menu

Jason’s Archives: A Defense of M13 and Epic Tales from the Prerelease.

Posted on by Jason Alt

Are you a Quiet Speculation member?

If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Learn More
Sign Up

Greetings, Speculators!

It's quite possible that I've exceeded the maximum amount of time one can go without working as a chemist and still call oneself a chemist, at least primarily. A tepid market and my reluctance to move and sell my house have proven to be obstacles to getting back into the industry, and that would likely entail another short-term contract position like the one that landed me in my current position in the first place.

While I've encountered difficulty in the profession I trained for, I've found the barrier to entry into Magic finance much lower. The community is much more inviting than I'd anticipated. Professional connections are made effortlessly and notoriety is dished out on merit rather than nepotism. I've found that my insights and instincts are serving me well and that I have a natural knack for this business.

My B.S. may be in chemistry but I've spent the last year getting my PhD in MTG finance. I defended my thesis ("The Last Three Dollars," a treatise on offering a quarter for bulk rares) and people are starting to listen when I give advice.

It's with that in mind that I wager all of the professional capital I've accrued on the following controversial phrase:

"There is financial opportunity in M13."

That’s Like... the Opposite of Accurate, Bro

First of all, don't bro me if you don't know me. Second of all, hear me out.

I agree that most people will feel let down after the amazing EV of Avacyn Restored. That expectation in our minds may be too much for any set to match, least of all a core set that has recently dropped the titan cycle. With the exception of a few cards, whose inflated presale prices are likely to decrease, there doesn't appear to be much value.

But let’s not fail to learn the lessons Avacyn Restored has to offer. Everyone is so fixated on how good it is to open AVR boosters in the hope of getting an Entreat the Angels that they’ve already forgotten Terminus and Entreat the Angels were preselling for the same price ($5). True story. It's obvious that the card is bonkers now, but people weren't so sure at the time.

Got a called shot? It's not too late to pull the trigger.

Take a look at Thragtusk. It's no secret that this card is ridiculous and will be worth building around. Consequently everyone is looking at his $15 price tag right now saying, "Yeah, I could see that going higher." Well, how many of you prebought him at $6? That was his original price before he sold out swiftly and doubled in price, only to increase from there.

This set is full of [card Thragtusk]Thragtusks[/card]. Perhaps he is the only soon-to-be $20 card that could have been scooped at $6 (no point crying about it now). But if you double or triple your investment in a lower-value card you'll make the same amount as you could have speculating on Thragtusk. And the best part about speculating on "penny stocks" is that bargain basement prices can’t depreciate much, so your risk in picking them up is virtually nil.

It’s not my purview to give specific advice on which cards to invest in. But I’m sure you’ve all seen a card or two in the spoiler that seems way too good to justify its bulk presale price.

Maybe said card has applications in EDH. Maybe casual players will snap it up. Maybe the card is powerful but no one has bothered to break it yet.

Trust your instincts. If you’re staring at a card with huge combo potential, casual appeal or EDH utility and you’re wondering why it’s preselling at bulk, the answer is simple. Presale prices feel wrong because they are. Those cards are just waiting for you to snap them up and make bank.

Just like it took a week or two for the price of obviously nutty cards like Entreat the Angels to go up, there is still financial opportunity in M13. The set isn't even on sale officially yet!

Pull the trigger. Get that card you know should be worth more, because soon it will be. Trust your gut, not the presale prices. That is, unless you think Liliana of the Dark Realms is a $30 card.

The Only Thing Worse Than the Helvault (Is Nothing at All)

The prerelease was this weekend which unfortunately means no decklists for you this week. However, I think I can more than make up for it with the stuff I found from the prerelease. Let's not waste any more time.

Remember Gameshark?

I don't know of any codes in Duel of the Planeswalkers to start at 100 life or give all of your opponents bobble heads, but allow me to humbly offer a much more useful collection of cheat codes:

Duel of the Planeswalkers the easy way

Redditor Egibson has collected all of the Duel of the Planeswalkers 2013 codes that we've come across so far online. These will unlock a ton of free content and the posting on Reddit contains instructions on where and how to enter the codes.

I'm sure a lot of you would equate this to buying trophies to put on your mantle, but if you want to get this content the easy way, it's my job to give you the option. Enjoy.

There’s More Than One Way to Play Magic on Easy Mode

I noticed this when mine traded with my oppnent's Birds of Paradise, which shouldn't happen for a lot of reasons

Redditor AvrosKyargath brings us a creature that is significantly weaker on DOTP2013 than it is in real life. Hopefully they either patch this soon or mail everyone sharpies so we can fix our cardboard copy. Whichever is cheaper.

Some Quaint Folk Still Prefer Paper Magic

For those of you less interested in computerized Magic and more in winning on easy mode in real life, a few redditors bring tales from the prerelease.

Sybertron's guide to nothingness

Redditor Sybertron brings us a thorough review of how he used Door to Nothingness to win the easy way. That's right, Magic is a game where assembling all five colors of mana, untapping with an artifact and racing your opponent's threats is doing things the easy way. Great report, Sybertron.


 

Admit it, you're impressed.

Redditor Spehiroth912 has brought us a sighting of someone getting the elusive Battle of Wits victory at his local prerelease.

This scene is very easily staged, but I am going to echo Trick Jarret who shared this pic with the twitterverse when he stumbled across it a few days ago -- "I believe."


 

The fearsome Nicol Bolas oversees a local tournament

Redditor Midnighthero was in charge of his prerelease so he decided to sculpt a fearsome set of [card Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker]Nicol Bolas[/card] horns to keep the competitors in line. Here he appears to be telling people how many hours they have in deck construction.

Savor the Flavor

One card that has real flavor issues associated with it is the new [card Liliana of the Dark Realms]Liliana[/card]. Redditor MiffTheFox thinks he can fix them, though.

Either that or Liliana won their fight and couldn't wait to display her trophy

I think the revised card makes much more sense.

That's All I Got for Ya's

Prerelease weekend means no decklists to talk about. But if you can't get enough of my wit and wisdom, the Brainstorm Brewery podcast has a special guest this week to discuss the financial implications of M13.

Tune in to hear me, Corbin, Marcel and our guest debate the finer points of a core set with low EV and how you can get the most bang for your buck. If you routinely read Corbin's articles you won't want to miss this special episode. Look for it later this week.

Good luck in your upcoming release day events. May your opponent always cut you to your bombs, may your Vampire Nighthawk ever be enchanted with Rancor and may your Batterskull always return to your hand.

Jason Alt
@JasonEAlt on Twitter

Entreat the Angels

Posted on by Carlos Gutierrez

Are you a Quiet Speculation member?

If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Learn More
Sign Up

From time to time, I get an opportunity to help new casual players build their first Commander deck. I usually start by asking them what strategies they enjoy, what cards they brought to the store that day (or didn’t), and how much they are willing to invest to improve their deck.

Last week someone came in with an extensive collection of foil angels --Karmic Guide, judge foil Exalted Angel, Twilight Shepherd. Name an angel, he had it; if a foil was available, he had it. It was one of the most insane collections I've seen in a while. He had decided to build a mono-angels Commander deck to give some of those foils a home.

The first thing we established was that he wanted to be mono-white for thematic purposes. Between Selenia, Dark Angel and the three Avacyn Restored legends, you can play any two-color combination with an angel as your Commander. There aren’t many other non-white Angels, so a second color mostly just contributes utility spells.

The issue at that point is picking a Commander, but before we get too far, let's start with the list of angels headlining the deck that will form the bulk.

Ladies in White

The important thing to recognize when you're building around giant, flashy, expensive angels is that your deck will be slow. For a lot of people, that may seem like a disadvantage that cannot be overcome, but that's not true. It's fine for your deck to be slow as long as you prepare adequately and set up your deck to make games go longer.

This means sweepers, lifegain and resilient creatures will be the bread and butter of a deck like this. The suite of angels accomplish all three of these things.

  • Adarkar Valkyrie
  • Aegis Angel
  • Angel of Glory's Rise
  • Angel of Jubilation
  • Angel of Salvation
  • Angelic Arbiter
  • Angelic Overseer
  • Archangel of Strife
  • Baneslayer Angel
  • Battlegrace Angel
  • Blinding Angel
  • Deathless Angel
  • Emeria Angel
  • Exalted Angel
  • Herald of War
  • Karmic Guide
  • Lightkeeper of Emeria
  • Platinum Angel
  • Pristine Angel
  • Requiem Angel
  • Restoration Angel
  • Serra Angel
  • Shattered Angel
  • Sunblast Angel
  • Twilight Shepherd
  • Victory's Herald
  • Decree of Justice
  • Entreat the Angels
  • Akroma, Angel of Wrath
  • Avacyn, Angel of Hope
  • Linvala, Keeper of Silence
  • Reya Dawnbringer

That's a lot of angels, many of which provide utility effects to drag games out. You have lifegain from Lightkeeper of Emeria and Battlegrace Angel; resiliency from Karmic Guide and Adarkar Valkyrie; and even a creature sweeper in Sunblast Angel and an acceleratnt in Herald of War.

Really though, all of these angels were going to be played one way or another. There were only really two questions that needed to be answered. First, who should the commander be? Second, which angels can be cut if they aren't pulling their weight?

The first question is pretty easy, since there aren't that many options. The first thing we decided was that Iona, Shield of Emeria was a bad idea. She encourages non-interactive games, leaves people feeling bad, and just isn't a ton of fun to have at the top of your curve.

The second one that we threw out was Reya Dawnbringer. Even though she has a super powerful effect that this deck certainly wants access to, she's not resilient enough to be an effective commander at six mana.

Of the commanders left, Avacyn, Angel of Hope and Akroma, Angel of Wrath do similar things for the deck. They let you keep hands with nothing but ramp since they give you a threat to ramp into. They apply a ton of pressure and give the deck a significant amount of resiliency if that's what you're looking for.

But since most of your deck is already comprised of curve topping threats, I don't think you need another one as the commander.

That leaves Linvala, Keeper of Silence, which we agreed was the best choice. It applies pressure and interacts early on. It also shuts down some of the more degenerate commanders in the format, and buys you time to ramp up to your bombs. Most importantly, it allows you to run powerful midgame cards like [card Sword of Fire and Ice]Swords[/card] so that your deck isn't nothing but Angels if it does turn out that the list is running too much top end.

