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Weekend Magic: 1/23-1/25

Jared Yost

With a new Standard set and recent Modern and Legacy bannings and unbannings, this weekend is sure to bring attention to several cards that were previously flying under the radar. We’ll also see old decks coming back again. Let’s take a look at Star City Games: DC to see what the outcome of it all was. In addition, the Super Sunday Series Championship took place. This event can also provide more insight into the direction that Standard will be going since Fate Reforged has been released.

Star City Games: DC – Standard Open (Washington, DC, USA)

Decklists

Deck	Finish	Player	Deck	Finish	Player
Sultai Control	1st	Gerard Fabiano	G/B Constellation	9th	Brian Braun-Duin
R/W Aggro	2nd	Danny Goldstein	Mardu Aggro	10th	Benjamin Nikolich
Abzan Aggro	3rd	Hunter Nance	Temur Ascendancy	11th	Mark Toepfner
W/U Heroic	4th	Logan Mize	Abzan Midrange	12th	Jeremy Bowman
Sultai Ramp	5th	Ali Aintrazi	Jeskai Tokens	13th	Tom Ross
Abzan Aggro	6th	Andrew Boswell	U/B Control	14th	Ryan Phraner
Abzan Midrange	7th	Dan Musser	Abzan Midrange	15th	Steve Rubin
Jeskai Aggro	8th	Michael Walewski	W/R Heroic	16th	Zach Jesse

Gerard Fabiano took down the event piloting a Sultai Control list. The deck was focused around planeswalkers and featured two copies of the mighty [card]Ugin, the Spirit Dragon[/card] in the main deck. [card]Garruk, Apex Predator[/card] also made an appearance alongside [card]Kiora, the Crashing Wave[/card] and [card]Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver[/card].

Also present were two [card]Tasigur, the Golden Fang[/card] out of his sideboard. This card has already spiked from its lows of $3 or $4 to upwards of $12 or $13. The current spike is due to the low supply of the card in the market—if you have any extra copies, I would sell now and then buy back in later once the price has lowered a bit. It seems that eternal formats could also be driving the demand of Tasigur and raising the price, since he was seen briefly in Modern. However, he is legendary and many players are opting to play only one or two copies of the card between their main decks and the sideboards.

Next up is Danny Goldstein’s R/W aggro deck, which featured [card]Monestary Mentor[/card], one [card]Soulfire Grand Master[/card], two [card]Outpost Siege[/card], two [card]Collateral Damage[/card], and two [card]Valorous Stance[/card]. [card]Hushwing Gryff[/card] was a two-of in the sideboard as well. Gryff is a notable card in the new format because it can help white decks out against the surge of Sultai that is sure to show up over the coming months due to Tasigur, in addition to the already existing [card]Siege Rhino[/card]s and Abzan cards.

Other notable appearances in the Top 8:

Tasigur also appeared as a two-of in the third place Abzan Aggro list.
[card]Frontier Siege[/card] appeared as a three-of in the Sultai Ramp list, and Ugin appeared as two-of in this list.
Abzan Aggro featured a full playset of [card]Warden of the First Tree[/card] and four [card]Valorous Stance[/card].
Abzan Midrange featured one Tasigur and one Ugin.
Jeskai Aggro featured two [card]Shaman of the Great Hunt[/card], two [card]Stormbreath Dragon[/card] (also one the sideboard), three [card]Abzan Advantage[/card] (also one in sideboard—foils could be a good target here), two [card]Valorous Stance[/card] (also two in the sideboard), and three [card]Wild Slash[/card].

Patrick Chapin made a Twitter comment about the number of Fate Reforged cards that saw play in the Top 8, and he wasn’t kidding! Usually, this many cards from a second set don’t see Standard play. However, Fate Reforged seems to have bucked this trend.

Notable Top 16 cards include:

A playset of Frontier Siege in BBD’s G/B Constellation deck.
Three [card]Brutal Hordechief[/card] and two Wild Slash in the 10th place Mardu Aggro list.
A [card]Temur Ascendancy[/card] combo deck, featuring four [card]Temur Sabertooth[/card] alongside Nykthos and [card]Temur Ascendancy[/card].
Three [card]Whisperwood Elemental[/card] in the 12th-place Abzan Midrange deck.
Three Monastery Mentor and two Soulfire Grand Master in Tom Ross’ Jeskai Tokens list, with a [card]Citadel Siege[/card] and a [card]Mastery of the Unseen[/card] out of the sideboard
One [card]Silumgar, the Drifting Death[/card] and Ugin, along with three [card]Crux of Fate[/card], out of the U/B Control list.
Three [card]Temur Battle Strength[/card] out of the W/R Heroic list, which is an interesting spin on the U/W Heroic that is usually seen.

Star City Games: DC – Modern Premier IQ (Washington, DC, USA)

Decklists

Deck	Finish	Player	Deck	Finish	Player
Auras	1st	David Heilker	Burn	9th	Gary Nunes
Abzan Midrange	2nd	Kevin Vanevery	Mefolk	10th	Cristo Yanez
Zoo	3rd	Pat Cox	Jeskai Flash	11th	Timothy Taylor
Storm	4th	Stan Smith	Abzan	12th	Oscar Sardinas
G/R Tron	5th	Brad Carpenter	Temur Twin	13th	Allen Norman
Storm	6th	Joshua Everly	Scapeshift	14th	Jonathan Goldman
Jund	7th	Karl Delatorre	Abzan	15th	Chad Kastel
Affinity	8th	Lance Hartbarger	Zoo	16th	Eli Loveman

Auras took down the Modern portion piloted by David Heilker. Looks like this deck is back on the radar now that Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time are banned. Nothing new appeared in this deck—it was a classic Boggles list that was able to win due to the sheer speed of the clock it presents.

Tasigur made an appearance in the Abzan Midrange deck that took second place at the event. Also appearing in the deck were [card]Liliana of the Veil[/card], Stirring Wildwood, and [card]Voice of Resurgence[/card] along with two [card]Creeping Corrosion[/card] and four [card]Fulminator Mage[/card] out of the sideboard.

Rounding out the Top 8 were Zoo, two Storm decks, G/R Tron, Jund, and Affinity. Notables from these decks include Geist of Saint Traft, Pyromancer Ascension, Past in Flames, and Chandra, Pyromaster. Not much innovation from Fate Reforged, so it looks like Modern has gone back to the way it was post-Khans.

Rounding out the Top 8 were Burn, Merfolk, Jeskai Flash, two Abzan decks, Temur Twin, Scapeshift, and Zoo. Notables from these decks include Restoration Angel, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Wanderwine Hub, Seachrome Coast, Gifts Ungiven, Knight of the Reliquary, and Blood Moon.

Star City Games: DC – Legacy Premier IQ (Washington, DC, USA)

Decklists

Deck	Finish	Player	Deck	Finish	Player
Show and Tell	1st	Daniel Cosiem	Miracles	9th	Gavin Schober
Lands	2nd	David Long	Jeskai Stoneblade	10th	Kevin Jones
Lands	3rd	TJ Martin	Temur Delver	11th	Daniel Signorini
Abzan Maverick	4th	Doug Azzano	G/B Midrange	12th	David Richardson
Metalworker	5th	James Wohlmacher	Temur Delver	13th	Zack Kanner
Dredge	6th	Erik Copenhaver	Esper Stoneblade	14th	Shaheen Soorani
Temur Delver	7th	Myles Housman	Shardless Sultai	15th	Harlan Firer
Grixis Control	8th	Jeff Mcaleer	Temur Delver	16th	Cody Shoemaker

Show and Tell took down the Legacy portioned piloted by Daniel Cosiem. Dig Through Time managed to avoid the banhammer in Legacy, yet it wasn’t used in the winning Show and Tell list. Lands took second and third place—cards to watch from this deck include Mox Diamond, Gamble, and The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale. Wasteland could also see an uptick in demand since U/R Delver is no longer a deck based on the Top 16 we see here.

Other cards to watch from the Top 8 include Deathrite Shaman, Stoneforge Mystic, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, Living Wish, Metalworker, City of Traitors, Grim Monolith, Golgari Grave-Troll, Lion’s Eye Diamond, Nimble Mongoose (which seems to be making a resurgence), Baleful Strix, and Dack Fayden. All of these cards were important pieces of their respective decks in the Top 8 results of the Legacy portion of the weekend.

From the Top 16, G/B Midrange is the rogue deck of the week. Cards to watch from this deck include Obstinate Baloth, Titania, Protector of Argoth, Choke, Green Sun’s Zenith, and Rolling Spoil.

Super Sunday Series Championship

Decklists

Back to Standard. Luis Salvatto took down the Super Sunday Series Championship by piloting a R/W Midrange list very similar to the R/W Aggro deck that took second place at the SCG Open. Notables from Salvatto’s deck include Chandra, Pyromaster, Brimaz, King of Oreskos, Ashcloud Phoenix, Valorous Stance, and Stormbreath Dragon.

Second place went to Oscar Christensen playing R/G Monsters. Notables from this deck include Boon Satyr, Ashcloud Phoenix, Stormbreath Dragon, two Yasova Dragonclaw, and Crater’s Claws.

Rounding out the Top 8 were two Abzan midrange decks, Jeskai Ascendancy Combo, BG Constellation, Sidisi-Whip and Abzan Aggro. Notables here included three Tasigur and one Torrent Elemental out of Matt Costa’s Sidisi-Whip main deck, along with another Torrent Elemental and Crux of Fate out the sideboard.

Other notables from the Top 8 include Shamanic Revelation out the BG Constellation sideboard, two Monastery Siege out of the Jeskai Ascendancy Combo sideboard, and lots of copies of Nissa, Worldwaker and Drown in Sorrow across multiple sideboards.

Last Thoughts

Modern and Legacy seem to have reverted back to post-Khans, barring any future innovations from Fate Reforged, and Standard appears to have a ton of possibility for the future! There are plenty of cards to watch from Fate Reforged, but current themes suggest that we should watch Tasigur, Ugin, and Monastery Mentor the closest. These three cards seem to be the most powerful from Fate Reforged—so far!

Collectibles: Why Magic is One of the Best and Nintendo is One of the Worst

Jim Casale

As far as collectibles go, Wizards of the Coast has one of the best systems in place in the gaming industry to support its customers. This position may sound weird, given all the cries for reprints and the soaring costs of eternal formats, but Magic has one of the greatest distribution methods and most finely tuned market practices to offer long-term support to this great game. Recently, I’ve been looking to acquire some other game collectibles, Nintendo’s Amiibos, and it’s been one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever done.

Nintendo’s newest collectible product, for those unaware, are miniature statues that can hold data and unlock things in other games (this varies wildly by game). Their most marketable trait is their ability to save data from the wildly popular Super Smash Brothers franchise and bring it with you to other consoles. This makes them uniquely different than other collectible statues because they have an in-game impact. Rather than just having them on a shelf to look pretty when you have guests over, they are an active part of your game experience. Sound familiar? Magic cards are similarly appealing to collectors as they are to players of the game.

Something we take for granted as Magic players is the speed and efficiency of new card releases. Each product has a page where very simple but very important information is listed—set name, release dates, languages it’s printed in, number of cards, Twitter hashtag–pretty much everything except for the cards themselves. Anyone can derive from that information when and what they should expect from a given set.

On the flipside, Nintendo’s Amiibo information is a disaster. The official information page for Amiibos has every figurine listed, even if it hasn’t yet been released! There is no breakdown of release by wave (as they are known by collectors). There is no exact release date—just a month. You don’t know when they may be in stock and when to go to stores to buy them. This, coupled with the fact that there is actually a rarity for some figures, just compounds the problem.

Have you ever picked up a card from pre-Stronghold and tried to figure out the rarity? It’s pretty miserable not knowing which ones will be difficult to find and which aren’t. And to top it all off, four of the eleven figurines in wave three will be in-store exclusives! How miserable would you be if you could only buy packs of cards with [card]Flooded Strand[/card]s from StarCity Games, only [card]Polluted Delta[/card]s from Channel Fireball, and [card]Siege Rhino[/card]s from Card Kingdom? I’m pretty sure many people would outright quit.

One of my biggest gripes is the print run for these figures. Certain Amiibos were deemed to be mainstay characters and received several times more figures than other characters. Outside of Mario and Peach, it’s pretty much a crap shoot trying to find other characters in stores. This is basically like Wizards saying they think Mountains are more popular and printing more of them than Plains. We know when a new set is released that sometimes there is a small shortage if it’s very popular on the release weekend, but I’ve never seen an in-print set ever be out of stock for more than a week. If this has happens at your LGS, it’s most likely a problem with their ordering habits than actual availability.

“But wait, there are tons of Magic products with limited print runs. Why aren’t you complaining about those?” It’s because they’re all reprints. The Amiibo shortage problems are on brand-new toys! According to some sources, the Rosalina and Luma figurines from Target sold out of pre-orders in less than a day. Today, much of Magic’s short-printed products are promotional cards (like judge foils) and limited-edition products (From the Vault, Duel Decks Anthologies, etc). These are not first-time printings of cards, so they are purely for collector value. They don’t inhibit the players of the game or force them to shell out lots of money for premium versions.

Not every collectible works that way. About a week ago, I was looking online for a Captain Falcon Amiibo. I had long ago decided I wasn’t going to collect them all and limited myself to 4 of the 29 previewed up until that point. I was lucky and got a Donkey Kong one on release day at Wal-Mart when I was picking up my copy of Pokemon Alpha Sapphire. The remaining three (Diddy Kong, Captain Falcon, and Bowser) were not released then. It was unclear when they might be released and I didn’t think much more of it. Then people figured out some figures got short printed: Marth, Villager, and Wii-Fit Trainer are extraordinarily rare.

Nintendo did the equivalent of printing fewer [card]Bloodstained Mire[/card]s because they wouldn’t be as popular as the other fetches. Obviously, this caused a problem and now each of those figures can fetch upwards of $140 on eBay. Now, I’ve apparently missed Captain Falcon’s release day by about a week and they are sold out everywhere. And it’s extremely unlikely any retail store will get them in stock within the foreseeable future.

The difference from Magic with this situation is that these figures are not promotional versions. It’s not like it’s the super shiny, alternate pose, neon-colored Captain Falcon figure. It’s the only version available and now that I don’t have it, I probably never will. The amount of “feel bad” this creates is pretty impressive.

Even when Standard legal-cards reach prices out of the grasp most people’s wallets, we can still buy a pack and open one. It’s not guaranteed we will open the cards we want or need, but each pack will contain some rare or uncommon someone needs. This fuels the secondary market. That’s why fall sets typically reach record low prices for singles around December. This is when the most significant amount of product has been opened and cards are readily available.

By intentionally short printing some figures, Nintendo has guaranteed they will be sold out—but it leaves a sour taste in the mouths of people who couldn’t get them. The company also caused artificial inflation in the secondary market, because people will buy them only looking to sell them immediately for several times the retail price.

So next time you complain because of the price of [card]Tarmogoyf[/card] or how shops don’t sell From the Vaults for MSRP, know that it could be much worse.

Brainstorm Brewery #132 – Gains & Loses

Brainstorm Brewery 01:08:52

Those who didn’t value it less than a Garth Brooks concert were able to play the prerelease this last weekend and look forward to Monday morning when the DCI dropped a bomb and banned Treasure Cruise, Dig Through Time, and Birthing Pod and ruined lives. We help you navigate the post-ban landscape.

We do all the normal podcast episode stuff, too. Finance 101? Boom, nailed it. Pick of the Week? Happened. Was it a jumbled mess and it’s unclear in what order things will appear in the final episode once it’s been through the editing process? You guessed it. Do we alienate half of our listeners? Maybe. You’ll have to listen to find out.

No guest. No need.
Finance 101 is going strong but needs suggestions. E-mail us.
Prerelease!
Picks of the Week happen, and everyone comes up with one.
Questions? Concerns? E-mail brainstormbrew at gmail dot com.

Cabe Riseau produced the intro and outro music for Brainstorm Brewery.

Contact Us!

Brainstorm Brewery – Website – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Ryan Bushard – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Corbin Hosler – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook – QuietSpeculation

Jason E Alt – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook – QuietSpeculation

Marcel White – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Order Fate Reforged boxes and singles from CoolStuffInc.com today!

Privileged Perspective 12 – Facilitating Value

Ross Lennon

When I first accepted my prestigious and highly paid position here at Brainstorm Brewery, this article was one of the ones on my mind. So much so that I have taken several months to ruminate over some of my points. This will not be an all-encompassing treatise on Magic finance, but rather the humble beginnings of a likely meta-series on valuable fundamentals.

Some of the segments of this article will be more or less applicable for different types of traders. If you own a game store or are a vendor, then you have some firmly established means of moving cards, and you probably already knows what moves and what doesn’t for your particular markets. Most of you, however, are probably much more like me: an honest, blue-collar guy, who loves his country and just wants to make playing this children’s card game a bit more affordable.

Having Options

Let’s say you have a card that you want to sell. What are your options? And I mean you, personally, not a ficticious amalgamation of all Magic players. You, reading this now. Think about all the different ways you know you could sell a card today if you had to.

I’ll wait.

Done? Awesome. The different options are part of what I consider a person’s Magic Network. Now, which option you choose will largely depend on what type of card you are looking to sell, which is something you need to make sure you are aware of. Some network options are stores, some are individuals, and some are websites.

Stores as Options: Stores are an important option, because they are often the only option that will put 100-percent cash in your hand today. The downside, of course, is that they are not in the charity business, so you will be buylisting, and therefore eating a considerable percentage as a cost. We will talk about buylisting more in depth in a little bit, because I think it is often maligned, when it really shouldn’t be.
Inviduals as Options: It’s rather callous and impersonal to treat human beings as merely some sort of financial tool, but that’s not what this article is about. Individuals are often excellent options for moving cards, because you will typically know what a person is willing to buy before you ask them. Oh, and for the record, I don’t consider everyone I’ve ever FNMed with as an option. These are the people who spring immediately to your mind when you know you have something they want. If you stumble upon a NM Alpha [card]Lich[/card], who is your out? A JP foil [card]Havengul Lich[/card]? Japanese non-foil [card]Blackcleave Cliffs[/card]? Individuals are often your best choice when you are trying to out something that has high value and low demand, or fits squarely in a niche market. You may not have your personal directory developed yet, but it is a great tool for having quick outs for hard to move cards.
The Internet: This is tricky, because there are several different platforms for selling cards, and they all have unique aspects. Let’s try this again…
Twitter as an Option: Ah, that’s better. For the last few years, Twitter has been an excellent way for me to out cards. The cards that I have the easiest time moving are typically foils and higher-end Constructed staples, as well as foreign copies of (typically Commander) cards. Rather than tell you what to look for, let’s go over a couple of my handy rules for trying to sell cards on Twitter:

We will come back to more of my finance fundamentals in the future. I would rather spread them out over several weeks to keep getting paid to make sure that every subject gets its fair due, and to address any questions or concerns that may arise. Let’s talk about the [card]Siege Rhino[/card] in the room and address what happened this week with the bannings.

