I love Deserted Temple (aka Gaea’s Cradle #2). If I had a dime for everytime with Wort the Raidmother it was conspired Crop Rotation for Temple and Cradle, conspired Sylvan Scrying for the same, Primeval Titan (before it was banned), etc…

To be fair, I have about as many spares set aside, I also have as many extra Deserted Temples and Thawing Glaciers. Probably have 10+ copies of each of them just for decks. I’d consider them all for speculation, but I think the Canyons are the hidden gem here.

I agree with selling Mutavault now. Heck, I sold my Mutavault when they were $20 TCG and not $25.

Regarding Thoughtseize, I wouldn’t buy in now. Theros set the record again for best-selling set of all time, so there are likely a ton of them out there. If you really want to invest in Thoughtseize, I rather target the FOIL at $25-$30.

On the other hand, Thoughtseize will not drop at rotation while Mutavault should since it’s played mostly in Standard. So the play is definitely to sell Mutavault here.

Is Thoughtseize worth acquiring here or was the print run too large?

Indeed it’s probably noteworthy.

You may want to think about Winding Canyons as well, as Pi mentioned above 🙂 It’s a lot cheaper after all.

EDH in most groups is about fairly long or longer games. Frequently your creatures are getting blown up by Wrath or one of its brethren. Besides that in multiplayer there is a good chance of unexpected attacks and of wanting to have the ability to have mana to protect yourself on other players’ turns. Winding Canyons helps considerably with both, in the first scenario it gives your creatures a kind of pseudo haste that allows them to attack before anybody has the chance to Wrath (barring Rout or Starstorm), while in the second scenario you can just keep your mana open looking way more threatening to potential attackers and then during the last opponent’s turn drop your creatures. Sure, you can’t always spend 3 mana on this(2 + the Canyons), but with the long games more often than not mana is not the problem.

Stronghold is great for its recursion, but, not drawing new cards can be a trap as you might get stuck in a loop that doesn’t cut it, but stopping will get you killed immediately. With more opponents not drawing new cards will be considerably more relevant as they are already outdrawing you. It will definitely help to have the card in your deck and it might be played over a Canyons in a deck with black (though which I’d prefer would be a toss up), but that still leaves all other decks that don’t have black.

That doesn’t contradict though that the Stronghold is more widely known, but, isn’t speculating all about identifying tomorrow’s popular cards?

Maybe the effect was that they did not become double what they are now because there are more copies on the market? Of course they didn’t intend them to go up, but, that doesn’t naturally lead to any conclusions on how far they wanted them to go down.

I think the Canyons is as good as, if not better than, the Stronghold and as such I feel it has a lot more growth potential. Don’t discount that it’s playable in every EDH deck rather than only those with black. Give me $20 to invest and I’d much rather get 3-4 Canyons than 1 Stronghold. In my view we only need to wait for Canyons’ spike.

My comment was only toward Modern Masters and its effects on the cards in the set. That’s why I didn’t mention Mutavault.

Modern Masters DID reduced the prices on almost everything EXCEPT for Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant. In fact, I do not think any non-bulk rare in Modern Masters that went up or at least stay near around the price pre-MM.

If you read my comments again, I attributed the fact that both Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant are also Legacy staples, so that’s why they went up. Certainly, none of the other Mythics are Legacy staples, with the exception of Vendilion Clique as a fringe card. Perhaps that’s why Vendilion Clique is only the only Mythic to hold its prices instead of going down.

So again, my conclusion is that MM DID reduced prices on most of the cards printed. The fact that both Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant increased does not equate to “MM failed to keep Modern staples at an affordable price levels”.

This is a separate discussion below regarding Mutavault:
It is the MOST played card in Standard at the moment (according to MTGTop8) but I think the reason is that it was printed in a core set, which means that the supply is very small compared to a big set like Theros or RTR. That’s why Thoughtseize is hitting closer to $10 and Mutavault is hitting closer to $25 even though both are reprints. Granted, Mutavault does see more play than Thoughtseize, but the difference is not large to enough to explain an almost 150% gap between the 2 cards.

If we’d known how small the modern master’s print run would be, we could have guessed that Tarmogoyf, Dark Confidant, and Vendillion Clique would go up in value simply because the demand for them would likely go up by a large amount thanks to WoTC’s promised support for modern as well as the existing demand increase from Legacy alone these cards were bound to go up. And for those who didn’t make it out to Vegas, props to SCG for being the first people to make the connection because they were buying at TCG low prices in Vegas to build a stockpile.

Vendilion Clique is certainly played in Legacy plenty. Progenitus and Sarkhan Vol, seriously? These barely see any play. I suppose the useless Kamigawa Dragons also dropped in price, too…

Shackles is perhaps the one good example, but even this card sees very little Modern play.

So maybe the conclusion is Mythic Rares printed in Modern Masters but don’t see Modern play dropped in price, while Mythics that see Modern and Legacy play did not. Would that be a fair statement?

Don’t forget – I’m in the camp that Modern Masters WOULD help reduce prices and I expected this to happen. I just didn’t expect Goyf and Bob to go UP instead of down. That’s what perplexed me.

What do you think of Mutavault? Is this just high in price now and showing resilience because of Standard? That’s my assessment.

Needless to say, I’m no longer going to see a reprint and automatically assume it means price drops coming – the situations are far more complex nowadays.

I only assumed Wizards wanted to have some kind of effect because they claimed Modern would be an affordable format. Do you think they intended the price of Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant to go UP with this reprint? Highly doubt it. I strongly expect these will get reprinted again somehow and that they will be cheaper 2 years from now than where they’re at today.

Yes, Winding Canyons I suppose is another one. But Volrath’s Stronghold is more powerful, is it not? More rare and more playable, yes, but less in demand maybe?

Agree whole-heartedly with Tu Ta

Furthermore, Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant are also Legacy-staples, which most of the cards in MM are not. If anything, that is the main reason why they went up so much. Some of the other Mythics in MM barely budged (Vendilion Clique) or went down a lot (Vedalken Shackles, Progenitus, Sarkhan Vol).

So please, as a somewhat respected voice of the finance community, please stop spouting this non-sense of “Modern Masters failed to keep Modern-staple prices at an affordable level”.

This assumes Wizards wished for a large effect. The one way they could absolutely mess up is by overprinting (Chronicles anyone?). They are more likely testing the waters and erring on the side of caution. Remember that they are in it for the long haul, they can aim for an impact in several years just as long as they don’t mess up terribly somewhere along the way. Sure, it might take a little longer before Modern prices are at a level more people are comfortable with, but, as long as things are going well for them that’s not really a problem.

“Volrath’s Stronghold is a powerful land that belongs in every black Commander deck. After running up to $23 earlier this year the card has settled back down to $20. Once again this looks like a price floor to me, and an increased player base along with more Commander players could drive this card’s price even higher.”

Winding Canyons! What kind of gains are you expecting on the Stronghold? 20% seems reasonable, maybe 40% at best? Now look at Canyons, it’s at about $5-$6, it’s probably (slightly) more rare and it’s more widely playable. What it has working against it though is that it’s not as well known. Over the long run I can easily see Canyons double from its current price, most of which will likely come at a sudden spike. Admittedly you probably have time to wait for the spike, but the same could be said for the Stronghold.