The question of what to cut is a little harder to answer, since it depends on the rest of the deck. The following are the angels that I'd look at closely to see if they're doing good work:

Angel of Glory's Rise and Angelic Overseer need humans to be really good, and I don't know if there are many this deck wants to run. All the angels that gain life are similar, so you could cut Lightkeeper of Emeria, Shattered Angel or Battlegrace Angel. Last, I think you could probably cut either Angel of Salvation or Archangel of Strife because they don’t do enough at the top of the curve when you compare them to Avacyn or Akroma.

The Supporting Cast

What’s almost more important than all of the angels you're planning to cast is how you get there. How do you make sure you’re still alive by the time you get enough mana to cast those guys? How do you avoid getting blown out by a removal spell on the first angel you play? These are questions that you have to be prepared to answer, and I thought we could use a great on-theme approach:

  • Brass Herald
  • Sunseed Nurturer
  • Angelic Chorus
  • Defy Death
  • Miraculous Recovery
  • Well of Lost Dreams
  • Book of Rass
  • Nim Deathmantle

The theme here is that your life total matters. Gaining life is something that white, and angels in particular, is good at. So it stands to reason that you won't have a particularly difficult time keeping your life total high. As long as you don't die to commander damage, you should be able to buy enough time to let your angels take over the board and start turning your life-gain into extra cards with Book of Rass or Well of Lost Dreams.

Because of that, we have a few extra lifegain cards in Angelic Chorus and Sunseed Nurturer. Nurturer in particular is insane because it's both ramp, lifegain, and a human for Angel of Glory's Rise!

Last, we have a few extra cards that give your angels some resiliency to removal. Defy Death is a fine on-theme reanimation spell, although I do prefer Miraculous Recovery for being instant-speed. My favorite of all of them though is Nim Deathmantle, even though it's the card I would cut first for flavor reasons. Zombie angels aren't exactly thematically correct.

Controlling the Board

Nothing too exciting here. We have a bunch of typical utility cards. Note the inclusion of sweepers that tuck or exile things. Since we’re planning on going really late, we will need to have answers to recurring threats and these wrath variants do the trick.

  • Path to Exile
  • Swords to Plowshares
  • Austere Command
  • Final Judgment
  • Hallowed Burial
  • Terminus
  • Solemn Offering
  • Revoke Existence
  • Tormod's Crypt

This is the section of the deck I'd like to expand on the most, but doing so would involve cutting some number of angels to make more space. When I first build a theme deck, I don’t like compromising in that area.

Managing Mana

I keep mentioning that one of the most important parts of this deck will be making sure you can cast your angels on or ahead of time. There are quite a few tools to ensure you continuously hit your land drops, and those cards backed by artifact mana should be more than good enough to do the job.

  • Land Tax
  • Weathered Wayfarer
  • Expedition Map
  • Paradise Plume
  • Urza's Incubator
  • Wayfarer's Bauble
  • Marble Diamond
  • Coalition Relic
  • Worn Powerstone
  • Sol Ring
  • Fellwar Stone
  • Everflowing Chalice
  • Mind Stone

Something that people don't often think about is how you can optimize your ramp based on your curve.

The common sequences of ramp are 2-4-6 and 3-5; it's important to figure out which your deck prefers. 2-4-6 refers to playing a ramp spell on turn two, like Mind Stone or Rampant Growth, and following it up with Solemn Simulacrum or Explosive Vegetation to hit six mana on turn four for any manner of titan or dragon.

The 3-5 scheme is more focused on consistency than explosiveness, and is more focused on cards like Cultivate than on cards like Rampant Growth. Usually these produce more mana over the course of a game, but do it much more slowly than the 2-4-6 set up. This set up is better for control decks that want the game to go long. You'd rather generate cards and land drops than spend cards to pull ahead early on.

Granted, this scheme gets messed up a little if you make space for the Cloudpost and [card Urzas Tower]Urzatron[/card] engines, since those can allow you to make strange jumps like two to seven, but it's still good to have an overall plan.

On the subject of mana bases, let's put one together for this and take a look at the finished product.

Commander: Linvala, Keeper of Silence

Untitled Deck

Creatures

Sorceries

Instants

Artifacts

Enchantments

Lands

Decks like this are a good reminder that you don't need crazy combos or super-efficient, overpowered cards for a deck to succeed. At its heart, Commander is a casual format that's about having fun, whatever that means for you. For some people, it's as simple as casting giant angels or showcasing the sweet cards they've collected over the years. People play the game for all kinds of different reasons, and casual play is a great reminder of that for those of us who are so deeply involved in the culture of the game that we don't remember what it's like to be truly casual.

I haven't quite figured out what I'll have ready for next week, so if you're reading this and you've got any questions or decks you'd like to see, be sure to get in touch. I'm always glad to talk shop!

Carlos Gutierrez

cag5383@gmail.com
@cag5383 on Twitter

Insider: Next year’s chase Commander foils, today

Posted on by Douglas Linn

Are you a Quiet Speculation member?

If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Learn More
Sign Up

All you need to know about how Commander influences foil prices is to look at Expedition Map. The low common goes for over $10 to the right player because when you become a Commander, you want foils all around you. All of those spells should be holographic! While we knew Map would be a good staple in Commander, I don't think people called that it would be this much for a common, this early. Today, I'm going to share my forecasts for the next hot Commander cards - ones I think will double or triple in price in a year or two. Let's start!

Exsanguinate

Which means to remove the blood from something.

In this case, it's each enemy that you can look at.

Exsanguinate is part of nefarious monoblack decks but it's also a potent blade in other long-game, spell-focused decks. In a four-player game, hitting this thing for X=8 makes for 24 life in your favor. Heck, this thing is a variable Kokusho that doesn't get exiled all the damn time. Exsanguinate is popular and when a casual player looks at it, they immediately make the connection that this card scales really, really well with multiplayer games.

What I can't believe is that this card goes for under a dollar in foil online. The general rule for retailers seems to be "every foil is worth $2 if it's playable at all!" Thus, I think this card is a real steal at what it goes for right now. This is a great long-term scoop. It's also a good candidate for a card to get if you want to juice up a trade binder. I know that foils can be hard to move, but this is the kind of card that someone who wants Commander foils will jump at - and maybe overvalue emotionally.

Staff of Nin

You've got to know that if you play a non-blue deck in Commander, it's easy to be crushed under card advantage. The reason is simple - for every card you draw, your "opponent" draws three. It doesn't matter that your opponent has three or four heads in this instance. In nonblue decks, it's really challenging to see a card here or there. I play a Karn, Silver Golem deck (39 nonbasics!) and I have to resort to things like paying echo on Urza's Blueprints to stay in the game. I'm looking forward to the Staff and it's going to be high on the list of non-blue draw tools that are worth playing. Seriously, this has an effect similar to Honden of Seeing Winds and it pings things. It only asks you for mana once, instead of things like Jayemdae Tome or Temporal Aperture.

It's hard to get a real price on this card in foil right now since it's brand new and a promo, but the non-foil goes for $0.50 right now so the foil will probably settle for a dollar or two. This is another one to nab early.

Mwonvuli Beast Tracker

Just about all of the good monsters in Commander have one of these abilities and it fits a very convenient color scheme. Green is the color of "bounce me for utility ETB effects" and this is a fine effect. It would be much better if it were like Fierce Empath and put it in your hand, but it's still a good monster. I don't expect phenomenal foil prices on this, but it's good to keep an eye on.

Trading Post

So the closest thing I can think of with this is Staff of Domination, another artifact with a crazy list of abilities and a home on the Banned list in Commander. Trading Post doesn't do anything blatantly broken with mana generators and it cannot untap itself, which is a challenging drawback. However, this card also has a lot of utility wrapped up in it that card. Consider this: there's a lot of destruction that happens in Commander. You've got a creature checking out already? Cash it in for an artifact that you lost earlier. You can even step things further if all you recovered was a now-useless Signet, since Trading Post can slowly cycle it away. I get it, the tapping blows, but this really does do a great job of converting resources that you have too much of into something that you might want. A Goat token can play Forcefield to keep a bigger monster away. This, like Druidic Satchel, will find its way into a lot of decks that aren't sure of their last spots. It's going to be a fan favorite for a lot of players who will write forum posts about everything that they did with their Trading Post in that game. I'm looking forward to telling Mana Crypt to GTFO when I'm done with it, for one.

Reliquary Tower

Now mind you, these are already kind of a hot ticket. Their reprint is going to do a funny thing to the market. There will be a lot more of these, so the non-foil price will even out a bit. The foil price might dip a bit too, but you're really going to clean up on these with toss-in trades from Standard players. Foils of this card are about $8 or so from Alara and you wouldn't know it if you didn't play Commander. Heck, you can pillage this from draft pickings and still walk away with $1 uncommons in non-foil. This is the card to keep an eye out for. It's like the people with foil Mana Leaks when it was reprinted in 8th Edition who were happy to trade them away, even when you told them that they were $5 cards. The price on these will pick up again, but I predict a dip even in online prices as the new foils crush the demand for older foils.

So there's the short list for now. Not every card is as obvious as "get foil Gilded Lotuses for later" but I have confidence that we'll see some action in these. If you've got your eye on Commander foils that seem underpriced or you're wondering about something in M13 (or older sets) that I left off, post it up here! In time, $2 Cultivates become $7 Kodama's Reaches.

Until next week,

Doug Linn

Insider: Magic 2013 Prerelease Primer

Posted on by Corbin Hosler

Are you a Quiet Speculation member?

If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Learn More
Sign Up

Here we go again. Today we’re breaking down M13 and making my financial predictions for the set.

I’m going to assume everyone here is familiar with my set reviews and how I do them. If not, here’s the cliff notes. I take these very seriously, and in the past I’ve done very, very well at making people money with these. To me, that’s not bragging, that’s accepting responsibility. I act on my own predictions and make money doing so; I expect other people to do the same. That means I won’t be giving you a half-assed review. This is my trading strategy for the Prerelease, and I hope you can make money from my calls as well.

I assume you know that a bulk rare, is in fact, a bulk rare. Or close enough to it to not be worth mentioning. Unless you hit on a sleeper (like I did by calling Zealous Conscripts at 50 cents for Avacyn Restored), you can safely ignore most of the rares you’ll see at the prerelease.

AVR was pretty good for us. I correctly called the spikes in Restoration Angel and Zealous Conscripts, pinpointed Cavern of Souls and Temporal Mastery with my only incorrect call being Griselbrand, a move that caused me to trade mine away at $5 under its current retail value. I also missed the spike in Bonfire, which was unfortunate, though I did later correct my call on it before it moved past $15.

All in all, I’ll take it. Let’s hope I can do as well here.