About Those Bannings

A lot of people are coming out of the past week with feelings of regret and frustration. With the popularization of “Magic finance,” ban list update time usually brings a rare frenzy of activity¹.

BRIEF PHILOSOPHICAL ASIDE: I was thinking about Tuesday morning, and the following came to me. You know that famous Gretzky quote, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take”? I think so many people on the finance side are so afraid to miss taking a shot that they don’t realize that all of their shots won’t make it.

Because the B&R announcement has historically caused spikes immediately after its publication, speculators have attempted to anticipate the announcement by going deep on cards as early as a week before publication. This is stange on several levels, which we will address progressively. This time, it was [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card], which actually maintained semi-realistic prices (outside of the promo copy), and [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card]. The previous B&R announcement, it was [card]Skullclamp[/card].

What do these three cards have in common?

There Is No Chance in Hell These Cards Will Ever Be Allowed in Modern

Of course, many people felt that this same sentiment applied to [card]Bitterblossom[/card], which was the first such card to get the “Pre-Announcement Buzz,” and was the only one people actually got right². Bitterblossom was a menace in Standard, and everyone who was playing then definitely has an opinion of the card. Of course, Modern is not Standard, and since Morningtide, [card]Abrupt Decay[/card] has become a multi-format all-star. I’ve actually played against the Modern Fae decks a bit, and they don’t have nearly as much bite as they did then. The deck is still mostly small value creatures, counters, and disruption, but they are extremely weak to [card]Thoughtseize[/card] and Decay, and they get relatively little that wasn’t available to them when the deck was in Standard (besides better mana). Fae games back then were always defined by sticking Bitterblossom on turn two or not, and when you can just Decay it? You didn’t just slow them down a turn, you took out their incremental advantage engine.

BRIEF COMPARATIVE ASIDE: “Ross, if Abrupt Decay is so great, then what’s the big deal with Stoneforge Mystic?” That’s an excellent question, Straw Man! While the two cards are notorious, Stoneforge Mystic is more than a powerful card; it represents two things that WOTC doesn’t want to push in modern design. Stoneforge tutors for a card and then helps you cheat it into play, and is priced so aggressively that you are often saving mana on the cheat (several, in the case of [card]Batterskull[/card], your most likely target). The card is a development error, and Wizards does not this format to be represented by “mistake” cards like Stoneforge or Jace. Sure, Abrupt Decay will hit Stoneforge, but you still got to pay 1W to [card]Demonic Tutor[/card] for your likely win condition.

Count Your Many Bannings

Smarter people than me have talked about this before, but there are some cards on the Modern banned list that could theoretically come off. There are some, however, that are clear development errors that will literally never see the light of day in Modern. If your Magic background is not very deep, and you don’t have familiarity with all of these cards, then it may be difficult to tell the difference. The small run on Skullclamp last year is an example of people thinking that a card they weren’t familiar with contextually could come off the list. We are going to highlight the cards on the current list and briefly touch on whether or not they are candidates to make it back.

[card]Ancestral Vision[/card]: This could come off, possibly soon. The card trades cost for time, which means that combo decks can’t abuse it without either having to delay going off or target a single turn for attempting to go off. It’s a card that fits more with control, which prefers raw draw power to filtering, but I think the biggest fear is that combo would somehow appropriate it, which would land it back in the penalty box.

[card]Birthing Pod[/card]: I have surprisingly little experience with this deck, with or against it. I could see it coming back as a potential shot in the arm if popularity wanes in the long term, or if people complain too much about it leaving. The format is probably better without it, though.

[card]Blazing Shoal[/card]: This was allowing players to combo off as early as turn 2 in GP Philly. Fragile or not, that’s good enough to get a life sentence in Modern.

[card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card]: Cascade is so good that I’m surprised we are allowed to have [card]Captured Sunlight[/card]. This is not the card that made Jund the menace it was, but it did let a middle schooler top eight a standard GP. One of the more likely candidates to come off the list, if just by virtue of how many are here for life.

[card]Chrome Mox[/card]: I wish I could tell you that Chrome Mox fought the good fight, and WOTC let it get unbanned. I wish I could tell you that, but Modern is no fairy tale world. This card would give Storm more ritual mana (although at the cost of another card), and I think currently Wizards wants to play it safe. I like the card, but I’m not gonna get my hopes up.

[card]Cloudpost[/card]: My first Modern deck was 12=Post, and it was fun. That said, Cloudpost is very unlikely to come back—the Tron engine has a fairer drawback system, while still rewarding you for playing situationally terrible lands.

[card]Dark Depths[/card]: Now that this card has two ways of going off ([card]Thespian’s Stage[/card] and [card]Vampire Hexmage[/card]), I think it’s safe to say Depths won’t be coming back ever, especially since the Stage route is counter-proof.

[card]Deathrite Shaman[/card]: This is the card that made Jund what it was, and he is going to be locked up for a very long time. This card is way too good.

[card]Dread Return[/card]: This is one of the key pieces that the dredge/sundry graveyard strategies are missing. Dread Return won’t come back, because several other things (including the recently paroled [card]Golgari Grave-Troll[/card]) would have to simultaneously get locked back up.

[card]Glimpse of Nature[/card]: All the other pieces for Elves are already in Modern (besides Cradle, which is admittedly a big one), but the deck doesn’t see play. I’m afraid WotC may someday unban this as a litmus test, where they will discover that it is still way too good. Regardless of your opinions on the card, I think it is too expensive as a buy-in for a “maybe someday” gain.

[card]Great Furnace[/card] (and the other artifact lands): I would actually like to see Great Furnace come off the list—not the whole set, just Furnace. There is some utility to playing four in mono-red, which was a thing in Extended to turn on [card]Shrapnel Blast[/card]. Affinity (or Robots, or whatever) makes this extremely unlikely. Sorry, guys, you’re too much of a developmental whoopsy.

[card]Green Sun’s Zenith[/card]: Be thankful you have Chord of Calling. I’d like to see this card come back, but it does something that Wizards doesn’t really like to have in the spotlight so often, and it creates repititive game states.

[card]Hypergenesis[/card]: Wizards wants the crucial turn in Modern to be roughly turn four, and this is a turn-three combo. Sorry, but at least [card]Living End[/card] is a thing?

[card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card]: Seriously?

[card]Mental Misstep[/card]: If they won’t let you play it in Legacy, you probably won’t get to play it in Modern. To quote High Fidelity: “It was like trying to borrow a dollar, getting turned down, and asking for 50 grand instead.”

[card]Preordain[/card]: Somehow this card is not restricted in Vintage. Long story short, it makes Storm and the other combo decks just a bit too consistent. Sorry not sorry.

[card]Ponder[/card]: See above, except this one is restricted in Vintage.

[card]Punishing Fire[/card]: This pushes aggro decks out of the format, so while development-wise it is fine on its own, having [card]Grove of the Burnwillows[/card] makes this a bit too oppressive.

[card]Rite of Flame[/card]: Ha, yeah right.

[card]Second Sunrise[/card]: Rather than play a statistically significant amount of matches to determine whether Second Sunrise is safe for unbanning, many Wizards employees would rather kill themselves.

[card]Seething Song[/card]: See also: Rite of Flame.

[card]Sensei’s Divining Top[/card]: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

[card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card]: We talked about her earlier. Ain’t ever happening.

[card]Skullclamp[/card]: The day of Regionals in 2004, I added a few of these to my cleric combo deck. The sheer increase in speed was indescribable. I knew then that this card was never meant to see print as is. You’re lucky they let you play this in Commander.

[card]Sword of the Meek[/card]: Maybe? The fact of the matter is, this combo is not as scary or oppressive as people viewed it before, and the decks it was good in were primarily using it as a back-up plan for Dark Depths. Financially, it’s not a great target since it’s just an uncommon, and the deck is probably not good enough to push out Splinter Twin or other, better combo kills.

[card]Treasure Cruise[/card]: See also: Mental Misstep.

[card]Dig Through Time[/card]: This is some sort of Minority Report precog thing, where Organized Play saw a grim future of Dig Through Time just taking over the Treasure Cruise slot. I strongly doubt either come back.

I have to say, looking at this list and breaking it down card by card, it feels like Wizards has got a better feel for the format a couple years in. I don’t have any major issues with it as is, and nothing on the list desperately feels like it needs to come off. Let’s finish off this bad boy (we had a long one today! [Ed. note: I’ll say]) with some Quick Hits.

http://paulblow.tripod.com/quick-hits.jpg

Quick Hits

One of the undermentioned features of PucaTrade is that you are able to send and receive cards immediately, in terms of prereleases. You can out the stuff you expect to fall, and people can send you what you want so your deck is ready in time for the first FNM! I got a [card]Brutal Hordechief[/card] mailed out at 6 a.m. Saturday morning, and it was here Tuesday.
Speaking of Brutal Hordechief, if you have him, assign blockers to your Heir of the Wilds—then you get to just kill their two or three best dudes.
[card]Golgari Grave-Troll[/card] sets are selling for silly amounts. My-friend-and-local-store-owner Eric and I were watching his get bought up Monday. I do not expect the card to have an immediate impact on the format, but you may see more graveyard decks in your local Modern tournaments. [card]Leyline of the Void[/card] and [card]Rest in Peace[/card] haven’t had big upticks in price, and I doubt they will, but they’re the two best tools for fighting Dredge.
I literally just discovered the card [card]Sudden Reclamation[/card], and I am in love. It doesn’t really go in anything, but I need about 100 JP Foil copies just in case.
Am I the only one guilty of this? I see a card, usually an uncommon, and I think, “Eh, card’s not that good.” Then I see a JP foil copy of that uncommon, and I think, “Hey, maybe that’s a spicy one of!” I am not good at decks.
I always appreciate your feedback!

Best,

Ross

1I hate that DailyMTG updates at 11 AM EST now, EXCEPT for the fact that these announcements are no longer made at midnight.

2Scary to think about how many poor decisions can be made in the wake of success.

Conjured Currency #46: A Modern Modern Format

Douglas Johnson

One of the downsides of my writing deadline being Tuesday evening is that my articles can’t go up until Thursday morning. In a world where a new influx of information causes prices to spike hundreds of percentage points in a matter of hours, a two-day delay is less than helpful for in-the-moment action. This past Monday, Wizards of the Coast announced that [card]Birthing Pod[/card], [card]Treasure Cruise[/card], and [card]Dig Through Time[/card] were banned in Modern. At the same time, [card]Worldgorger Dragon[/card] dusted off its wings to rejoin the Legacy crowd, and [card]Golgari Grave-Troll[/card] (GGT) gets to shamble into Modern decks for the first time since the format’s inception.

This is obviously old news to anyone reading, so there’s not any money to be made buying the two cards that got unbanned. Grave-troll and Dragon both jumped to $10 within hours of being unleashed, and my Duel Deck copies of GGT were quickly selling on TCGplayer for $8 each. Is Dredge a viable deck in Modern without [card]Dread Return[/card]? I have no idea, but I think there’s room for GGT to slowly drop until there’s an actual performing list confirmed at an event.

If there is a graveyard-based deck fueled by GGT, there are some peripheral cards to keep an eye on. [card]Vengevine[/card] is the most obvious one, and already jumped a few dollars from $12 to $15 with the help of some hype-train fuel. I’m still comfortable trading for them at the current price, because there are so many people wanting to brew new lists, and you have an easy out in this wild west format. In the best case scenario, there’s a real deck and you get to jump out at $20 or $25. Worst case scenario, nothing happens and you trade them to the people on PucaTrade who still want to build a tier-two deck because [card]Birthing Pod[/card] is no longer a thing.

PucaPriced

Speaking of PucaTrade, I want to talk for a moment about why using the website to grab currently underpriced cards (or to speculate on future price changes) is not the best use of your time or money. If you’ve never heard of PucaTrade, you can check it out and sign up here, or read this one for a relatively recent and well-thought out article on the “how-to” aspect of the website.

If you saw that [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card] foils were climbing in the weeks prior to the banned and restricted update, you might have looked at their PucaTrade price and thought, “Wow, Alara Reborn foil BBEs are only $3.99 in PucaPoints, but they’re $15 on TCGplayer! I’ll just add them to my want list, and some sucker will ship me those Bloodbraid Elves so I can resell them for a huge profit!”

If you weren’t one of the players with that line of thought, let me explain how that worked out for them: First of all, there’s an extremely low likelihood that many (if any) 399-point Elves were shipped. Why, you ask? Because the one guy who happens to have the card notices on his send-a-card page that there are twenty other users who all want the card at once. That’s enough of an alarm bell for anyone to check the current price of the card, and see what all the fuss is about.

Anyone who ended up not getting those foil BBEs are the lucky ones. On PucaTrade, there’s no setting to remove a card from your want list when the system updates and changes the price of the card. If you had $20 worth of PucaPoints, and wanted five BBEs for the purpose of speculating or flipping, you might be shocked when the system updates while you’re sleeping, and the price correction occurs. Now they’re worth the correct value of 1000 points, and more people are willing to send them. But you didn’t want them to play with, you wanted to speculate. The unlucky players got stuck with normally priced cards that they can’t unload, because the hype is over.

What’s the Next Spike?

Now let’s go back to speculating. Everyone loves speculating, right? The feeling of being correct on a spec is so much fun, everyone wants to be ahead of the trend and one of the cool kids. I’ve mentioned before that I no longer buy cards for speculative purposes, and that’s still true. However, I’ll throw around some ideas on what could happen to the prices of certain cards now that the format got turned upside down.

[card]Bloodghast[/card] seems like an obvious inclusion to the Dredgevine deck, but it’s already $9 on casual graveyard/vampire appeal by itself. To complement that, I believe it’s a strong inclusion possibility in Modern Masters 2015. My belief is that MM15 will involve a heavy landfall theme, complete with Zendikar fetches and a high percentage of Zendikar-block cards, akin to the original MMA’s focus on Future Sight and Suspend. I’m actually selling Bloodghast, and hoping to avoid a reprint bomb this summer. I don’t see much upside to buying in now, especially if nothing comes of the deck

[card]Faithless Looting[/card] foils can be found on TCGplayer for as low as $3, and that just doesn’t seem correct to me. It’s from a small set that wasn’t opened much, it sees play in a couple Legacy and Modern decks, and will be a likely edition to any new brew that features GGT. While there is a comic book promo that hovers around the same price, that promo is not foil. If there’s any deck at all to support Grave-Troll, I can see foil Lootings trending up to $7 to $10. I’d buy them if you’re going to play with them, and trade for them aggressively if you’re looking to speculate.

[card]Snapcaster Mage[/card] was a pretty obvious pick-up with the details of Modern Masters 2015 being revealed, because the cards added to the set stop right before Innistrad. However, Snap has the potential to become even stronger in the new Modern metagame, due to the fact that all of his targets won’t be costing eight or being delved away. These seem like strong pickups via trading at $30 to $33, holding until at least $40.

[card]Animate Dead[/card] is only $1 for its cheapest edition, and it hasn’t moved in the days since the dark day that Pod left this Ear—er, I mean the bannings. It used to be the other piece of the combo with [card]Worldgorger Dragon[/card], where you would make infinite mana by tapping your lands before they were exiled over and over, and eventually do something silly to kill your opponent. That was God knows how many years ago (seriously, I tried a few Google searches and can’t even find how long Worldgorger has been banned), and nowadays we have the ability to put Emrakuls and Griselbrands into play, who just win the game by turning sideways once or twice. I don’t think Worldgorger makes the cut in Legacy anymore, and will go the way of [card]Land Tax[/card]. I don’t recommend speculating on any of the old or new Worldgorger pieces like [card]Entomb[/card], [card]Dance of the Dead[/card], or [card]Necromancy[/card], and sell any Worldgorgers that you have.

Don’t even think about it.

While there are some great speculation targets out there, I’d like to point out that there won’t be anything to replace [card]Birthing Pod[/card]’s slot in the deck. Does that sound obvious to you? It should, but I recently saw a Facebook post on my feed that suggested [card]Yisan, the Wandering Bard[/card] as a spec target to replace Pod in Modern. Please don’t buy copies of that card expecting them to be played. It costs a lot more mana, a lot more time, and is much easier to kill than Pod.

Sleeping Banned Cards

We’ve already learned from past experiences, such as [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] and [card]Bitterblossom[/card], that a card doesn’t have to make an impact on a format to shoot up in price after its unbanning. GGT and Worldgorger were both sleeping in $1 boxes, and weren’t on many people’s radars. They were easy to pick up, and had very low risk of dropping in price during their slumbers. Suddenly, they became easy money and profit. Since we’re already on the subject, let’s take a look at the Modern banned list for cards that also have low risk and might eventually be unbanned.

[card]Sword of the Meek[/card] stands out to me the most in this situation. Back in the day, it was known for comboing with [card]Thopter Foundry[/card] in order to create an engine of flying creatures and life, and being exceedingly hard for aggressive decks to break through. I can imagine that a shell nowadays might include [card]Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas[/card] for an easy tutor package and fast win condition. However, Modern is a format where you can easily get blown out on turn four by [card]Splinter Twin[/card], or torn to pieces by a [card]Delver of Secrets[/card] while having all of your spells denied by cheap countermagic. Even [card]Siege Rhino[/card] will likely trample through the banning of Birthing Pod and live on in an Abzan shell of some sort. I don’t think that the Thopter-Sword combo stands to overshadow this type of metagame, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it come off the banned list at the next update. Although the card is an uncommon, it’s also from Future Sight with no alternate printings. An unbanning could see us into a world of $10 Swords, just like with our rare friends this time around. I’m definitely willing to invest in these in trades at $1 each.

