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Daily Stock Watch – Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Daily Stock Watch! Today, we'll talk about one of the most beloved blue cards (although not lately) in recent history.

There was an error retrieving a chart for Jace, Vryn's Prodigy

Now you must be wondering, why are we talking about a card that's barely used nowadays in Modern and Legacy? Well, in case you missed it, Magic just spoiled the contents of From the Vault: Transform:

These fifteen flip cards will soon be available in premium foil versions, which also means that there is going to be an increase in their supply and almost certainly, a decrease in their value eventually. However, we'll keep the spotlight on Jace, Vryn's Prodigy for now.

Using the same tool that I use to check out how often a card is used in a top 8 deck (which I will be calling "Utility Checker" from now on), I did some research to check why JVP hit the $90 mark at a certain point in time. What I found out was that a whopping 24.8 percent of decks made the top 8 of Standard tournaments in 2016 using a complete playset of it. If my memory serves me right, the spike was caused by Grand Prix Paris 2016 where these decks slugged it out in the finals:

Grixis Control by Petr Sochurek

Creatures

4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
3 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet

Instants and Sorceries

4 Dig Through Time
2 Disdainful Stroke
2 Duress
3 Fiery Impulse
2 Grasp of Darkness
1 Languish
2 Murderous Cut
2 Painful Truths
2 Roast
2 Ruinous Path
2 Transgress the Mind

Other Spells

2 Chandra, Flamecaller
1 Ob Nixilis Reignited

Lands

4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Flooded Strand
2 Island
2 Mountain
4 Polluted Delta
2 Smoldering Marsh
2 Sunken Hollow
3 Swamp
4 Wandering Fumarole
2 Wooded Foothills

Sideboard

1 Disdainful Stroke
3 Dispel
1 Dragonlord Silumgar
1 Dragonmaster Outcast
1 Infinite Obliteration
1 Languish
1 Negate
1 Painful Truths
3 Radiant Flames
1 Roast
1 Transgress the Mind

Dark Jeskai by Ben Stark

Creatures

4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
2 Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet
4 Mantis Rider
3 Soulfire Grand Master

Instants and Sorceries

4 Crackling Doom
2 Dig Through Time
2 Disdainful Stroke
2 Duress
3 Fiery Impulse
1 Murderous Cut
4 Painful Truths
2 Roast

Other Spells

1 Chandra, Flamecaller

Lands

4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Flooded Strand
1 Island
1 Mountain
2 Needle Spires
1 Plains
4 Polluted Delta
2 Prairie Stream
2 Shambling Vent
2 Smoldering Marsh
2 Sunken Hollow
1 Swamp

Sideboard

2 Arashin Cleric
1 Disdainful Stroke
1 Dragonlord Silumgar
1 Duress
1 Exert Influence
1 Fiery Impulse
1 Ob Nixilis Reignited
1 Ojutai's Command
3 Radiant Flames
1 Roast
2 Transgress the Mind

One look at these decks and you could see how strong JVP is once it's flipped. With more than twenty possible spells that could be flashbacked once it becomes Jace, Telepath Unbound, it gave both decks a plethora of options to choose from at any point in the game. Since I'm also a blue mage, I was also one of the players who experienced its overwhelming power and ended up joining the bandwagon.

"This card is so good, it's going to cross over to Modern" was something that I told my friends right after that impressive run.

Upon checking its Modern usage on that same breakout season, it was almost non-existent as only one percent of winning decks have used at least three copies of it. We could build a case for it being a very good Standard card because there were limited tools in the format that could deal with it both as a creature and as a planeswalker. This isn't a problem at all in Modern, as cards such as Lightning Bolt, Path to Exile, and Maelstrom Pulse, just to name a few, could eliminate it with relative ease. Rightfully so, the card was down to $30 in three months after that GP. The hype and demand died eventually, and everyone was suddenly selling their playsets.

But as a finance junkie, you know what this card is capable of doing. Another spike like this could occur when someone breaks the format wide open again, and we'll suddenly find ourselves looking for copies of JVP.

As it stands, you will find non-foil copies of this card in almost every online store at the $21-25 price range. The Magic Origins foil copies might suffer from the reprint, and the current $55-69 price tag it carries will definitely be down before the release of the FTV. The SDCC 2015 foil version becomes rarer due to this reprint, so this might see some slight gain in the future. If normal copies of JVP go down to as low as $12-$15 (this is just my projection, barring any major exposure of the card in any coming tournaments), I'm definitely buying in. But for now, I'd be glad to keep an eye on its market movement. I'm not counting out the possibility of a Standard reprint of this card but I could always be wrong.

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!

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