Core sets are a little different animal to call. The biggest problem is that, more than any other set, you have to be able to see both how it fits into the current metagame as well as a post-rotation metagame. With so little time in between the core set release and the Standard rotation, this isn’t always easy.

Let’s get started.

Ajani, Caller of the Pride

This cat is going for $40 on SCG, and that’s definitely high. I see him in a Liliana-type role. He’s very good, but doesn’t slot into every deck that shares his color. That said, there will be plenty of games where you lose the dice roll and have one land in play, facing down a 5-loyalty Planeswalker. Normally you don’t evaluate the ultimate to determine power level of Planeswalkers, but as early as this guy comes down it’s relevant enough that his ultimate is something to be scared of.

I see him setting around $25, give or take five bucks either way, unlike the next Walker on this list.

Liliana of the Dark Realms

Preselling at $30, which as you would expect, is too high. It’s possible Liliana finds a home in Standard, but I can’t imagine it’s going to be a nice one. She basically just doesn’t do anything. Hitting your land drops is nice, and I understand it can “fix” your mana with Shocklands, but in the end she’s just not that threatening.

Still, there’s EDH demand along with whatever playability she has, so I see a $10-15 price tag holding up down the road. It may take a little while to fall that low, but a year from now she’s going to be all but forgotten.

Rhox Faithmender

It’s worth noting that this won’t ever be bulk. Casual players like Lifegain, and as far as “worthless” rares go, this isn’t the worst to nab as a throw-in. I expect it to crop up on buylists for a dollar down the road, and it’s selling for $2.50 on SCG. Obviously there’s nothing huge here, but it’s worth mentioning.

Serra Avenger

I think it’s incredibly awesome they’re reprinting this card. I also don’t love it in Standard, as crazy as that might sound. Since you can’t play it until turn 4, it’s a virtual four-drop, where it will compete with Restoration Angel and the new (gives) Exalted Angel. That’s some stiff competition, not to mention it loses in a fight with Resto. All of that means the $3 pricetag is about right.

Sublime Archangel

This is a really difficult card to pin down for me. A lot of times attacking with one creature is worse than swinging with the team, but there’s still a lot to like here. For starters, it trades straight-up with Restoration Angel, which is a good test to pass. Secondly, it has pseudo-haste since it will provide a huge pump the turn it comes into play, much the way Rafiq of the Many did. And there are a ton of Hexproof guys running around right now, meaning you’re even less likely to get blown out in combat.

It’s out of stock at $20 on SCG, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some upward movement from there. I don’t think it can go much higher than $25 for very long (if at all), but it also will have a difficult time going below $12-15. I’m looking at Geist of Saint Traft levels here, between $20-25, especially since the pair will go in many of the same decks. Geist is played more in older formats, but the Angel is well, an Angel, and won’t be opened as long as Geist was, so it should mostly balance out.

War Falcon

Grab foils. I have no idea if this will see any play, but it’s a pretty damn good answer to an early Delver and curves perfectly into Thalia.

Battle of Wits

You better believe this will trade well early in the set’s release, even though it’s a meager 50 cents on SCG.

Augur of Bolas

This guy is playable. He’s not going to be a super expensive Uncommon, since only a few decks want him, but I do expect him to see play. Means you should be on the lookout for these in draft leftovers or foil versions.

Master of the Pearl Trident

Merfolk! Merfolk! Merfolk! (Listen to the latest cast of Brainstorm Brewery for more context). Presells at $5 is probably a few bucks too high, but I do think this will help to revitalize Fish in Legacy, where they were already on the upswing, as well as possibly pushing the deck into Modern. Look for gains in the peripheral Merfolk cards from older sets.

Disciple of Bolas

This is my pick for sleeper card of the set. At $3 pre-sales, I’m not sure how much upside there is, and I don’t like a cash buy. But I do like aggressively trading for it at two bucks on Prerelease day. This guy doesn’t fit into a possible Vampires deck since the 4-spot is full, but if Zombies is looking to complement Falkenrath Aristocrats at the 4-drop spot, this guy is great. He eats a Messenger for infinite value, and even chomping on a Gravecrawler isn’t exactly bad.

Interestingly, the foil version of this guy is sold out at $10 on SCG.

Vampire Nocturnus

This guy is rightly expensive, sitting at $13 on SCG. Thanks to this reprint, his days as a $20 card are over, but we could see a spike to that level if the big guy busts back into Standard. The Vampires deck is about two cards away (another 1 and 2-drop) from being really good. I expect this guy to trade extremely well during his second run through Standard.

Thundermaw Hellkite

They wanted a Baneslayer Angel in Dragon form, and they found it here. He’s out of stock at $20 on SCG, and there are only 2 copies of foils at $50! This Dragon is the real deal. Even if Vapor Snagged he’s going to do some work, and the only problem is how many competing options RG has at the five-drop spot now with him, Thragtusk and Silverheart. Hellkite is a definite beating, though, so I expect him to stay over $10 without a doubt, and probably settle in the $13-15 range, with even higher numbers possible if he becomes the go-to five-drop.

Flinthoof Boar

This is the best Constructed-playable piece of the cycle. Nab them from draft tables and scoop up foils.

Ground Seal

A respectable Green answer to Snapcaster. These should move around pretty well in your trade binder for being basically free right now.

Thragtusk

Now this beast is truly, well, a beast. Says no to Vapor Snag and helps stabilize immediately. I don’t like how splashable he is, but that’s just my design complaint, not a dismissal of his power. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few Cavern of Souls name Beast just to make sure this bad boy hits play.

As just a rare, and another five-drop, $10 is probably high. I see him on the Silverheart level of $7-8 instead, but you can’t really go wrong trading into this guy at the prerelease.

There are a ton of casual favorites in this set, from Gilded Lotus to Akroma's Memorial to Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker. This is going to drop the price of these cards across the board, but they’ll still be good throw-in targets since all are EDH or casual staples.

That’s it! Let me know what you all think of my calls. Too far out there? Am I missing anything?

Thanks for reading,

Corbin Hosler

@Chosler88 on Twitter

With Apologies to Gitaxian Probe: On Snapcaster, Cantrips and Brainstorm

Posted on by Ryan Overturf

Are you a Quiet Speculation member?

If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Learn More
Sign Up

Many Magic players have a tendency to be competitively minded. This impacts their attitude as they approach a game as well as their attitudes about winning and losing. Perhaps more importantly, this impacts the way that they think and talk about the game.

There are a lot of players that care more about believing that they’re already right than they do about learning new things. This is most commonly demonstrated in the use of results-oriented thinking; that is, a player asserting that they did something correctly because they won a game by doing so.

I won't tell anybody.

It would be nice to believe that we know everything. Nobody can deny that it feels good to know and understand things. Additionally, awareness of things that we don’t know can prove maddening. The problem being that the things that we don’t know far outnumber the things that we do.

Players are frequently reminded that in every game that they lose, there is something they could have done differently. They are less often reminded of the things they could be doing better when they’re winning.

Some of the best Magic cards end up being the most commonly misplayed. The reason being that it’s easy to win when you draw three Bloodbraid Elfs, even if you play them all sub-optimally. Of course, the nuances of playing Bloodbraid Elf and winning Jund mirrors are a bit dated. Currently, the best cards that I see frequently misplayed are Snapcaster Mage and Brainstorm.

The two share a common problem, and that is that they almost always generate some sort of value. So long as a card replaces itself, it’s difficult for many to comprehend that it was wasted.

Let’s start by looking at Snapcaster Mage, specifically in UW Delver.

The Snapcantrip

I frequently see it posited that what pushes Snapcaster Mage over the top is the ability to flashback Ponder, Gitaxian Probe and Thought Scour. This is somewhat true, but not for the reasons that I see backing this claim. These are all fine Snapcaster targets, but they're generally worse than just flashing back relevant cards.

Snapcaster Mage flashing back Gitaxian Probe on turn two is just a glorified Elvish Visionary that costs two life. This play is hardly intrinsically good. It can be strong when the first Probe shows that your opponent is going to be getting a slow start and your hand is incapable of otherwise applying pressure. Alternatively, I like the play when the first Probe tells you that you need to draw something quickly. For the most part, though, I dislike throwing away a Snapcaster like this when either player’s hand is good.

If my hand is good, why do I need the cantrip? If their hand is good, won’t I need to rebuy a spell stronger than one that gives me information I already have? Perhaps one like Vapor Snag or Mana Leak that actually interact with them. If I don’t have any such cards, then the cantrip is clearly the best option, but it’s far from ideal.

On top of that, how relevant is the 2/1 body, really? Sure, he does the same work as any other creature when equipped, but until that can happen he mostly just dies to half of a Strangleroot Geist or one-quarter of a Lingering Souls.

The reason that cantripping with Snapcaster is good is that it adds to the card’s modality. Unless you’re in the market for something random, a cantrip is the least powerful thing that can be flashed back.

Let’s take a look at an example of lack-luster Snapcastering.

Early last month Todd Anderson posted video from a daily event with Gerry Thompson’s Angel Delver.

In game one of round two of the daily, Todd keeps a very strong hand on the draw, if slightly mana-light. He Probes his opponent on turn one and sees that his opponent has kept a speculative (see: weak) hand with a Ponder. Todd plays a Delver and passes.

On his opponent’s turn two he casts his Ponder, doesn’t shuffle and then pays life to Probe Todd. On Todd’s turn he plays Snapcaster Mage and flashes back his Gitaxian Probe. This is the exact play that ends up costing Todd the game.

Among the two cards that Todd’s opponent had drawn since Todd’s first Probe was a Geist of Saint Traft, which Todd could have easily Mana Leaked had he not cantripped so aggressively.

Not only did he not respect the possibility that his opponent could draw Geist, he also cantripped in a position where it simply made no sense. He was ahead on board, he had already drawn his third land and saving the Snapcaster Mage until after he spent his Mana Leak would very likely lock his opponent out of the game.

Throughout the rest of the game Todd continues to use Snapcasters and Restoration Angels to cantrip where it’s arguably wrong, but I think that these plays are largely irrelevant in comparison to his hyper-aggressive turn-two Snapcaster-Probe.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that flashing back a cantrip with Snapcaster Mage is akin to putting two +1/+1 counters on a creature with Jund Charm: while it is a powerful ability, it is generally going to be less powerful than the card’s other modes.

Now, let’s move on to some trickier business


Brainstorm

If you haven’t read AJ Sacher’s Pondering Brainstorm, then do yourself a favor and give it a read. Then read it again. Then go play a few rounds of Legacy. Then read it a third time.

For as much attention as Brainstorm get,s it is still played incorrectly far more often than correctly. Again, this is largely because it’s an immensely powerful card that always replaces itself.