[card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card]. Big Jace. One of the most iconic cards printed in recent memory, Jace never even had a chance to shine in Modern, as he was slapped with a BANNED sticker as soon as the format came to exist. Is that correct? This single topic probably holds enough discussion to produce an entirely separate article, but I’ll keep it to a minimum here. Personally, I don’t think it’s correct for Jace to come off the banned list, and I wouldn’t recommend trading into him expecting him to be unbanned. Even if his power level isn’t oppressive to the format, I’d argue that Wizards doesn’t want another Tarmogoyf-level price running around if they have the ability to contain it. While they can’t ban ‘Goyf at this point, they can take a passive approach to keeping the Mind Sculptor inside his cage.

Predicting Future Bannings

It’s not exactly a secret that I love [card]Birthing Pod[/card], and I’ll admit that I still have quite a few copies that are leaving a bad taste in my mouth right now. I took apart my Modern deck several months ago, but didn’t end up getting rid of very many Pods since then. Whoops. When I pieced out Kiki-Pod, I rationalized that Pod could very well be banned in the Khans of Tarkir update. To support my claim, I looked to the reason that Wizards of the Coast decided to ban [card]Green Sun’s Zenith[/card]:

On turn one, this can give the acceleration of a Llanowar Elves by getting a Dryad Arbor. On later turns, it can get a large creature or a one-of “toolbox” creature such as Gaddock Teeg. While this is interesting, it is also too efficient. If one intends to build a deck that has turn-one accelerants, Green Sun’s Zenith is a great choice. If one wants to more access to utility green creatures, Green Sun’s Zenith is a great choice. If one wants to more reliably get a large green creature, such as a Primeval Titan, onto the battlefield, Green Sun’s Zenith is a great choice. However, this ends up with fewer different decks being played in practice, as Green Sun’s Zenith is such a good choice that there are fewer green decks that do anything else. The DCI hopes that banning Green Sun’s Zenith increases diversity among Modern green decks.

Although Pod can’t tutor on turn one, it certainly spawned its own family of decks over the course of its lifetime: Melira Pod, Kiki-Pod, Spike Feeder Pod, eventually ending up with Rhino Pod. There were only really two or three different green shells in the entire format, and Pod was almost mandatory if you wanted to compete on the highest level of play—similar to how GSZ was in 2011. Looking back, I should have realized that the time for Pod was coming to an end and gotten rid of my copies a long time ago. While hindsight is 20/20, it’s still important to use this information and look towards the future as to what might be banned. That’s nearly impossible to do in a brand new format like this one, but it should still be kept in mind as the format develops. Go back and read the past updates to the banned and restricted lists, and find cards that tend to break the goals that Wizards has set for the format.

Restricting my Word Count

Normally I hate going over 2,000 words for fear of boring my readers, but the banned and restricted list updates are definitely worth going the extra mile for, especially when there’s a lot of interesting information to digest. Do you have a personal spec target based on the result of these bannings? Are you going to tell me to buy Yisan? Do you think JTMS has earned parole? Tell me more.

Commanding Opinion: Stitcher Geralf, Ghoulcaller Gisa, and the Innistrad Storyline

David Rowell

Before I begin, I should introduce myself. I’m David Rowell, formerly SolemnParty over at WinTargetGame, where I began the Commanding Opinion series a few years ago and never quite got to where I wanted to with it. A couple of months ago, the site finally closed down for good. While some of my old articles are at Life… Successfully, Brainstorm Brewery is the new home of my articles. If you want a sneak peak of some of the articles I’ll be uploading here, or if you just want to take a look at my brother’s writing, check the gaming section out.

I’ve been playing Magic only since New Phyrexia—the first event that I ever played in was a New Phyrexia Sealed event that I ended placing eighth out of forty-something people with a decent pool (all I remember for sure is a foil [card]Carnifex Demon[/card] and a [card]Molten-Tail Masticore[/card]). I wasn’t entirely new to competitive card games. I had played Yu-Gi-Oh! for a few years (gave up a little after Synchro Monsters were introduced) and then played the Pokemon TCG competitively for quite a while (which I ended up dropping for Magic due to the erratic rotation cycle of Pokemon).

After that, I played Standard for quite a while, playing junky decks and then finally leaving Standard after the rotation of [card]Birthing Pod[/card], and that’s when I truly got into Commander. My brother bought all five of the original Commander pre-cons, and I immediately fell in love with the format. The first deck I ever built from scratch was a [card]Nicol Bolas[/card] Commander deck (which quickly turned into [card]Sedris, the Traitor King[/card] after playing in a Commander league with that deck and never playing Nicol Bolas). Sometimes I’ve gotten up to 10 decks at one time.

Although I started in New Phyrexia, the first full block I really played was Innistrad. I had just started writing for WinTargetGame when the set was announced, and I was throwing spoilers out like crazy. However, I kept seeing a couple names that never got used to their full potential: Geralf and Gisa. All we knew about them from the set was that they were necromancers, and that Geralf was some kind of Dr. Frankenstein.

Geralf has a uncanny resemblance to this particular version of Frankenstein…

I’ll be doing double duty in these first few installments, talking about both [card]Stitcher Geralf[/card] and [card]Ghoulcaller Gisa[/card]—but I’ll be starting with their stories.

Tell Us About Geralf and Gisa, David

Little is known of their actual origins, besides that Geralf and Gisa are brother and sister who are cousins to [card]Mikaeus, the Lunarch[/card]. They were essentially two sides of a coin: Geralf embodied the blue aspect of Innistrad’s zombies by being a mad scientist, stitching corpses together to his own ends, while Gisa was a necromancer, just animating bodies to torment the living.

The flavor of Innistrad’s blue-black zombie tribe was to encompass all different kinds of zombies. The blue aspect was that of Frankenstein: beings stitched together from corpses and given life through lightning or magic. These zombies tended to be stronger and more intelligent, as the stitcher can use only the best materials if they so wish. The black aspect was that of the more modern zombies: the slow, shambling zombies of Dawn of the Dead that just exist to kill the living.

Before the siege of Thraben, Geralf and Gisa simply played games, called the Moorland Necrowars. They waged their necromantic armies against each other to see who the better ruler of the undead was. Seeing as there were no deaths (well, aside from those necessary to make the zombies and skaabs), these really were practically games. Of course, any living humans in the way would be turned into more corpses for future contests. But eventually, the siblings moved beyond simple fun and games.

Together, they agreed to take down one of the few sanctuaries for living human kind: Thraben. They created Grimgrin, a giant zombie the height of two men that easily took down the gates of Thraben by himself. Their goal was to conquer the city and to kill [card]Mikaeus, the Lunarch[/card], so that Geralf could become the ruler of Thraben itself.

This plan failed. [card]Thalia, Guardian of Thraben[/card], managed to rally her forces and fight back the undead overcoming the city. Sadly, [card]Mikaeus, the Lunarch[/card] was still killed by Geralf, but the city was in no state for him to take it for himself. At this point, he met [card]Liliana Vess[/card], who showed great interest in the corpse of the Lunarch. Being a necromancer, we can already assume where that led.

But enough of that. Let’s talk about the cards.

How Good are They?

[card]Stitcher Geralf[/card] is a 3/4 legendary human wizard for 3UU. Solid typing, stats, and costing. 3UU is a little on the high side for a commander, but his deck doesn’t need to revolve around him. His ability is unique, but similar to Gisa’s: for 2U and tap, each player sends the top three cards of their decks to the graveyard, and then you can exile up to two creature cards milled this way to stitch together a zombie with power and toughness equal to the total power of the creatures exiled this way.

One thing to note about this ability is that you can exile eldrazi with it before they are able to shuffle back into the library. Overall, Geralf is a pretty solid mill commander compared to something like [card]Amabassador Laquatus[/card], who isn’t bad, but isn’t anything special, either.

From a flavor standpoint, I really like the fact that Geralf literally stitches the zombie tokens together from the creatures that are milled with his ability. It captures his Frankenstein vibe really well. The only problem I have is that he is mono-blue—there are so few mono-blue zombies that a zombie tribal deck with him as a Commander isn’t very good, and blue also tends to have the smallest (and least) creatures when it comes to any mono-colored deck. He works well alongside his sister, though.

[card]Ghoulcaller Gisa[/card] was revealed before her brother, and I like her a little bit more.

For 3BB, you get a 3/4 Legendary Human Wizard—the same stats as her brother, she’s just black instead of blue. Her ability is also pretty decent, like her brother’s. For B, tap, sacrifice a creature, you get a number of 2/2 zombie creatures equal to the power of the creature you sacrificed.

Again, I love the flavor of this card. Gisa just wants as many zombies as possible to overwhelm humanity, rather than stitching fewer, stronger zombies together.

She actually works very well with her brother: he makes a huge zombie with his ability, and then Gisa breaks his huge zombie down into a ton of 2/2 zombies. I’m not exactly sure how two things stitched together give rise to a whole ton of things not stitched together, but I”m not going to complain about flavor when the synergy is so powerful.

In the few installments, we’ll be talking about the individual commanders, and after that, what they can do together.

Until next time,

–David Rowell

Diary of a Former-but-Relapsing Competitive Player

Ryan Bushard

A little-known fact about me: I am not much of a writer. Growing up, everything came fairly easy to me in terms of school. A perfect storm of introversion and private schools during my elementary years made the remainder a bit of a cake walk once I moved to a rural public school. College taught me a few lessons about how to formulate thoughts and process what I can only declare as a circus that runs through my head when I go to type.

Fast forward a few years to a chance meeting with Kelly Reid, at that point an orchestrator of an idea and vision in the form of Quiet Speculation. I found Kelly to be one of the more fascinating people I had met within the finance community. After our first encounter, I touched base with him again, and the results can be found in the archives of both Quiet Speculation and Gathering Magic. Before this point, I was more of a limited PTQ grinder who utilized Magic as a way to fund his hobby—and sometimes himself during rough times. Over the years, I have grown more distant from Kelly, but if he reads this, I just want to tip my hat in his direction for getting me motivated and in some way thank him for what I have now.

I knew how the game worked, and though I am not savvy with technology in most senses, I was very good at being who I needed to be at that point, and an online presence was not that far of a stretch. I have rarely been the best at many things—I tend to excel in most areas of life but rarely master more than what is needed to be proficient. I don’t believe I will ever be a world champion or the leading role in anything, but I will be there competing. Even if I may not be the best in the room, I understand how to study situations and derive the best odds of success.

This idea that I will likely never be the top dog is a major part of what drove me from Magic competitively in the first place: the idea that I had finally gotten to the Pro Tour and fell short of anything but mediocrity. After a conversation and a weekend of bad beats, I brought things back around as I always seem to manage, and began expanding Magic finance to be more than just a hobby. I have found a sense of love for this game and this community I did not fully realize while I lived it all those years as a kid.

As a quick aside for anyone who does not visit card shops on a regular basis or takes issue with a kid hanging out there too often, I beg you to reassess the situation. It is one thing if you do not have time, but if you believe you enjoy Magic enough to want to share that concept, I urge you to visit an LGS on a semi-regular basis. The first time I walked into a real game store, now long since closed, I remember taking it all in, everything from the Spawn action figures to the wall of comics. Though I was entranced in the moment, it was not until much later I would realize just how much this place would mean to me. Though most of these people will fade from your life, it is amazing how many will remain. Even after Magic fades from the forefront, these friends will still be there. It has been a number of years now since I have been a regular patron of any one store, but there were periods of my life that I spent more time in those stores than at home or work: it just begins to feel more comfortable.

Given my clear enthusiasm for the group of people I now call friends, and for every other group out there just like us, that is what has kept me going all these years. I still in many ways love the game. I just put a Commander deck together to start playing again and managed to make a PTQ this weekend. Which, as it happens, is what has brought me once again to this place: the keyboard beckons.

When I decided to quit, I stashed most of my reasoning away, it was easy to claim that I just found finance to be more profitable, and believe me, it is. The honest truth is that I did not think I had what it took to be at the top level of play at that point in my life. I still do not believe I will ever be the first rank or even the second, but these past five years of refocus have taught me a great deal about myself as a competitor. I do not want to turn this into a tournament report, but I think a few things clicked this weekend and the moments require some insight into what I have been doing as a competitive player.

Anyone who reads my series on Gathering Magic already knows that I have been changing some of my focus from the world of finance back to the more competitive scene. This started as a bit of an experiment to liven up the series. No one needs basic lessons anymore, and for everything else I can teach, so few people would be able to utilize the information that it hardly demands a regular series. I figured if I started to play more Magic Online, I would be a little more in tune with the average player as far as Standard pricing was concerned.

Though my series has certainly helped me, and everyone else I hope, it has also given my competitive nature a taste of the game again and, as anticipated, it had a bit of cabin fever. The first outlet was to get a Standard deck built. I had not realized this before finding U/W Heroic, but I don’t know that I have ever played a Standard net deck that fit my play style until now. Who would have thought I would be mimicking Craig Wescoe when I am such a diehard combo player? But this is something I can get behind. I always used to be a strictly Limited player until Pro Tour Kyoto when I was forced to pick up Boat Brew having never played a game before getting on the plane. I borrowed the deck from a friend, as I was a broke college kid, and it went about as well as one could hope given how little experience I had.

I am not terrible at Constructed. In fact, I am likely better at Constructed than Limited if given the right deck. Any Legacy combo will keep me interested, and finding lines of play that do not seem plausible or calculating odds and mana is right up my alley. Of course, it is rare we get a playable combo in Standard so when Jeskai Ascendency combo was revealed, I was instantly locked in. Then, between a few hundred games and some rough beats with the deck, I switched to U/W and up until this weekend, have just been running well online quietly.

Then on Friday night, Ray Perez convinced me to go play in FNM. It was nice to be back in that shop atmosphere again. Over the past year, I have not had much access or time, so I was grateful for the opportunity, and I believe that lent itself well to my mood going into Saturday.

The early morning feeling of being half dead as you drag yourself to the car for the two-hour drive is one you will always hate in the moment but miss down the road. As I managed to fight the urge to sleep much more, we talked shop and got crazy in the car on our way to Fort Wayne. In these moments, I regret nothing. There may or may not have been some twisted version of karaoke, or whatever you want to call it.

On site, we got locked in and after walking the vendor line, it was clear I was solely here to play—no need to work this weekend. I managed to dispatch my first opponent without much issue and my confidence finally hit a little bit of a spike. Up until that point, I have kind of looked at myself as this washed-up player who quit years ago: we are our own toughest critics, they say.

From this point, I remember getting rocked two rounds in a row. The first was by old-school Jeskai: [card]Mantis Rider[/card]s, Stormbreaths, and the ilk. I pulled out game one but lost two and three while having him near lethal both games. I always feel like I made a mistake if my opponent beats me while at one, but I have replayed this game in my head more than Nassif’s topdeck, and I cannot find it.

The next round, I had to make a few mulligans and dropped two quick games to what I have decided is the toll of playing my list. I found that I regularly drop a game out of every twenty or so to the fact that my land count is so low. This leads to excessive mulligans, and in this case, they sadly both managed to be in the same round.

This was the real breaking point for me. I was certainly out of top eight given how bad my breaks would be, but I realized I didn’t care. A few months ago, I played an event and quickly dropped after falling from contention in the first few rounds. Disappointed and ashamed, I went to work when I got home, testing like crazy. This event, however, I wanted to play. I felt like I made no play mistakes in either match and was not ready to call it there. From that point, I rallied and ended 5-2: enough for thirteenth place. Sure, it wasn’t the top eight I was hoping for, but if it was going to be my last run, it was at least respectable.

With each Ordeal played correctly and each bluffed counter, I felt myself gaining more confidence. Much like the power and toughness of the creatures I was voltroning, so too did my confidence grow. I announced every trigger (a skill these past few years of Magic Online has helped with), I managed every point of damage, and I saw lines I would have otherwise missed, given how little play time I normally have with a deck. By the end of the day, even with the disappointment the morning brought, I was the second best in the car on the way home. That thought inspired me to do better next time, but I did not let not being first-best consume me. We exchanged stories, enjoyed impromptu karaoke again, and found ourselves back home.

The truth is the passion to play has never faded. Every time I hear the announcement for round one pairings, part of me mentally wanders to go check for my name. I always quickly snap to reality, but it never fails: for that split second, I remember the rush.

This weekend brought more than just that back. It also brought an understanding I lacked five years ago: sometimes showing up to compete is all that matters. Before, I did not just want to play—I had to win. That mentality was unhealthy and was a burden I put on myself. Plain and simple, I quit enjoying the game. For the past five years, I have driven myself from situations in which that matters, taking up new hobbies I know I cannot be the best at and focusing on work.

But it has all come full circle now. I feel it may be time to give it another shot. I no longer need to work 70 hours a week or go to every event to work. I do not know that I have what it takes to compete again at the highest levels, but I know if I spend enough time dedicated to working on it, I can at the very least find out. For me, it is no longer about winning, it is about finding my passion for the game itself again—something I have been missing for a many years.

I do not know how I will move forward with this. Perhaps a new series or maybe a new podcast, but I know the only way I will dedicate myself to something is to write it down and get it done. As much as I am writing this to help readers, it is also something I’m doing to inspire myself. I do not intend to be the best in the world, and I am alright with that now. I just feel that I knew there would come a time and a place for me to start again—no one quits forever.

I have an understanding of competitive Magic outside of the percentages. No longer do I feel the need to win with my own brew. The drive to win is not there in the same capacity, but it is crawling out of the cellar, slowly. I do not know that I will move toward the PPTQ scene, as that is a bit rough on my schedule, but I will be looking to play in more Opens this coming year. It will take some time to knock the rust off, and I have wavered greatly this past year on if this is even what I wanted, but after this weekend, I don’t think I can sit back and play casual Magic any longer.

Blackhat

Jason Alt

A taut, cat-and-mouse tech thriller set in the aftermath of a fictional but plausible attack on a Chinese nuclear reactor, Michael Mann’s Blackhat is easily the most underrated movie of 2015. The January release of the film makes it easy to make such a declaration, but a combination of trailer that was far from compelling and its release in January, historically a graveyard for mediocre film projects (the exception being the critically-lauded American Sniper which became the second film in a week to become the “highest grossing January release ever” after the banal and predictable Taken 3) have all but condemned the film to obscurity. The film deserved better, but its release speaks to Hollywood’s tiring of Michael Mann’s shtick as much as the merits of the film itself.

Love it or hate it, Michael Mann has a shtick. His penchant for formulaic protagonists and an almost pathological adherence to the same major plot points have earned him both acclaim as a technically proficient and successful director and also, as Slate film critic Daniel Engber put it so eloquently, “Hollywood’s greatest hack.” In Engber’s view, the greatest feat of hacking in Blackhat isn’t accomplished at a computer terminal but rather behind the camera. Is Engber right? Well, yes, and I’m not going to argue that. That’s actually not an altogether bad thing.

