Hi, guys.

Recently I have been focusing on Modern, due to the Modern Pro Tour and the unbannings of Bloodbraid Elf and Jace, the Mind Sculptor. This week, I'm going to have a look at the picks I've provided over the past four weeks to see how they've fared.

Here are the links to the articles:

• What's Up in Modern?
• Modern Specs One Week After the Pro Tour
• Modern After the B&R Announcement
• Impacts of the Jace and Bloodbraid Unbans

Cryptic Command was 10.56 tickets back when I suggested keeping track of it. It went up in price after that because of the unbanning of Jace.

We know that staples in Modern will always be good investments whenever they are at their low points. Now, what do I mean by Modern staples? Its very easy to identify them: if a card is the first few cards that you will think of, when you look for cards of its color, then it is most probably a staple. For example, when you think of blue, it's always Cryptic Command and Snapcaster Mage, or cantrips like Serum Visions and Thought Scour.

Snapcaster is another card I mentioned in the same article:

Back then, Snapcaster was 14.57 tickets—it increased in price for the same reason as Cryptic Command. If you bought either of these blue cards, now is the time to get rid of them and aim for other new specs, as Jace is really not that impactful in Modern.

Liliana of the Veil is another Modern staple and it's probably the best spec I provided in the past month. Exactly four weeks ago, this card was only 53.09 tickets. As I wrote in the second article in February, Liliana went up in price by about 15 tickets. After the Bloodbraid Elf unban, the price increased further and peaked at about 78 tickets. Assuming you followed this spec, you probably earned about 15 to 23 tickets depending on when you bought and sold your copies.

Scapeshift was one of the forgotten cards in Modern that I wrote about last month. Back then Scapeshift was only 14.61 tickets—as you can see in the graph, now it's above 18 tickets and shows no sign of slowing down. If you haven't bought this card yet, it's not too late to get your hands on some playsets. The Valakut decks are still pretty good in the current meta, and this card can still go up to above 20 tickets.

Bogles is very good when the format is full of removal-heavy midrange decks. The last time I talked about Daybreak Coronet it was only about 0.9 tickets each. With these kind of cards, players can easily afford to buy 100-200 copies for investments. Buying 100 copies of this card would have yielded an easy 100 tickets profit!

Two weeks ago, Inkmoth was 7.59 tickets each. I suggested buying in because Infect is slowly gaining popularity online. The creature land reached multiple points above 9 tickets after that, due to an increase in not only Infect decks but also Affinity.

Affinity traditionally has a bad matchup against Jund unless they have an explosive start or are able to stabilize with Etched Champion. However, now that Bloodbraid is unbanned, Jund is a bit slower compared to last time. They also play fewer copies of Fatal Push compared to last time because cascading into Fatal Push is less attractive. Affinity is taking advantage of this and thus the demand for Inkmoth increased.

Last week I mentioned that in order to be good in the current meta, you need to be either very aggressive, or able to out-value the Jace and Bloodbraid players. [card]Collected Company[card] decks fall into both of the above categories.

There are a few different versions of Company decks, but Knight of the Reliquary is always a four-of in the value-based shells. This has made the price of Knight double in the past month, as you can see in the graph above.

Failed Specs

After covering some successful picks, I do have to talk about some failures. The first card is Leyline of the Void.

When I wrote about this card last time, it was above 10 tickets each. Since then it has dropped a little bit and has no sign of increasing in price soon.

I think this is partly because not all players like to use Leyline as their sideboard graveyard hate. Out of 20 black decks I found online from recent events, most of them are using Grafdigger's Cage, Nihil Spellbomb, or Surgical Extraction as their post-board graveyard hate instead of Leyline. Some green decks even include an additional Scavenging Ooze in the sideboard with no Leyline.

If you're still holding copies of these, you can probably keep them for a while and check the price daily. If they drop below 8 tickets, it's time to sell them off to stop the bleed.

Glittering Wish was about 1 ticket each a month ago when I talked about it. For whatever reason the brew by Jeff Hoogland did not fare well in the new format. But you can still hold on to your playsets, as we don't know if there will be another deck in the near future that can abuse Glittering Wish and break the format.

Masters 25

The full spoiler of Masters 25 is completed. Most of the reprints have dropped in price, with the exception of Jace, the Mind Sculptor. I've gone through the price of the reprinted cards and found one that I would like to suggest for a buy:

Phyrexian Obliterator is not a popular card in Modern but the price has maintained somewhere near 10 tickets for a very long time. Now that the price has decreased a lot, I feel like this is the opportunity to invest in some playsets.

In my opinion, this is also one of the ways to beat Bloodbraid Jund. Jund has reduced their copies of Exterminate! and Fatal Push, while increasing the numbers of Lightning Bolt and Kolaghan's Command. In other words, not many cards in Jund can deal with Phyrexian Obliterator effectively. If I were to bring a brew to a tournament, it's very likely to be something with four Obliterator in the 75.

Alright, guys, that’s all for this week. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you again next week.

Adrian, signing out.