Generally, it’s best to be patient with your Brainstorms. If your life total is relatively high, there’s no reason to aggressively dig for the Swords to Plowshares to kill your opponents Delver. That said, a player will be rewarded for their impatience relatively often considering just how powerful drawing three cards is.

There are a lot of ways to Brainstorm improperly, but the one that irks me the most is probably burning one to flip a Delver. For starters, this play shows an utter disrespect for the fact that the Delver deck is roughly 50% Instants and Sorceries. RUG Delver is built so that your Delvers are going to flip a lot. Have a little faith.

What makes this play especially bad is that it’s really not that different from casting an Unholy Strength. I understand that Unholy Strength doesn’t replace itself, but if the Brainstorm that you used to flip your Delver doesn’t find you another Brainstorm, then it hasn’t exactly replaced itself either. It is the most powerful card in RUG Delver and it’s really not close.

As AJ clearly states in his article, “Brainstorm is not a cantrip.”

When a player considers it to be one, their play and card evaluation slips drastically.

For the life of me I do not understand why Thought Scour is still played in RUG Delver, and this is coming from a guy who played Mental Note in early incarnations of the deck.

Basically, the card is seen as the 9th-10th cantrip, but it’s actually the only true cantrip in the deck. Brainstorm and Ponder both net you more than one card of value.

Thought Scour is essentially a do-nothing. It interacts well with Brainstorm, Ponder, Nimble Mongoose and, to an extent, Delver, but what does it actually do as a singular card? Unlike Brainstorm and Ponder, it does little more than Cycle.

Let’s take a look at a few hands:



The first and second hands are dramatically better than the third.

The Brainstorm in the first hand allows you to shuffle away either the Lightning Bolt or the Spell Pierce if they turn out to be irrelevant, or just lets you wait until your opponent does something that you need to react to at which point it does a pretty good Ancestral Recall impression.

The Ponder hand will potentially leave a dead card or two stuck in your hand, but the Polluted Delta means that the Ponder itself will likely be good.

The Thought Scour hand is extremely borderline. It basically leaves you at the mercy of the top of your deck if your opponent can deal with your Delver of Secrets. Of course, the Thought Scour could be anything. Even another Thought Scour!

For the most part, I feel that there are too many strong, prevalent decks in Legacy right now to play a crappy cantrip like Thought Scour. Reanimator demands that you play plenty of counters. And the presence of Maverick and Merfolk to counter the presence of Reanimator demands that you play plenty of removal. There just isn’t room for the card anymore.

~

I love drawing cards as much as
 well, probably a lot more than the next guy, actually. However, you don’t win the game by cantripping. Of course, a player can win plenty of games in which they cast bad Snapcasters and Brainstorms simply by virtue of how powerful these cards are.

They’ll win a lot more by casting them well, though.

-Ryan Overturf

Insider: Run, Baby, Run!

Posted on by Chad Havas

Are you a Quiet Speculation member?

If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Learn More
Sign Up

“It’s been a great run, buddy. Seriously, I know you still have the stuff of a champion, but we just can’t renew your contract unless you take a pay cut.”

“But, Coach!?!”

“... No buts, Tiago. That’s just the business we’re in.”

Time is ticking down on the release of Magic 2013, and new changes to Standard are imminent. The time to act is now. Snapcaster Mage is going to be falling steeply in the very near future. What does ‘steeply’ mean?

Paper Chart

(from blacklotusproject.com)

MTGO Chart

(from mtggoldfish.com I chopped off the hyper-inflated portion that happens during Pre-Release)

Snapcaster in Paper is already on the decline. At first, I attributed this to a banning scare. I heard from various sources both in person and across the Twitterverse, that people “in the know” were dumping their Snapcaster Mages. I was insistent there would not be a banning, and there wasn’t. PHEW. I expected buylist prices to rebound. They haven’t. Star City Games has Snapcaster Mage at $19.99 sale list, with 8 playsets in stock as of this writing, and their buy price is at $8. ChannelFireball.com still sells it at the same price, but buys at $10. Clearly we have a large spread in Buy/Sell here, no matter how you see it. Logically, this would tell me that they really don’t want any more stock or they are expecting a big decline and they don’t want to be stuck. So, if he’s not banned, and he’s a monster in Standard, why do we fear his decline?

First, of all, many of us here at QS, and many others elsewhere, predicted a high price for Snapcaster Mage early on, but most of us expected him to fall to the $15 retail price within a few months of release. We’re now 9 months in, and it’s clearly started to fall. Some of this comes from the reasons we expected last Fall. Packs are open. Drafts are done. We’ve reached the tipping point where this non-Mythic Rare has flooded enough supply out there to meet the demand of not only Standard players but Legacy, EDH and Modern as well.

But there’s more. WotC admitted that Snapcaster Mage is too powerful for Standard. I knew that wouldn’t mean a brand-damaging banning, but rather metagame shifts and new printings. Well, we’ve got ‘em. Ground Seal is a real card. Tormod's Crypt is a real card. While other hate already exists for Tiago, we’ve added more fuel to the fire, while also ensuring that enough survives rotation after Nihil Spellbomb and Surgical Extraction rotate from Standard.

Wizards is pushing the format hard away from blue dominated aggro decks, and encouraging the aggro decks to play the other colors, as seen in cards like Rancor. Snapcaster’s new home will be in U/B and U/W control decks, flashing back things like Duress, Tragic Slip and possibly Timely Reinforcements until it rotates. But the days of Snapping back an [card]Unsummon[card] are soon to be over.

We’ve also seen a complete nerfing of the strategies that have kept Snapcaster Mage in the limelight. The Core Set is not even providing a new cantrip at U, but rather Index (I mean, can a brother get an Opt even?). Not only was Mana Leak not reprinted (no surprise there), we don’t even get a Cancel (while it rarely sees play, we will still have Dissipate)!

While Rewind is a real card, casting it via Snapcaster Mage is no easy feat. Narrow hard counters like Negate and Essence Scatter are fine, but not enough to keep an aggro-control deck like Delver afloat post-rotation. Snapcaster Mage will certainly still see play, don’t get me wrong. But on a totally different scale that what we’re used to. I actually wrote a blog post on my personal blog about how Mana Leak is really the monster that made aggro-control so powerful in blue.

The people who were “In the know” weren’t betting on a banning (if they were, they were just lucky) they were betting on massive scale nerfing. While I’m not surprised to see R&D drop a Nerf-hammer rather than a ban-hammer, I’m bummed I didn’t pick up on this a dollar ago, rather than holding out hoping they’d bounce back after the non-ban. They still hit an easy $16 on Ebay and even as high as $19 at times, but the quantity selling at those prices are dwindling. If you can find any outlet to get rid of these at reasonable prices, I would do so. Otherwise, to EBay with them promptly. Since they still sit at hefty StarCityGames and ChannelFireball retail pricing, I’d be using that pricing scale to guide trades as you try to dump these at your big pre-releases around the corner.

Notice the charts of both the Paper and MTGO pricing. MTGO pricing has been fairly stagnant, while Paper pricing has begun the decline. Typically we see the MTGO market move a bit quicker, but there’s another animal at work here. The online price hit its equilibrium much faster as draft packs flood the market much faster in comparison to the demand for constructed, and Legacy playability is not a huge factor on modern-era Rares on MTGO. Typically we see Standard playable rares sit around 60-70% of their paper price on MTGO, so that being said, I think by Fall’s rotation, we’ll see Snapcaster potentially as low as $10, and buy prices around $6. I’ll be looking to re-buy at that time and stash for the long haul.

I’m really interested to see how my Summer calls pan out once we see how formats shift after the new set, so I’ll be updating those as time passes. Any M13 cards we haven’t addressed yet you’d like to see some detailed analysis of next week? I plan to pick a few cards to create some detailed projections on their lifecycle.

Insider: Emotional Magic vs. Financial Magic

Posted on by Sigmund Ausfresser

Are you a Quiet Speculation member?

If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Learn More
Sign Up

This week my intent was to discuss the financial impact of some of the recently spoiled, influential M13 cards. As many have noticed, at the time of this writing, this set has thus far been significantly underwhelming in this regard.

[Editor's note: the full M13 set has been fully spoiled since Sigmund wrote this article, so expect his thoughts soon! In the meantime, be sure to visit the forums to stay on top of the community's conversations.]

There appear to be a great many spoiled cards geared towards casual and EDH players. Wizards of the Coast is certainly highlighting their dedication to the EDH player within M13 by reprinting favorites Akromas Memorial and Gilded Lotus. Additionally, there are by my count eleven cards which cost seven mana or more (I included Door to Nothingness, which does nothing without a 10 mana investment, and Diabolic Revelation, which is absolutely terrible if cast for six mana).

So where does this leave me? Frankly, it leaves me with either an inconsequential M13 article or a need to audible. Guess which one I chose


Emotion and Magic

This week it gets personal. Through a series of anecdotes and reflections I want to describe some of my own emotions about this collectible card game as well as where strong emotion has helped and hurt me financially.

For those of you hoping for the next list of cards to acquire, I may mildly disappoint this time. I will try to sprinkle some recommendations throughout the article with my tried and true blacklotusproject.com charts. This may or not be satisfactory, but, in either case, I hope readers at least have an appreciation for my honesty and candidness.

The Beginning – Visions

I did not seek out the game of Magic – it found me. Around the time Visions was released my father remarried my Stepmother (although rumor has it the events are unrelated) and I suddenly had a Stepbrother one year older than me. His favorite hobby at the time was this collectible card game called “Magic”.

I asked my father for some cards for my birthday and before I knew it I was spell-slinging left and right. I even won my very first game thanks to a poor keep on my Stepbrother’s part. My first $5+ card was Desertion, simultaneously teaching me that these cards can have cash value and that blue was the strongest color.

Funny enough, thanks to EDH Desertion is once again a $5+ card and a fairly stable pick-up at that. The card is easy to grab in trades and even buy-lists to retailers well (chart courtesy of blacklotusproject.com)

Looking back I realize this was a tumultuous time for me. My father had just remarried and moved far away, meaning I would see him much less frequently. My mother, whom I was living with, moved to a new town and so I had to start a brand new school and make all new friends. I was rather lost.

Magic: The Gathering really helped me stabilize. Through this hobby I not only connected with my Stepbrother, but I also met some of the best friends of my life in other Magic players at school. These memories are all positive and the emotional strength I garnered from Magic is a cornerstone of who I became in my new Middle School. These kinds of feelings towards the game are, in my opinion, 100% acceptable and even encouraged – it drives a type of respected passion for the hobby.