The word “hack” has negative connotation but there is a bit more nuance to its use than is typically applied. The dictionary definition of a hack is “a writer or journalist producing dull, unoriginal work”. It’s impossible to discuss Mann’s work, even to laud him, without confronting the fact that it’s not terribly original. After all, being discussed is a director who literally made the same movie twice; 1989’s made-for-TV film LA Takedown amounted to little more than the rough draft for the full-length motion picture that was released as 1995’s Heat, a film that earned both critical acclaim and $70 million at the box office in the United States alone. Not content with the legacy of Miami Vice as one of the 1980s most entertaining television series Mann inspired himself to make a Miami Vice motion picture, set in 2006 and complete with a modern cover to Genesis’ “In the air tonight”, the musical backdrop to one of the television program’s most memorable scenes. The film hardly broke new ground or tied up loose ends, rather it was a cash-grab reboot of the series which ran from 1984-1990 which banked on appealing to nostalgia. Bank on nostaliga it did, grossing $63 million domestically (impressive but less than half of its reported $135 million runaway budget). If all Michael Mann seems to want to do is tell the same story over and over again, why do we keep letting him?

The answer is that even though Mann relies on a lot of the same tropes and tricks, it’s unfair to say he hasn’t matured as a filmmaker. Nowhere is that more evident than in Blackhat, a film that applies the “Mann filter” to the most ambitious story to date. Rather than chronicle the activities of a police department trying to catch drug runners and pimps or detail the “catch me if you can” story of a medium-time crook and the cops who want to nail him (a trope seen in 1981’s Thief, 1986’s Manhunter and, most famously, 1995’s Heat) Blackhat is the story of a grandiose world domination plot that spans the entire globe. In a lot of ways the complexity of the story shows development in the kinds of projects Mann wants to tackle and in others, Blackhat feels like branching too far out of his comfort zone makes it seem like he is in over his head.

Make no mistake; Blackhat is vintage Mann. All of his signatures are present from his gorgeous, helicopter-assisted establishing shots of the vibrant lights of a bustling metropolis cutting through the night sky to his use of a crescendo of synthesizer music to punctuate pauses in conversation, especially when the male protagonist first meets the love interest. The film is an ecstatic visual feast and every scene in the 148 minutes is integral to the plot even if every shot is not. No one sets a mood better than Mann who has mastered the art of using low-light filters and a lot of nighttime shots to make even a city as large as Los Angeles seem utterly abandoned and the characters in it utterly alone. Mann’s up to all of his old tricks and fans of his work will feel right at home in the mood he creates, a real feat if you consider how the backdrop shifts rapidly to cities all around the globe, a real departure from his conventional film which is usually encapsulated in one major city. As much as a lot of the film felt old and familiar, though, a lot felt new, and that wasn’t always a good thing.

Tom Cruise in Collateral

Blackhat centers around a sudden cyber attack on a nuclear facility and the involvement of the one man who can bring the perpetrator to justice; played by “Thor” himself, Chris Hemsworth. Hemsworth’s Nick Hathaway is in the physical condition of his life and up-to-date on all of the latest technological advancements despite spending years locked in a maximum security prison, a facility which doesn’t manage to stop him from using a smuggled cell phone to get up to hijinks like hacking into the prison’s commissary to pad the balances of himself and his friends. As adept a hacker as ever, Hathaway is also lethal in hand to hand combat and nearly indestructible which he demonstrates in scenes where he fights off several armed thugs in a Chinese restaurant or survives the extreme heat of the control room in the damaged nuclear reactor while everyone else is succumbing to heat stroke. This is familiar fare for Hemsworth who is used to portraying the omnipotent, handsome lead in Hollywood movies who can shrug off bullets and keep his hair perfectly coiffed. It’s unfamiliar ground for Mann, though, a director who is used to keeping the odds more heavily stacked against the protagonist. The real threat to Hathaway in Blackhat is uncertainty and the knowledge that if he fails to bring the perpetrator to justice, his chances of getting his prison sentence commuted vanish.

DeNiro in Heat

It’s apparent that Mann is in unfamiliar territory with the story arc of the character and Hathaway is treated differently than almost any Mann film protagonist ever. Two of the best Mann protagonists are undoubtedly Collateral’s Vincent played by Tom Cruise and Heat‘s Neil McCauley played by Robert DeNiro (though Mann borrowed the name “Vincent” from Pacino’s Heat character, Detective Vincent Hanna; he borrows from himself quite a bit). Part of what made those characters so compelling was the dispassionate way Mann told the story from the side of the criminal and how his refusal to condemn those characters cloaked them in a kind of moral ambiguity. Mann went even farther, cloaking them in a costume that personified the moral grey area quite literally. The characters in both Heat and Collateral wear an identical grey suit in a not-so-subtle blurring of the line between black and white, good and evil.

No such nuance exists in Blackhat’s Hathaway who spends the entire film clad in clean, pastel shirts and khakis that make him look more like a cashier at Banana Republic than a convicted computer hacker doing hard time in a super max when he’s not getting out on furlough to engage in hand-to-hand combat with thugs and foil global terrorism plots.

Speaking of the terrorism plot, it’s a much more ambitious premise than Mann’s used to tackling and feels more like it should have been left up to James Bond to thwart, not an MIT dropout and his college roommate. The sheer grandiosity of the plot that reveals itself slowly as the heroes chip away at its layers and try to get to its heart feels like an unwelcome departure from Mann’s usual fare. I was reminded of the movie Adaptation where Charlie Kauffman created a fictional twin brother to represent the desire to take the easy way out and make the boring, formulaic plot that Hollywood wanted. In a way, Michael Mann has discarded one predictable formula for another, and it looks unlikely that he’ll be rewarded at the box office for his efforts.

It’s not all “bad new”, though. As much as the film centers around the prototypical, indestructible Hollywood badass, the film’s love interest played by Wei Tang is a radical departure from Mann’s typical device of using the female love interest as an Achilles Heel. Wei Tang is Hathaway’s partner as well as lover and her involvement in the unraveling of the sinister plot serves to focus Hathaway and remind him that the stakes are incredibly high if he should fail. The bad guy gets away, he goes back to prison and to quote another character in the film, Wei Tang’s brother Chen played by Leehom Wang, “what kind of life would that be for her?” Not only is Wei the most three-dimensional female character Mann’s ever portrayed, this may be the first of Mann’s films that passes the Bechdel Test.

Blackhat’s biggest crime of all is its trailer. Audiences were turned off by a trailer that attempted to summarize an intricate plot but instead served to marginalize it. It got across the point that this was a movie about a “Blackhat hacker named Hathaway” but not that it’s not not the formulaic “hack the Gibson” movie that they’re expecting. The problem? It is kind of the formulaic “hack the Gibson” movie that they’re expecting, and there isn’t enough footage in the movie to disabuse people of that notion with a better trailer. As awkward as Mann felt with Hemsworth’s nigh-invincible Ubermensch hacker who can also kung fu fight he’s even less comfortable extolling the virtues of his own work in the trailer and ticket sales have suffered greatly with a disappointing $4 million opening weekend for a movie with a $100 million budget. Chris Hemsworth is a box office draw, but not in every context.

In a lot of ways, Hemsworth is even more of a liability than all that. He’s not believable as an MIT-educated computer hacker any more than he’s believable as someone who won’t spend the whole movie punching faces. Those who give the movie a chance beyond the trailer are treated to Hemsworth using the same look on his face to regard a difficult puzzle as he does his female costar; a look that comes off more bewildered than pensive. Instead of looking like he’s concentrating on divining the significance of a signal transmitter he finds in a potted plant he looks like a Chimpanzee examining an iPad for the first time. Hemsworth’s involvement in the film only seeks to give the film’s detractors more ammunition, and it doesn’t help that it sounds like he took American-accent elocution lessons from John Wayne. Mann gambled with Hemsworth’s box office cachet and lost.

All in all, Blackhat is a very enjoyable film. It’s hard to know whether Mann was thrown off course by a predictable Hollywood plot written by Morgan Davis Foehl or if he made it his own and gave it his thumbprint. What is clear is that this is a beautiful and carefully-crafted film. While long at 148 minutes, it’s also dense and engaging and doesn’t drag on like many films of similar lengths might. Whether you consider Mann being a hack a good thing or a bad one (It might be fairly obvious that I don’t mind if he only knows how to make one movie because I love that movie), Blackhat is one of the year’s best efforts so far and well worth the investment of your time. On a scale from 1-10, I give it a B-

Privileged Perspective 11 – The Combine: Fate Reforged Edition

Ross Lennon

I like a lot of games, but very few are able to truly grab the full focus of my attention (a side-effect of attention deficit disor—*checks Twitter*). Magic, first and foremost, is one of those games: its pull on me is so powerful that it has singlehandedly pulled me away from other games like World of Warcraft. There is another game, however, that is able to enrapture me for weeks on end, and that is professional football.

Many sports get kind of a bum rap in nerd communities, which is unfortunate. Football especially is often considered a “meathead” sport, where a bunch of idiots smack into each other chasing a ball—probably because to many non-fans, much of their exposure is high school football (which is terrible). In actuality, football, especially at its highest level, has a lot in common with strategy games like Magic: you evaluate your team’s strengths and weaknesses, exploiting opponent deficiencies while minimizing your own. Even though many players may play the same position, their individual skills and attributes can be radically different ([card]Siege Rhino[/card] and [card]Polukranos[/card] are both green four-drops, but don’t always belong in the same deck).

Just like when new cards enter the public sphere, new football players undergo intense scrutiny. The athletes leaving college go through a series of interviews and exercises called the “NFL Combine,” and are then drafted (or not!) by NFL teams. Today, we are going to give Fate Reforged cards the NFL Combine treatment, and joining me today are three NFL legends to evaluate this class of rookies:

AJANI GRUDEN: Mr. Gruden is the former head coach of both the Oakland Raiders and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which is a statement that becomes less and less impressive every year. He is perhaps best known for being one of the current analysts for ESPN’s Monday Night Football, as well as being “Gary Busey level” insane. He is also an anthropomorphic cat planeswalker from Lorwyn or whatever.

PHIL SIMMIC: Many consider the quarterback position to be the most intellectually and athletically challenging of any position in all of sports. That Phil Simms was able to succeed there is a strong argument to the contrary. He is currently breathing loudly with his mouth open on CBS.

EMBERSMITH: Hall-of-Fame running back Emmitt Smith helped the Dallas Cowboys win three Super Bowls during his fifteen-year career. He is also the least articulate human being on planet Earth.

Together, the four of us will review some of the more intriguing cards in the new set, as well as some Twitter requests. May God help us all.

[card]Mastery of the Unseen[/card], as requested by @ChasAndres:

This is probably one of the more difficult cards in the set to grade. If red decks are a problem at your FNMs, then you can probably skip ahead. But if this format slows down, then this could be somewhere between “Card Advantage Engine” and “Takes Over Games By Itself.” Many of the Ux control decks have had trouble playing significant threats, but this lets you just tick out guys at the end of their turn and eventually just get there. There’s also the possibility of building around this in a deck with actual creatures, but it could just as likely be a control mirror trump that lets you sandbag your counters and draw spells. I’m personally still not on the Trail of Mystery/Hooded Hydra/Master of Pearls hype train, but those people are out there and they will return—and in greater numbers.

[card]Sage’s Reverie[/card], as requested by @LochCorrigan:

You know he says crap like this all the time, right? Like, briefly breaking the fourth wall or whatever, but Phil Simms spews useless filler like this all the time. Even on Madden, he’ll be like, “And it’s always better to win the game than to lose it!” like we somehow didn’t know that. I don’t know what’s going on with the Giants, but all of their best QBs seem to have the IQ of a rock.

[card]Sage’s Reverie[/card] is an obvious foil target for Uril, Bruna (or whichever of those angels it is), and a few other decks. I don’t think there are enough auras seeing play right now (bestow aside, which is difficult to predict) to get this to see Constructed use. Financially, this set would have to be ludicrously under-opened for non-foils to have any real value, and even then, they are best in decks that only want one. Even if this gets picked up by Bogles players in Modern, it won’t be enough to drive them outside of foil.

[card]Crux of Fate[/card]:

This was one of the first cards we saw from Fate Reforged, and I have been salivating over it ever since. While dragon is definitely getting pushed in terms of flavor and ASFAN (did I spell that right? Is there a hyphen somewhere?), it’s still going to be a top-heavy creature type in terms of converted mana cost. This is mostly going to kill non-dragons, and then your mix of [card]Hero’s Downfall[/card]s, [card]Utter End[/card]s, or [card]Murderous Cut[/card]s will deal with any creatures that you can’t counter after that. It’s worth noting that against a deck like Abzan Aggro, this is just a [card]Wrath of God[/card]. It’s even better if you somehow have a Dragon out! I think the 3/7 hexproof dragon is too slow to be a control finisher, but maybe the UW one could see play? It costs seven, which is where [card]Pearl Lake Ancient[/card] sits on the curve, but it’s easier to kill. More importantly, this card is good. Next!

[card]Warden of the First Tree[/card]:

I was really hard on this guy at first, and I am not too proud to admit I was wrong for the first time in my life. This card is not terrible, he is just misleading (and possibly okay but not great). The obvious comparison here is to [card]Figure of Destiny[/card], a Red Deck Hall of Fame enshrinee who has a very similar mechanical structure. I’ve played with Figure of Destiny, and I can tell you this man is no Figure of Destiny. In actuality, [card]Warden of the First Tree[/card] is more of a 3 or 7 drop, who can sometimes sneak in when you have otherwise unused mana on earlier turns (I played Abzan Aggro for the first time last week, and there were a definitely few turns where I had to pass with a useless G open). His top end is obviously better than Figure of Destiny, but everywhere else along the scale he is about the same or worse. If you are able to activate him more than once, you are probably winning the game, but you may never have to as long as he is played in just the best good stuff decks of the format. Color me cautiously optimistic.

Tasigur, the Golden Fang:

…What?

Anyway, this is probably one of the biggest wild cards of the set—delve influences our traditional evaluations of converted mana costs, but it’s very situationally dependent. This guy could seriously cost anywhere from B to 6. The earlier you cast him, the more likely you are to lean on the fact that he’s a 4/5, which is certainly a Tarmogoyf statistic (although since our new friend is legendary, you can’t rely on two of them doing clean-up duty). Later in the game, he becomes a very weird pseudo card-advantage engine: mana-intensive and random, but repeatable and somewhat controllable through delving. This guy certainly has Commander appeal (I’d play him), but it is almost impossible to come up with more than best-case scenarios for him at this point. I expect he will get a lot of practice reps from players to try and evaluate his intangibles, and maybe see some significant playing time his rookie season.

[card]Soulfire Grand Master[/card]:

I honestly have to assume that part of the inspiration for this card was putting an Xzibit meme on a white creature. This card almost feels tailor-made for the white-red deck Mike Flores was pumping on Top Level Podcast a few weeks back, where you are just able to pick up incidental value off the life gain, and then eventually have the last ability on SGM allow you to loop your burn spells as a way to end possible stalled board states. I don’t think this card is a major pillar of the format, and I don’t think the last ability will make or break many significant games, but there will always be attractive financial value on him as long as that middle ability remains unique in Magic.

One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is that this could maybe see sideboards in Modern burn, since they are already splashing white for Boros Charm and Lightning Helix. I don’t know enough about that list or its mirror tech to say for sure, but if it is ever going to be a slam dunk in Modern, it’ll be in the burn deck.

[card]Grave Strength[/card]:

If you’ve learned anything about me by now, you probably know that I have a strong predilection for graveyard synergies. This card is certainly something that is up my alley, and could be another push towards letting [card]Nighthowler[/card] end the second half of his playing career with some sustained success (which I guess makes Nighthowler Larry Fitzgerald). Three cards is not major in terms of fueling these types of decks, but by stapling it on a card that is good at multiple phases in the game (sometimes you just want to make your Elf a 2/2 or a 3/3 early on, or late game you want one big swing), it’s definitely good enough to start as a four-of in my lists. I expect the foils to look insane.

[card]Mob Rule[/card]:

Just me this time. I just wanted to point out that this card shares it’s name with a Dio (well, technically Black Sabbath) album. That is all.

[card]Orc Sureshot[/card]:

CAUSE YOU CAN’T YOU WON’T AND YOU DON’T STOP.

[card]Brutal Hordechief[/card]:

I really think this guy is awesome. He makes the black aggro decks respectable on his own, and is probably good enough to steal a couple slots in Abzan Aggro. The first ability is great at messing with combat math, as well as giving you the occasional free drain for three or so, and should not be underrated. The last ability is very mana intensive (and possibly just unobtainable for the Black Aggro lists), but it will be a clear game breaker in the Abzan Aggro mirror. By forcing bad blocks, you can choose to wrath their board (or make the most favorable trades) while still getting damage in off the first ability, or you can assign all their blockers to your smallest guy and end the game by everyone else getting through! Either one will be a realistic play depending on the life total and hand size of your opponent, and I seriously expect this guy to do some major work in the format. I wish he was a rare so I could get my four for cheap right away, but he is way too good.

[card]Ghostly Conscription[/card], as requested by @Lowbeyonder:

I think this will ultimately be another good-but-not-Great black Commander card, where the foil copies will maintain a premium,while the regular ones sink to near bulk-mythic price. A lot is made of the fact that you probably won’t be able to get the full value out of flipping the manifested cards, but I think that if you look at the card as a graveyard hoser plus army in a can, then the ability to possibly flip some is just upside. Black has few massive token generators ([card]Army of the Damned[/card] and [card]Empty the Pits[/card] come to mind), but they are always swingy and demand an instant answer. If that’s your thing, then this is a good card—just don’t bother trying to make this work in Standard.

