Welcome back, readers!

It seems a lot of people are focused on Modern thanks to the SCG Invitational and GP Charlotte coming up. With no big Legacy events in the near future, my love of the eternal formats (or really just...not Standard) needs to be satiated and Modern is a great option.

I was a Legacy player before the format existed and for a long time simply viewed it as "diet Legacy"--half the fun for half the cost. For awhile it was just that; many people simply ported Legacy decks into the format, sacrificing relatively pain-free mana bases and free counter magic for slightly more painful manabases and not quite free counter magic.

My first Modern deck was Hive Mind using Ethereal Usher, Aerial Responder, Preordain, and all the red rituals (both Seething Song and Rite of Flame) to cheat it into play really fast. Then you just played one of about 11 Pacts and won the game...pretty consistently on turn three. Then they started banning many of said components, and I went back to playing Legacy.

By now Modern has proven itself a strong and diverse format (well, relatively diverse) and a lot of players who weren't already playing are starting to pick up the stuff they need after this last Modern Masters release. This means we're likely to see steady growth of the format's player base, which in turn means demand for the format staples.

How has that demand changed? Below is a list of the top 25 most played Modern cards as well as their prices now, one month ago, six months ago, and one year ago.

Single Prints

Now that you can see the full data set we're working with, let's break it down a bit more.

First, let's isolate the single printing cards from the pack. As you know, the single printing cards tend to have the highest chance of major gains (and also major losses with a reprint).

For this subset of data I will allow minor reprints (like RPTQ foils,  judge foils, or MM reprintings @ mythic level) as they tend not to affect the price nearly as much. For now, we'll also ignore anything that is still in print and thus can have additional supply added to the market. I'm also pulling out the really cheap stuff (under $1) simply because with the scale of the graph they would make it basically unreadable.

As you can see by the graph, overall we see growth of the staples. It's important to note that the reprinting of Tarmogoyf in MM2015 (as well as MMA) does seem to have an effect on its price overall, so it may be wise to remove it from our data set, since it alone forces me to double my axis size.

With Tarmogoyf removed we have something more like this:

Now we're seeing a better overall positive trend as the only card not showing solid gains currently is Scavenging Ooze, who is #10 on our list. This, to me, highlights Scavenging Ooze as a solid speculation target.

While he did show up in the original Commander product (and for a while he sat at $40+ dollars each), his reprint in a core set (and likely more painful promo printing with said core set) has kept his price down dramatically. However, being the tenth most played card in Modern and very good against the #3, #7, and #13 most played cards implies that he has a lot of potential moving forward.

Reprints

I see single-printing cards as having the most potential due to their (usually) smaller total supply in the marketplace. However, as Blood Moon will show you, the number of printings doesn't always matter if the card is extremely powerful (or possibly if all those printings were a long time ago).

So let's look at the data set for all reprinted cards on the list, regardless of how they were reprinted; i.e. duel deck, Modern Masters, Standard-legal set reprint, etc. The only thing we'll ignore are FNM promo reprintings, because these print runs tend to be small enough that they may not add a lot to the supply.

(Note: I have Tarmogoyf on both sets of data because it's been reprinted twice, but both times were at a mythic level in a limited print run so the total number added to the supply is still somewhat limited--it's in a sort of awkward "middle ground" between both sets of data.)

The data show that reprinting cards seems to cause an initial drop as expected, but the true staples eventually recover. We can see this trend when we compare cards with reprintings from more than a year ago, like Thoughtseize or Blood Moon, to the cards that have been reprinted in the past year (see Goremand, Fulminator Mage and Spellskite).

What this means is that you can and likely should pick up the format's true staples after they've been reprinted (see some of my previous articles to get a good time estimate of the lowest prices) and expect them to recover. The only problem now is that enough people seem to have caught onto this particular trait and people are weary of trading away a lot of these staples rather than waiting for a better price.

This also means that the MM2015 reprints are prime targets to pick up. While they may go down a bit more, they will likely rise back up and then past their previous price points (barring any additional reprints in the next year or so).

I'm targeting the following MM2015 reprints:

1. Spellskite - #9 on the most played list and the third most played card that was in MM2015. This card can fit into any deck and serves as a powerful "hate bear" against some of the format's linear decks (Infect, Bogles, Burn) and it hoses Splinter Twin pretty hard as well. Its most recent price high point was around $25 and the MM2015 version can be picked up for around $18.
2. Fulminator Mage - #16 on the list, this card was as high as $42 per copy and his reprinting has dropped copies to less than half that. With the resurgence of Tron and Amulet Bloom, this is one of the most efficient hate cards against both decks that can fit into any deck with either red or black in it, though decks that only splash either color may still have trouble utilizing it.