And although we were mostly ignorant about card prices, valuing Craw Wurm at one dollar and Lord of the Pit at infinite, we still loved the game for what it was to us at the time – a way to connect with friends in a familiar way.

Casual Years – Visions – Time Spiral (yes, Time Spiral)

My first nine years playing Magic were strictly casual. My friends and I would get together on the weekends and play countless multiplayer games attempting to outplay one another with our Craw Wurms, Dark Banishings and Counterspells. I remember I used to collect Wurms, and my prized possession was Warping Wurm, which I thrillingly opened in a Mirage pack.

My play during this time period was not consistent – sadly, I did not play Magic at all during Urza’s Saga block or Mercadian Masques block. Happily, I also missed Mirrodin block years later. My interest in the game fluctuated much like the value of a highly speculative card.

Because my enjoyment of this game was strictly on a casual level, I made some poor decisions from a financial perspective during this time. For one, my friends and I absolutely hated opening rare mana-fixing lands. They could never win us the game nor gain the respect of our circle, so we tended to trade them away. Sadly, I owned two Dual Lands which met this fate – a Tropical Island and a Plateau.

I also sold many of my constructed playable cards on eBay during my time in college. In 2004 I happily sold my three moderately played Force of Wills for $28 shipped on eBay. And that awful land Wasteland sold for over $10! Score!

Let’s see how those sales turned out for me according to blacklotusproject.com


Yeah
 sort of reminds you of Apple’s stock price, doesn’t it?

During this phase my mind was often removed from the game of Magic. As a result, I made poor financial decisions within the game. The moral – if you intend to stay in the game in any capacity, at least pay attention to financial trends on a macro level. There is no need to know the weekly fluctuations on card values, but if I had even considered reading some online articles (or InQuest Magazine, which still existed), I would have readily observed price trends. With a little more financial acuity, I could have saved myself from costly mistakes.

Time Spiral to Present – Finance and Competitive Magic

My first ever Friday Night Magic was a triple Time Spiral draft back in 2007. I was absolutely crushed week after week – both in the tournament and at the trade tables. I was beginning to notice trends in card pricing and the driving forces behind these trends, but I still allowed my casual side to drive trading decisions. I was thrilled to pick up my first Psionic Blast
 right before it rotated out of Standard. I also opened a ton of Legions packs around this time with the hopes of opening Akroma, Angel of Wrath. Never happened.

The problem was I did not embrace MTG finance as a separate entity. I was too emotional about the game and my decisions were influenced by this. I couldn’t bring myself to trade away the cards I loved and, at the same time, I would overpay for cards I really wanted.

This is where emotion needs to be kept in check. In the extreme case, retailers hold almost no emotion for their cards. This is absolutely necessary – if they were emotional they would surely make poor pricing moves constantly.

Most of us aren’t retailers, so we are allowed some emotional attachment. It is okay to splurge once in a while, as long as the majority of our decisions are rational. Was I even playing the Psionic Blast when I acquired it, for example? Nope – I just loved the artwork and classic feel. Should I have just waited another couple months to acquire the card at $3 instead of $20? You bet.

Emotions – A Double Edged Sword?

In my last article I talked about how one should not hold emotional attachment to their cards because it’s bad for business. That was poorly stated on my part. The truth is most of us aren’t businesses and we play the game for some level of enjoyment. Subsidizing the hobby through savvy financial moves is great, but the big picture cannot be ignored.

Let me therefore propose a slightly alternate approach. Identify the cards in your collection to which you are emotionally attached. If you’ve always wanted a Gaeas Cradle, it’s perfectly fine to sink the $60 it would take to acquire the card right now. Need the latest Angel card to keep your collection complete? Pre-ordering the card from Star City Games may be costly, but it’s reliable and instantly gratifies.

The key is to keep these emotional attachments in check and reasonable. All other cards, and I would go as far as to say this should include every Standard card you own, should remain up for trade. I single out Standard cards specifically because the vast majority of them dip in price at some point, especially near rotation. Even Legacy staples like Noble Hierarch dip at rotation before picking up again.

If you are patient enough, you can acquire most cards at a cheaper price than what you unload them at. That is why I recommend the “nothing is sacred” approach. I would never trade away my Angel collection because of how much time and energy I put into acquiring all these cards. But if someone needed my set of Force of Wills badly enough and I wasn’t using them, I’d be perfectly fine trading them away at retail prices (for example) for a set of Gaeas Cradles.

Many people struggle with how expensive the game has become, especially for the emotionally involved player. As someone who used Magic: The Gathering as a source of stability and friendship during a difficult time, I have just as much emotional involvement in the game as anyone else. But, through some disciplined research and rational thinking, I have been able to apply basic financial principles to my buying, selling and trading to make the game more affordable than ever. This is possible without sacrificing all the joys of having a prized collection worth sharing.

-Sigmund Ausfresser
@sigfig8

Jason’s Archives: The Right to Face One’s Accuser, Defense of Home Brewing, A Week On Reddit & All the Decklists

Posted on by Jason Alt

Are you a Quiet Speculation member?

If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Learn More
Sign Up

Greetings, Speculators!

I want to start out this week with an update on the Jon Elden story. Last week I talked about what was an apparently open-and-shut case of some savage cheating and what you can do to make sure you aren't similarly cheated.

The day the article went live, Corbin and I recorded Episode 15 of Brainstorm Brewery along with our friends Marcel and Ryan. The main topic of conversation was Jon Elden's conduct in Detroit and our genuine desire to have Elden defend himself on the cast. As quick as I was to condemn Elden, in the spirit of fairness I think it is essential to hear Elden's side of it.

In the days that followed the event in question, his brother constructed a wordpress blog site where Elden wrote a semblance of an explanation found here. His bother, David, wrote a treatise in his defense on the same site.

Facing One's Accuser

Whether or not you find their arguments compelling it is important to get their side of the story. I have made repeated attempts to contact Elden to allow him to explain himself in one of my articles and/or on the podcast, so far to no avail. I imagine he may be reluctant to do so and would rather put the incident behind him. But with an impending suspension or ban announcement likely, that may not be a possibility.

My intentions are not to further condemn Elden or gang up on him on the podcast; I merely find the entire incident fascinating and I am eager to learn as much as I can and no one knows more about what happened that day than he does.

I will continue to follow this story as it develops. It may be that there is more to the incident than was apparent initially and it's exciting to see what the future has in store for us.

Sam Black is Better at Magic Than You

I know this has happened to you. You are daydreaming and all of a sudden two previously unconnected ideas join in your head and a deck idea coalesces. Excited, you grab the nearest thing to write on and a decklist pours out of your brain onto the paper. The ideas come forth effortlessly and within a minute you have a rough idea of a maindeck sketched out.

"How could no one else have come up with this before?" you wonder as you jot down what you imagine is the next breakout deck. Visions of top-eights, deck tech interviews with BDM and future articles about your divine inspiration dance dizzily in your head.

As you begin to revise the list though, your enthusiasm fades. After a few minor changes you quickly realize there is a reason this particular seventy-five has never graced the top eight of a Grand Prix. After optimizing some of the spells and the mana base, you're left gazing at 51 of the 60 cards in the most popular tournament deck.

Countless players have had the same idea as you, and the logical conclusion every one of them came to lead them exactly where you are now and that's the deck everyone is playing. It doesn't exactly take divine inspiration to come up with a bad version of Delver sporting Fettergeist or a few copies of Lone Revenant to screw up your mana curve.

I am here to tell you that we've all been there. I've gotten incredibly excited about jamming Slivers in Legacy only to discover it's a Merfolk deck with horrible mana and four fewer lords. I've brewed a deck with Threaten effects and Ooze Garden only to realize that once I splashed black I was running a clunkier version of the Jund Sarkhan Vol, Nantuko Husk and Torrent of Souls pile Ryan Bushard and I had run 3 months earlier at Regionals. It's frustrating.

I am also here to tell you that you absolutely can not stop brewing.

Succumbing to the Hive Mind

The internet is both the best and worst thing to happen to Magic. It created a closely-knit community and ushered in an era of information sharing that has led to the game catching on in a way no one could have predicted back in 1993. It has also led to a hive mind mentality that has stifled creativity.

Most of what brewers come up with are bad versions of better decks, or ideas that won't work at all in practice. That's why a lot of people stop brewing and end up as yet another netdeck zombie.

That doesn't mean all of your ideas are bad. If you brew a lot, you will accumulate several good ideas and contribute to the game in a positive way. Does U/W Delver put five decks in the Top 8 at a nonprofessional event because it's the best deck, or because it's the deck the hive mind has decided everyone should be playing?

What Sam Black Does Better

When Sam Black has an idea for a deck, he makes the deck and tests it. He's had a lot of bad ideas. He's had more bad ideas than you, I bet. He's probably had more deck ideas that didn't pan out. He's been teased by his playtest partners way more than you have. He's slapped his own forehead more times for not realizing he spent ten minutes building a bad version of a good deck.

So if he hasn't given up on brewing, why should you?

Sam Black thought that Blood Artist was a good card, just like you did when you first read it. The difference is that when you both wondered if it was playable in Legacy, you probably thought, "If it were, someone would have come up with an idea by now," and he thought, "Let's test it."

Later in the article where I discuss decks from the weekend, I'll talk more about how Sam Black is my hero.

My Own Foibles

Normally I wouldn't discuss brewing at all and the pressure that fear of failure can put on you, but Sam Black's deck from the GP had quite an impact on me.

Recently, Ryan Bushard and I were trying to break Modern and we decided Zombie Infestation was the way to do it. We had [card Squee, Goblin Nabob]Squee[/card], Bloodghast, Gravecrawler, Faithless Looting, etc. and we had a good time brainstorming cards for it. I thought for half a second "Would this deck be better in Legacy?" and I immediately shot the idea down. If Bloodghast and Gravecrawler were Legacy playable, surely someone else would have come up with the idea already.

I don't dare imply that I would have come up with the deck Sam Black used to take the Legacy GP by storm. The idea to run a discard suite, including Tidehollow Sculler (which is a zombie!), and build it is as card advantage deck rather than the pseudo-dredge deck Ryan and I wanted to build in Modern, was inspired. I doubt I would have come up with as good a list as Sam did.

But I never gave myself a chance to even get close. Where I dismissed looking at how the Legacy card pool could improve the deck, Sam Black top-eighted a GP with a totally unique deck.

Most of my ideas are bad. But even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Go, brew something.

Picstravaganza!

Insert your own 2 explores joke here. They're still funny. Really.

