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Ornithopter

It’s another week of examples today, selected to help hone some of your predictive senses on speculation. I’m going to share some cards today and I’ll be honest – sometimes, I still don’t know why these things act the way they do. Join me as we tease out the reasons why cards go up or fail to go up. You’ll get a sense of my thinking process and the questions that I’m asking myself along the way.

Grand Prix Columbus was a great time – I was there – and it pulled in almost 1,050 players, which is impressive for a format that people seem to hate on the internet. Most of my opponents had not played the format before, but just about everyone expressed that they thought it was a fun format that they’d like to keep playing.

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.

Fifth Dawn was the third set in Mirrodin and was inexplicably focused on getting people to play all five colors. In the abstract, this is fine, but this was in a set full of artifacts that gave you advantages for running them. It would be like if Onslaught Block culminated in a set focused on super-powered spells instead of really good Tribal creatures…

Oh, wait.

Darksteel, the second set in Mirrodin block, is notorious for driving off more Magic players than any other set, even the Urza block. It contained high-power cards for Affinity that did not require finesse to win with. It was like UG Madness in that the best deck was cheap, easy to play and frustrating to metagame against.

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