Hello everyone, and welcome to the Puzzle Box!

Here we are. This is it! This is the mutli-colored section of the cube, and it’s the last section to be posted. After today, anyone can come to this website and find a powerful and balanced cube for under $200. This is exciting! I’m just going to dig right in because there’s lot’s to be said this week.

General Notes on the Gold Section of the Puzzle Box

In this cube, the largest and most detrimental omission due to the financial constraints is the mana base. That being said, just because you don’t have all of the very expensive lands does not mean you won’t have a lot of fun playing this list. When I started building my own cube, I had only a few of the M10 check lands and ten [Card]Terramorphic Expanse[/Card]s as fixing—and it was an absolute blast to play. Why is that? Because you are going to build the best decks you can, they will be at balanced power levels, blowouts won’t happen, and games will just be fun. I would, however, recommend that the mana base is the first place you put any real money into this list. If you don’t already have the ten shocks, you can start by getting the M10 check lands as they are quite inexpensive. However you feel like acquiring the lands for cube is up to you. One thing I would suggest, though, is that you add them in cycles to keep things balanced.

Regarding the dual lands, and mana rocks for that matter, in our list I chose the best lands and mana artifacts within our price restrictions. Each archetype got one dual land and one mana rock—which one depended on the focus of the archetype.

Control and midrange decks such as Dimir, Azorius, Selesnya, Orzhov, Golgari, Simic, and Izzet got the Ravnica bounce land and its signet. Rakdos was the only guild to get its pain land and Mirrodin talisman. Gruul and Boros each got its corresponding pain land and signet. These two guilds are good for aggro but also for [card]Wildfire[/card] deck. The pain land gives each deck the option for a turn-one [Card]Goblin Guide[/Card] and a mana rock aids in breaking the symmetry of [Card]Wildfire[/Card] and [Card]Armageddon[/Card].

I think it’s interesting how things ended up balancing out. You’ll find that the signets will be very high picks in this cube because of the general lack of fixing. What this might mean is that aggro decks will be happy to main deck a [Card]Pillage[/Card] or [Card]Disenchant[/Card],  because it could very well blow out an opponent that is relying on signets for fixing. I walked in late at my LGS one night and there was a six-man team cube draft going on. Two team members were looking at a decks and a comment was made that the deck just died to a [Card]Stone Rain[/Card] because the mana base was so greedy. In our case, we don’t run [Card]Stone Rain[/card], as there aren’t that many targets for it (compared to a normal cube). For this list, where the concentration of mana-fixing artifacts is very high, that comment translates rather well to [Card]Disenchant[/Card].

Lets look at the lists.

Azorius

These colors are firmly rooted in control. There won’t be much opportunity for a U/W tempo deck because we’re missing cards like [Card]Geist of Saint Traft[/Card], [Card]Delver of Secrets[/Card], [Card]True-Name Nemesis[/Card], and [Card]Master of Waves[/Card]. If you have these and would like to push blue tempo rather than control, that’s a good place to start.

[deck title=Azorius]
[Cards]
Azorius Chancery
Judge’s Familiar
Azorius Signet
Azorius Charm
Plumeveil
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Dimir

Dimir’s cards are a little more flexible. [Card]Psychatog[/Card] and [Card]Shadowmage Infiltrator[/Card] are good cards to have in both U/B tempo or U/B control decks. This is a better color combination for tempo than U/W, mainly because there is so much instant-speed removal and more removal attached to creatures.

[deck title=Dimir]
[Cards]
Dimir Aqueduct
Dimir Signet
Far // Away
Psychatog
Shadowmage Infiltrator
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Rakdos

Rakdos in this list is pure aggro, mainly made up of above-curve one- and two-drops and unconditional removal. Fixing that is immediate and causes yourself damage: what more could you want? An obvious exclusion is [Card]Murderous Redcap[/Card]. Add it if you’d like, but I wanted to keep this section as focused on aggro as possible due to the fixing that we have available to us.

[deck title=Rakdos]
[Cards]
Sulfurous Springs
Rakdos Cackler
Spike Jester
Talisman of Indulgence
Terminate
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Gruul

Gruul is a bit of a mashup in this list. It has two one-drops and a [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card]. I included the two one-drops to help out aggro decks and [Card]Bloodbraid Elf[/Card] because it’s a card I am extremely happy to have in my deck all the time! If you don’t like this section, there is certainly room for innovation here. Have at it!

[deck title=Gruul]
[Cards]
Kird Ape
Tattermunge Maniac
Bloodbraid Elf
Gruul Signet
Karplusan Forest
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Selesnya

Selesnya is by far the deepest guild as far as the quantity of quality cards. Luckily for us, [Card]Kitchen Finks[/Card] was just reprinted and can be found fairly inexpensively. However, when Modern season hits, this may need to be adjusted as it could break our budget depending on if Reddit decides to buy it out.

[deck title=Selesnya]
[Cards]
Selesnya Sanctuary
Dryad Militant
Qasali Pridemage
Selesnya Signet
Kitchen Finks
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Orzhov

I really like this selection of cards. [Card]Lingering Souls[/Card] is very powerful and has thankfully been reprinted enough times to allow for its inclusion. I find [Card]Tidehollow Sculler[/Card] to be a very fun and powerful card to play.  [Card]Mortify[/Card] is awesome removal with a sometimes-relevant second option. If I know that my opponent has a [Card]Curse of the Shallow Graves[/Card], I’m going to be happy this kills it!

[deck title=Orzhov]
[Cards]
Orzhov Basilica
Tidehollow Sculler
Orzhov Signet
Mortify
Lingering Souls
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Golgari

This is an interesting section. In most lists, it includes removal spells and more removal spells, such as [Card]Abrupt Decay[/Card], [Card]Pernicious Deed[/Card], [Card]Putrefy[/Card], [Card]Maelstrom Pulse[/Card], and [Card]Vraska the Unseen[/Card]. We can afford none of these, so we get to include all the fun creatures that other cubes don’t get to include! As Mark Rosewater always says, “Restriction breeds creativity,” and being creative is always more fun.

[deck title=Golgari]
[Cards]
Golgari Rot Farm
Lotleth Troll
Putrid Leech
Golgari Signet
Dreg Mangler
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Simic

Simic is great because it lends us one of the very few combat tricks in the cube: [Card]Snakeform[/Card]! Again, because of our monetary restrictions, we are going to need to include some cards that are not as good, but may end up being more fun. So are they truly not as good, even when more fun? Only you can say.

[deck title=Simic]
[Cards]
Simic Growth Chamber
Simic Signet
Trygon Predator
Snakeform
Mystic Snake
[/Cards]
[/deck]

Izzet

Izzet is the most shallow of our guilds. The one staple that we have in this guild is [Card]Ral Zarek[/Card], but he doesn’t make or break the section. Again, here we have room for innovation. If you would like to push U/x tempo you could add [Card]Frostburn Weird[/Card] here. Use your imagination and see if you can come up with some fun things to include.

[deck title=Izzet]
[Cards]
Izzet Boilerworks
Izzet Signet
Fire // Ice
Izzet Charm
Prophetic Bolt[/Cards]
[/deck]

Boros

Here we have the home of aggro: one-drops and some burn spells. I would have included the Mirrodin talisman had it existed to help out aggro further. But I’m not sad to include the signet instead, because we have [Card]Wildfire[/Card] in the red section.  Not much else to be said here other than if you have an [Card]Ajani Vengent[/Card], you should get that guy in here because he is a pack one, pick one all day long!