[card]Plains[/card], as requested by @HRSlaton:

I hate you so damn much.

~~~

Well everybody, just like Peyton Manning, we are done! Thanks for reading to those of you that actually made it this far, and I will see you next week!

Brainstorm Brewery #131 – Fate Reforged Set Review with Conley Woods

Brainstorm Brewery 1:35:08

Fate Reforged set review with Conley Woods (@Conley81)

Cabe Riseau produced the intro and outro music for Brainstorm Brewery.

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Conjured Currency #45: Pack to Square One

Douglas Johnson

Have you ever heard of the phrase “Pack to Power”? For those who are new to the world of Magic finance, or just never came across the term, let me explain. Back in April of 2010, Jonathan Medina (known to some as one of the forefathers of the Magic finance lifestyle), began an article series on Gathering Magic called Pack to Power.

Basically, he wanted to open a single booster pack (at the time the most recent set was Rise of the Eldrazi), and trade the contents of that booster pack as a bubble collection separate from his own inventory, eventually picking up a piece of the Power Nine. He wasn’t allowed to accept charity cards to increase the value of his “pack” collection, and he wasn’t allowed to rip off unknowing/new players. On August 27, 2010, the final installment of his series went up, where he showcased his newly acquired [card]Mox Pearl[/card]. He had turned a $4 investment into a piece of the Power Nine. Aspiring Magic financiers around the world were in shock: if he could do it, why couldn’t they? It couldn’t be that hard to continuously grind for value—it was like free money!

Author’s aside: Looking back at some of those prices is just mindblowing. $10 [card]Vendilion Clique[/card] and $8 Inferno Titan[/card]? [card]Chains of Mephistopheles[/card] at barely over $50?

Now about $350…

From $10-$70. Will it be in MM2015?

Currently sitting in my $1 rare box, waiting for an EDH player

Unfortunately, it wasn’t free money. While some other players managed to replicate the project (sometimes with their own sets of rules only loosely based on Medina’s), it eventually tapered off as smartphones became a staple of the Magic trading floor. It became a much rarer instance to use one of Medina’s trademark phrases, “What do you value this at?” when the truth was a few button clicks away instead of having to rely purely on price memory. Knowledge of casual gems became less of a way to make massive jumps in value, so you can no longer trade for $10 [card]Mana Reflections[/card] because you knew the Standard player thought they were bulk rares.

While Pack to Power is now more commonly seen as a “this is a thing some guy did almost five years ago” piece of Magic history, attempts to complete the project have not entirely died down to zero. Newer players enjoy hearing war stories like this one, and think, “I could do that.” Just recently, I saw a post on Facebook in one of the “Buy/Sell/Trade” groups, where a player was attempting to do a Pack to Power project, through the mail. He posted a picture of his binder page to Facebook containing a bulk rare from Khans of Tarkir, an uncommon Charm, a foil common card, and a token. He also made absolute sure that everyone knew he was doing a Pack to Power, and everyone should “help him out to finish the project.”

Yes, that’s a bad idea

I can already feel what you’re thinking. I can taste the disgust in the future when this goes live on Thursday. “Why on earth should I give this guy value and trade through the mail just so he can fail his pack to power two weeks in when he runs out of money for stamps?”

The answer is simple: you shouldn’t. I’ve only actually traded with a few people who were trying to complete this project on the floor of an event, and none of them were a very pleasant experience. The phrases, “Come on, buddy,” and “Help me out here,” were thrown around more often than I was comfortable with, and at one point one of them even added a card from his own collection into the pile I was getting, and then put [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card] that I gave him into his pack to power binder, breaking one of the cardinal rules. Now that smartphones exist, it’s much more rare for players to misvalue their own cards, or accept a number that strays too far from what their phone says is even. And that’s a good thing.

This is Not a Green Light

Now, there might be a select few of you reading this who are thinking, “Wow, that Jon Medina guy is a legend. I sure want to be like him when I grow up. I think that this article DJ is writing is a great way for me to learn what not to do when I do my P2P, because I’m not a jerk and I’ll be the best there ever was!”

I’m writing this paragraph to tell you that doing a P2P nowadays isn’t worth it. Stop now, before you start. It’s not just because of my poor experience with those who have tried, either. Isolating the contents of a single booster pack and trying to turn them into a piece of the Power Nine (or any other high-dollar card) just isn’t worth it for you, financially or time-wise.

Time is Money

It took Medina from April until August to turn $4 worth of Magic cards into his Mox Pearl, valued at $360 (how times have changed). That was over four months of constant binder grinding, looking for value, and using questionable trade tactics to slowly accumulate value.

Now that we live in smartphone land and more players than ever are up to date on the financial side of the game, it would take infinitely longer for you to finish the project. Power costs a lot more money now, you probably don’t have the reputation that Medina did back in the day, and your margins will be thinner on every single trade. It’ll take way too long, just for the bragging rights of getting a gold star to hang on your fridge at home.

Juggling Collections

For the entirety of his project, Medina kept his “pack” in an entirely separate bubble from his real inventory, so as to not contaminate the exercise. If someone wanted one card from each collection, he would have to make two separate trades, which became awkward if the values in the person’s binder didn’t make that possible. If player A wants one card from each of your collections that costs $15, and the only thing in his binder worth anything is a [card]Snapcaster Mage[/card], what do you do? This is a trade that would be a lot easier if the P2P wasn’t getting in your way, especially since Snapcaster is looking like a pretty juicy pickup due to the fact that it can’t be included in Modern Masters 2015.

Modern Value Trading

While the wild west days of “What do you value this at?” and “I think this is worth X, do you agree?” are pretty much dead and gone, there’s still room to make that invisible “value” on trades that we financiers enjoy. It doesn’t have to rip off your trade partner, and both parties can walk home happy. You don’t have to shout to the world that you’re doing a pack to power project for people to toss in free value, or any other sort of similar project.

For example, if you tend to buylist cards back to stores a lot when you’re not using them, you can trade for cards based on the buylist price. Two different cards might both be $10 based on the TCG mid, but one of them probably has a higher buylist price than the other. If you were going to sell to that buylist anyway, trade for the card that will give you a higher cash value. Your trade partner didn’t lose anything, and you got more actual money out of the deal.

Alternatively, you can act as your own personal buylist for your community if you have the inventory and reputation for it. This is a mantle that I’ve personally accepted in my college town, because we don’t have a store that buys or sells singles. If you’re in the same boat as I am, get the word out that you’ll trade for (or buy) anything and everything, as long as you get that margin.

Cracking up

Value trading does not have to be a project where you become famous through turning a booster pack into a Mox. There are so many more ways to save money and make money in this game that I can’t possibly go over all of them.

However, I can cross the terrible ones off of your list: stop doing Pack to Power, or you’ll end up pack to square one. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concepts that you think can be written about, let me know!

Weekend Magic: 1/9-1/11

Jared Yost

Let’s take a look at another weekend of Magic action. This weekend featured two constructed events, Grand Prix: Omaha and Star City Games: Philadelphia. The Grand Prix was Modern so we will be able to add more Modern data to our analysis of the format before the new banned and restricted announcements are revealed. The SCG Open featured Legacy as the main event, which is exciting because Legacy events are becoming rarer and rarer every day. Time to get down into the Magic.

Grand Prix: Omaha (NE, USA)

Decklists

Pod took down the tournament piloted by Erik Peters. Despite the success of U/R Delver in Modern from the one and only Treasure Cruise, Pod still seems to be taking Modern by storm. LSV and others still tote it as one of the most popular decks in Modern, and the power of Birthing Pod can’t be denied even in a field full of fast, aggressive decks. Highlights from Peters’ deck include Voice of Resurgence and Siege Rhino (foils are a good target now). Siege Rhino has quickly made itself a mainstay of Modern, at least in the current format, and foils are good target both for Standard applications and the the predicted usability of the card in Modern moving forward.

Second place went to Amulet Combo, a deck that is notoriously hard to pilot but does great in a field full of fast, aggressive decks since it can kill your opponent quicker than an aggro deck if the proper sequence of plays are executed correctly. Such were the skills of Stephen Speck that he was able to place in the finals of a Grand Prix with such a deck. Cards to look out for in the deck include [card]Primeval Titan[/card], [card]Amulet of Vigor[/card], [card]Summer Bloom[/card], and [card]Hive Mind[/card]—all cards essential to the deck’s operation.

Rounding out the Top 8 were a diverse listing of decks which included R/G Tron, Merfolk, two U/R Delver lists, Four-Color Zoo, and something called R/G Breachscape. Let’s take a look more closely at Merfolk, Zoo, and Breachscape since the other lists are Modern mainstays that have been documented extensively in past articles.

Merfolk – Many pieces of Merfolk have already stabilized in price over time due to the success of this deck in Modern. This means that some have a high chance of being in Modern Masters 2, like Cursecatcher and Silvergill Adept. Others like Master of the Pearl Trident have already increased in price due to Merfolk also popping up from time to time in Legacy, further increasing demand for the core components. Even Cavern of Souls and Aether Vial keep going up over time, since they are casual favorites in addition to being key parts of the deck. Mutavault is probably the most undervalued card of the deck due to the recent M14 printing.
Four-Color Zoo – Cards to look out for here include [card]Anafenza, the Foremost[/card], [card]Siege Rhino[/card] (again!?), [card]Loxodon Smiter[/card], [card]Lightning Helix[/card], and [card]Path to Exile[/card].
Breachscape – Cards to keep an eye on in this deck are Chalice of the Void (which just experienced another buy out and spike in price), Obstinate Baloth, Anger of the Gods, Summoning Trap, and Through the Breach.

All in all, GP Omaha was very exciting for Modern as it showcased seven different archetypes that have done well since Khans of Tarkir was printed. However, as some pros were quick to point out, there were two common trends amongst the decks – you either played [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] or played [card]Chalice of the Void[/card] main deck or sideboard to deal with TC decks (unless you’re Zoo, obviously).

Star City Games: Philadelphia – Legacy (PA, USA)

Decklists

Deck	Finish	Player	Deck	Finish	Player
Temur Delver	1st	Daryl Ayers	Elves	9th	Bobby Colegrove
Storm	2nd	Ross Merriam	Sultai Control	10th	Gerard Fabiano
Sneak And Show	3rd	Peter Johnson	Shardless Sultai	11th	Joseph Herrera
Lands	4th	David Long	Dredge	12th	Eric Copenhaver
Temur Delver	5th	Ralph Betesh	Shardless Sultai	13th	Rudy Briksza
Grixis Control	6th	Ed Demicco	Jeskai Stoneblade	14th	James Pogue
Omnitell	7th	Nick Cummings	Temur Delver	15th	Kemper Pogue
Elves	8th	Ross Prajzner	Ad Nauseam	16th	Nick Eldering

The Legacy Open this weekend featured some very interesting finishes. I see that Ross Merriam decided to ditch Elves this weekend in favor of Storm – what a chump, if he just would have played Elves he would have won! I mean, the guy that won was playing Kird Ape in his main deck! That hasn’t happened since like 1995. All joking aside, let’s take a look at the outliers here.

Besides [card]Kird Ape[/card] in Daryl Ayers’ winning list there wasn’t anything financially relevant in the Top 4. Storm is pretty straightforward, as is Sneak and Show. Lands also didn’t give us anything new.

Grixis Control again featured [card]Dack Fayden[/card], a trend that should be noted. Also, Omnitell featured a full playset of [card]Dig Through Time[/card] rather than just the usual one-of or two-of that is normally seen.

Two Shardless Sultai decks made the Top 16, along with Dredge and Sultai Control. Standouts from these decks include Shardless Agent, Ancestral Vision (especially if it is unbanned in Modern like some are predicting), Toxic Deluge, and.. Courser of Kruphix!? Yes, that’s right folks Courser has now moved into Legacy along with Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise. Neat. Dredge again had Mana Confluence as a playset and Sultai Control showed how a bunch of one-of and two-of’s along side Counterbalance seems to work out nicely.

Star City Games: Philadelphia – Standard (PA, USA)

Decklists

Deck	Finish	Player	Deck	Finish	Player
Mardu Midrange	1st	William Grogan	Abzan Reanimator	9th	Bradley Robinson
Jeskai Aggro	2nd	Noah Walker	Abzan Midrange	10th	Jon Goss
Abzan Aggro	3rd	Kellen Pastoore	Abzan Midrange	11th	Andrew Boswell
Abzan Midrange	4th	Spencer Assiff	R/W Aggro	12th	Lonny Warner
W/R Aggro	5th	Robert Sabol	Jeskai Heroic	13th	Chase Petersen
Abzan Reanimator	6th	Randy Ball	G/R Aggro	14th	Richard Anderson
W/U Heroic	7th	Joe Lossett	R/W Aggro	15th	Ben Schoenbrun
Abzan Aggro	8th	Phil Pratt	Abzan Midrange	16th	Joshua Halmagyi

Not a whole lot of news from this front, with the approach of Fate Reforged and all. Here are some notable cards to keep in mind moving forward:

[card]Butcher of the Horde[/card] – Pretty cheap at $1.50 or less, and a lot of upside going into the new format with the new tool Monastery Mentor.
[card]Chained to the Rocks[/card] – Solid removal and still around $1, definitely room to move up.
[card]Hushwing Gryff[/card] – Seen in many white sideboards and only around $2.50. Looks undervalued to me.
[card]Eidolon of Countless Battles[/card] – Seems like a good target if it continues to see play in W/R Aggro decks that have been placing well lately. Definitely a card to watch.
[card]See the Unwritten[/card] – Showed up in Abzan Reanimator and is a cheap mythic with a lot of upside later this year.

Star City Games: Philadelphia – Modern (PA, USA)

Decklists

Deck	Finish	Player	Deck	Finish	Player
R/G Tron	1st	Thomas Riker	Temur Control	9th	Luis Alfonso
Abzan Midrange	2nd	Erik Smith	4-Color Zoo	10th	Jessy Hefner
Temur Delver	3rd	Cody Shoemaker	Melira Pod	11th	Anthony Lebron
Jeskai Control	4th	Robet Seder	Ascendancy Combo	12th	Jarvis Yu
Affinity	5th	Joe Fasano	Affinity	13th	Thomas Conmy
Scapeshift	6th	Andrew Vorel	Abzan Pod	14th	Robert Pompa
Scapeshift	7th	Michael Mapson	Abzan Pod	15th	Vincent Pau
Abzan Pod	8th	Yi Min Wang	U/R Delver	16th	Charles Hagaman

Here’s some more Modern action for you courtesy Star City Games. R/G Tron took down the event with Abzan Midrange coming in second. The rest of the Top 8 included a decent mixing of decks. Notables include:

[card]Scavenging Ooze[/card] in Abzan Midrange. Copies are still floating around $5-$6, which is cheap for this important Modern role player.
[card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card] in Jeskai Control. A full playset was played in this build, showcasing the power of the card.
[card]Courser of Kruphix[/card] out of Michael Mapson’s Scapeshift list. The time to target Coursers will be upon Theros block rotation.

Out of the Top 16, other notables include:

[card]Keranos, God of Storms[/card] out of Temur Control
[card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card] and [card]Arc Trail[/card] out of 4-Color Zoo
[card]Fatestitcher[/card], [card]Jeskai Ascendancy[/card], and[card] Dig Through Time[/card] out of the Jeskai Ascendancy combo deck

That’s it for this week! Fate Reforged is coming out shortly so more coverage will be arriving next week based on those results. Until next time.

Cards to Keep an Eye on in Anticipation of a Banned List Update

Enmou Gao

With the banned and restricted list update looming in January, I’m surprised at the lack of discussion about it. Major changes could have a huge impact, especially on Modern.

The last time that the Modern banned list changed was right before Pro Tour Valencia last February. Preceding the unbanning of [card]Bitterblossom[/card] and [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] and ban of [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card], speculation was all over the internet. Whether it was Brian Kibler or Josh Utter-Leyton, everyone had a say in what they thought were the most reasonable unbanning(s) and banning(s), [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] being on the top of the list of potential bannings and [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] dying to be released. But it was to the surprise of everyone when [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] was actually banned and [card]Bitterblossom[/card], a card previously thought to be too powerful for Modern, was unbanned.

There is no good way of accurately predicting what will be banned or unbanned, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t clues along the way. Before the B&R announcements on February 3, prices were well in flux. Although bans do affect the format, the biggest potential money makers will be the unbans. Here are the graphs for the two unbans for the previous announcement.

[card]Bitterblossom[/card] showed the most obvious movement, though it was never clear whether the movement was the result of insider buyouts or speculation. [card]Bitterblossm[/card] jumped from about $18 to $31 a week before the announcement, and at the highest point, reached $70 before settling down.

There was plenty of talk about a [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] unban, and I personally bought into the speculation. [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] also saw increases in price leading into its unbanning, most pronounced in the FNM version of the card. The prices also abated after it was discovered Zoo wasn’t really the deck to beat in the format.

Unbans

So the million-dollar question is, what are the potential unbans coming up this year, if any?

I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but here’s the only card that I picked up on my radar.

There’s been a good amount of movement on FNM copies of [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card], a card that has proved to be powerful in the Modern format. There is currently only one copy of FNM [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card] on TCGPlayer at $9.25, and it’s not even near mint. Last time [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card] was legal in Modern at Pro Tour Return to Ravnica, Jund was far and away the most popular deck in the format, sporting almost a third of the metagame. I would be shocked if [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card] was unbanned, but then again, the B&R Announcement has been more about shaking up the format for the Modern Pro Tour rather than equalizing the field.

In a world where [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] exists, [card]Ancestral Vision[/card] for all intents and purposes is safe to come out to the party. While the price has only gone down since its Duel Deck Anthology reprinting, [card]Ancestral Vision[/card] would give blue-based control decks a foothold in the metagame by providing them with a much needed source of card advantage. I don’t think there is a good money to be made speculating on [card]Ancestral Vision[/card], foil copies are already $55 on TCGPlayer, suggesting that speculators have already moved in to the card. While prices will certainly move in the case of an unban, there are plenty of copies available that it would be difficult to make money off the buylist.

Bans

It should come as no surprise to anyone that [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] is on top of the potential banlist. It’s not so much that the card is overly powerful for the format, the Modern meta is quite able to adjust to any card, broken or not. I would attribute the [card]Chalice of the Void[/card]’s 180% growth and [card]Choke[/card]’s 700% growth to this one card. But the fact of the matter is that [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] has sufficiently warped the format such that it’s really come down to either playing [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] or finding the combination of cards to beat [card]Treasure Cruise[/card]. The fact that Burn is running [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] should be alarming, because the last time that Burn splashed a color, [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] was banned. There’s already a precedent for a card being banned in Modern while it’s still in Standard, so that argument is right out the window. If Wizards wanted to shake up the Modern format, banning [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] would be the way to do it.

