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Hello, readers and welcome to the Thursday edition of the Daily Stock Watch! Unstable is coming, and it should be a fun weekend for those who would be drafting their boxes. I'm not sure if I could come up with a special edition for it tomorrow, so let's stick to our regular segment for today. Let's check out one of the biggest gainers for the past few weeks.
This card just hit its all-time high of $19.99 today (that's for normal copies) and it's out of stock everywhere. It's a pretty amazing price tag for a card that only saw action in a measly 0.1% of winning Modern decks for the year based on my Utility Checker. It's a no-show in competitive Legacy and Commander decks, so we could think of it as a second coming of Glimpse the Unthinkable(in a casual sense), but an artifact is easier to fit in most decks, particularly in the sideboard, than a two color sorcery spell.
But then again, why not put those two in one deck and see how it goes?
Esper Mill by Azeem Lyons
This beautiful mill deck isn't just your average casual delight; it finished in 14th place of SCG Classic Baltimore that was packed with the best decks that Modern has to offer. I'm not so sure how vital Mesmeric Orb was in this deck, seeing how loaded it was with mill spells, but it nicely fits the curve along with Hedron Crab and Fraying Sanity to set up its game plan in the succeeding turns.
But do you think that this exposure is enough to catapult its price to something north of $20? Chances are, it is.
Miller Time
Cards that mill libraries are known casual favorites in the short history of Magic, and the ones above are just some of them. It's a known fact to pros that decks of this kind will pop up every once in a while as a rogue variant, but the strategy is not poised to be that successful, especially in a format as diverse as Modern. I'm not saying that Azeem Lyons' finish was a fluke, but I think that it's more of a deck mastery success rather than a good metagame call. Either way, it was a very good finish for a deck that's not even in tier 3 territory.
I've scanned through big online stores such as Star City Games, TCGPlayer, Card Kingdom, and Channel Fireball, and they're all out of stock just like what I mentioned earlier. I don't think we'll see this in Masters 25, so it's safe to say that this could go up a little more up to the $25-$30 range ala Glimpse the Unthinkable, so buying or trading for copies of the card in the $15 range is fine. If you happen to have spare copies and people are willing to trade or buy them for $25 and up, I think that's also fine to do. Mirrodin is the only expansion where it was printed, so it could be missing in the next Masters set, but could still be part of a Duel Deck or some FTV that will be printed down the road. After all, some profit is better than no profit at all.
And that’s it for the Thursday edition of the Daily Stock Watch! See you again tomorrow, as we check out our last card for the week. As always, feel free to share your opinion in the comments section below. And if you want to keep up with all the market movement, be sure to check in with the QS Discord Channel for real time market information, and stay ahead of the hottest specs!