[deck title=Boros]
[Cards]
Battlefield Forge
Figure of Destiny
Boros Signet
Boros Charm
Lightning Helix
[/Cards]
[/deck]

And So It Has All Come Together

Everything about cube can be debated. I invite that debate in the comment section. Considering that I have $8 left from the $200 budget, you could easily call me out for not including cards like [Card]Murderous Redcap[/Card]. However, I made sure each section got at least one or two of its non-budget inclusions and kept things at their lowest cost which I felt was in the spirit of this list.

Here I have included the link to this list on cube tutor so you can see it in its fullness.

I will be back next week to wrap up and reflect on this project and talk about some plans going forward. If you have any ideas of what you would like to see, please share them in the comment section. Or if you’ve been building this list as we have been going along, (and I know there is at least one or two of you), I would love to hear about it in the comment section. Or you can hit me up on Twitter @awcolman.

As always everyone, thanks for hangin’.

Andrew

“William has already made us $15k. Cool, you want me to break something else?”

“Do you think it will work? It would take a miracle.”

“When will then be now? Soon!”

Timing is everything in investing. The difference between making 100% and losing 50% can be as little as 24 hours. Being in the right place at the right time can mean selling an Elspeth for $40 because the tournament is starting in 20 minutes.

Marcel is involved in MTG finance mainly on MTGO. This gives him some extra benefits because he can buy and sell quickly. However, he is also limited because he can’t click over to TCGplayer and buy 30 copies of a near-mint mythic.  Jason is able to flip his wares quickly, too, but because he buys and sell at events. Jason also runs his MTG business so that he can be in tune with what his potential clients will want. This is necessary in order to not be sitting on a stack of worthless cardboard at rotation. Profit per trade means more trades (or volume) is key.

This first round, we will compare Marcel and Jason from the period starting November 1, 2012, going through April 30th, 2012.  During this time, each individual made a different number of calls.  As before, we are going to pretend like you went out and spent $100 on each and every card they said buy, and by coincidence you sold exactly $100 worth of every card they said to sell (if you are spazzing about the math here please read Investing 201). Then we’ll divide the profits by the number of trades.

Let’s start with the short-term results:

Marcel’s average return 30 days after his calls:
8.4% profit  per trade

Jason’s average return 30 days after his calls:
27.6%  profit per trade

Based on these short-term results, you might think that Marcel should stick to smooth jazz radio stations. But don’t turn on the Kenny G just yet. Marcel’s picks are meant for longer terms and are low-risk specs. This way, he doesn’t have to micromanage his portfolio. Jason, on the other hand, pays the bills on turning cards quickly. Making 27.6% on one’s investments per month will pay a lot of bills.

Despite a large variance in returns, they actually have similar prediction ratios:

Marcel correctly called the direction of a cards price 37.5% of the time.

Jason correctly predicted the direction of a card price 40% of the time.

Some Examples

Here are some examples of buy recommendations to show why the returns are so different (all price changes are the prices 30 days after the call):

Marcel:

[card]Birthing Pod[/card] (MTGO): $2 –> $4.  (100% profit)
[card]Underworld Connections[/card] (MTGO): $0.40 –> $0.40  (0% profit)
[card]Lilliana of the Veil[/card] (MTGO): $35 –> $40.   (14% profit)

Jason:

[card]Invisible Stalker[/card]: price $1.50  –> $3.50 (133% profit)
[card]Spellskite[/card]: $3.50 –> $10.00    (185.71% profits)
[card]Obzedat, Ghost Council[/card]: $25.00 –> $15.00   (-40% losses)

So far, Jason’s short-term business approach for his calls is beating Marcel’s slow-and-steady approach. Lets take at look at the percentages at rotation. Remember that we are looking at a period starting in November 2012 to April 2013, so all picks were at least six months old upon the release of Theros.

Marcel’s  returns on picks through rotation:
79% profit per trade.
Correct buy/sell calls: 56.25% of the time

Jason’s  returns on picks through rotation:
1.6% profit per trade
Correct buy/sell calls: 36%  of the time

Wait, what? What happened?

A very high 78% of Jason’s picks peaked shortly after he called them, but they all dropped by rotation. Marcel’s picks, on the other hand, rose steadily. He did hit 500% profit on his [card]Counterflux[/card] call (starting price of $0.05), but even if we remove that one, he still earned an average of 48.7% per trade.

Here are some examples of cards Marcel and Jason called, their prices 30 days later, and their prices at rotation.

Marcel:

[card]Craterhoof Behemoth[/card] (sell recommendation): price, $18 –> 30 days later, $12 (33% value preserved) –> price at rotation, $5 (72% value saved).

[card]Liliana of the Veil[/card] (buy recommendation): price, $35 –> price at rotation, $55 (57% profit).

[card]Mutilate [/card] (buy recommendation): price, $2 –> 30 days later, $3 –> price at rotation, $4 (100% profit).

Jason:

[card]Invisible Stalker[/card] (buy recommendation): price, $1.50 –> 30 days later, $3.50 (133% profit) –> at rotation, $1 (-33% loss).

[card]Rhox Faithmender[/card] (buy recommendation): price, $1 –> 30 days later, $3.50 (250% profit) –> at rotation, $0.50 (50% loss).

[card]Chalice of the Void[/card] (buy recommendation): price, $9 –> 30 days later, $10 (11% profits) –> at rotation, $4 (-55% loss).

Conclusion

Marcel is a classic Alex-profile investor. His picks seem to favor low-risk, long-term growth. Though he makes fewer sell calls, he’s a buy-and-hold investor, not a buy-and-forget guy. Jason, on he other hand, is almost single-handedly building the Gordon psychographic from scratch. If you want to flip short-term specs, Jason seems to have it down. His picks turn fast, so “leave the last 10% for the next guy.”  While an Alex type will advise you with less risk and more upside, a Gordon will get bored waiting for results.

Join me next time when we watch two more Brew Crew members face off!

-Brian Dale

My editor says that articles are best at around 1500 words. My problem is that I’m a teacher. I teach sixth through twelfth grade students. In teaching we use something called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) dictates what students are and are not able to learn based on what they currently know. I want to make sure that I don’t start off talking about things that are out of another person’s ZPD because they don’t have the groundwork laid to begin in a new direction. As such, many of my articles are likely to be in series of multiples, like this one.

Basic Business

Understanding estimated value (EV) is vital to pinching pennies or tickets (‡) on Magic Online. It is the most common catch-all term for Return On Investment (ROI) in MTGO. ROI is a business term that indicates how much money is made by one investment over another. If you were to stick money into a bank account, your expected ROI would be <1% per year. If you were to instead purchase a five-year CD, you could expect around 3% per year. It may be even better to spend the money than save it—something like replacing the windows in your home with higher quality windows might save you $30 per month in heating costs. When you have something that you are looking at in business terms, you have to consider what your expected ROI is for various ways to spend it. In Magic, calculating EV is how you do this.