It’s anyone’s guess what would happen if [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] were to go, but I would say that Pod would displace UR Delver as the deck to beat, which has already been the case on Magic Online. As is the case for decks that become public enemy number one, hate cards will invariably come around. I liked [card]Grafdigger’s Cage[/card] at below $2, and I still like [card]Grafdigger’s Cage[/card] at $3.50 especially in the case that [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] is banned and [card]Birthing Pod[/card] remains untouched. Will [card]Birthing Pod[/card] be banned? Eventually, but who knows when?

The next card is a lot less uncertain because an argument can be made for and against its banning. [card]Dig Through Time[/card] gives blue combo decks a fighting chance against [card]Thoughtseize[/card], [card]Inquisition of Kozilek[/card], and [card]Liliana of the Veil[/card]. It’s also not as degenerate as [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] as a draw engine, though arguably a much more powerful effect even at twice the mana cost. In the scenario that both draw engines are banned, [card]Steam Vents[/card] decks would once again be left to the whims of [card]Overgrown Tomb[/card] decks, and will presumably go back to the [card]Grim Lavamancer[/card] plan. In the case that [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] is the only ban, UR Delver will likely step back to its previous spot as a tier-two deck. Combo decks will definitely benefit from this shift in the metagame, particularly [card]Splinter Twin[/card] and [card]Scapeshift[/card], which have hugely benefited from the addition of [card]Dig Through Time[/card]. Because of this uneven exchange, if [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] is banned, I would expect [card]Dig Through Time[/card] to also go as it would otherwise pigeonhole blue decks to play the midrange, control, or combo game without elements of aggro or tempo.

There have been discussions on a [card]Jeskai Ascendancy[/card] ban, but I just don’t see it, especially in the case of a [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] and/or a [card]Dig Through Time[/card] ban, and I’ll leave it at that.

Whatever the B&R Announcement brings, I hope that the Modern metagame will become as engaging as it was when [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] and [card]Dig Through Time[/card] were first released into the format. Khans of Tarkir has done much to shake up the Modern format, and here’s to hoping that more goodies for eternal formats will come out of this block!

Hello from GP Omaha!

The Spike Feed

We’re at GP Omaha this week. After an exhausting day of Modern, Cameron and Curtis fell asleep, but then decided to record a podcast in the middle of a lucid dream. We give our takeaway from the event and discuss the ups and downs of the format. We also go over some new Fate Reforged spoilers, including a horrible [card]Suntail Hawk[/card] impersonator which we shall not name. Thank you for your honor.

Cameron McCoy – @Cameron_McCoy

Curtis Nower – @CurtisNow

Dustin Gore – @mtgdustin

Our show – @SpikeFeedMTG

Music by Micah Jones

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Stoking The Flames

Max Perlmutter

Feeding The Fire

I just lost my win-and-in for top eight and I’m two hours away from home. This sucks.

I played some of the best Magic I have played in a long time today and I desperately wanted this win more than any tournament before. I won games and matches off of bluffs, strategies, and good old-fashioned luck, but in the end I got beat by variance—and those are the losses that hurt the most. The thing is: this one was different. I was told I looked basically dead, empty, despondent. While, yes, it did create those feelings, this one poured gas on the fire. I don’t know why it did, but I’m excited that this is the life I’ve chosen to lead for at least the next few years.

My Goals

Going into 2015, I set some goals for myself to improve as a player and I put some big-ticket items on my wishlist.

1. Win a Star City Games Open

This one is huge and just one of the big-ticket items sitting on the list

2. Day two all four Star City Games Invitationals.

Thanks to my late-in-the-year successes from 2014, I found myself qualified for the next three, and picking up a fourth invite shouldn’t be that hard.

3. Top eight multiple Star City Games Premier Invitational Qualifiers.

These are where I first found success and I feel at home in a tournament of this size.

4. Have fun with friends new and old traveling and grinding the Open Series.

I love to travel and see new places and I love to play Magic. I love small towns and weird cities, and grinding IQs on the weekends lets me visit these places. When an Open is in driving distance, I’ll happily go do battle.

The Tournament Today

Today, to me, felt like it was supposed to be the start to this journey, and I guess it was just not the way I wanted it to play out. I’m still gathering my thoughts and piecing it all together as I write this, so please bear with me. I, of course, battled today with my usual Zoo list and a couple sideboard changes (like adding a third [card]Choke[/card] and experimenting with different Affinity hate in my sideboard for the observed field of Delver, Affinity, UWR Geist, and Pod).

Round one I beat Bogles. This one is still sinking in. My boogieman, my nemesis, my worst nightmare: and I slew it. I felt good and nearly unstoppable afterwards. Following that, I beat Tribal Zoo thanks to outplaying an opponent who didn’t know how to play the deck or the matchup as well as I did. I lost the next round to RG Tron. I got to battle against UWR Geist and Pod after that, and while the UWR Geist matchup was close, I was able to keep the Lightning Angels at bay and just 2-0 smash my mana-screwed Pod opponent. My deck likes to mulligan to five far more than theirs does.

Round six, and I’m in ninth place. I have a clear-cut win-and-in for top eight: 5-1 is in and 4-2 is out. Every single person in the building was there for a PPTQ, but I wanted those Open points more than anything else. The short story is I lost. I was lax about watching my opponent shuffling my deck this round and I lost to the mono-lands draw. You know, the one I’m all too familiar with. Crack fetch, draw fetch, crack fetch, draw fetch and repeat until they find a threat to kill me with or I fetch every fetchable land from my deck.

While I don’t have any concrete proof of anything fishy going and I do blame myself for not being as vigilant as I was during the other five rounds, I feel like something must’ve been happening—or that when the variance gods strike their vengeance down upon me, they do it in the most heartbreaking fashion possible.

The New Fifth Goal

This brought me to a fifth goal for the year, and a list of five looks much nicer than four.

5. Promote good clean play on the Open Series and within any other tournaments I happen to play in.

Simply put, Magic is a game and I feel it should be played for enjoyment and not just money and prizes. I have been a victim before and I don’t want others to have to go through the heartbreak of being cheated.

Moving Forward

I’m up in the air about what I want to do with Modern. I was talking on the long drive home with my friend Barrett about Modern and he was pointing out that maybe some variation would be good for me. He recently set his Faeries aside for Pod and I feel like because of this and how we have dealt with our decks quite similarly, he knows what he is talking about. I know Zoo is good for me and I can attack the format very well with it, but I autopilot far more matches than I should and I win a lot based on surprise factor and play skill with my deck—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I do see how it can definitely hinder growth to be just a Zoo player.

I own most of the cards to build a Junk Pod list and I have easy access to the few I am missing. Maybe it is time for me to branch out and learn more of the format and attack it from different angles instead just for three damage on turn two. I’m still planning on developing Zoo lists, and I have a fun five-color list in the pot right now, but it’s still cooking and needs time to thicken. This will all shake itself out. I love this deck and all it has done for me, but I think I need to branch out and grow as a player more. I’m still going to be battling with Zoo for SCG Philly’s Modern Premier IQ, but I don’t know after that. The Baltimore Open is coming up in a month and hopefully I’ll have a better idea by then.

For Standard, I toyed with the idea of playing Jeskai Tempo right before the deck came screeching to a halt and died. I realized I wouldn’t enjoy myself playing a deck that to me always felt like it was digging for a win and just barely getting there. I’m now on the Constellation deck and I’m loving it. I think a third color would be amazing, though, and I am debating moving the shell into an Abzan Whip deck or jumping more towards a Sultai Sidisi Whip. I’ll be watching the format closely, but I don’t think I want to be doing anything besides slamming [card]Doomwake Giant[/card]s and drawing my entire deck off of [card]Eidolon of Blossoms[/card]. Maybe I’ll add a crash of Rhinos to the deck, because for lack of a better term: [card]Siege Rhino[/card] is sweet!

Well, thats all for now so thank you for reading and I hope I can keep you all updated throughout the year and hopefully the successes of last year were just the beginning. I feel a fire under my ass, and no, it isn’t just the seat heaters from my new car. I want to win and I want to succeed, but most importantly I want to have fun.

P.S. I know I still owe you guys a few Zoo combo matchups. Life has been hectic and hopefully I’ll be able to set some time aside and bang out those last few matchups for the guide.

Privileged Perspective 10 – My 100% Totally Legit Preview Card Spectacular

Ross Lennon

Welcome back! I hope your holidays were as relaxing and unproductive as mine were. Even though Christmas is typically Magic’s downtime, there was a lot going on with the beginning of spoiler season. Next week I’m going to talk more about what we are seeing out of Fate Reforged and how to contextualize it, but I do want to start this week with my preview card!

**ROSS’S TOTALLY LEGIT FATE REFORGED PREVIEW CARD THAT WAS FOR REAL GIVEN TO HIM BY WIZARDS BUT THEY MUST HAVE LIKE FORGOT OR SOMETHING**

So this happened:

So what I am going to do is assume the Game Day promo is my preview card, and I will do this AS LONG AS IT TAKES until Trick or Gleemax or the corporate fat cats at Hasbro give it to me for real. We can even keep score (starting next time). So let’s see what card I get to start with!

It’s actually fitting that this is my preview card this time around, because I’ve been playing some Mono-Black Aggro lately, and this card is a seemingly obvious inclusion.

There are some deck construction conflicts here, because black now has four playable one-drops, as well as two conditionally playable ones in [card]Cruel Sadist[/card] and [card]Ruthless Ripper[/card]. If you decide to build your deck more synergistically, you can play Shadowspear with [card]Bloodsoaked Champion[/card] and [card]Tormented Hero[/card], which then pushes you pretty strongly towards a small white splash for [card]Chief of the Edge[/card] (and consequentally, some of the better combat tricks). Prioritizing power gives you Gnarled Scarhide over the Tormented Hero, which is essentially a [card]Savannah Lions[/card]/[card]Falter[/card] split card and doesn’t pressure you into playing a very sketchy manabase (likely including some number of tapped lands) in your small creatures deck. I would not recommend playing more than 10 to 12 one-drop creatures in your list, unless you are confident you won’t see Anger of the Gods. If you decide to do that, however, [card]Pain Seer[/card] becomes even more of an automatic four-of than it was already (and it was a pretty big deal before).

Let’s look at my list:

[deck title= Just Win Baby]
[Creatures]
*4 Bloodsoaked Champion

*4 Gnarled Scarhide

*4 Pain Seer

*4 Mardu Skullhunter

*4 Mogis’s Marauder

*3 Mardu Shadowspear
*3 Master of the Feast

[/Creatures]
[Spells]

*4 Thoughtseize

*3 Despise

*1 Hall of Triumph

*3 Murderous Cut

*4 Sign in Blood
[/Spells]
[Land]

*11 Swamp

*4 Bloodstained Mire

*4 Polluted Delta
[/Land]

[/deck]

This is the kind of deck I would never pay time and money to play with in a large event, but it is more than capable of stealing wins in smaller, less tuned environments (you know, like FNM). It has some of the qualities that I look for when playing an aggro deck in a small format, but it hasn’t been able to check all of the boxes yet. Here are some of the things going for this archetype that make it well suited to play at FNM.

Critical Redundancies: Mardu Shadowspear is just one example of critical redundancies in this deck. You always want to make sure you hit your aggressive one-drop in a creature-heavy aggressive deck, and having several to choose from solves that problem easily. [card]Thoughtseize[/card] and [card]Despise[/card] do work as proactive removal spells for difficult to answer permanents, especially in the board-presence-heavy format we are in now. Thoughtseize also allows you to keep the control decks from casting their removal on time, forcing them to either dig up more or otherwise commit resources to staying alive rather than progressing a game plan. The top end for this deck is pretty unimpressive, but there are options available, including the Fate Reforged offering [card]Brutal Hordechief[/card].
You Get To Cast Thoughtseize: You know this card is insane, right? Being able to cast a guy turn one, then play another guy and take their best card is a strong opening line against most archetypes, but sometimes you start with more than one Thoughtseize. You never play it turn one in this deck since you need to lead off with a threat (there isn’t enough raw damage in the deck to allow you to skip an attack), but you should still be able to resolve it before anything dangerous comes online.

It Has Foolproof Mana: Temples, refuges (the “+1 life” lands), and tri-lands are so good that they encourage the midrange decks to basically do nothing in the early phase of the game. By sticking to one color (even though I want this deck to play [card]Butcher of the Horde[/card] SO BAD), you prevent yourself from having to waste mana on scrys or future fixing. Also, since our curve is so low, you’re able to keep most two-land hands. Also, you don’t have to play Urborg, which would only benefit your opponent and cause you corner case headaches in multiples.
It Has A Clear And Consistent Gameplan: A lot of the decks that you see people bring to FNM are scattershot in terms of operational objective, but this is not. While this strongly limits the flexibility of play, it also prevents you from making a lot of mistakes. This is especially good if you are FNMing after a long day of work, you haven’t played in a while, or you had a couple of grownup drinks before the tournament started.
It’s Cheap! …Well, it’s cheap for a Standard deck. You know, assuming you own Thoughtseizes and fetchlands by now. You should really own Thoughtseizes and fetches by now. The beautiful thing about this deck is that if you don’t own the fetches, you can just play 18 Swamps (not a typo, I would shave one for either the last Despise or Shadowspear).Otherwise, the majority of the pieces are uncommons or easily acquirable rares.

Overall, there are not many changes I would make to the list, but that may change with the final reveal of Fate Reforged. Brutal Hordechief is a very likely candidate for making the list (although we will need to figure out how to make that off-color activation work), as well as [card]Mardu Strike Leader[/card]. It is worth noting that all of them are warriors (including the token generated by Strike Leader), so Chief of the Edge may be worthwhile on his own. Also, judges, correct me if I’m wrong, but you can use Brutal Hordechief’s ability to force their entire team to all block one creature of yours, as long as they are satisfying the blocking requirement. That’s a pretty impressive diversion if so. Speaking of the Hordechief…

RARITY REFORGED

There is something seriously concerning with the rarity situation in Fate Reforged. Many of the apparent tournament staples (like our aforementioned friend Brutal Hordechief) are at mythic, with several legends at rare. This is concerning, given that the understanding when the change in rarity happened was that the tournament staples ([card]Char[/card] was the example cited at the time) would largely remain at rare. I understand that the situation is nuanced, and it seems many cards are at mythic simply because they are very long and boring to read from beginning to end (I assume Robert Jordan is posthumously given a design credit).

It’s confusing, at least in part, since some of the mythics don’t seem out of the realm of possibility of being rare. [card]Warden of the First Tree[/card], which appears to be Casey Affleck’s Invitiational card, is only mythic in the sense that it is eventually very good and also costs G to cast. [card]Monastery Mentor[/card] is likely only mythic because it says “prowess” one too many times—it’s less that the card is too good to be rare (although as printed it basically is), and more that creating tokens with prowess creates an on-board math nightmare that WOTC only wants showing up occasionally in Limited. [card]Temporal Trespass[/card] is mythic partially as a means of prestige: it’s a callback to an extremely powerful card, although the “fixed” text of exiling itself (and also costing a bunch to cast in multiples) keeps it from being oppressive as is.

Ultimately, Magic is not in danger from Fate Reforged—but it will be if every set is like Fate Reforged.

Next week, we will be addressing card evaluation more fully (with guest stars!), but I just wanted to touch on this subject today since it is pertinent. Now, let’s close this thing out with some quick hits!

2015 is starting off pretty strong with an early set release, as well as a stacked Clash Pack. Sure, the next few FNM promos aren’t close to [card]Stoke the Flames[/card] quality, but the Elspeth vs. Kiora Duel Deck will make up for that.
Speaking of that Clash Pack, here’s what worries me about the rarity thing in Fate Reforged. If rares are fair game for reprints (as we are learning, apparently), then it’s pretty scary that a lot of the important cards for Standard seem to be sitting at mythic in this set. I can’t seem to think of any mythic promos outside of… Zendikar block? I know GP promos kind of alternate, but in terms of any other type, have we seen mythic promos? Is that infringing on FTV sets? I can tell I’m rambling.
There were a lot of really awesome pictures of great gifts in the PucaTrade Secret Santa program this year. Unfortunately, they all dried up and what we’ve been left with is a bunch of people (like me!) wondering where their present is. I will still plan on participating next year, since I believe that most PucaTraders are really great people, but I wonder if there is a way to filter out the people who aren’t in it for the right reasons. Shout out to the people who went above and beyond this year.
Bonus shoutouts to @DamageDirect and @TheProxyGuy, who helped make next week’s article possible. It is not PP6, that’s the week after next (I promise! Unless it isn’t).
Top Level Podcast is the best podcast I think I’ve ever listened to in terms of understanding the dynamics of Standard (or any other format). You’re leaving money on the table if you play Standard and don’t listen regularly.
The second installment of #BTBExt will be January 31, 2015, at Premier Sports Cards in Orange City, Florida! $5 entry (all of it going into the prize pool), and bonus prizes will be raffled off! Registration begins at 12, with the event starting at 1. If you’re in the area that weekend, we’d love to have you! Fate Reforged will be legal, so that will be exciting.

Therefore, be excited! See you next week.

Brainstorm Brewery #130 – Dargons

Brainstorm Brewery 01:06:29

So. Here you are—the half of the original listener base that wasn’t alienated last episode. That’s excellent. We’re glad to have you back. You passed our test, and you can be our friend now. This was an episode just for you, the fans. We talk about Grand Prix Denver, spoilers, and Finance 101, and we even make time for Picks of the Week. We hope you like it. If you don’t, keep it to yourself.

We can actually use the exact same bullet points from last week, and they (basically) line up. That’s fun. This is not out of laziness, but rather because we have a winning formula and we are not going to tamper with it. We’re professionals.

No guest. No need.
Finance 101 is going strong but needs suggestions. E-mail us.
Spoilers!
Picks of the Week happen, and almost everyone comes up with one.
Questions? Concerns? E-mail brainstormbrew at gmail dot com.

Cabe Riseau produced the intro and outro music for Brainstorm Brewery.

Contact Us!

Brainstorm Brewery – Website – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Ryan Bushard – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Corbin Hosler – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook – QuietSpeculation

