Hey everyone! Welcome back to The Real Deal. As many of you know, I’m the General Manager here at StarCityGames.com. I’m responsible for buying inventory for our business, setting prices for our stock, and all steps in-between. On top of these duties, I also write this weekly column for Craig.
When I first started this column, I pitched it to Craig as a current events / issues forum. Parallel to The Real Deal, I also write the “Cards to Trade For at the Prerelease” articles and the individual set reviews. Although there are missteps here and there (nobody is perfect), I have a pretty good track record at predicting the market ahead of time on singles. Usually articles dealing with these topics are premium, because they have real value — my job depends on me being able to accurately evaluate cards financially, and a frank discussion of the value of cards as they are being released is of value to anyone who might trade / buy / sell cards.
In this week’s column, I’m going to over some of the current financial trends within Magic. Let’s jump right in and discuss Standard.
The Breakout Cards of Standard
790 players attended Grand Prix: Kyoto, which used Standard as its format. And the end of the weekend, the Top 8 was comprised of the following:
2 copies of Red/Blue/White Control (Featuring Lightning Angel and Boom / Bust)
1 copy of Project X (Crypt Champion, Saffi Eriksdotter, and Essence Warden combo)
1 copy of Blue/Green Urzatron (Featuring Wall of Roots and Vesuvan Shapeshifter)
1 copy of Blue/Black/White Control (Featuring Body Double and Angel of Despair)
1 copy of Mono-Blue Pickles (Featuring Vesuvan Shapeshifter and Brine Elemental)
1 copy of Gruul Beats (Featuring Giant Solifuge and Blood Moon boarded)
1 copy of Izzetron (Featuring Sulfur Elemental and Bogardan Hellkite)
It’s all fine and dandy to point to these decks and say “well, this color did well” or “man, a lot of these decks have Compulsive Research!” The question is this: which cards were the breakout cards of this tournament and are in high-demand right now?
1) Blood Moon: Take a look at the manabases of the decks that made the Top 8 in Kyoto. Six of the decks had eighteen basic lands… between them! Between the Ravnica Bouncelands, Ravnica Shocklands, Pain lands from ninth, Coldsnap comes-into-play tapped lands, Deserts, Quicksands, Urza’s Factories, the Urzatron, Flagstones or Trokair and other non-basic lands, decks are just asking to be hosed by cards such as Blood Moon. People began rediscovering Blood Moon at the end of the Extended season as well (which is much easier to manage and cast on your own end than Destructive Flow). It would not surprise me, coming into Regionals, to see decks in the Top 8 that are packing main-deck Blood Moon.
2) Boom / Bust: Armageddon, except for two more mana. A lot of decks are also playing Flagstones of Trokair, and the Boom side of Boom / Bust combos well with that card. Virtually every deck in the Top 8 was combo or control, and those decks get hit hard by mass land destruction.
3) Chord of Calling: Played as both a combo-tutor in Project X, and as a straight tutor in the Blue/Green Urzatron deck. Once you get around the triple-Green mana cost (which can be reduced with Convoke), you have one of the best creature tutors ever printed. Since Chord of Calling also operates at instant speed, it helps work against countermagic and control elements.
4) Compulsive Research: This is the best card-drawing spell in Standard, period. Unless you’re playing a Fathom Seer engine, you have no excuse to leave this out of your Blue deck.
5) Court Hussar: Court Hussar was originally relegated to a niche deck (Solar Flare), but broke out in Extended season. It was supplanted in many decks by Trinket Mage by the end of the Extended season, but that makes it no less potent in Standard. Court Hussar is great against aggro-decks, and replaces itself against control decks — much in the way that Wall of Blossoms wasn’t ever really a dead draw.