Let’s assume you have six boosters and 4‡ (tickets) in your account. You have a number of options for what you can do. First off, you can sell the six boosters and have more tickets. This isn’t a very exciting option, since the way you probably got the boosters was by paying tickets for them in the first place. So you decide you’re going to enter a queue. But which queue you enter can drastically alter your expected results. For the sake of this article series, I’m going to assume you are likely to have average results regardless of the queue you enter. While there is a documented difference in the quality of players in 8-4 versus Swiss Drafts, and there tend to be better players in large premier events, I’m going to work under the assumption that you are in the middle of the pack for every queue you join. The reason for this is that if you’re better, most of the same advice still stands, and if you’re worse than average, you are going to lose money regardless. In this case, you should only play Swiss queues in order to minimize your losses.

I also can’t take into account the possibility that you happen to crush triple RTR drafts but happen to be really bad at M14 sealed. I’ll note that the differences from one queue to another is small enough that if there is a format you specifically don’t enjoy playing (triple DGM anyone?), it is probably not worth the advantages of playing it over a format you enjoy. Generally, as humans, we dislike things we’re bad at and enjoy things we’re good at. But three hours of your time to play Sealed over Draft when you really just want to draft isn’t worth the .32‡ it might save you. But it is important to understand how the choices you are making affect you.

The Math

If you don’t have strong math fundamentals, this may be a difficult article series for you to understand. I’d say you need a decent grasp on algebra to work through all the numbers. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to explain these fundamentals to you. If you’re having trouble grasping the math, just skip the confusing parts and move along to the results. We’ll be calculating a lot in the next article, so bear with me. If you want to skip the math, that’s okay, but today’s article is about the math specifically.

Terms

Queue EV = (What you pay to enter an event) – (what the average person gets from an event)

How exactly people calculate EV on queues varies slightly but it stands to reason you want to play the queue with the best EV and avoid those with the worst. Your EV is heavily affected by your win percentage. If you’re winning less than 50% of your matches, then a prize structure for winning a queue matters less to you and the prize structure for winning some matches will matter more. Regardless of where you stand, high EV basically means the queue is better for you, low EV means worse. However, queue EV is frequently negative. This means the average player will walk away with fewer ticets in card- and pack-value after playing a queue than they had before playing the queue. The key here is to pick the queues where you lose as little as possible, or if available, play in queues with a positive EV. Increasing your win percentage will increase your EV significantly.

Pack Cost – The market price to buy a booster pack of a given set.

The cost of purchasing a pack of a given set from a bot. Following Rule #2 (never buy packs from the store) from my article 10 Rules for Profit, we learn that the cost per pack is not $3.99 and playing a draft doesn’t cost you 14‡. Pack cost fluctuates wildly over the course of a set’s run and is even less predictable when dealing with flashback Draft formats (drafts where out-of-print formats return on MTGO). During prereleases, prices fall as people want to jump back into another queue and are more than willing to unload their draft winnings to do so. As release events finish up, prices tend to stabilize unless there ends up being a number of expensive rares in the set. Core set pack cost drops very quickly once the queues stop and the next core set comes out. The third set of a block often has a lower pack price because it is main set given as prizes but is primarily being used in block drafts, meaning more are being won than are being opened. The first set in a block will often rise in price later in the block as people go back to needing it to play full block drafts. Overall, packs can range as low as 1.25‡ all the way up to over 4‡.

Also note that there is a buy and sell pack price. You can generally sell packs for about 5% less than you can buy them. I generally use only the buy price because I rarely sell packs that I can still use to get into another queue.

Pack EV = (The value of each card in the set) / (How likely that card is to be in a single booster)

When you open a pack of Return to Ravnica, you have a chance to pull a [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card] worth 30‡ or a [card]Volatile Rig[/card] worth .03‡. Before the pack was opened, it had a potential value that included both of these cards. Once the pack is opened, there’s no more guessing.

The pack value can be calculated by adding up the value of all the cards in the set, adjusting for rarity, and dividing by the potential you’d see in each pack. Individual high-priced cards heavily impacts pack EV, but a number of other factors play a role as well. Currently, M14 has a very high pack EV due to [card]Mutavault[/card] being a rare instead of a set with a similarly-priced mythic like [card]Voice of Resurgence[/card] out of Dragon’s Maze. Cards like [card]Wasteland[/card] (an uncommon worth somewhere around 60‡) or even [card]Ancestral Mask[/card] (a 6‡ common) will increase the Pack EV way more than a 60‡ mythic. After all, there are 80 commons opened for every mythic.

There’s a few Excel spreadsheets with this already calculated out and all you have to do is punch in the totals for the set. If you want to know the current pack value, take a look at MagicEV, which calculates it for you (down on the bottom right). Pack EV generally ranges from about .75‡ to 1.5‡ for sets in Standard.
An example that makes a clear point about how pack value works is an unopened booster of Beta costing about $2000. There’s only one card you could open out of 117 rares that would provide you with a value that would be more than your initial cost. You could open a $5000+ [card]Black Lotus[/card] or a $6 [card]Warp Artifact[/card]. With so many rares and only 30 or so worth over $100, your pack EV is probably in the $500 range.

Pack Spread = Pack Cost – Pack EV

The difference between the pack cost and the pack EV is the pack spread. The greater the spread, the more packs you need to win to make up for your loss in opening up packs. If the spread is small enough or negative, then you can almost make a profit just by ripping packs open and selling the contents. For almost all packs on MTGO, you’ll find the pack cost is significantly above the pack value. The price for a pack doesn’t generally drop below 2‡ while there are active queues for it. In general, a 2-3‡ pack spread is common in MTGO. This means that you have to win about two packs for each three packs you open in the tournament to come out even after you pay entry fees. As I’m writing this, the pack spread on Theros is 2.23‡, M14 is 2.09‡, Modern Masters is 3.99‡, and Mercadian Masques is 1.10‡. While the high value of cards in Modern Masters makes it inviting and it has a significantly above average pack value, the pack spread is so high due to the cost of purchasing the packs. Thus, Modern Masters is one of the least profitable packs to open. You’re actually better off playing M14 or Theros.

Prize Structure

There are a number of different rewards for playing in various tournaments and queues. Sometimes the names of the event speak about the prize structure, such as 8-4 and 4-3-2-2 events, which indicate the number of packs given to each place. The reward for taking first place is significantly affected not only by the prize structure, but also the pack cost of the packs you are winning. If you win an 8-4 Draft at a 3.8‡ pack cost, you pick-up about 30.4‡ in prizes. Meanwhile, an 8-4 with a 2.8‡ pack cost will only give you about 22.4‡ in prizes.

Some events have a prize structure that rewards the players that did well significantly more than others in the tournament. Other events seek to reward everyone who performs decently, and still others reward everyone that plays and manages a win. Larger events will reward the top eight, 16, 32, or 64 players, regardless of how many enter. This could provide either a fantastic chance to a very mediocre chance of winning prizes based on the number of players. Prize structures based on number of wins are often much better than prize structures based on place, because the number of players doesn’t change your chances of winning. In an event that rewards the top 32 players, your chances of making it with 65 players is much better than with 256. On MTGO, premier events frequently have the same prize structure regardless of number of players.

Entry Fee = (Tickets) + (Pack Spread * Number of Packs)

Various events—from Draft queues, to dailies, to premier events—have entry fees. Entry fees for most events can be paid in tickets (bad idea) or a combination of some small number of tickets and product (good idea). The posted entry fee in MTGO isn’t the real entry fee you end up paying. When calculating potential winnings, you need to understand the portion of entry fees that you’re essentially paying to get into the prize structure as well as the fees you’re paying in pack spread. You end up paying the tickets, but you still get the value from the cards in the packs you open. If I have to open six packs to play in a Sealed event, I lose my pack spread six times instead of the three times I’d lose opening a draft. This means the prizes in a Sealed event would have to be almost twice as good as in a draft to have the same EV.