Jason E Alt – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook – QuietSpeculation

Marcel White – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Pitt Imps Podcast #100 You Will Be Missed Ryan

Pitt Imps 01:54:49

Welcome to Pitt Imps #100. Holy crap. We got here. In this episode, we celebrate the show, the listeners, and Ryan. This being his last episode with us as a permanent host created a very touching moment which we quickly snuffed out. We answered questions from the listeners, and Angelo, unknown to the other hosts, put in a drinking game. Every time Angelo says, “I feel ya,” you drink. Good luck getting to the end if you choose to play. Angelo plots the next two-year vision of what he perceives the show will become and how you guys can help him reach his vision. A bunch of other podcasters jumped on to help us celebrate this occasion and Chris Lanci (posse member) sent us all a nice cigar to smoke during the celebration. Pitt Imps will now be taking a brief hiatus during the holidays and maybe an extra week. From all of us to all of you Happy Holidays. Don’t die on New Years Eve please.

Host Angelo @Ganksuou

Co-Host Ryan @brotheryan

Co-Host Will He don’t do the Twitter thing.

Facebook

Show Email [email protected]

Special Thanks to (in order of appearance) Chewie @TheManaPool Find him on MNM, The Mana Pool, and TMP News Jack LaCroix @jacklacroix Find him on MNM, Not Another Magic Podcast, and MTGBroDeals.com Jon Celso @BalduvianBears Find him on Tap’N’Sac and a writer on MTGBrodeals.com Calvin Layfield @Zero_Layfield Find him on Direct Damage Cast on zerofortitude.com Kaesi Corne @GirlOnNerds Find her on Direct Damage Cast on zerofortitude.com Marcel @MarcelMTG Find him Brainstorm Brewery Cast on BrainstormBrewery.com Matty @MattyStudios Find him on the Heavy Meta Podcast on manadeprived.com David Moline @raginggumby Find him on the Heavy Meta Podcast on manadeprived.com TSG @TristanGregson Find him on the Heavy Meta Podcast on manadeprived.com Ryan Bushard @CryppleCommand Find him on Brainstorm Brewery Cast and as a writer at Gatheringmagic.com Jason Alt @JasonEAlt Find him on Brainstorm Brewery Cast, Money Draught, and as a writer for QuietSpeculation.com Houston @TNSGingerAle Find him on Tap’N’Sac Podcast on TapNSac.com

Always and Never in Magic Finance

Anthony Capece

Today I want to talk about one of the great traps in Magic finance, or really any kind of investing. The trap is forgetting about, or just ignoring, this statement: past performance does not indicate future results. To take it to the extreme, it’s the trap of “always” and “never.”

Let’s start with an example. Take a look at the following chart, which is the price of a Revised [card]Underground Sea[/card] circa May of 2014 (just before Journey Into Nyx hit). Before you continue reading, take a few mental notes on what you see.

Here are my notes for comparison:

[card]Underground Sea[/card] has seen about a 150% gain since June of 2012.
It has not seen a meaningful decrease in price during that time.
It has recently seen a dramatic increase in price (January to May of 2014) and has not leveled off.
The last significant jump was about one year ago, in May of 2013.

That is a pretty matter-of-fact interpretation of the data. Importantly, it’s entirely focused on what the card has done in the past and doesn’t make any predictions about the future. Let’s be honest, not many of us were quite so level-headed about duals at the time.

You were much more likely to see the following comments on [card]Underground Sea[/card]’s price movement from Magic financiers last May:

[card]Underground Sea[/card] has never dropped in price meaningfully and likely never will.
Based on the current trajectory, the price will certainly climb to $400 soon and $500 eventually.
Duals now appear to have a seasonality (see May of 2013 and 2014) as people sell out of Standard in the spring and want to preserve their capital.

Reserved List cards, with duals among the most desired, are truly the only safe haven in Magic finance.

There is no ceiling.
Sea, like other duals, is a good buy at any price since they will never drop.

You might notice that these bullets are made up of observations and conclusions smashed together. The support for these conclusions comes from a false equivalency of past performance and future results. Dual lands have never gone down in price so dual lands will never go down in the future. [card]Underground Sea[/card] has increased dramatically in price so it will increase further in price.

Now let’s look at how things unfolded (if you don’t already know) and then go back and take another look at the analysis.

[card]Underground Sea[/card] (like most of the duals) has dropped by about 20 percent since May and does not appear to have leveled off.

The Mistake of Always and Never

This is not an “I told you so” article. No one that I’m aware of called for a substantial decline in the dual lands this year. I certainly did not.

This is not a “we should have seen it coming” article, either. There was every reason to think that duals would continue to climb in price based on the trend. There was nothing, at least that I can tell, that forecasted this drop. Vague statements and doomsaying like “they can’t go up forever” do not count as forecasting a 20 percent decline, either.

The mistake was turning probably into always and turning probably not into never. If you deployed money based on those equivalencies, you lost and maybe lost big.

It’s a subtle distinction on paper but a massive change to mindset. We will make drastically different investment decisions when looking at probably than we will when looking at always.

Probably calls for an investment coupled with the usual safeguards: diversification, properly sized investments, and other risk mitigators.

Always is a sure thing, a stone-cold mortal lock. Always means safeguards are not necessary, that caution can be thrown to the wind, because it is 100 percent. If you ever find one, go ahead and bet it all—no one would argue against pushing all-in when your opponent is drawing dead. Good luck finding these opportunities, if they even exist.

You really can’t afford to confuse “always” and “probably” when a lot of money is on the line.

Variance in Investing

To be clear, the correct read on that first chart (May 2014) is that Underground Sea would continue to increase in price. There was nothing to support a call for a decline or a break in the trend.

The thing is, we often forget that there is massive variance in investing in Magic, just like there is variance in the game itself. In fact, there is massive variance in any kind of investing.

You can’t solve an investment any more than you can solve a game of Magic. Perfect play loses to timely top decks from your opponent, and sometimes cards drop in price that “shouldn’t” drop or have never dropped before. You can stare at charts and spreadsheets until your eyes pop, but you will never get the variance out.

Everything indicated duals were safe and would continue to go up, but they went down instead. Are there reasons for this? Maybe. Somewhere buried in a thousand variables there might be an answer, but we are not going to solve it and we are certainly not going to predict it. Call it variance.

These things just happen. Duals always go up until they go down. At some point we may get confused and think they can’t go down. The same was true of the U.S. housing market a few years ago.

The good news is that this is all very easy to work around, at least in Magic finance. Just plan for variance in your Magic investments. You can do that in a lot of ways, but here is the executive summary: never make an investment that will break you if you lose it. It’s only really a problem if you are making large bets.

Dual lands are a great example to use here because they, more than almost any other set of cards, entice financiers to make those huge bets. You don’t have to worry about variance very much when you pick up a hundred copies of a bulk rare. Your safeguards come built in in the form of a low price. A single Underground Sea costs more than that spec, and the financiers investing in duals are buying lots of dual lands. It’s adult money.

If you have a playset of Underground Seas that you can use in a Legacy deck, big deal, they are worth less now. If you dove headfirst into Magic finance by buying $5000 in duals, well, that’s a lot tougher. It could be quite a while before you break even, let alone turn a profit.

“Always” and “never” are not words that should be in your vocabulary if you are investing serious money in Magic. Top Magic pros don’t say, “There’s only one card that beats this line but I haven’t seen it yet so he’ll never have it now.” They painstakingly play around the one card that the opponent, in all likelihood, doesn’t have in his hand or maybe even his deck because they risk losing everything if they don’t.

Invest the same way. Press yourself into finding the scenarios where you lose big and don’t dismiss any of them as too unlikely. Don’t take the shortcut of simply extending the trend line.

Upcoming Opportunities

This isn’t just a dual land thing. I see it elsewhere in Magic finance. Here is a short list of investments where I regularly see people turning probably into always. If you are thinking about putting real money into one of these, be sure you aren’t making assumptions.

1) Sealed Product – Many people did well holding sealed product during the Magic boom. That has morphed into the perception that sealed product always goes up, always gives you a good return, and never drops.

Avoid This Mistake: Don’t be the one with a closet full of recent booster boxes when the paradigm on sealed product changes. Eventually it will—there are already cracks in the foundation.

2) Modern Masters 2015 – Whatever you think you know about this set, forget it. In fact, forget it is even called Modern Masters because it will behave radically different than its predecessor. Forget what you think you know about the cards that will be included and what it will do to their price.

Avoid This Mistake: Don’t empty your checking account for [card]Tarmogoyf[/card]s and other Modern Masters reprints if they show up in MM2015 and dip in price. Yes, they spiked majorly after the first reprint and turned out to be a great buy, but you are working with one data point. A repeat is far from a given, and this really could be the time that Goyfs go down and stay down.

3) Legacy Staples – If I asked every reader of this article what dual lands are going to do next, I bet some of them would say, “Duals are going back up because duals always go up.” Re-read the article. Maybe [card]Underground Sea[/card] bounces, maybe it drops another 10 percent.

Avoid This Mistake: Don’t assume that a 20 percent drop eliminates the risk from buying duals and make the same mistake this article is about by plowing all your money into them now. It very well could be a buying opportunity ([card]Volcanic Island[/card] is already ticking up) but a deeper decline is not impossible, so please use caution. Make sure your buys are appropriately sized and you are not overextending.

That’s all I have for today. You can find me on Twitter at @acmtg if you have any questions or just want to discuss Magic finance.

Thanks for reading.

Unified Theory of Commander: Threats Part 2 – Your Commander

Jason Rice

Imagine for a moment that your commander is an actual living being someplace out in the Magic multiverse. He, she, or it wants something. Can you say what that something is? Does she want to grab a sword and slice someone open? Does he want to make it impossible for his enemies to cast a spell? Maybe it just wants to consume and destroy anything in its path? Whatever it is your commander wants, its your job to provide it when you are building your deck.

Who’s #1?

In our first discussion on threats, we talked about setting goals and asking yourself a few important questions as you select the cards that will define your deck. What kind of deck do you really want to build? Generally, the answer to that question revolves around your choice of commander. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to start every deck concept with a commander in mind. Perhaps you picked up an [card]Assemble the Legion[/card] in a trade and it inspired you to build a Boros tokens deck. Maybe there’s a tribal deck like Goblins or Treefolk that you are just dying to play. But unless you are picking a commander just for the colors, that card is generally going to be your number-one threat.

Inspiration… but not your #1 threat

The reason should be perfectly clear. Unlike any other card in your deck, your commander is available any time you have the mana necessary to cast it. Even with the clever tricks we outlined earlier in the series to make sure our mana sources are correct in every deck, we can’t even be certain that a particular basic land is going to be in a given opening hand. So sometimes the randomness of the shuffle keeps particular threats out of reach, but the big boss of your deck is waiting for you in the command zone as soon as you are ready to produce a threat and advance your game plan.

Commanding Threats

This unique availability of your commander is obviously a useful part of picking the threats that will define your deck, but it doesn’t come cost-free. The stacking command tax of two colorless mana begins to add up if you are forced to recast your commander multiple times. Lose your commander to removal or a bad combat phase enough times, and suddenly your number-one threat could be out of reach. So knowing the right time to bring your commander into play is an important part of executing a gameplan.

A cheap, aggressive commander such as [card]Rhys the Redeemed[/card] or [card]Edric, Spymaster of Trest[/card] wants to come online as soon as possible. This type of commander’s goal is to start putting pressure on the board right away and generating card advantage. With a good start, they can force an entire table’s worth of opponents to expend their answers instead of developing their own board states. Picking other threats that align with this strategy can help this type of commander run away with the game and pick up quick victories.

Not every commander wants to be this fast.

However, not every commander should be played that way. One of the most common mistakes I see made by new players is casting their commander as soon as they have the mana, but before their board state is in a position to take advantage of the commander’s presence.

Even other seemingly aggressive commanders require some consideration before being cast. [card]Aurelia, the Warleader[/card], the commander we discussed in our last article on threats, is a great example. With a converted mana cost of six in colors that do not naturally ramp into huge amounts of mana, she wants to be aggressive, but casting her before you are ready to kill or cripple one of your opponents is generally a bad idea. She wants a suite of equipment or a supporting army waiting when she comes online to maximize the damage she can inflict and minimize the number of times she needs to be cast.

Going back to our initial question helps us determine when to cast our commanders. [card]The Mimeoplasm[/card] wants to eat something awesome in the graveyard, so casting it before there is something delicious to consume is not generally the right choice. [card]Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir[/card] is best used once there’s enough mana available to combo out or lock down the table. And sad to say it, but [card]Oloro, Ageless Ascetic[/card] doesn’t want to be cast at all. He just wants to keep feeding you life every turn and let the other threats in your deck benefit from the value.

This guy doesn't even want to get out of his chair to play with you.

This jerk doesn’t even want to get out of his chair to play with you.

So to refine our question even further, perhaps you should ask yourself, “What kind of board state does my commander want to see when it joins the battle?” Then pick threats and play hands to set up that condition before calling the big boss into action.

Optimizing Threats

Now that we know what our commander wants and when we really want to bring them into play, we can start refining our other threats to maximize their value. Let’s go back to our Aurelia example for an illustration. She wants to enter the battlefield with the ability to quickly eliminate an opponent, so having potent equipment waiting for her is obviously important. Equipping those artifacts can be expensive, though, and Aurelia already costs at least six mana to bring online. So cutting a bigger, more threatening creature in lieu of a [card]Puresteel Paladin[/card] might make Aurelia much faster and stronger. This isn’t synergy in the traditional sense: it’s optimization. The paladin improves Aurelia’s potential to threaten the table even though the two cards by themselves don’t directly interact to create card advantage.

Small body. Big threat.

Optimizing our threats also means deciding which “version” of a deck we want to run. Consider [card]Hazezon Tamar[/card]. Some versions of this sand warrior’s deck are meant to play him early, then cast threats that benefit from the tokens he produced. Cards such as [card]Regal Force[/card] or [card]Slate of Ancestry[/card], that care how many creatures you control, are fantastic in this version of the deck. Hazezon’s deck can also be tuned to be a bit more combo-focused. Cards like [card]Food Chain[/card] and [card]Goblin Bombardment[/card] become much more threatening in this version, allowing Hazezon to produce a massive number of tokens and then shoot the table for the win.

This highlights again why synergy is last in our “My Deck Tickled a Sliver” method for deck building. All of the cards above synergize with Hazezon Tamar’s token generation, and it’s certainly possible to build a hybrid deck that uses all of them, but that doesn’t mean including them all creates the best-performing version of the deck. By picking threats that optimize towards a primary strategy first, we improve each draw and greatly simplify the decisions we need to make while piloting our decks.

Conclusion

So does your deck make its commander happy? Does it have a gameplan? Do all the other threats point the deck in that particular direction? Your number one threat is wasted if the deck doesn’t produce the type of board states that create card advantage when you cast it from the command zone. If you disappoint your commander, the deck will likely disappoint you. So align the other threats in your deck with your commander’s desires and you’ll find that even a budget deck can be fun to pilot—and pick up some wins along the way.

Pitt Imps Podcast #99 Worlds

Pitt Imps 01:15:30

Join our dynamic duo (Will had work issues and couldn’t make it) as they regale you with the events that occurred as the world’s eyes were upon France. Top decks for wins. A bunch of other crap. My experiment proved that most don’t read this anyway. If just one person would have responded last week to the show summary you would of won a prize. Nobody did. So due to that, I must assume that you guys don’t read this. By the way next week is episode 100. That’s crazy!

Host Angelo Twitter @ganksuou

Co-Host Ryan Twitter @brotheryan

Co-Host Will He’s not on Twitter

email [email protected]

Weekend Magic: 1/2-1/4 (with Discussion of Possibilities from Fate Reforged!)

Jared Yost

Happy New Year! Welcome back to Weekend Magic coverage here at Brainstorm Brewery. Plenty of Magic action happened last weekend with Star City Games Columbus, Grand Prix Denver, and Grand Prix Manila. Let’s get right down to business and check out the results.

Grand Prix Denver (CO, USA)

Format – Standard

Decklists

Until Fate Reforged becomes legal in Standard, we only have the same type of decks to look at until the new set makes its impact. The issue now is whether the Standard decks that exist currently will maintain their dominance, or will new archetypes emerge that make use of recently spoiled cards from the new set?

The first-place deck at GP Colorado, U/B Control piloted by Andrew Brown, certainly has one card that could be added to it: [card]Silumgar, the Drifting Death[/card].

This card has many players excited about its Standard applications since it is great against token strategies in addition to having Hexproof, making it harder to kill than most things. I don’t think you can go wrong picking these up for $0.25 or less. Dragons are a very popular creature type amongst the Magic crowd and the dragons from Fate Reforged will also follow this trend, ensuring that you could still out them later if it doesn’t pan out initially.

Cards of note from Brown’s deck included [card]Pearl Lake Ancient[/card], [card]Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver[/card] (four across the maindeck and sideboard), [card]Perilous Vault[/card], and [card]Dig Through Time[/card]. All of these cards should be watched moving into the future.

Second place was taken by Matt Sperling piloting Abzan Aggro, a deck that we’re intimately familiar with at this point. Again, however, Fate Reforged has given it another possible tool in [card]Warden of the First Tree[/card].

An Abzan [card]Figure of Destiny[/card]? Close, but it is slightly different in several ways, and any one of those differences could exclude it from Standard play. There are so many other options that already exist for the Abzan decks, but Warden’s abilities are certainly powerful and it only costs one mana to cast—this is good for instances where you need to play a Temple on turn one or two. I’ll be keeping an eye on this guy moving forward.