First up we have a t-shirt bleached by Redditor Eander. That's a seriously ridiculous bleach job. I'm impressed with how it turned out. Great job, Eander!


 

Remember, printer ink costs more per ounce than champagne

Redditor "Redditorwhatever" points out that if you want to print out your DOTP six-card booster voucher, you may as well just buy the thing for what the ink would cost you. Black text on a white background is so 2011.


 

If you zoom in on the second card you can see an Intruder Alarm in the background

Redditor The_Red_Comet has very sharp eyes. He caught a very cool idea artist Karl Kopinski had for some art he was commissioned to do for M13. Nice catch, The_Red_Comet!

Weekend Decklists

What Happens in Atlanta Affects All of Us

The Legacy GP in Atlanta drew players from all over, tallying one of the biggest crowds for a Legacy GP in recent memory. Was it a mistake not to ban Griselbrand? How much did Land Tax affect the format? Why did I spend half an article talking about Sam Black? Let's find out!

Top 32 Legacy GP Deck Lists

There is a lot less to talk about here than I would like. Anyone who reads a lot of Twitter will note that there were a ton of copies of Karakas in evidence in Atlanta, which had two results.

  1. Karakas is now an absurd $80.
  2. There were no Griselbrand in the Top 8 -- again.

Maverick is still the deck I would play in Legacy right now as it has the tools to beat everything. It's the best Karakas deck and it has gobs of hate for the rest of the format.

A reason not to play Maverick? It dies to all the hate that Sam Black's new brew may bring to Legacy in the future. I don't know what he called it so I am going with:

Zombardment
Sam Black Legacy GP Atlanta 2012
60 cards
3  Badlands
3  Bloodstained Mire
2  Marsh Flats
3  Polluted Delta
3  Scrubland
2  Swamp
1  Undiscovered Paradise
3  Verdant Catacombs

20 lands

3  Blood Artist
4  Bloodghast
4  Carrion Feeder
4  Gravecrawler
3  Tidehollow Sculler

18 creatures

 2  Bitterblossom
4  Cabal Therapy
4  Faithless Looting
3  Goblin Bombardment
4  Lingering Souls
4  Thoughtseize
1  Tragic Slip

22 other spells

Sideboard

2  Dark Confidant
1  Darkblast
2  Disenchant
2  Go for the Throat
2  Perish
2  Pithing Needle
3  Surgical Extraction
1  Vindicate

 

With more synergy than you can shake a stick at, this deck is easily the most fun-looking new Legacy deck I have seen in the past five years.

Generating two damage per creature with Goblin Bombardment plus Blood Artist, you can make quick work of an opponent who took a few early jabs from your zombies. Bloodghast + Undiscovered Paradise is a fun interaction. Making good use of Bitterblossom as well, this deck has a powerful discard suite, silly recurring creatures and several good sacrifice outlets, all of which add up to card advantage even blue has a tough time keeping up with.

The event was won by RUG Delver, piloted by Gaudenis Vidugiris. Interestingly enough, Gaudenis Vidugiris expressed interest in running Sam Black's "Zombardment" deck (I like that name and hope it catches on so I'm going to pretend that was always the name), but Black himself talked him out of it. Good thing, too, as the RUG deck he ran instead took him all the way to the top.

There were only three copies of Land Tax in the Top 32, which surprised a lot of people who I bet are starting to regret paying $45 apiece for theirs this week. I am going to give people a little more time to brew with this card because there is a sick amount of advantage there waiting to be unlocked. That can be your homework for this week, speculators.

Zombieless in Seattle

There was also a StarCity Open in Seattle this weekend, so let's see if the Legacy brewers there came to some different conclusions.

Top 32 Legacy Decklists

Initial signs point to yes. The Top 8 included seven different decks, only one RUG Delver build, and two Merfolk lists, including that of eventual winner Ian Kendall. The event really couldn't have been more different than GP Atlanta.

Martin Goldman-Kirst played an Aluren build I really like, putting the deck back in the spotlight after it had languished in obscurity for a few years. Great job, Martin!

Top 32 Standard Decklists

Maybe Delver isn't the elephant in the room after all. Managing four copies in the Top 8 in Legacy and four in Standard, it appears the flying nacatl may be beatable after all. Although Nick Harlow took Delver all the way to the finals, he was ultimately done in by Nathan Anderson's G/R Aggro deck.

Also in the Top 8 were three different types of pod decks. RUG, Naya and Zombie all made the cut. The Zombie Pod deck could have used more Gloom Surgeon if you ask me, but its use of Mortarpod is a good choice and propelled the deck into the Top 8.

Eight unique decks in the Top 8 point to a healthy and diverse format. I am pleased with these results.

Someone else who is going to be pleased soon is Phillip Johnson, the pilot of a monoblack deck that is only going to get better with Mutilate. Making use of Increasing Ambition and Sever the Bloodline, this deck is a great blueprint for making your own homebrew that may use some neglected cards with real potential.

That's All, Folks!

Join me next week when I will have more metagame developments to discuss and possibly a followup to the Jon Elden story. With M13 just around the corner, there will be a lot of exciting stuff to talk about in future weeks.

If you have a homebrew you've been working on but were afraid to share with anyone, post it in the comments. I'll post my own to get us started. No judgments, just brainstorming. Remember, most of your ideas are bad. That means some of them are good.

Until next week!

Living Lands (And How to Slay Them)

Posted on by Carlos Gutierrez

Are you a Quiet Speculation member?

If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Learn More
Sign Up

My favorite card type in Magic is undoubtedly land. I'll cut just about any spell in my deck to squeeze in one more utility land, because there's nothing I enjoy more than hitting my land drops on time.

One thing I've learned since starting to play more competitive formats is that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. There is an upward limit on the number of utility lands that you can play before flooding becomes a frequent problem.

I like to think of it as a bell curve. At one end is an incredibly greedy deck with very few lands. It may be inconsistent, but you'll absolutely crush opposition when you draws the right number of lands. At the other end is a deck full of nothing but mana sources. You may hit your land drops every turn, but if that's all you do, you're going to get crushed by people who are casting spells. It's important for most decks to walk the line between these two poles and try to find the sweet spot where you don't get flooded or screwed particularly often.

I love decks that let you break this rule with unnaturally high land counts. So it was incredibly exciting for me to see the deck @Andrew_Magrini was working on a few weeks ago. It was a Jund deck that did some absurd things by animating everyone's lands and crashing in for a billion damage.

I wanted to take this in a more controlling direction, and @GUDoug and I talked quite a bit about what a deck like that would look like with Ghave, Guru of Spores at the helm. The deck we came up with is hilarious and goes way over the top of typical strategies in Commander.

Of Life and Limb

The centerpiece of the deck are land animation effects, both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. They set up some pretty crazy shenanigans with cards like Skullclamp and Verdant Succession. Everything else is built around these unique effects.

  • Kormus Bell
  • Life and Limb
  • Living Plane
  • Ambush Commander
  • Nature's Revolt
  • Living Lands

There are a couple different strategies to pursue after animating everyone's lands en masse.

One option is to build an aggressive Jund deck that smashes everyone's face in with stuff like In the Web of War and Shared Animosity. This is a hilarious avenue that can generate lots of damage quickly.

Alternately, you can build a recursion engine that aims to break cards like Planar Birth and Second Sunrise by sacrificing lands for value and rebuying them. After producing a critical mass of card draw and mana, you have merely to decide how to abuse it!

Starting the Engine

So your lands are creatures. Now what? The first thing you want to be aware of is that lands will have summoning sickness. We're going to include Concordant Crossroads to get around that. You could go even bigger with Akroma's Memorial too, but that's a little out of my budget for now and I haven't gotten a chance to try it yet.

The second thing we can do is encourage opponents to Armageddon themselves by chumping with their lands. Cards like Earth Surge will make our army huge enough for this task.

These things are both great Plan B's, but aren't the main focus of the deck.

What I really want to do is to turn our lands into other resources, like some token decks do after assembling their combo. Fortunately, since our lands will be creatures as well, we can run a good number of the same cards.

  • Ghave, Guru of Spores (Commander)
  • Skullclamp
  • Skullmulcher
  • Zuran Orb
  • Perilous Forays
  • Overgrown Estate
  • Squandered Resources
  • Ashnod's Altar
  • Harvester of Souls
  • Slate of Ancestry
  • Verdant Succession
  • Eldrazi Monument
  • Marsh Casualties
  • Curse of Death's Hold
  • Concordant Crossroads
  • Earth Surge
  • Beastmaster Ascension

These cards break the symmetry of the Living Lands effects and get you ahead on various resources. Cards, mana, life, and other things once we get a little further. Cards like Harvester of Souls are perfect for this deck, and sure to shine as a piece in our wacky Rube Goldberg machine.

In addition to generating value for us, we can use the animation effects to kill everyone else's lands. These aren't effects that I generally advocate playing, but I think the opportunity here is unique.

I just want to assemble Curse of Death's Hold and Kormus Bell against someone with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth. It may be because I'm vindictive, but I find the idea of [card Armageddon]armageddoning[/card] someone for the rest of the game incredibly amusing. Maybe after pulling it off once or twice I'll be satisfied and be ready to cut the interaction.

Preparing for Sunrise

So we've animated our lands. We've sacrificed them for value. How can we take it to the next level?

This is where the deck gets crazy, the part that I absolutely love. We get to use one of my favorite cards. Let's go Second Sunrise!

  • Nim Deathmantle
  • Planar Birth
  • Second Sunrise
  • Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
  • Melira, Sylvok Outcast
  • Cauldron of Souls
  • Faith's Reward
  • Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker

Once we've sacrificed our lands, we want to do it again and again, netting more cards, more mana and more life each time.

There are some narrow pieces here, such as Melira. But I want the density of these effects to be as high as possible so that I can find out what number the deck needs to function. If you're maxed out on animation spells and ways to recur lands and it still isn't enough, then the deck probably isn't going to work.

It's worth mentioning that there's another M13 spoiler in this deck: Faith's Reward. In case you haven't seen it, it is a one-sided Second Sunrise for 3W.

I think this is enough of an engine to get us started, especially since a number of these come close to going infinite on their own, and they interact particularly well together.

Imagine a sequence in which you cast Mikaeus, sacrifice your board, draw a bunch of cards and get your lands back with undying. Then you activate Cauldron of Souls and sacrifice all your lands again. Now they can undie again, and by that point you may have drawn a Second Sunrise, which can reset everything for a third time.