Next Time

Since I’ve probably already given my editor a heart attack, I’ll stop here and pick it up in part two where we’ll discuss what to do with all these numbers. This article gave you the basics regardingthe terms I’ll be using and we’ll get into the gritty details in my next article. I’ll break down each queue as well as some historic prize structures and explain why they good or bad value so you can be on the lookout for changes in the future that provide you with good opportunities.

Previously, this article series has covered the basic considerations for a Standard-only Commander card pool consisting of Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash, Dragon’s Maze, Magic 2014, and Theros. This second part will cover the eight mono-colored legendary creatures provided by Theros and their possible inclusion in mono-colored decks. These legendary creatures are a good start for exploring a Standard-only Commander format by exemplifying the best resources available to each singular color. By combining typical deck building concepts such as card advantage, mana acceleration, tutoring, and removal, interactive decks are still very possible even with a narrower card pool. All the example decks below will attempt to maximize the key themes Wizards of the Coast has implemented in each color under the New World Order design philosophy. In a Standard Commander format, do not automatically discount a mono-colored deck pilot despite his lack of color flexibility. Instead, these decks will capitalize on their steady mana bases to bring their strength to the fore.

Mono-White

[card]Heliod, God of the Sun[/card] naturally has white gravitating towards a vigilant token creature theme, but doesn’t have much in the way of cheap, non-narrow creature removal. What white does have are ways to wipe the board of creatures and start over with Heliod: [card]Angel of Serenity[/card], [card]Elspeth, Sun’s Champion[/card], [card]Luminate Primordial[/card], and [card]Planar Cleansing[/card]. A deck built around Heliod might work to get board states consisting of a populated token army with pump effects or protected by [card]Rootborn Defenses[/card] followed by a board wipe. Alternatively, [card]Gideon, Champion of Justice[/card] is a semi-indestructible threat that continually gets larger. White also has access to an inordinate amount of life gain. By buffing the player’s life total, a [card]Heliod, God of the Sun[/card] deck can recover from an opponent’s board wipe and have enough life buffer to rebuild its army. Such a deck might look like this:

[deck title=Heliod Commander]
[Creature token generators:]
*1 Precinct Captain
*1 Heliod, God of the Sun
*1 Evangel of Heliod
*1 Scion of Vitu-Ghazi
*1 Urbis Protector
*1 Angelic Accord
*1 Murder Investigation
*1 Rootborn Defenses
*1 Elspeth, Sun’s Champion
*1 Devout Invocation
*1 Strionic Resonator
*1 Trading Post
*1 Akroan Horse
[/Creature token generators:]

[Creature buffs:]
*1 Frontline Medic
*1 Phantom General
*1 Archangel of Thune
*1 Angelic Skirmisher
*1 Path of Bravery
*1 Spear of Heliod
*1 Fortify
*1 Ajani, Caller of the Pride
*1 Righteous Charge
*1 Haunted Plate Mail
[/Creature buffs:]

[Creature removal:]
*1 Banisher Priest
*1 Court Street Denizen
*1 Haazda Snare Squad
*1 Master of Diversion
*1 Heliod’s Emissary
*1 Martial Law
*1 Pacifism
*1 Divine Verdict
*1 Trostani’s Judgment
*1 Gideon, Champion of Justice
*1 Angelic Edict
*1 Vanquish the Foul
[/Creature removal:]

[Board wipes:]
*1 Angel of Serenity
*1 Luminate Primordial
*1 Planar Cleansing
*1 Ratchet Bomb
*1 Volatile Rig
[/Board wipes:]

[General removal:]
*1 Soul Tithe
*1 Renounce the Guilds
[/General removal:]

[Enchantment removal:]
*1 Keening Apparition
*1 Ray of Dissolution
*1 Solemn Offering
[/Enchantment removal:]

[Graveyard hate:]
*1 Rest in Peace
[/Graveyard hate:]

[Control:]
*1 Pithing Needle
[/Control:]

[Life gain:]
*1 Soldier of the Pantheon
*1 Dawnstrike Paladin
*1 Riot Control
*1 Congregate
*1 Elixir of Immortality
*1 Bubbling Cauldron
*1 Staff of the Sun Magus
[/Life gain:]

[Recursion:]
*1 Codex Shredder
*1 Illusionist’s Bracers
[/Recursion:]

[Tutor:]
*1 Traveler’s Amulet
*1 Ring of Three Wishes
[/Tutor:]

[Mana acceleration:]
*1 Chromatic Lantern
*1 Darksteel Ingot
*1 Burnished Hart
[/Mana acceleration:]

[Lands:]
*1 Encroaching Wastes
*1 Mutavault
*1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
36 Plains
*1 Rogue’s Passage
[/Lands:]
[/deck]

This deck may also want [card]Fiendslayer Paladin[/card] as an early threat with life gain and semi-protection. However, it can be a dead draw later in the game given a lack of synergy with the token theme and without a variety of efficient equipment normally available to white to increase its combat survivability. [card]Riot Gear[/card] may also be something that a Heliod player might want to consider because it pumps a creature out of first strike damage range and can be moved around after combat. +1/+2 on any key creature may be enough to keep it on the table and be a continued threat in many scenarios. Lastly, [card]Vial of Poison[/card] has potential to combo with [card]Trading Post[/card] and the token theme of the deck.

Mono-Blue

[card]Thassa, God of the Sea[/card] easily fills the expected classic blue control, draw-go build despite the focus of the color in Standard on milling a single opponent. A blue Thassa deck will be able to draw into more answers consistently than other mono-colored decks and lay down singular threats while simultaneously protecting them. The downside of blue is going to be lack of multiple large threats to quickly eliminate opponents. The blue player will possibly need to lean heavily on the social contract and deal-making to avoid being stereotypically eliminated first before attempting to take control and win the game. Playing a kingmaker role to remain in second place and waiting to bounce the entire board with a well-timed [card]Ætherize[/card] or [card]Cyclonic Rift[/card] may be a heavily-treaded strategy used by this deck’s pilot.

[deck title=Thassa Commander]
[Creatures:]
*1 Clone
*1 Master of Waves
*1 AEtherling
*1 Stolen Identity
*1 Trading Post
*1 Haunted Plate Mail
[/Creatures:]

[Card draw:]
*1 Scroll Thief
*1 Stealer of Secrets
*1 Thassa, God of the Sea
*1 Thassa’s Emissary
*1 Messenger Drake
*1 Prescient Chimera
*1 Prognostic Sphinx
*1 Horizon Scholar
*1 Windreader Sphinx
*1 Bident of Thassa
*1 Divination
*1 Inspiration
*1 Opportunity
*1 Jace, Architect of Thought
*1 Jace, Memory Adept
*1 Thassa’s Bounty
[/Card draw:]

[Counterspells:]
*1 Annul
*1 Mizzium Skin
*1 Spell Blast
*1 Swan Song
*1 Essence Scatter
*1 Negate
*1 Cancel
*1 Dissolve
*1 Scatter Arc
[/Counterspells:]

[Board wipe:]
*1 Shipbreaker Kraken
*1 Cyclonic Rift
*1 AEtherize
*1 Curse of Swine
*1 Ratchet Bomb
[/Board wipe:]

