Jace, Memory Adept is buylisting for $10 after a run midweek when Duskmantle Guildmage was spoiled and is going higher than that on ebay.

The public loves the idea of a viable milling strategy, and a fragile two card combo will attract fnmers if nothing else. I doubt there will be much price movement until after Gatecrash is released; word of mouth will help propagate demand at that point even if there are no high profile results to back up the deck's viability.

Imperial Recruiter is a Judge foil. While making an Aluren play at this point doesn't make much sense, I'm going to keep my eye out for Painter's Servants. Grindstone is already fairly pricey and will probably see a bump as more Recruiters come into the market, but the initial investment required has turned me off at this point.

Servants on the other hand can be had for $3-4 fairly easily and buylist to SCG for $3 making the risk negligible. I like this play quite a bit, but remember this is still legacy and you have to get rid of them before you buy out the internet.

GP Denver told us a lot of things about Deathrite Shaman, things we probably already knew, but did you remember it was an ELF Shaman? CFB did, and Matt Nass top 8'd with an elf deck using both Deathrite and more interestingly Natural Order.

People have already started buying up the cheap copies on Ebay, but this is a great target to pick up in trade and while I doubt it will return to its previous highs of a year or two ago, these are not easy to find and people will be asking for them again after months of no one caring about the card.

Modern season has already started and its no surprise that budget achetype staples have already started to climb given the lack of consumer confidence in the format as a whole with Modern Masters looming after the season's end. The following cards have gone up by at least half using TCG Mid in the last two weeks with some of them more than doubling: Daybreak Coronet, Sylvan Scrying, Karn Liberated, Auriok Champion, Serra Ascendant, and Wilt-Leaf Liege.

Not only do all of these cards have real casual demand, they also have ingrained price memories much lower than their recent spikes and sometimes even lower than their pre-spike prices. There are still opportunities to pick these up at their old numbers locally, but its probably too late to make a cash play on anything that's already jumped on TCG so these are going to be limited to trade pick ups for the most part.

RtR Targets

While some of RTR has already rebounded after bottoming out a few weeks ago (Jace and the shocklands), many of the less exciting standard staples are still bargains. Its worth your time to pick up those cheap Abrupt Decays, and Supreme Verdicts. you'll be thanking yourself come June.

On the flipside, I'm actively staying away from Thragtusk during the next few weeks, and its not just because of Skullcrack though that has something to do with it. During a new format the hype is going to be focused around new cards even if they are actively worse than some of the known quantities. Thragtusk's current price is a product of it warping the format to the point that it took a second artificial supply increase to stabalize it during October. That artificial supply is going to drag the price down as people look to try new things during the first month of Gatecrash, and there isn't demand for those excess copies from the event decks. Thragtusk also hasn't moved in price for several months and will almost certainly get worse when every aggressive deck has the option of splashing for Skullcrack which combined with the excess supply available should make the price drop during February and early March.
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This is a transitional period and prices are changing rapidly as we bring in the new year. This amount of fluctuation means that its time to hit the trade tables harder than usual, taking advantage of price memory is probably the best way to make money until Gatecrash hits now that many of the cash plays have dried up.
Happy Hunting.