Welcome back to my Daily Financial Value of Shadows over Innistrad series! From now until the full set is spoiled, I’ll be posting up regular daily updates with my thoughts about the officially-spoiled cards from Shadows over Innistrad!
I will be reviewing cards using the following system:
Starting Price: The first price we assign to this card as a preorder
Current Price: The current price of the card at the time this article was written (usually by 5:00 pm the day before publication).
Future Price – Low: The lowest price I believe this card will hit while it is Standard Legal, post-release.
Future Price – High: The highest price I believe this card will hit while it is Standard legal, post-release.
Before I start the article I want to point out a fact that will… Blow. Your. Mind.
Star City Games has 13 letters in it.
With that out of the way, let’s begin!
Rarity: Rare
Starting Price: $1
Current Price: $1
Future Price – Low: $0.50
Future Price – High: $1.50
Thoughts: Only those of you who watch my Commander VS. Videos know this, but I’m a Simic Mage at heart. I will be the first person to purchase a foil Altered Ego from StarCityGames.com and I will play it in many Commander decks for the rest of my life.
Altered Ego has a ton of Casual appeal, but that’s about it. It’s going to be a bulk rare, but the foils will probably be $3-$4.
Rarity: Rare
Starting Price: $1
Current Price: $1
Future Price – Low: $0.50
Future Price – High: $1
Thoughts: Another card to add to the evolution of Fireball. This card could become more useful later on in Standard, but it feels really out of place right now. There are currently only a handful of cards in Standard that have indestructible, so the ability seems kind of useless right now. In addition to that, I believe that madness will be popular enough for Avacyn’s Judgment to completely outclass Burn from Within.
Rarity: Rare
Starting Price: $4
Current Price: $4
Future Price – Low: $2
Future Price – High: $5
Thoughts: In one of my first articles I talked about Relentless Dead being a fantastic card, which I still think it is. I went on to talk about how I felt that, as more cards were spoiled, we would get enough cards to support a very aggressive B/R Zombie deck. Now, with more information, I can see that I wasn’t accurate. We now know that the aggressive deck is a B/R Vampires deck, and while Relentless Dead does combo very well with Prized Amalgam, I don’t think it will be strong enough to be a top-tier Standard deck.
Prized Amalgam has a lot of potential to see play in Dredge decks as an additional free creature that you get when your Narcomoebas, Ichorids, and Nether Shadows enter the battlefield. That isn’t the extent of the sweet interactions Prized Amalgam has; in addition to dredge, it also works well with persist, undying, and a number of Tier 1 Zombie cards. Prized Amalgam definitely has the potential of seeing a lot of play one day; it’s a card that only gets better as more cards are printed. I can’t say for certain if this card will be broken anytime soon, but I’d be willing to bet we’ll see it doing well one day.
If you ever catch this card approaching the $1 range, it would be safe to pick them up and sit on them for years.
Rarity: Rare
Starting Price: $2
Current Price: $2
Future Price – Low: $1
Future Price – High: $5
Thoughts: Between Scourge Wolf and Goldnight Castigator, I think there could be an extremely aggressive red deck in the future Standard format. If this happens, I would expect Scourge Wolf to follow a pattern that’s very similar to Ash Zealot. Ash Zealot started at $2 and eventually became $6; it slowly fell back down below $1 as it became less popular. Ash Zealot was extremely threatening during Standard and I would rank Scourge Wolf very high on the “I can kill my opponent fast” scale.
Rarity: Mythic
Starting Price: $8
Current Price: $10
Future Price – Low: $4
Future Price – High: $7
Thoughts: After the initial hype from this card is over, it will drop like a rock. I’m hearing a lot of really “cute” combos that involve doing things like reanimating The Gitrog Monster to mill yourself in a Dredge deck. I’m not a fan.
As a Casual card, I absolutely love The Gitrog Monster. A Legendary Frog! How awesome is that?! It will retain some amount of value just from the Casual appeal, but I’m not expecting this to be breaking any constructed formats. I would avoid this card for the next few months while the price settles down.
Pack Value
Now that we know the actual number of rares (59) and mythics (18) in the set, it makes pack value a bit easier to calculate. It’s still unclear how frequently flip rares and mythics will appear, but hopefully it won’t change the value that much.
Mythics of Note ($4+)
|
Card |
Price |
|
$25 |
|
|
$40 |
|
|
$5 |
|
|
$5 |
|
|
$5 |
|
|
$30 |
|
|
$20 |
|
|
$20 |
|
|
$20 |
|
|
$8 |
|
|
$25 |
|
|
$6 |
|
|
$10 |
|
|
Total |
$219 |
Rares of Note ($2+)
|
Card |
Price |
|
$2 |
|
|
$8 |
|
|
$5 |
|
|
$3 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$6 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$4 |
|
|
$5 |
|
|
$3 |
|
|
$3 |
|
|
$4 |
|
|
$4 |
|
|
$6 |
|
|
$6 |
|
|
$6 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$6 |
|
|
$4 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$3 |
|
|
$9 |
|
|
$3 |
|
|
$20 |
|
|
$2 |
|
|
$3 |
|
|
$4 |
|
|
$4 |
|
|
Total |
$147 |
The equation I use to determine pack value is: 2R + 1M (each rare is printed twice against each mythic) / (2x total number of rares + number of mythics) = Pack Value.
((2*147)+219)/136 = $3.77 per pack or *36 = $135.72 per box
Join me tomorrow as I continue to cover the Shadows over Innistrad Spoiler Week!