[Creature removal/bounce:]
*1 Tidebinder Mage
*1 Voidwielder
*1 Colossal Whale
*1 Blustersquall
*1 Gridlock
*1 Rapid Hybridization
*1 Griptide
*1 Voyage’s End
*1 Inaction Injunction
*1 Vial of Poison
[/Creature removal/bounce:]

[Bounce permanent:]
*1 Disperse
*1 Totally Lost
[/Bounce permanent:]

[Recursion:]
*1 Meletis Charlatan
*1 Archaeomancer
*1 Elite Arcanist
*1 Mnemonic Wall
*1 Jace’s Mindseeker
*1 Diluvian Primordial
*1 Strionic Resonator
[/Recursion:]

[Tutors:]
*1 Traveler’s Amulet
*1 Ring of Three Wishes
[/Tutors:]

[Mana acceleration:]
*1 Chromatic Lantern
*1 Darksteel Ingot
*1 Burnished Hart
[/Mana acceleration:]

[Lands:]
*1 Encroaching Wastes
36 Island
*1 Mutavault
*1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
*1 Rogue’s Passage
[/Lands:]
[/deck]

[card]Annul[/card] may seem an odd counterspell inclusion, but it has real strength as one of the singular ways to preemptively deal with the Theros Gods. [card]Clone[/card] is a card that will have tremendous power in this type of environment given it’s flexibility and very reasonable casting cost. For Johnny-type players, [card]Conjured Currency[/card] may be a card to consider. It’s a very slow [card]Switcheroo[/card] that can create some unexpected, possibly advantageous board states as it makes its way around the table. Additionally, the possibility of taking control of key god creatures is one of blue’s limited ways to deal with the troublesome permanents.

Mono-Black

A mono-black Commander deck has two options for its general, but a deck lead by [card]Erebos, God of the Dead[/card] has a strong draw engine that will compare with Standard Commander [card]Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius[/card] or [card]Prime Speaker Zegana[/card] decks with the added benefit of a low casting cost and indestructibility. Despite black’s inability to deal with non-creature permanents, black has some strong synergies and has potential to hold its own against the dual-colored decks possible in a current Standard card pool. Black also has a Johnny player’s type of deck when combining [card]Shadowborn Apostle[/card] with [card]Abhorrent Overlord[/card], [card]Desecration Demon[/card], [card]Lord of the Void[/card], and [card]Shadowborn Demon[/card].

[deck title=Erebos Commander]
[Creatures:]
*1 Tenacious Dead
*1 Thrull Parasite
*1 Pack Rat
*1 Wight of Precinct Six
*1 Lifebane Zombie
*1 Mogis’s Marauder
*1 Nighthowler
*1 Desecration Demon
*1 Returned Centaur
*1 Necropolis Regent
*1 Nightmare
*1 Pontiff of Blight
*1 Lord of the Void
[/Creatures:]

[Creature token generation:]
*1 Xathrid Necromancer
*1 Liliana’s Reaver
*1 Ogre Slumlord
[/Creature token generation:]

[Card draw:]
*1 Blood Scrivener
*1 Erebos, God of the Dead
*1 Dark Prophecy
*1 Underworld Connections
*1 Liliana of the Dark Realms
*1 Read the Bones
*1 March of the Returned
[/Card draw:]

[Sacrifice outlet:]
*1 Gnawing Zombie
*1 Vampire Warlord
*1 Abhorrent Overlord
*1 Altar’s Reap
*1 Rescue from the Underworld
*1 Bubbling Cauldron
[/Sacrifice outlet:]

[Creature removal:]
*1 Festering Newt
*1 Slum Reaper
*1 Keepsake Gorgon
*1 Shadowborn Demon
*1 Quag Sickness
*1 Devour Flesh
*1 Doom Blade
*1 Ultimate Price
*1 Hero’s Downfall
*1 Grisly Spectacle
*1 Launch Party
*1 Liturgy of Blood
*1 Corrupt
[/Creature removal:]

[Board wipe:]
*1 Hythonia the Cruel
*1 Ratchet Bomb
[/Board wipe:]

[Recursion:]
*1 Corpse Hauler
*1 Sepulchral Primordial
*1 Whip of Erebos
*1 Grave Betrayal
*1 Grim Return
*1 Rise of the Dark Realms
[/Recursion:]

[Graveyard hate:]
*1 Cremate
*1 Vile Rebirth
*1 Crypt Incursion
[/Graveyard hate:]

[Life gain:]
*1 Gray Merchant of Asphodel
[/Life gain:]

[Mana acceleration:]
*1 Crypt Ghast
*1 Darksteel Ingot
*1 Burnished Hart
[/Mana acceleration:]

[Tutors:]
*1 Diabolic Tutor
*1 Traveler’s Amulet
*1 Ring of Three Wishes
[/Tutors:]

[Lands:]
*1 Encroaching Wastes
*1 Mutavault
*1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
*1 Rogue’s Passage
36 Swamp
[/Lands:]
[/deck]

Mono-Red

[card]Purphoros, God of the Forge[/card] obviously needs to have multiple creatures come into play as often as possible to utilize its trigger. Unfortunately, a Standard Commander deck has limited options to make tokens repeatedly or en masse: [card]Goblin Rally[/card], [card]Hammer of Purphoros[/card], [card]Molten Birth[/card], [card]Utvara Hellkite[/card], [card]Young Pyromancer[/card], [card]Akroan Horse[/card], and [card]Trading Post[/card]. Given the small amount of feasible red instants and sorceries in Standard for Commander, [card]Young Pyromancer[/card] and [card]Molten Birth[/card] really fail to fit in this deck.

An idea to work with this limitation is to explore additional themes unexpectedly found in red Standard Commander: Cheating large creatures into play and playing all the dragons available with [card]Utvara Hellkite[/card]. Red has the ability to cheat creatures into play with [card]Guild Feud[/card] and [card]Possibility Storm[/card]. The important detail about Guild Feud is, “If no creatures or only one creature is put onto the battlefield this way, no fight happens.” Unfortunately, with only 25 creatures in the deck, this is a risky deckbuilding strategy, but will appeal to Johnny-type Magic players. (There is a finite number of red or artifact creatures in Standard currently with both high power and toughness with which to utilize with [card]Guild Feud[/card].) Accelerating straight into a [card]Furnace Whelp[/card] from a [card]Dragon Egg[/card] is fun too. [card]Possibility Storm[/card] acts as a secondary and even perhaps better alternative to [card]Guild Feud[/card]. The difference between the two is that [card]Guild Feud[/card] allows you to consider trying minor group politics while [card]Possibility Storm[/card] risks accelerating your opponents far beyond your own board state.

Second, if a Purphoros player can land an unanswered [card]Utvara Hellkite[/card], it can quickly take over a battlefield within a few turns. [card]Hellkite Tyrant[/card] offers another way to cheat large threats onto the table by stealing key artifact acceleration with the side benefit of taking away opponents’ Theros artifact enchantments. [card]Hellkite Tyrant[/card] will probably never win Purphoros the game, but has potential for serious card advantage with permanent theft of opponent’s resources.

