optimizing for the upcoming transition. One of the interesting, non-partisan elements of the current election is the discussion over how the transition will be made next January, even if the Democrats end up keeping the White House. It’s been compared to a new CEO taking the helm of a giant corporation, except that it’s unarguably even larger in scope. Both of the major parties have spent the last several months discussing how the protocol and procedure of such a move would take place; this isn’t as a means of political bluster, but as a way to avoid any costly hiccups or oversights. Stability and continuity is going to be the name of the game. Why should we approach Standard any differently?

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I mentioned the non-rotating rare lands a couple of weeks back, and this is certainly the foundational level of looking ahead. Being able to actually cast your spells is pretty important, and even though both cycles are going to have a tough time breaking into Modern, it’s not crazy to think that either SoI’s or BFZ’s lands could be commonly played in full sets. The Shadows lands all have a full year left in Standard, so the appeal of buying in at roughly $2 each now seems like it could easily pay off at some point in the next twelve months. My favorites here are undoubtedly Fortified Village and Port Town (White is VERY strong right now, and surprisingly deep in terms of deckbuilding options), but it’s worth mentioning that the red ones feel at least somewhat artificially depressed- don’t forget that R won like 3 Pro Tours in a row and could easily win another in the next year.

Building off of the revolutionary concept that Lands are good in Magic, the next look is to finding dynamic, standalone threats. It you look at winning games from the “Top Down” perspective advocated by Pat Chapin, then look for the things that are going to win you games either in immediacy or in essence just by casting them. One of the first things on my list here is actually a new card, Elder Deep-Fiend. This card saw a pretty interesting bump during preorders, and is probably going to see a small price shrink in a month (unless it is literally half the top 16 or more of PT:EMN, which is possible). Right now, it’s like the 2015 Minnesota Vikings or 2016 Jacksonville Jaguars2, a darling among the pundits that is going to have to prove the larger pools of doubters that they are legit. Emrakul is in this conversation to a degree, but she is definitely priced too high at $15, and I’m happy to wait that slump out.

Ulamog at $12 is only slightly more appealing, but World Breaker at $5 seems like the smarter play. World Breaker in application seems to certainly do enough to get the job done, and in conjuction with Drownyard Temple is able to take over most situations. The deckbuilding costs with splashing green for World Breaker are not terrible, since two or the best creature lands (Hissing Quagmire and Lumbering Falls) are simultaneously in G and the two best control colors. Staying in green, Cryptolith Rite seems like a solid buy at just under $3, especially since it’s high water-mark was more than twice as much. Cryptolith Rite is going to be in Standard just as long as Westvale Abbey (a tricky call at ~$7, but a powerful and broad threat nonetheless), and the two cards certainly pair well together. The trick here is to look for things that are good on their own, without relying on potential synergies that may prove too hard to bet on with yet-to-be-known mechanics from future sets.

A big reason why this is so important to focus on now is because Eldritch Moon rares/mythics are currently all at inflated values. The potential to convert something like a Liliana, the Last Hope into twelve or thirteen Fortified Villages seems like a trade that won’t be possible in a few weeks. Gisela, the Broken Blade was one of my favorite cards coming out, but I’m not sure how long she can maintain $24 without having that crucial fourth point of toughness. Spell Queller, the fifth most expensive card as of me writing this, is over $12 and still just a rare — I expect that value to crater as the set gets opened en masse. Heck, even Ishkanah, Grafwidow is floating around $10, and that card’s best home is probably Gauntlet Legends: Dark Legacy3.

Decimator of Provinces has already seen a slide down to about $5, and even though I think it’s probably safe there for a while (unless the card proves to be literally useless immediately, which I don’t think is possible), I think more mythics will be joining it by slipping down a few bucks in the short term. Consequently, cards from most of the other sets in Standard (not just DTK and Origins, which are entering their senior year) have had a small dip in value, making this the best time to buy most of the cards from any set BESIDES EMN.

Speaking of Origins (kinda), the slow burn on Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy is incredible to me. I’ve officially started targeting them aggressively, and if they get much lower than their current $30, expect to see someone with the capital stage at least a partial buyout. This card plays perfectly with the environment of the next few months, and is a proven player in Standard AND the Eternal formats. Ask yourself this- is there any point in the next 5 years where I would rather have a Tamiyo and a Grim Flayer OVER a Jace? This price drop feels like what happened years ago with rotations, before players realized that good cards were good even after they left the marquee format.

What do you think? Which cards do you think are safe or appealing in three or six months? Which EMN rares are best to trade away now?

Best,

Ross

1[‘condescending smirk’ emoji].

2DUUUUUUUUUUUVAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLL.

3The PS2 version, obviously.