The plan is to dig through the deck and eventually find Eternal Witness. Then every iteration of your combo you sacrifice Eternal Witness, cast Second Sunrise to get back Eternal Witness which itself gets back Second Sunrise. At that point, winning is trivial. We'll wait until we know how many slots in our deck are necessary for the engine before we worry about that.

Drawing all the Cards

The hope here is to add more mechanisms to draw cards while you're comboing. Once you've found one way to rebuy your lands, all you want to do is draw into another one. Another big concern is making sure you have enough mana to continue to combo if you haven't found either Squandered Resources or Concordant Crossroads.

  • Sun Titan
  • Lotus Cobra
  • Well of Lost Dreams
  • Eternal Witness
  • Seer's Sundial
  • Grazing Gladehart
  • Regal Force

The most exciting card here is Well of Lost Dreams. It ties together some of our land sacrifice outlets like Zuran Orb and helps you dig through your deck to find missing pieces.

It's certainly possible to combo out without Eternal Witness, but it is harder. Eternal Witness provides a shortcut-able infinite loop that makes the combo more compact, harder to disrupt and mechanically easier to execute.

The biggest issue at this point is finding a way to make the combo more consistent. Setting up the pieces you need for the first iteration can be difficult without access to blue's card drawing and cantrips. You could run a ton of [card Demonic Tutor]Demonic Tutors[/card], but I don't really like the idea of pushing this into an overpowered combo deck as opposed to an engine deck with combo potential.

For Consistency's Sake

What I like most about engine combos is that you aren't dead if you whiff the first time you go for it. As long as you have a way to rebuy your lands and you don't get blown out by a counterspell, all you've done is generate a ton of value. If you draw the pieces to go for another iteration, then go for it, but otherwise you're still ahead.

The purpose of these tutors is to give you enough consistency to set up big turns that might lead into a combo, but not to make the deck's purpose to combo out as quickly as possible. A typical play with Dragonstorm was to play cantrip, ritual, ritual, Bogardan Hellkite. Similarly, sometimes with this deck you'll just cast Second Sunrise to draw a bunch of cards instead of going off.

  • Expedition Map
  • Academy Rector
  • Idyllic Tutor
  • Reap and Sow
  • Diabolic Intent
  • Green Sun's Zenith

It's not a ton to be sure. But with quite a few ways to set up each piece of the combo we don't need a whole mess of tutors. Just enough to find the missing piece. You could probably do a ton of good with something like Sensei's Divining Top and ramp spells to shuffle. You could also use effects like Enlightened Tutor and Eladamri's Call to find combo pieces more easily.

Filling in the Gaps

The last thing this deck needs is a kill condition and a way to protect itself from [card Wrath of God]Wrath of Gods[/card].

As for the effects that crush us, we're actually just cold to Wrath of God once our lands are animated. To be fair, so is everyone else, but I don't much relish playing a game where everyone's lands have been arbitrarily destroyed.

  • Blood Artist
  • Falkenrath Noble
  • Krosan Grip
  • Wickerbough Elder

Blood Artist and his friend are great role players for this deck, incidentally both a win condition and pseudo-engine piece with Well of Lost Dreams. We also have a few ways to protect ourselves from board sweepers that could kill our lands. I've picked Wickerbough Elder over other effects because you can rebuy it with Second Sunrise effects, and it can sit on the board and protect you at instant speed.

This puts us at fifty cards, which leaves just enough space for a few ramp spells and forty lands. The lands should be mostly Forests, to power up Life and Limb and other effects that care about Forests in particular. Taking that into account, we end up with this list:

Commander: Ghave, Guru of Spores

Untitled Deck

Creatures

Sorceries

Instants

Artifacts

Enchantments

Lands

6 Swamp
3 Plains
29 Forest

I'm very excited to get some games in with this deck and tune it as time goes on. We'll have to see whether or not this particular build ends up too combo-oriented.

If you're interested in the Jund version, get in touch with @Andrew_Magrini for his list.

Next week I want delve into the world of tribal and talk about some of the spoiled M13 cards. Since Avacyn Restored just came out, I think we'll have to give the set its due and build an Angel deck!

Carlos Gutierrez

cag5383@gmail.com
@cag5383 on Twitter

Insider: Scouring Scars of Mirrodin

Posted on by Douglas Linn

Are you a Quiet Speculation member?

If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Learn More
Sign Up

It's hard to believe that Scars of Mirrodin is nearly two years old. It's nearing the end of its rotation through Standard and while many of the prices in the set are still under the influence of Standard pricing, there are still a lot of hidden gems in the set. In this article, I'm going to focus on the lesser-known cards and the casual stars. You know about what Copperline Gorge and Darkslick Shores go for, but I'm sure you'll come away from this with a more comprehensive knowledge of the set. If you're looking for throw-ins or running your own bulk box, you'll get a lot out of this.

Asceticism

$1.25

Everyone gets Troll-Shroud Hexproof! This is a great place to start the article because this is an absolute dog of a rare, but it still checks in for a buck. If you see these, angle for the throw-ins. This card is going nowhere and it's worth a bit more than bulk, even on Ebay.

Elspeth Tirel

$7.75

Five-drop Elspeth offers so much - lifegain, monster creature production and a good shot of hitting a nice ultimate. She never picked up because nobody in Standard had much of a need for her. She's the Cloudgoat Ranger of the format, big and clunky but board-dominating, but the Tokens decks just have not gotten to where they needed to be. Absent the Delver decks, I feel like Elspeth would have had a much better run. However, the chance of getting her Mana Leaked or Snapcasted makes this five-drop too hard to run out.

That said, Elspeth has great casual flavor. She makes three tokens! Over and over! I think $7.75 is a great price for these right now, since she's going to retain a lot of casual appeal for a long time. People will likely overvalue these in trades to your advantage if you're getting rid of them. I'm also kind of surprised that she's this cheap right now, since Planeswalkers don't usually dip this low if they have a relevant ability or two.

Geth, Lord of the Vault

$1.00

Geth is a good example of the bottom floor on Mythics that sits around a dollar. Geth isn't anything special and he's never seen constructed play, but Geth has enough casual appeal. He's a decently good Commander in monoblack decks and can dominate the lategame. What usually happens is that the Geth player gets their Cabal Coffers and Extraplanar Lens and enough Swamps to make about 26 mana and loot the choice bits from each graveyard. None of this is going to make Geth into a valuable card, but it's good to ask for him as a throw-in because most people see him as overcosted trash.

Koth of the Hammer

$4.50

Koth is a decently good Planeswalker. He isn't great because he asks you to build around him, unlike the top tier of Planeswalkers. He asks you to favor Mountains and protect him so he can do his thing. Koth has seen plenty of Constructed play, but he's not going to be making many appearances in Modern, his last market. On top of that, the casual market for cards that support mono-red control strategies is pretty slim. Koth isn't a guy that plays well with the 3-damage burn spells that most Red players favor.

Koth's value got crushed by the Duel Deck reprint. I doubt that he'll go much above $5.00, especially after rotation.

Mox Opal

$11.25

Mox Opal is a Mox that they got right. Chrome Mox was just a little too good, after all. Mox Opal asks that you commit a lot of artifacts to your deck, but it doesn't narrow things into "Affinity or unplayable." It's also made appearances in Tezzerator decks in Modern and in the Kuldotha Red decks of previous Standard months.

Since it has Mox in the name, people are going to hold onto this one. I'd like to think that it will drop a little in price, but I do not see this dipping below $10. It's the bedrock of Modern Affinity/Artifact Aggro/Metalcraft or whatever you want to call it. The Mox allows for some of the more busted openings, typically involving Signal Pests or Steel Overseers on turn 1 with backup armies. It also fixes the mana for things like Galvanic Blast or the backside of Ancient Grudge. On top of its general use in the deck, the point stands that just about all the decks that want Mox Opal will want four copies. That should keep demand up.

Platinum Emperion

$1.50

The big brother of Platinum Angel is bigger, but that's about all he's got going for him. He won't save you from decking or poison (or Coalition Victory) like his little sis will. He won't let you pay life, which means that you cannot use Force of Will, fix your colors with fetchlands or pay Phyrexian mana for goodies - that Gut Shot costs retail. Though Platinum Angel saw a fair bit of Constructed play, Emperion has seen basically none. That doesn't stop it from being an awe-inspiring casual card, so pick these up cheap and move them to the people who are gonna love him.

Skithiryx, The Blight Dragon

$2.50

Skrillex was the big hope for the Infect decks that largely failed to materialize. The idea was that, with Haste, he'd be the black Ball Lightning, coming from out of nowhere to end the game. He's still a big monster and he saw a tiny bit of Constructed play now and then. He was the bedrock of a million mono-black FNM decks, for example.

It's hard to call the future price on this card. He's got some unique abilities and he's got the Dragon Multiplier, the mathematical price advantage that makes even the worst Dragons worth something. This is far from the worst dragon and he's got a nice, juicy set of abilities. I wouldn't be surprised to see this Dragon end up quietly hitting the $5-8 mark in due time.

Tempered Steel

$1.00

Tempered Steel has gone up and down so much, you could have probably sold the card four times for a profit. It was nothing until LSV and crew started tearing up the place with free 3/3 Memnites and big Etched Champions. It's the sort of card that now and then would come into the spotlight because it was the right call for a particular week's tournament.

I'm unsure of whether Tempered Steel will make a splash in Modern because Affinity outclasses the deck as a whole. You could attempt to fit Tempered Steel into the existing Affinity deck, especially if you commit by ditching Galvanic Blasts and grabbing your Plains. While losing the burn would make the deck much weaker, it does mean that your Ornithopters become actual threats. Casting a double-mana card in a deck with only sixteen lands, most of them colorless, is a gusty move though.

Venser, The Sojourner

$5.00

Venser asks you to build a deck around him so that he lasts long enough to hit his Ultimate. He'll blink your Wall of Omens and retarget your Fiend Hunters. He's the kind of card people love to play with, the same people who flock to Crystal Shard to get more use out of their Eternal Witnesses. Venser decks came and went a little bit in Standard but they never made a great impact. Likewise, he shows up in a few Reveillark decks in Modern, but I don't think we'll all be scrambling for sets of the guy any time soon.

Venser was a good $20 card for awhile, but the duel deck just killed his value. Why would you pay $20 for a Planeswalker when that same $20 gets you two extra decks? The duel decks are a fine way to get Planeswalkers into the hands of players, but it's disappointing that they just use them to drop the price on the planeswalkers without approaching other money cards in Standard. At least now, players who really want the blink effect don't have to shell out crazy amounts for it.