Humorously, [card]Guild Feud[/card] works on a very Vorthos level to demonstrate red’s attempt at politics: “You’re in the lead and you want a put a creature into play? Fine, I’ll try to kill it and you’ve milled three cards. Hey, look! My guy is meaner than yours too!” This is also aided by [card]Akroan Horse[/card]: “Give that weaker player over there a blocker. I get an army for doing so? Imagine that…” Just don’t attack the [card]Akroan Horse[/card]’s controller with a [card]Hellkite Tyrant[/card].

[deck title=Purphoros Commander]
[Creatures:]
*1 Fanatic of Mogis
*1 Ill-Tempered Cyclops
*1 Stoneshock Giant
*1 Wrecking Ogre
*1 Chaos Imps
*1 Ripscale Predator
*1 Guardian of the Ages
*1 Colossus of Akros
[/Creatures:]

[Dragons:]
*1 Dragon Egg
*1 Scourge of Valkas
*1 Stormbreath Dragon
*1 Hellkite Tyrant
*1 Shivan Dragon
*1 Utvara Hellkite
[/Dragons:]

[Token creature generation:]
*1 Goblin Rally
*1 Trading Post
*1 Akroan Horse
[/Token creature generation:]

[Creature buff:]
*1 Legion Loyalist
*1 Pyrewild Shaman
*1 Purphoros, God of the Forge
*1 Ogre Battledriver
*1 Hammer of Purphoros
*1 Skyblinder Staff
*1 Fireshrieker
*1 Fleetfeather Sandals
*1 Prowler’s Helm
*1 Riot Gear
[/Creature buff :]

[Sacrifice outlet:]
*1 Barrage of Expendables
*1 Bubbling Cauldron
[/Sacrifice outlet:]

[Card draw:]
*1 Dragon Mantle
*1 Chandra, Pyromaster
*1 Wild Guess
[/Card draw:]

[Creature removal:]
*1 Fleshpulper Giant
*1 Molten Primordial
*1 Five-Alarm Fire
*1 Ordeal of Purphoros
*1 Volcanic Geyser
*1 Vial of Poison
*1 Rod of Ruin
[/Creature removal:]

[Land destruction:]
*1 Ember Swallower
[/Land destruction:]

[Artifact removal:]
*1 Batterhorn
*1 Wild Celebrants
*1 Vandalblast
[/Artifact removal:]

[Board wipe:]
*1 Street Spasm
*1 Homing Lightning
*1 Mizzium Mortars
*1 Anger of the Gods
*1 Ratchet Bomb
*1 Volatile Rig
[/Board wipe:]

[Recursion:]
*1 Codex Shredder
*1 Strionic Resonator
*1 Trading Post
[/Recursion:]

[Control:]
*1 Pithing Needle
[/Control:]

[Mana acceleration:]
*1 Guild Feud
*1 Chromatic Lantern
*1 Darksteel Ingot
*1 Burnished Hart
*1 Opaline Unicorn
[/Mana acceleration:]

[Tutor:]
*1 Traveler’s Amulet
*1 Ring of Three Wishes
[/Tutor:]

[Lands:]
*1 Encroaching Wastes
36 Mountain
*1 Mutavault
*1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
*1 Rogue’s Passage
[/Lands:]
[/deck]

Mono-Green

[card]Anthousa, Setessan Hero[/card], [card]Nylea, God of the Hunt[/card], or [card]Polukranos, World Eater[/card], despite having access to almost all of the mana acceleration available in Standard, will all have a very difficult time facing off against other Commander decks. The color has extremely limited and narrow card draw, few board wipes with limited effectiveness, and minimal fight-based creature removal. Additionally, Anthousa requires a deck built around the Heroic mechanic, but without recursive spells. This makes her a poor choice. Nylea herself does not have trample and is considered by eternal Commander players to be a less effective [card]Kamahl, Fist of Krosa[/card]. Polukranos provides some effective removal with its cheap cost, but that benefit will dwindle over time as its command zone cost continually rises with multiple deaths. Timmy-type Magic players could possibly be interested in this archetype for a while due to its potentially large creatures, but it lacks resiliency and will frequently get stuck in topdeck mode. Eternal mono-green players may find this color to be a little frustrating to play.

[deck title=Nylea Commander]
[Creatures:]
*1 Arbor Colossus
*1 Giant Adephage
*1 Howl of the Night Pack
*1 Kalonian Hydra
*1 Miming Slime
*1 Mistcutter Hydra
*1 Nemesis of Mortals
*1 Sporemound
*1 Colossus of Akros
*1 Haunted Plate Mail
[/Creatures:]

[Creature buff:]
*1 Boon Satyr
*1 Bow of Nylea
*1 Crowned Ceratok
*1 Death’s Presence
*1 Ivy Lane Denizen
*1 Nylea, God of the Hunt
*1 Oak Street Innkeeper
*1 Primeval Bounty
*1 Wild Beastmaster
*1 Fireshrieker
[/Creature buff:]

[Card draw:]
*1 Garruk’s Horde
*1 Nylea’s Presence
*1 Warriors’ Lesson
*1 Garruk, Caller of Beasts
*1 Witches’ Eye
[/Card draw:]

[Creature removal:]
*1 Deadly Recluse
*1 Polukranos, World Eater
*1 Time to Feed
*1 Hunt the Weak
*1 Vial of Poison
[/Creature removal:]

[Noncreature removal:]
*1 Rust Scarab
*1 Sylvan Primordial
*1 Naturalize
*1 Artisan’s Sorrow
*1 Fade into Antiquity
*1 Bramblecrush
[/Noncreature removal:]

[Board wipe:]
*1 Windstorm
*1 Ratchet Bomb
*1 Volatile Rig
[/Board wipe:]

[Graveyard hate:]
*1 Scavenging Ooze
*1 Serene Remembrance
[/Graveyard hate:]

[Control:]
*1 Pithing Needle
[/Control:]

[Life gain:]
*1 Nylea’s Disciple
*1 Bubbling Cauldron
*1 Staff of the Wild Magus
[/Life gain:]

[Mana acceleration:]
*1 Elvish Mystic
*1 Gyre Sage
*1 Voyaging Satyr
*1 Karametra’s Acolyte
*1 Into the Wilds
*1 Ordeal of Nylea
*1 Burnished Hart
[/Mana acceleration:]

[Recursion:]
*1 Wildwood Rebirth
*1 Codex Shredder
*1 Elixir of Immortality
*1 Strionic Resonator
*1 Illusionist’s Bracers
[/Recursion:]

[Tutors:]
*1 Gatecreeper Vine
*1 Lay of the Land
*1 Seek the Horizon
*1 Traveler’s Amulet
*1 Ring of Three Wishes
[/Tutors:]

[Lands:]
*1 Encroaching Wastes
34 Forest
*1 Mutavault
*1 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx
*1 Rogue’s Passage
[/Lands:]
[/deck]

With this deck, Nylea is the optimal commander and the cards work together to capitalize on making large creatures with trample. The Nylea player should be careful about overextending into removal and may want to help the table keep the focus on another threat by actually holding back attacking frequently. When the opportunity arises to hit the player that everyone fears the most, the green player will swing with an impressive force. As always, the green player will need to hold removal spells to remove key flyers found in blue and enable trample as frequently as possible to deal with tokens and pump effects.

Mono-Colored Summary

With a single commander (except for black) and a limited card pool available for mono-colored decks, a Standard Commander deck may appear obvious for optimized builds when compared to guild-colored decks. Mono-colored deck builders will have to trade a set of color weaknesses for a consistent mana base and a potentially more dedicated theme.

