I would love to see more lists and thoughts about cards and their financial values. Great article!

IMHO I think that since commander has already shown a rise in popularity, the "spike" in the price of format-defining cards has already happened.

Hey man thanks for the comment.

To start off, casual cards are a total different beast than competitive cards. No one is saying bank on 100 Doubling Seasons and hope to make a decent chunk of change in 5 years. Casual cards are not money like Vintage is. You don't invest in casual the same way you would in a set of Power 9. But while on that topic, the potential gain in Vintage cards has been dwindling in recent years. That's why Beta Underground sea has gained so much in the past year, but Beta Black Lotus has pretty much met it's plateau. On SCG, which is a decent base price to follow especially for older cards, Beta Underground Sea is now the 2nd highest priced card in Beta. It is somewhat difficult to get accurate price histories on such high end cards using Blacklotusproject.com due to the fact that the software is not 100% perfect. It can't weed out the graded cards, which IMO is the only real market out there for Black Lotuses at the moment, aside from random people trying to complete a P9 set. People aren't heading out in droves to buy Black Lotuses to play with, they are collecting and/or investing in them. But just looking at the general trends over even the last 3 years for both cards and you will see what has happened with Vintage and what is happening with Legacy. A few writers have written about this and if anyone has links to good articles about the "demise" of Vintage please feel free to share them here.

Casual cards are more of a fluid market. I would never really hold onto casual cards unless there is a big event on the horizon like the release of the Commander decks. Otherwise their prices raise pretty stagnant. But like I said in the article, they are very stable, and not much effects their price. Nothing rotates for a casual player. Bans don't happen very often either. Barring a strictly better printing of a card like something like a "Tripling Season", new cards don't really push out cards, archetypes or decks in casual either.

We all like to think that the tournament player base is the biggest part of the magic world, but that is pretty much wrong. We are just the most informed and the most active. Casual players make up the bulk % of players around the world. They won't drive the price of something like Doubling Season to $100 but they will keep the price at a price somewhere around what it is now, barring a Standard set reprint, or mass printing like Foil Reya Dawnbringer promos. I specifically say Standard set reprint because any boxed set like the Commander decks still costs a certain amount of $ and is printed at a lower # than a standard set is. The number of boxed set rare cards in circulation is a fraction of what a regular rare from Zendikar in circulation is. So even if Doubling Season get's reprinted in a Commander set, it won't drop as much as if it were printed in Innistrad. It also may not even drop depending what else is in that particular box set. Jitte was in Rats Nest and the reason why that didn't effect it's price is because it took up the whole price of that precon.

As for investing in Commander specifically, I may not have been clear enough in my article. What I really meant to show is now is an excellent time to invest in Commander, not Commander is something you should be banking all your money in. I also think you are wrong about Commander flopping. The presales around the net are doing extremely well. In my opinion, the Commander product is bringing Magic closer to a boardgame if that makes any sense. They are a perfect product for players who have quit due to having no time or having moved on in their life, but still love the game. I could see dad's getting these for their kids to play at the cottage or at a family gathering. I also think as a prepackaged product a lot of tournament players will try it out, and at least a % of those players will, from then on, be EDH players as well as tournament players. I can also see older players who have friend who still play getting back into it through this product as well. Essentially it is the perfect casual product for the biggest portion of the magic player base. Every player has different tastes and Commander seems like it will appeal to the largest % of players out there.

I do agree with your comment that the best cards to invest in are cards that are multiformat playable. I did touch on that a little in the article, and will touch more on it in following articles. ANY constructed playable card that has casual appeal is always worth going after. A recent example of this was Vampire Nocturnus. Vamps wasn't even that great of a deck in that time, but it was definitely playable, combo that with the Twilight craze and you got it's price while in standard. BUT guess how much he is worth right now, seeing no play in constructed formats. He's roughly around $10, which is nothing to just brush aside. Hope this opens your eyes to the worth of the casual market.

PS Wasteland/Strip Mine are both extremely good in EDH as some lands are so broken that they need answered. EDH being a multiplayer format, curves are generally higher so having 2 colourless lands that deal with other lands will not hinder your deck.

PPS Sorry everyone for the super long reply. There was just lots to talk about in Allinsons post.

@QED
I personally knew the ballpark of a foil Treachery. It was the editor that commented on the foil price. I actually want to do another article focusing on foils, especially generals because we all know, some of those are worth some decent paper. Is anyone else interested in that? I find some of my best trades are for EDH Foils.

@chasandres
For Vesuva, I think the price spike had a lot more to do with EDH, and possibly some speculation for legacy that hasn't readjusted itself. Take a look at the BLP graph and you'll see 2 spikes, one for extended season and one in the past 6 months. Could be that SCG raised their buy price in February, which could have caused the price spike, not 100% sure on that one.

@Psilence6K
Thanks for the kind words! Hit me up next time you are in Toronto!

@American_Kid
I didn't want to get too many specific cards into the article as it's an intro article. Also, I wanted to keep the price window for the cards somewhat affordable for speculators. Maze of Ith was just out of that price range in my opinion. It is also a lot harder to find than all of the cards on my list. As for Skyshroud Claim, I actually have plans for another article highlighting common/uncommon staples that can get you some serious change if you keep the big ones around in your binder. IMO any time you can trade away a common/uncommon that isn't over $1 is almost free money. They'd be sitting in common bins or boxes at home otherwise.