6) Detritivore: This is Destructive Flow for Standard. The argument for this against Blood Moon goes as follows — Blood Moon hits the board earlier, and can be Repealed, countered or played around. You still keep your lands, just as Mountains. Detrivore is uncounterable, unstoppable, and kills lands outright. In the control-on-control matchup, can you afford to tap out for a turn to ensure killing four of your opponent’s lands over the next four turns? Apparently so, and you get a pretty large guy to boot at the end. Remember — everyone is playing Compulsive Research. Chances are they are pitching non-basic lands to feed that spell as well!
7) Remand: Every block has that marquee Uncommon that hits the ridiculous price range ($5-$6). Remand is that card, just as Skullclamp, Eternal Witness, and Sensei’s Diving Top were before it. Think of how many Top 8 decks in the past year, in virtually every format, have packed copies of Remand. Remand is not only a near-autoinclude for Blue, it’s a virtual reason to play Blue — Time Walk as a cantrip more often than not.
8) Sulfur Elemental: I had good things to say about Sulfur Elemental in my Planar Chaos set review. Sulfur Elemental single-handedly invalidates White Weenie as a viable Standard strategy (it kills Soltari Priest, Savannah Lions and Icatian Javelineers outright, and two in tandem kill every other creature White Weenie has to offer). It also wrecks the control-on-control matchup, because the Sulfur Elemental player can drop a relatively large threat at end-of-turn at uncounterable speed, making life difficult for an opponent. Sulfur Elemental is large enough to beat through Court Hussar, which is also important. I would invest in a playset of these sooner than later, because this has been our absolute hottest-selling card over the past week.
9) Vesuvan Shapeshifter: Two decks in the Top 8 of Kyoto featured Vesuvan Shapeshifter main, and two featured him in the sideboard. Honestly, the two Red/White/Blue decks probably could have stood to run this guy as well — he’s going to prove to be one of the two best Blue creatures available in Standard and Block, along with Teferi. I would even go so far as to say that in Block Constructed, which is the PTQ season coming up right after Two-Headed Giant, that Vesuvan Shapeshifter will be the most important creature in the format (barring Future Sight). I’ve played dozens of matches of Time Spiral block Constructed online, and 22 out of my 24 matches involved someone trying (and succeeding) in abusing Vesuvan Shapeshifter with various creatures — usually Morphs or Chronozoa. Get these now! People look at the double-Blue regular mana cost, and ignore that most decks are going to want to play him as a morph, and turn him face up for only a single Blue, making it one of the most splashable, powerful creatures available in Standard right now.
10) Wall of Roots: Man, it took long enough for this to get serious play. Many Extended decks that previously used Sakura-Tribe Elder (such as Tooth and Nail) started packing Wall of Roots because of the on-both-turns mana acceleration it provides, as well as a much, much more durable body against Aggro. Wall of Roots was an important mana-accelerator back in the day, and the new generation of Magic players are finally coming to realize just how good the Wall is.
Honorable Mention: Aeon Chronicler.
From my Planar Chaos set review:
Aeon Chronicler is my pick for the sleeper card of the set right now. Maro has always been on the fringe of playability, but it’s in the color that (before now) was short on card drawing. Aeon Chronicler, if you took away suspend, is a Blue Maro that costs one more mana. In-and-of-itself, that’s not terribly exciting. Yes, Blue’s a better color for filling your hand than Green, but it’s not like people would flock to a White Wild Mongrel that cost W2 instead of G1.
What makes Aeon Chronicler exciting, at least in my mind, is the Suspend trigger. Let’s say you suspend Aeon Chronicler for one on turn 5. When he comes into play, you cantrip, plus you’ll have five mana up (at the least) to defend him with countermagic. That, my friends, is a lot more exciting than Maro. This is Maro that costs one more, lets you play your lands untapped the following turn, and replaces itself immediately when it comes into play (or the time counter is removed). In the control / control mirror match, you can suspend the Chronicler for a lot longer, and have it act as Phyrexian Arena, except without the loss of life.
If there’s one rare that is currently being valued at bulk that I would recommend people pick up now rather than later, it’s Aeon Chronicler.