This format will no doubt be exciting. Each color on its own appears to have deckbuilding highlights that can be fresh, interactive, and interesting to play in a multiplayer game with red players possibly having the most fun. The red players trying the build found in this article are going to be most likely to understand the Joker metaphor presented in one of Adam Styborski’s articles: “Just shooting Batman holds no appeal for the Joker. He must die by a laser mounted on the moon instead.” Those specific games will be memorable long after the Return to Ravnica/Gatecrash/Dragon’s Maze/Magic 2014/Theros Standard Commander card pool has rotated out and faded away.

I love Modern because of all the value.

Even though Modern is a format where everything is subject to reprint, in addition to the likely release of more Modern Masters sets, the prices of staples are still low. In the year 2013, [card]Splinter Twin[/card] doubled in the U.S. shortly after doubling in Europe; [card]Chord of Calling[/card], [card]Fulminator Mage[/card], and [card]Horizon Canopy[/card] all more than doubled due not being reprinted; and novel new competitors like [card]Disrupting Shoal[/card] quintupled overnight.

Even fringe cards like [card]Threads of Disloyalty[/card] and [card]Restore Balance[/card] saw a bump just because it’s Modern and it’ll see more and more players as the format becomes more popular. [card]Threads of Disloyalty[/card] jumped 50% just because it was seeing play in two tier-one decks, and [card]Restore Balance[/card] is up 200% since six months ago, even though it sees close to zero competitive play outside of popping up in dailies every now and then.

For Magic financiers, it’s a good idea to play Modern, just like it is to play EDH, another eternal format that has a lot of room for speculation. The value proposition for playing the format is there. If a card has already been hit by a reprint in Modern Masters, you can only expect the value to go up from here. While Legacy has more stability, Modern has more spikes in value due to price corrections. Staying up to date about the Modern meta-game will give you a huge leg up to get to the spikes before the news goes around.

Modern tournaments are also heating up. Grand Prix Antswerp marked the biggest Modern Grand Prix to date with 1601 players, a respectable number even compared to other formats. Being that Modern is an eternal format with cards that don’t rotate, we can only expect the growth rate to accelerate going forward. As players jump on the bandwagon, more and more players will want in on the ride. And unlike Legacy, Modern is a pro tour format, which means that even if Star City Games can ignore the format for the time being, it can’t ignore it forever.

Post Modern: Banned List

Being that we’re getting closer to banned list announcements, I thought I’d take a minute to talk about the topic. It seems to always create controversy no matter what circle I’m in. Wizards of the Coast has more or less consistently banned/unbanned a card in Modern every six months or so, and we’re due for another change in the format.

Originally, I intended to list all the cards that will stay on the banned list no matter what, but the list is so long that it would likely take up the whole article. The banned list is unnecessarily long so that Modern would be protected as a new format, but that gives it space for cards to be unbanned (see [card]Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle[/card]). Let’s talk about other cards that can (and should?) be unbanned.

[card]Ancestral Vision[/card]

Modern doesn’t have any good cascade cards now that [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card] is banned. The [card]Shardless Agent[/card] following a [card]Brainstorm[/card] into [card]Ancestral Vision[/card] wombo combo doesn’t exist in Modern. Control in Modern is severely lacking, and UWR Control is currently on its knees due to having bad matchups against all of the tier-one Modern decks except Affinity. Recently, UWR has turned into more of a midrange deck. It runs a variety of creatures because there aren’t enough good cards to make a pure control strategy viable. [card]Ancestral Vision[/card] may be a powerful card, but it doesn’t win the game on its own and it tends to be a dead draw later in the game. It’s also quite slow, because that the earliest it can go off is turn five, while Modern is a turn-four format.

[card]Dread Return[/card]

Call me crazy, but I can see the argument for [card]Dread Return[/card] being unbanned to really shake up the format. Dredge is non-existent in Modern, in part because [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] is one of the most-played creatures in the format. Three creatures is a lot to sacrifice, and without [card]Narcomoeba[/card] and [card]Bridge from Below[/card], it’s just not happening on a regular basis. I would love to see more variety in Modern, even if it means playing against broken decks.

[card]Golgari Grave-Troll[/card]

Speaking of Dredge, why not unban the best Dredge creature? While [card]Dread Return[/card] would be a risky unban since it enables more trippy plays, [card]Golgari Grave-Troll[/card] is the safer unban because it’s just an upgrade over the Dredge 5 alternative [card]Stinkweed Imp[/card]. I don’t see this and [card]Dread Return[/card] being unbanned at the same time, but rather one or the other. Because graveyard hate is readily available in Modern now that [card]Rest in Peace[/card], [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card], and [card]Scavenging Ooze[/card] have been introduced to the format, there are plenty of cards to keep graveyard strategies in check.

[card]Wild Nacatl[/card]

The card that I’m most stoked about the possibility of being unbanned is [card]Wild Nacatl[/card]. It would introduce a Naya Zoo archetype into Modern, an exciting alternative to the only other existing aggro deck in Modern, Affinity. [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] is a card that is strong but not broken, because like all fair creatures, it dies to [card]Lightning Bolt[/card]. The reason that it’s on the banned list is because it limits variety in aggro decks, but being that aggro in Modern is as limited as it already is, I don’t see the reason for it to stay on the banned list.

So says the man who shook up MTGO and nearly caused an apocalypse. Could this be another shift of public opinion in the making? Love or hate the guy, apparently Brian Kibler’s opinions are the only ones that matter in the realm of Magic: The Gathering.

Seriously though, it’s not the end of the world if [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] is unbanned. [card]Delver of Secrets[/card] is already a flying [card]Wild Nacatl[/card] once it flips. Are players really in danger of dying to a vanilla 3/3 when [card]Tarmogoyf[/card] is legal in the format?

On the other hand, if none of the graveyard strategies are unbanned in Modern, I can see [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] being banned. On his stream, Craig Wescoe happened to mention the possibility even though he was using [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] for his Naya Burn deck.

[card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] wrecks deck diversity in Modern. From forcing midrange to go down the BGx route to denying graveyard shenanigans in Modern, [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] is a public enemy. Let’s also not talk about the strange stalemate interaction of having [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] on both sides of the table. Not many decks in Modern can answer a turn-two [card]Liliana of the Veil[/card] or [card]Birthing Pod[/card], which is unfair since Modern lacks a good [card]Force of Will[/card] substitute. [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] is the second-most played creature in Legacy, only recently being dethroned by [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card].

Once again at GP Prague, [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] led the BGx decks to dominate in 50% of the top 8 finishes. While t’s hard to argue that [card]Deathrite Shamanp[/card] makes BGx an overpowered strategy, it does make for Modern a stale format. On the other hand, banning [card]Deathrite SHaman[/card] would open the door for other midrange strategies like Naya, Bant, or RUG decks like Eternal Command. Because [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] demands a turn-one answer, a ban would give decks more space to have cards other than turn-one removals spells. [card]Path to Exile[/card] would get a significant bump if [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] is not in the format.

Post Modern: Disrupting Shoal

While the hype has died down on [card]Disrupting Shoal[/card], the TCGplayer mid price has stayed at $10.30 despite having zero copies in Day 2 of GP Prague. What gives?

Simply put, the Mono-Blue Ninja Bear deck is a fun deck. Here is a decklist in case you’ve missed it.