Current notables from Sperling’s build include [card]Fleecemane Lion[/card], [card]Rakshasa Deathdealer[/card], [card]Siege Rhino[/card], and [card]Anafenza, the Foremost[/card].

Grand Prix Manila (Manila, PH)

Format – Standard

Decklists

First place here went to Joseph Sclavzero playing Mardu Midrange. Notables from his deck include [card]Butcher of the Horde[/card], [card]Crackling Doom[/card], and [card]Chained to the Rocks[/card]. [card]Anger of the Gods[/card] out of the sideboard is also notable.

Which cards spoiled so far might be well-positioned in a deck like this? None spoiled so far really stand out to me except [card]Monastery Mentor[/card], which would primarily shine in Jeskai token strategies but could also have a place in Mardu decks.

Mentor could take the place of [card]Seeker of the Way[/card] in the Mardu and Jeskai decks, since lifelink can be granted to [card]Butcher of the Horde[/card] and given by [card]Sorin, Solemn Visitor[/card] currently as well. There is no doubt that this card is much strong than [card]Seeker of the Way[/card], and given enough time, like [card]Goblin Rabblemaster[/card, can eventually take over a game with all of the prowess that will be going towards the tokens and Mentor.

But does strength outclass efficiency? Three mana versus two mana is a huge difference. Whether the card explodes in price or drops significantly, [card]Monastery Mentor[/card] is definitely a card to watch out for in the new Standard.

Second place went to Abzan Midrange, which also took three other spots in the Top 8 and four other spots in the Top 16. The story of the tournament was told by the strength of Abzan Midrange, but Makihito Mihara’s third-place Devotion to Constellation build contained four [card]See the Unwritten[/card], a card that could break out in Standard if given the right tools.

SCG Columbus – Standard (OH, USA)

Decklists

Finish	Deck	Player	Finish	Deck	Player
1st	W/U Heroic	Joe Lossett	9th	U/W Heroic	Adam Johnson
2nd	R/W Aggro	Matt Anderson	10th	Abzan Aggro	Dylan Jones
3rd	Jeskai Tokens	Bruce Edelman	11th	U/B Control	Jerry Gillman
4th	U/W Control	Jim Davis	12th	R/G Monsters	Christopher O’Bryant
5th	Abzan Reanimator	Rudy Briksza	13th	4-color Soul	Adrian Throop
6th	Four-Color Delve	Chris Andersen	14th	Abzan Reanimator	Andrew Sparger
7th	W/U Heroic	Steve Mann	15th	Jeskai Tokens	Jadine Klomparens
8th	W/U Heroic	Logan Mize	16th	W/U Heroic	Kyle Rocco

If the story of Manila was Abzan Midrange, then the story of Columbus was U/W Heroic. The deck put five people into the Top 16 and took down the event.

Two interesting decks were Four-Color Delve and Four-Color Soul. [card]Soul of Theros[/card] appeared as a playset in both decks, so I will be watching this card very closely over the coming weeks for any sign of a price increase.

No other important trends were seen in Columbus that we haven’t seen already. Let’s get to Fate Reforged already for a shakeup!

SCG Premier IQ – Modern (OH, USA)

Decklists

Finish	Deck	Player	Finish	Deck	Player
1st	U/R Delver	David Nolan	9th	Abzan Midrange	Ben Weiner
2nd	Amulet Combo	Stephen Speck	10th	Blue Moon	Alex Zurawski
3rd	Necrotic Ooze Combo	Garett Young	11th	Storm	Caleb Scherer
4th	Jeskai Delver	Ryan Forsberg	12th	Jeskai Burn	Jonathon Custer
5th	Affinity	Jaime Jarvis	13th	U/R Delver	Carter Newman
6th	Tribal Zoo	Matt Ayers	14th	Abzan Midrange	Michael Farrell
7th	U/R Delver	Elliot Mork	15th	Abzan Midrange	James Grendell
8th	Storm	Stu Somers	16th	Affinity	Corey Filburn

Modern, on the other hand, is as diverse as ever. A new deck to appear in a Top 8 spot is [card]Necrotic Ooze[/card] Combo piloted by Garett Young. There is a whole list of cards that should be watched for from this deck:

[card]Necrotic Ooze[/card]
[card]Borborygmos Enraged[/card]
[card]Goryo’s Vengeance[/card]
[card]Soul Spike[/card]
[card]Zombie Infestation[/card]
[card]Lightning Axe[/card] – FOIL
[card]Grisly Salvage[/card] – FOIL

Even four [card]Pack Rat[/card]s were included in the sideboard. This deck seems like a great metagame choice to combat the [card]Treasure Cruise[/card] decks that have been showing up these days in Modern.

Other notables from the results are the appearance of [card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card] in the Zoo and Jeskai Delver builds, [card]Primeval Titan[/card] and other pieces of the Amulet Combo deck ([card]Amulet of Vigor[/card], [card]Summer Bloom[/card], and [card]Hive Mind[/card]), and [card]Scavenging Ooze[/card] out of the Abzan strategies. Storm also got two spots in the Top 16, which speaks to its power in the new Treasure Cruise format.

SCG Premier IQ – Legacy (OH, USA)

Decklists

Finish	Deck	Player	Finish	Deck	Player
1st	Ascendency Combo	Robert Graves	9th	Storm	Jacob Redfern
2nd	Bant Deathblade	Marcus Perez	10th	Mono-Black Pox	Kurtis Frazier
3rd	Omni-Tell	Eric English	11th	Lands	Hayden Brass
4th	Death and Taxes	Jeff Dickens	12th	U/R Delver	Nathaniel Snyder
5th	Grixis Control	Kevin Jones	13th	Jeskai Stoneblade	Nick Cowden
6th	Jeskai Delver	Lauren Nolen	14th	Sultai Delver	John Wiley
7th	Jeskai Stoneblade	Joe Bernal	15th	Jeskai Stoneblade	William Wingler
8th	Storm	Benjamin Ball	16th	Shallow Grave Reanimator	Robert Cremeans

Ascendency Combo took down the Legacy portion piloted by Robert Graves. As the new kid on the Legacy block, the Ascendency Combo deck is the real deal that isn’t easily going away. It turned [card]Fatestitcher[/card] into a $4 uncommon and Jeskai Ascendancy itself will eventually go up in price (barring a banning) due to its sheer power in this deck.

Bant Deathblade is something that hasn’t been seen in some time. [card]Geist of Saint Traft[/card] made an appearance in this build, the only card of note. [card]Omniscience[/card] is another card to watch due to third place finish of Omni-Tell.

Grixis Control is now a recurring deck that is putting up results in Top 16s these days. [card]Dack Fayden[/card] appears as a two-of in this deck and is certainly a card to watch moving forward.

Mono-Black Pox made an appearance in the Top 16, along with Shallow Grave Reanimator. Cards to watch from these decks include [card]Cursed Scroll[/card], [card]Chains of Mephistopheles[/card] (which is already a very pricy card), [card]Sinkhole[/card], [card]Nether Void[/card], [card]Mishra’s Factory[/card], and finally, [card]Shallow Grave[/card].

That’s it this week. Soon we’ll have Fate Reforged to shake up Standard, and maybe Modern and Legacy, too. Until then…

Conjured Currency #44: The Common Rares

Douglas Johnson

Welcome back, everyone! It’s been a while since I’ve actually written a finance article that revolved around buying and selling actual Magic cards. Last week I was on break for Christmas, but if you listen to the Brainstorm Brewery podcast like you should, then you’ll have heard my beautiful voice berating my personal sub-hosts Ryan Bushard and Corbin Hosler. While I was on the cast, I talked a bit about bulk rares during the Finance 101 section. If you’ve been reading this column for as long as I’ve been writing it, you’ll know that I pepper in the phrase “bulk rare” into almost every article I create, but I’ve never really dedicated an entire week to talking about what exactly constitutes a bulk rare, what you should be doing with them, or why they’re some of my favorite investments in Magic.

Different Types of Bulk Rares

Let’s start by trying to create an exact set of conditions for what constitutes a true “bulk rare.” I’ll grab a random rare from my alphabetized box and analyze it: [card]Labyrinth Champion[/card]. It’s a four-mana 2/2, already expensive for a body, but it requires additional investment to gain any sort of value. There’s zero Standard demand, close to zero EDH demand, and Theros, up until recently, was the most-opened Magic set of all time. Due to these facts, Labyrinth Champion has a TCGplayer mid of $.24, and there are currently zero buylists on the Trader Tools app that show interest in purchasing the card. If you took the card to SCG, ChannelFireball, or several other large stores at a Grand Prix, they would offer you a flat $.10 cash for the card as long as it was English and in Near Mint condition. On rare occasions, you’ll find dealers aggressively buying bulk rares for as high as $.11 to $.13, but that’s about it. True bulk rares can often be noted by the fact that they have a price of $.49 on SCG’s website.

The most this card has ever done for me is teach me how to spell “labyrinth” correctly on the first try.

On the cast, I talked about certain cards having a TCGplayer mid price of close to $1.00, but their buylist price not reflecting their supposed retail value. [card]Ash Zealot[/card] is currently a great example of this, because it has a TCGplayer mid value of $.80, and an SCG value of $.75. While I didn’t have a name for these at the time of the recording, I’d like to consider them “fake” bulk rares. While you can’t even get a dime on a buylist for a card like [card]Chandra’s Phoenix[/card], people who trade using the retail price will offer closer to $1.00 for the card, allowing you to get rid of it in exchange for more liquid assets. You can trade for multiple “true bulk” cards, quadrupling up your cash value from $.10 to $.40, or you can trade the “fake” bulk rares for a different dollar rare, who’s buylist value is approximately half of the $1.00 TCGplayer mid price.

Lastly, there is an entirely different category of cards that often get bulked off to me that shouldn’t be treated as bulk at all. These are cards similar to Ash Zealot or Chandra’s Phoenix: previous Standard staples with prices that didn’t decline after rotation, even though it’s assumed that they had. [card]Dreadbore[/card] is not a bulk rare, it actually has a buylist price of 80 cents. An even bigger surprise might be that [card]Thragtusk[/card] has a TCGplayer mid of exactly $2, and a high cash value of $1.35. Yes, that’s the same Thragtusk that was printed six trillion times in Event Decks, and barely sees occasional one-of play in Modern and Legacy. It might seem tedious, but I highly recommend scanning through your piles of bulk rares every so often and checking if some still have some life left in them.

“You thought I was a bulk rare? Just who the hell do you think I am?” – Swagtusk

Why Do I Care?

Bulk rares can serve any number of different functions, depending on what the size of your collection is and how you tend to work toward your different outs. If you tend to trade more than you sell, and if you hate the prospect of dumping your copies of [card]Heartless Hidetsugu[/card] to a vendor en-mass for a dime each, I highly recommend separating them entirely from the rest of your trade binder, and creating an organized bulk rare box for the casual players in your community to dig through. I personally have multiple $.25 boxes that I throw all of my true bulk and fake bulk rares into, and they have an extremely high success rate for both new and experienced players finding cards that they can’t wait to jam into 99- and 60-card decks alike. It works out for everyone, because the people that find the fake bulk rares remember them being $1.00, so they get a great deal at 75 percent off, while I get to liquidate the stuff that’s not going anywhere else.

If you want to keep this box appealing, I recommend combing through and eviscerating all of the completely unplayable bulk rares, and shipping those to a dealer separately. While [card]Myr Battlesphere[/card] is an adorable bomb that fits perfectly into multiple decks, [card]Vizzerdrix[/card] and [card]Goblin Hero[/card] are not. No casual player is going to want these, unless they’re trying to collect 800 copies of the worst cards in Magic for style points. Pull out anything that seems like it doesn’t have a home, and try to ship off cards that you have more than four copies of. While I consider [card]Tower of Fortunes[/card] to be an amazing bulk rare in ramp-heavy EDH decks, I don’t need 15 copies to fill the goal of supplying everyone who needs one.

If you truly don’t mind going through your entire collection with a microscope, you can find some bulk rares that have randomly high (high is subjective here) buylist prices. Some true bulk rares happen to have a store looking to purchase them for upwards of $.25, and you can squeeze every single possible penny of value out of all of those dregs of Standards past. While I don’t recommend this if you value your time extremely highly, it’s probably fine to check the semi-playable bulk rares if you already have a large buylist process preparing to be shipped to multiple different stores.

Speculating with Bulk

Although I don’t buy cards to speculate on anymore, being able to buy bulk rares for $.10 is a great way to speculate on a low-value card without the risk of having to resell for less than you bought it for. During the Block Constructed Pro Tour where [card]Prognostic Sphinx[/card] was a hit, there were a number of community members suggesting it would be a strong card to spike post rotation in a control shell where it could act as a finisher. Instead of going out and risking $.50 to $1.00 a copy, I simply stashed them away while I was buying bulk rare lots instead of throwing them into my quarter boxes. I currently own more than 20 copies of the card, and while it hasn’t panned out exactly the way I wanted it to, there’s always the ability to bulk them back out for anywhere between $.10 and $.13 each at the next Grand Prix I attend.

There’s still time…..

How Do I Buy Bulk Rares?

A lot of you probably read that last paragraph and are now going to ask me the question: “But DJ, how do I buy bulk rares for $.10 when the cheapest available copy on TCGplayer is $.35 plus shipping?” The answer to this question is similar to my methods of buying bulk common and uncommons: there are very few Magic players who care about owning large amounts of bulk rares that they’re not currently using, and many players are willing to turn these [card]Drakestown Forgotten[/card] from their Conspiracy days into actual cash, or trade them up towards useful cards that they’ll actually play in Standard.

While I’m going to add my usual disclaimer of, “Please don’t try this at your LGS without discussing the policy with the store owner first,” I’ve learned that many local card stores don’t want to deal with buying bulk rares and taking the time to sort them, similar to bulk commons and uncommons. Just let them pick out what rares they want to bulk to you, and kindly push back the [card]Felidar Sovereign[/card] that they think is a bulk mythic at $.25. Let them know the real value of cards that are ridiculously out of the range of true bulk, and you’ll have more customers in the long run. That reminds me: buy splashy mythics like [card]Necropolis Regent[/card] and [card]Essence of the Wild[/card] for $.25 from players who don’t care, and then resell them for $.50 to $1.00 to the casual crowd.

Wrapping Up

While bulk rares aren’t as exciting as finding the next hot Standard or Modern tech, they’re a consistent source of income that can keep casual players happy if you know how to work with them. You’ll always have cheap cards to help newer players into the game with, and you can occasionally hit a gold mine on cards you specced on for dirt cheap.

It feels good to be back with a real finance article that I feel proud of. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for next week, feel free to hit me up on Twitter at the link below. I’ll also be hanging around on Facebook, Reddit, and in the comments section. Thanks for reading!

Brainstorm Brewery #129 – Manifest Destiny

Brainstorm Brewery 01:10:38

Spoilers have started, confusing mechanics are announced, the new year is upon us, and audiences are alienated. Some of you are going to reread that last sentence and try to figure out where it changed tense. Some of you are going to disagree with a few of the Picks of the Week. Some of you will not care that someone didn’t come up with one. The important thing is that you’re tuning in to the number-one MTG finance podcast in the world. You’ve read the show notes, and doing so was a solid decision. Keep the good-decisions train rolling, and put the podcast in your headholes for the next hour or so, and be whisked away to a land where no one cheats with manifest creatures, Soulflayers are powered with Chromanticore blood, and that has all of your densities and manafests. Join us for Brainstorm Brewery.

No guest. No need.
Finance 101 is going strong but needs suggestions. E-mail us.
Spoilers!
Picks of the Week happen, and almost everyone comes up with one.
Questions? Concerns? E-mail brainstormbrew at gmail dot com.

Cabe Riseau produced the intro and outro music for Brainstorm Brewery.

Contact Us!

Brainstorm Brewery – Website – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Ryan Bushard – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Corbin Hosler – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook – QuietSpeculation

Jason E Alt – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook – QuietSpeculation

Marcel White – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Brainstorm Brewery #128: Getting With the Times

Brainstorm Brewery 01:00:48

This week, the guest is Douglas Johnson (@Rose0fthorns). Doug is a finance writer for Brainstorm Brewery‘s content website, penning the wildly popular Conjured Currency series that is nearing its milestone fiftieth iteration. If you haven’t been reading, checking the backlog now and getting caught up is an acceptable use of your time. If you’re enjoying this podcast in audio form during some holiday traveling, you’re not reading the show notes, so I’m not sure why I’m even pretending I can interact with someone whose activities preclude reading this. It’s pretty clear you’re at a computer right now, since you’re reading the show notes, so I will make this very simple for you: His articles are at this link.

When he’s not writing a finance series described by the readers on Reddit as “informative” and “groundbreaking” and “easier to read on the toilet than trying to do a crossword puzzle,” he attends university, partially subsidized by the Gamers Helping Gamers scholarship. It’s true; they even wrote an article about it in the New York Times, a publication Corbin refers to as “The Times”—presumably lingo he picked up in a 400-level journalism class.

Strap in, nerds, because we’re about to take you to value town with a four-financier blitzkrieg of information that will make you so good at Magic finance that you stop playing the game altogether, citing “poor EV.” Learn how to sell collections, what constitutes bulk, and how to apply for a GHG scholarship of your very own on an episode of the best conceivable Magic podcast that will leave you asking, “Did Doug really nail Jason’s pick of the week or was that staged?” This is Brainstorm Brewery.

Our guest was Douglas Johnson (@Rose0fthorns). Yes, he spelled it out on the episode.
Finance 101 is all about bulk rares. Yes, it’s new stuff. Don’t worry.
What’s Doug Johnson all about? No, seriously. Who is this guy?
Doug made it sound like it’s easy to get on this podcast. It isn’t. He’s special.
We read so many e-mails. No, it’s the right amount—probably. It’ll be fine; relax.
Picks of the Week happen, and the guest goes first. Guess whose pick he steals.
Apply for a scholarship at GamersHelpingGamers.org if you’re eligible.
There’s a special cameo at the end of the episode.
Questions? Concerns? E-mail brainstormbrew at gmail dot com.

Cabe Riseau produced the intro and outro music for Brainstorm Brewery.

Contact Us!

Brainstorm Brewery – Website – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Ryan Bushard – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Corbin Hosler – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook – QuietSpeculation

Jason E Alt – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook – QuietSpeculation

Marcel White – E-mail – Twitter – Facebook

Episode Archives

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Super Sunday Series Championship

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Tell Us About Geralf and Gisa, David

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[card]Mastery of the Unseen[/card], as requested by @ChasAndres:

[card]Sage’s Reverie[/card], as requested by @LochCorrigan:

[card]Crux of Fate[/card]:

[card]Warden of the First Tree[/card]:

Tasigur, the Golden Fang:

[card]Soulfire Grand Master[/card]:

[card]Grave Strength[/card]:

[card]Mob Rule[/card]:

[card]Orc Sureshot[/card]:

[card]Brutal Hordechief[/card]:

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My Goals

1. Win a Star City Games Open

2. Day two all four Star City Games Invitationals.

3. Top eight multiple Star City Games Premier Invitational Qualifiers.

4. Have fun with friends new and old traveling and grinding the Open Series.

The Tournament Today

The New Fifth Goal

5. Promote good clean play on the Open Series and within any other tournaments I happen to play in.

Moving Forward

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RARITY REFORGED

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The Mistake of Always and Never

Variance in Investing

Upcoming Opportunities

Who’s #1?

Commanding Threats

Optimizing Threats

Conclusion

Grand Prix Denver (CO, USA)

Grand Prix Manila (Manila, PH)

SCG Columbus – Standard (OH, USA)

SCG Premier IQ – Modern (OH, USA)

SCG Premier IQ – Legacy (OH, USA)

Different Types of Bulk Rares

Why Do I Care?

Speculating with Bulk

How Do I Buy Bulk Rares?

Wrapping Up

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