Aeon Chronicler showed up as a single copy in one deck in the Top 8. However, I’ve gotten a chance to get hands-on experience with Aeon Chronicler during my 10 Decks in 10 Weeks experiment at MagicTheGathering.com as part of Building on a Budget. I can say, through use, that Aeon Chronicler is really good. It’s huge, it gives you card advantage, and it can be protected by Countermagic since it comes into play unsuspended after you untap. Is a 3/4 flyer with Haste better than a 9/9 ground-pounder with haste that acts as a one-sided Howling Mine before it enters play?
A Quick Note on Extended
Extended, as it stands, is set to rotate upon the release of the main set of 2008 (the block after Lorwyn block). This means that there will be one more major as-is Extended season probably towards the beginning of 2008, and then Invasion, Planeshift, Apocalypse, Odyssey, Torment, Judgment, Onslaught, Legions and Scourge are set to rotate out of Extended.
Now I’ve heard grumblings, and I want to stress that none of these grumblings have come from anything even remotely resembling an official source, that Wizards is contemplating changing the Extended rotation policy. The reasoning is that this past Extended season was easily the best-attended PTQ round in ages, and the format, as it stands, was ridiculously popular with players. It is possible, but not probably, that Wizards might break off Extended into another format (such as was done with Legacy) to allow Invasion-forward in this new format, while keeping Extended as Mirrodin-forward. There are already, however, a lot of Constructed formats to keep track of (Block, Standard, Extended, Legacy, Vintage), and adding another format between Extended and Legacy might tax the support system.
If the Extended rotation were to be changed, the two most likely scenarios would be that either one block would fall off each year (much like Standard operates, except reaching back to Invasion), or that the entire Extended format would freeze at Invasion. Both would solve the problem of changing a viable and popular format — but my money is on Wizards sticking to the rotation and making Extended start at Mirrodin.
If the rotation proceeds as planned, several decks will be decimated in the format (of course, barring Tenth Edition, and five to six more set releases by the fall of 2008) — Terravore is gone, fetch lands would be gone, and Cabal Therapy / Duress would be toast. Meddling Mage, and Orim’s Chant would be history. Most of the Goblins that matter (Matron, Piledriver, Sharpshooter, Ringleader, Prospector, and Warchief!) would be extinct. In fact, there would be three decks that are noticeably intact post-rotation:
Affinity
Boros Deck Wins
Tooth and Nail
If the format rotates as planned in 2008, there will be a massive drop in value of a lot of Invasion through Scourge legal cards that are suddenly jettisoned to Legacy-Vintageland. This happened when Tempest, Saga and Masques block rotated out of Extended nearly three years ago. If you’re planning to get the most value out of those cards, I’d probably sell sooner than later, and keep in mind which decks (Affinity, Boros, Tooth and Nail) will barely be affected by a new Extended.
Foil Madness
A lot of the market on foil cards are driven by Vintage / Legacy players (looking to pimp out their decks) and by collectors (looking to complete collections). Many players don’t realize just how rare foil cards can be. Let’s use Dark Confidant as an example.
There are 88 Rares in Ravnica, and each booster box of Ravnica yields roughly one foil Rare. With perfect distribution, you would need to open 352 boxes of Magic cards to get a full foil playset of Ravnica. For the sake of slightly easier math, we can say that every 350 boxes of Ravnica opened yields four foil Dark Confidants to the market.
In order for 100 players worldwide to have a playset of Confidants, you would need to open 35,000 boxes of Ravnica. Now, I can’t tell you how many boxes are printed of each set (the I-don’t-know I-can’t-tell-you, as opposed to the legally-I-can’t-say I-can’t-tell-you), but the ratio of opening 35,000 boxes to fill the needs of 100 players is pretty mind-blowing — if 1,000 out of the millions of Magic players in the world want to have playsets of Dark Confidants, that’s 350,000 boxes that need to be opened.
