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This weekend, Chris VanMeter got a deck tech for his Modern Evolutionary Leap Elves deck. Chris started off the tournament 6-0, and his build was generating a lot of buzz.
Evolutionary Elves
Over the course of the weekend, Evolutionary Leap moved from about a buck to 2-3 dollars, and Cloudstone Curio more than tripled from four to fourteen. Curio would be a great target if this deck were to take off seeing as it has only one printing and is a casual card, but whether it has legs in Modern remains to be seen. As we now know, the wheels fell off for Chris after his 6-0 start, and he ended up finishing in 105th place.
Elves won a Modern GP before the printing of Leap, thought even when it won the opinion of most was that it was maybe 45% against most of the field, and the success was something of an anomaly. The deck lacks the speed and resilience of other combo decks and the interaction of Merfolk when it comes to tribal decks. Evolutionary Leap adds resilience, though the addition of Curio and drawing a second Leap ever add a lot of air to the deck.
Curio's price was buyout driven, and will likely be coming down as more players sell into the hype. The fact that it only has one printing will likely keep the price higher than the $4 it was at, but nonetheless this isn't a good long-term position. Evolutionary Leap has a more promising future, as it's a great tool in both Standard and Modern to fight removal spells, and will likely gain during its time in Standard. I wouldn't be mad if I bought in when it was at a buck, but I imagine the card will drop back to that point before long.
MTG finance moves at a very fast pact, and sometimes you only have hours or less to make a move on hype, and in many of those instances you're forced to either miss an opportunity or invest poorly. You'll notice that buylist prices are very close to the pre-spike price on the card, and I wouldn't expect them to get much higher- at least from merchants looking for large numbers of the card. You're probably better off if you missed this one.
He started 6-0 and then went 0-4 drop after that. But because it was a fresh idea, no one seemed to care, as they wanted to try out the deck (esp online), and the price kept rising.
How much of this do you honestly believe was people trying out the deck?
Me
Meaning, I saw him stream it Thursday night and source as much of it that I was missing before Saturday. I only found 1 Curio and no locals had Summoner’s Pact so I put them in my Wants on PucaTrade and got them Monday.
UPDATE: a couple sites have upped their buylists on Curio to $8-9. They’re only buying a couple sets, so sell ‘en if you got ’em.