This concludes our tour of the lesser-known corridors of Mirrodin. We'll pick up again soon as we look at the expansions to the block with an eye for the cards that escaped standard play but have not escaped the market's eye. I tend to space these articles out because sometimes, the casual market has not fully embraced cards that are still in Standard and like a fine wine or stinky cheese, it takes some time to mature and be appreciated.

Until next week,

Doug Linn

Insider: The Booming Business of Ratios, Part 2 – Why Dealers are Badass

Posted on by Tucker McGownd

Are you a Quiet Speculation member?

If not, now is a perfect time to join up! Our powerful tools, breaking-news analysis, and exclusive Discord channel will make sure you stay up to date and ahead of the curve.

Learn More
Sign Up

If you remember from my last article, dear readers (Insider: The Booming Business of Ratios, Part 1 – Why Force of Will is Simply Worse Than You Think), we were discussing the concept of convenience and how it relates to value. The less something's worth, the less you care about it, and the more likely you are to get it at a discount. I argued that you should trade for low value cards to get better deals and avoid money cards like Force of Will because everyone knows how much it's worth and are less likely to willingly trade it at a loss.

If you haven't already, I would recommend at least skimming the previous article so the totally out of context examples I'm making are at least a little less nonsensical.

The Force/Paladin Conundrum

Continuing with this list of hypothetical situations, a person trading a Force cares more about the price than a person trading a pile of Paladin equivalents. They’re more willing to demand a specific price and grip tightly to their playset until they find a person who’s willing to meet their price.

The more expensive the card, the more work a person is willing to do to trade for or away at the right price - would you dump your Power 9 piece for 10% less than its value? If you said yes, please feel free to contact me. I want your entire collection.

If trading is a convenience, as long as the convenience isn’t outweighed by the value lost in completing the transaction, then a person is generally willing to complete the trade. Yes, you value your Thoughtseize at 45, but it’s Modern season and I need 4. This is quicker and overall cheaper than buying them, so I’ll make the trade.

Need, attributed to Perigosa and the magic of Google

Compare that to this: it’s NOT Modern season, I don’t need Thoughtseizes and you’re valuing at 50. Why the hell would I trade for them? It’s convenient to use your Standard stock as tradebait for cards you need because you value them at barely more than the cardstock they’re printed on (no matter if you say 6 or not during the trade, it’s not likely that you look at Silverblade Paladin and think ‘wow! This is better than a 5 dollar bill!’)

Black lotus? Son, that transcends cardboard so hard it can’t even be considered in the same level of reality as Paladin.

The Methods

Unfortunately, this cuts both ways. If you have a cunning collection of 5 dollar cards that you’ve been suavely picking up for massive chunks under their actual value, good on you, but how are you going to convince the Standard-under-valuer (every store’s got one)? He/she insists that the card on his/her end of the table is worth something, and even if it's wrong, won't listen because you won't budge, trying to maintain your bottom line.

Because I trade in such a small pool of people on a daily basis, and because maintaining an honest and positive impression on the people I interact with is important to me, I have to somehow deal with this problem without simply bullying or bruteforcing the trade into occurring. I know I can convince the guy that the trade is fine, but what if I see him three times a week in History 282 and I literally live down the hall? Why would I want to risk that relationship? As such, it's important to look at the list below, and remember something very crucial: You don't need to make value on every trade. I'll repeat that. You don't need to make value on every trade. For it to be a profit you have to make more money than you lose money, and being willing to make a trade that doesn't give you anything but the opportunity to help a friend goes a long way.

The Process, Listified

Both of these lists are very important.

In any case, here are the steps of my process to pay for my monthly allotment of food:

  1. Start with cards.
  2. Turn them into more cards of similar quality by abusing my superior knowledge of the price dynamics of Magic.
  3. Once I have plenty, diversify a little into slightly better and slightly worse cards.
  4. Once I have diversity, trade for undervalued gems.
  5. Sell gems.
  6. Take a portion of proceeds, buy a totally badass card with very little competition in the area.
  7. Trade at my own price for cards.
  8. Repeat.

Let’s start with the first step I haven’t explained yet, step 3.

If everything in your binder is worth 5 dollars, how do you expect to trade for the Stromkirk Noble that your trading buddy values at 2? Obviously you need to get it, but you need smaller schlock to do so. Similarly, if a guy has a random Exploration he calls 13, offering 3 Paladins is going to set off some alarm bells. Having bigger cards to match up with the higher priced stock is also important.

Step 4 should make sense, since I previously stated my love of Death Baron and his ilk in the first couple paragraphs of the first part of article. If you didn't read those sentences, here's what I think about him: since he’s traditionally undervalued (by a lot), you can compound the value you made off your crap card ratios by trading into him, although he's becoming more well known.

However, I see the following mistake a lot - keeping Death Baron in your binder and valuing him at what he’s worth. If he’s undervalued the world around, why would someone want to trade for him? Derp.  Remember that.

At some point, your pile of Sanguine Bonds, Elvish Pipers and Death Barons (you obviously don't need to trade for those three exactly, they're just examples of cards that you can get for cheap and then will be unable to trade effectively. Substitute your favorites- you'll find some, I assure you) will have pretty much locked up a significant percentage of your card value in cards that nobody wants for the right price. Therefore, step 5.

Step 5, or What You Do Next

Sell ‘em all. I don’t care if you think that selling your 10 dollar retail death baron for 4 dollars is dumb, if you got him for a Silverblade Paladin, who cares? Paladin is probably not worth 4 buy. In addition, it doesn’t matter if you aren’t in this business for cash. Whether you are or aren’t, step 6 is an excellent approach: Buy a card or 2 that you can name your price on.

Quick, value these.

What’s the value of a foil Japanese Marsh Flats? I’ll bet that 95% of traders can’t name a solid value without getting lucky on your shot-in-the-dark guess. Interestingly, I got offered 80 dollars in cash for each one I had from a dealer at GP: Minneapolis a few weekends ago, and they’re selling on StarcCty for 90.

One closed on eBay for 100, another pair for 60 each- If the dealer was off by that much, how likely is it that the EDH guy who wants ‘ALL THE PIMP IN THE WORLD’ either A: Has one, or B: Knows/cares how much it costs, exactly? '

Unlike Force of Will, which closes in enormous quantity on eBay every single day, ridiculous cards like this have very loose values available for interpretation and manipulation.

As a less extreme example, say you trade in for a NM foil Sensei’s Divining Top. How likely is it, do you think, that you could explain to a rabidly interested individual that you’re uncomfortable trading it for Standard stuff unless you got a significant chunk of value in the exchange? That's not a trick question, the answer is 'very'.

In my case I’m just trying to bring my quantity of high-movement cards up significantly, so I’m willing to dump that top immediately after ‘buying’ it to reset my binder. After having traded myself into a corner with death baron and his ilk, suddenly I can be back in business with the cards that are now the new FOTM (Flavor of the Month), and happily trade myself into stagnation once again.

A Complicated Example. Read Twice.

You will almost invariably make money off this if you know your values, since you’ve been trading for undervalued cards the whole time. As a rough example, if you trade your 100 dollar binder into a 200 dollar binder (not unreasonable in the slightest) over the course of a month or two, you could easily take 100 dollars of that that isn’t trading anymore and sell it for a foil Sensei's Divining Top.

The cards that were trading well you keep, and the Elvish Piper-esque schlock you turn into a fabulous foil. What you do from there is personal preference, whether you trade it into a massive pile of Paladin equivalents or simply set it aside for your collection.

A picture of the Punny joke I'm about to make

 While this doesn’t seem like much, especially compared to the 100% increase your binder made previously, this step is one I’ve found to be crucial.

Having a binder full of undervalued cards is a quick and easy way to build up the total value of your collection, but your options are limited. Even if you made no money whatsoever on the resell, even if you LOST money, you’d still be fine.

People are afraid to sell to dealers because they 'lose value', but what if that perceived value is pure profit you can't trade anymore? Why wouldn't you sell? Sell two Death Barons, buy lunch. Sell ten, buy a Flooded Strand. That 40 dollar card is going to do so much more than your 2.5 playsets of Barons ever would, despite the massive difference in retail prices.

Step 8

Repeat, Ad Nauseum.

~

Hopefully you enjoyed this, or at least it was helpful in your quest for greater value. If you have questions, comments or snide remarks, I eagerly look forward to reading them in the comments section.

Avatar photo

Tucker McGownd

Hi, I'm Tucker McGownd. I'm a low risk trader that spends most of my time in Minnesota, where I go to school, play magic, study for school, play Ultimate for my college team, study for school, and read. I've been playing for a long, long time (I first played during Mercadian Masques block, and first bought a pack in Urza's Saga). I was incredibly lucky when I cracked packs until I learned how much cards were worth, at which point I proceeded to open Thoughtlace in every set until Scars, where I picked up more than my fair share of molten psyche. I'm currently looking forward to the inevitable reprint of Chimney Imp.

View More By Tucker McGownd

Posted in Free Insider15 Comments on Insider: The Booming Business of Ratios, Part 2 – Why Dealers are Badass

Have you joined the Quiet Speculation Discord?

If you haven't, you're leaving value on the table! Join our community of experts, enthusiasts, entertainers, and educators and enjoy exclusive podcasts, questions asked and answered, trades, sales, and everything else Discord has to offer.

Join the QS Discord
Open Discord

Want to create content with Quiet Speculation?

All you need to succeed is a passion for Magic: The Gathering, and the ability to write coherently. Share your knowledge of MTG and how you leverage it to win games, get value from your cards – or even turn a profit.

Apply Today!

Want Prices?

Browse thousands of prices with the first and most comprehensive MTG Finance tool around.


Trader Tools lists both buylist and retail prices for every MTG card, going back a decade.

Start Using Trader Tools

Latest Magic Sets

Marvel Super Heroes
Marvel Super Heroes Tokens
Through the Omenpaths 2
Marvel Super Heroes Commander
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Eternal Tokens
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Eternal
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tokens
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Source Material
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Lorwyn Eclipsed Art Series
Browse All Sets
Yawgmoth Thran Physician Wrath of the Skies Vivi Ornitier Urza's Saga Underworld Breach Ugin Eye of the Storms Ugin's Labyrinth Tezzeret Cruel Captain Tamiyo Inquisitive Student tameshi reality architect Spider-Punk Sowing Mycospawn Solitude Shifting Woodland Sephiroth Fabled SOLDIER Ruby Medallion Recruiter of the Guard Ragavan Nimble Pilferer Quantum Riddler Psychic Frog

ION Suite

Discover ION Scanner and ION Retail.
Quiet Speculation