To further complicate this, a ton of players aren’t ever going to have their foil Dark Confidants enter circulation. Maybe they play casually, and never sell / trade their cards. Maybe they collection foil sets, so those Confidants never reach the hands of people who want to play with them. Some might be destroyed (accidents happen — keep your soda cans away from your cards!), and others packed up in shoeboxes by people who throw their cards in a closet, never to see the light of day again for half-a-decade.
To balance this, there are a lot of people who redeem full foil sets through Magic Online, and this helps to put an influx of foil singles into the market. But given all the other circumstances, it’s a lot more understandable why a foil Dark Confidant is worth $25 — they are extremely hard to get, spread globally, and once people stop drafting with a set, they stop entering circulation in any significant numbers.
If anything, foils are extremely underpriced in relation to their availability! Considering that a foil Goblin Welder easily fetches $100, and that Empty the Warrens is selling for $12.50 without any hesitation right now (yes, the Time Spiral common), I can’t imagine what would happen if the foil-collecting populace of Magic had a sudden upshift in interest in a short period of time.
Here are the 10 absolutely hottest non-Promotional foils in Magic right now:
Empty the Warrens — Time Spiral Common – $12.50
Jotun Grunt — Coldsnap Uncommon – $25.00 (We put 10 of these in the system last Monday at $17.50 each. They sold out within a day).
Mystical Teachings — Time Spiral Common – $7.50
Repeal — Guildpact Common – $7.50 (and rising)
Goblin Matron — 7th Edition Uncommon – $25.00
Rite of Flame — Coldsnap Common – $8.00
Cabal Ritual — Torment Common – $15.00
Polluted Delta — Onslaught Rare – $100.00
Merchant Scroll — 8th Edition Uncommon – $35.00
Viashino Heretic — Urza’s Legacy Uncommon – $12.50
Over the past week, I’ve been adding hundreds (if not thousands) of foils to our buylist. The more I thought about demand versus rarity (or basic supply versus demand), the more I realized that we needed, as a company, to be more aggressive in tracking down high-demand foil cards.
Just as a key to understanding potential high-demand foils, ask yourself:
Will this see a lot of play in Vintage or Legacy?
Will it be played across multiple formats?
Will it be played in multiple decks?
Most of the cards on the above list are “yes” answers to all three of these questions. None are a “no” to more than one question.
Psionic Blast (Textless Player Rewards)
Many of you have received your Player Rewards mailing for this cycle, and you’ve gotten your hands on the new Textless Psionic Blast. Bad times! The value of Psionic Blast from Time Spiral was already in freefall — players were finally beginning to realize that there was no reason why a less-played Char should be worth more than, well, Char!
To pile on this trend, suddenly a ton of Psionic Blasts are given away for free to the public. I am all for the concept of player rewards, but Wizards picked the wrong card to make textless. Psionic Blast isn’t very representative of Blue (as a color), and was already in decline. If anything, that mailing should have been either Char itself (why not? It’s a lot more popular!), or Remand (which has a high value and seems to keep making impossible climbs further upwards).
I understand that the lead time on Psionic Blast as a Player Rewards card might have made this tough for Wizards of the Coast to foresee, but even mechanically Psionic Blast seems like the wrong card to put out there right now.
That’s all for this week! I’ll see you next week for another edition of The Real Deal!
Ben Bleiweiss
[email protected]
PS: Here are the new cards that have been added to our system for the first time this week:
Blood Knight (Extended Artwork)
Deep Analysis (FNM Foil)
Disenchant (Textless Player Rewards)
Fiery Temper (Arena Foil)
Gerrard’s Verdict (FNM Foil)
Groundbreaker (Expanded Art)
Hedge Troll (Planar Chaos Release Foil)
Icatian Javelineers (Arena Foil)
Meddling Mage (Judge Foil)
Oros the Avenger (Time Spiral Prerelease Foil)
Psionic Blast (Textless Player Rewards)
Ravenous Baloth (Judge Foil)
Soltari Priest (JSS Foil)