[Deck Title= Ninja Bear Delver] [Creatures] 4 Delver of Secrets 4 Phantasmal Bear 4 Snapcaster Mage 4 Ninja of the Deep Hours [/Creatures] [Spells] 4 Cryptic Command 4 Vapor Snag 4 Remand 4 Disrupting Shoal 4 Serum Visions 4 Gitaxian Probe [/Spells] [Land] 18 Island 2 Mutavault [/Land] [Sideboard] *4 Vedalken Shackles *4 Hibernation *3 Vendilion Clique *2 Hurkyl’s Recall *1 Wurmcoil Engine *1 Echoing Truth [/Sideboard] [/Deck]

How good? I think that after playtesting it for a week, I think it would be fair to say that it has the potential to be a tier-1.5 deck with more tweaking, including a splash for Red.

The deck is consistent in the sense that literally half of the deck’s draws net cards in the form of [card]Remand[/card], [card]Serum Visions[/card], [card]Gitaxian Probe[/card], [card]Ninja of the Deep Hours[/card], [card]Cryptic Command[/card], and [card]Snapcaster Mage[/card]. Promo and foil [card]Gitaxian Probes[/card] are looking good if the deck places well in upcoming GP Prague.

What about [card]Disrupting Shoal[/card]? I don’t think it’s anywhere near the power of [card]Force of Will[/card] because it’s easier to play around, but it does have a place in Modern where a simple play like turn-one [card]Deathrite Shaman[/card] or turn-one [card]Expedition Map[/card] can determine the course of a game. In a format where going first is a huge deal, [card]Disrupting Shoal[/card] helps to offset the balance of the tempo gained by going first versus the card advantage by going second. If you’re still holding onto the card, I would advise you try to trade it away, but nevertheless, it’s a fun card to play.

I personally still think that the UR Delver deck that Jeff Hoogland popularized is better than the mono-blue version because it plays [card]Lightning Bolt[/card], the best card in Modern, as opposed to [card]Vapor Snag[/card], a temporary solution to permanent problems. [card]Spellstutter Sprite[/card] has really proven itself to be one of the premier cards in Modern due to its versatility in playing defensive as a control card and aggro as a threat on the table. While all the UR Delver decks that Day 2’d GP Prague were of the [card]Young Pyromancer[/card] variety, I believe that the [card]Spellstutter Sprite[/card] style has the most consistency because of the ability to counter most spells and also flash in threats.

For more talk about Modern, you can follow me on Twitter @fyawm or the MTGFinance subreddit where I post under the same name. Until then, please feel free to discuss the contents of this article in the comments below or on Reddit!

Modern season is getting closer and closer. People are preparing for Pro Tour Valentia, the big Modern event before the PTQ season starts.  At the PT, we’ll see the world’s best players brewing all manner of new decks that will inspire entire communities to speculate on cards. Competitive players will need to slowly start picking up playsets of Modern cards for their decks. This is an opportune time for me to talk about a card I would consider a great pick-up, both short- and long-term.

First allow me to tell you something about the way I’ve learned to work in MTG finance. As some of you might know, I wasn’t as knee-deep into finance a year ago from now. I had made some profitable trades, had a good sense of what cards were going to be good and how to grow my collection, but actually profiting from my hobby was not something I considered. Back then I listened to the Brainstorm Brewery podcast “just for fun.” But as I listened, I got more and more drawn into the appeal. Part of that is the joy that I get from watching numbers grow. It’s like gardening, but with numbers.

And because I love seeing my collection and finance account grow, I absolutely despise watching it fall. This causes me to be careful with what I trade for or purchase as “specs.” Hype-driven cards such as [card]Phyrexian Obliterator[/card] or [card]Disrupting Shoal[/card] are known to be mostly artificial price spikes, based on no results or actual demand, and offer very little profit with a high risk. Some opt to gather as many 10-cent rares as they can, hoping one of them becomes a hit. If not, they can just out them all at eight cents each. This is a low-risk investment but with an equally low reward. What I really want to shoot for are the cards that fall into the low-risk, high-reward section. Cards that aren’t going to unexpectedly drop in price (barring influence from Wizards of the Coast through bannings) and only have room to grow, but in a more pronounced fashion than the 10-cent bulk rares. Take a look at the grid I made.

This matrix gives you a clear demonstration of what I mean regarding risk versus reward. Through a few example cards, you can piece together how any given card will fall into these quadrants. Hopefully this grid will be useful to you, and you can also show it to other people if you ever want to explain how a card can be considered a bad spec based on the risks. But after this long introduction, it is time to get to what I really came for to talk about this week.

Does this art remind you of something? Some place? A township of sorts? There’s a link between this image and the matrix I showed you earlier. The card that this image depicts falls under that sweet category I spoke of. Low risk, high reward.

[card]Gavony Township[/card]

For a card that you can get around a dollar on TCGplayer or 1.50 euros on MagicCardMarket, this land does a lot of work. It is featured in several prominent decks in Modern, mostly variations of [card]Birthing Pod[/card] decks and green-white decks. Its functionality includes resetting your persist creatures, such as [card]Kitchen Finks[/card] and [card]Murderous Redcap[/card], as well as getting aggressive with your [card]Birds of Paradise[/card] as they quickly grow out of control with +1/+1 counters. And because both of these deck archetypes, which each have several variations, run mana accelerants, the Township activations come earlier and more often. Until, of course, the game has been ended by a bunch of 3/4 [card]Noble Hierarch[/card]s and [card]Birds of Paradise[/card].

[card]Gavony Township[/card] is excellent to pick up simply because of its utility and staying power versus its cost. Picking copies up as filler in trade isn’t hard because Township doesn’t inspire a particularly strong price memory. People think of this as rotated Standard fringe card.

And if that wasn’t enough of a reason to acquire some of these lovely pieces of real estate, just take a look at the Magic Online price. I’ve been picking up my fair share of those online as well.

Twelve cents. Do you know how easy it is to double your money on a twelve-cent card? Don’t be surprised if you more than quadruple your investment. Before rotation, the card’s price had gone as high as 1.1 tickets, more than nine times as much as it is now. And the card sees more Standard play than it did Modern..

So there you have it. My off-air pick of the week. I know this article was a short one, but that should make up my 2000-word wall of text last time. I would like to know if you found the above matrix to be useful (and it still needs a name!). Also, if you enjoyed the sweet landscape images, you should definitely check out Jung Park’s work and support him by playing the Zendikar basic lands with his artwork. If you want to contact me, you can do so as usual on my mail [email protected] or hit me up on Twitter @TheMeddlingMage.

This weekend marked the first major Modern event of the year: Grand Prix Prague.  As we creep closer and closer to Modern season, Modern staples are beginning to ascend in price almost across the board.  If you don’t believe me, go TCGplayer and search [card]Birthing Pod[/card].  It’s already almost a $10.00 card, and Modern season doesn’t technically start until June.  I will be selling my copies of [card]Birthing Pod[/card] at $10.00 if and when we get there.  While it will very likely climb to higher heights, I am quite content with the profit I’ll be making at that point.  As the guys from the Brainstorm Brewery podcast like to say, “Leave the last ten percent for someone else.”  With that being said, Wizards just announced a new deck product for Modern.  We don’t know what will be printed in the deck, and I won’t speculate on its contents.
 Wizards would like to capitalize on some of the Modern hype and this product will assuredly be in high demand despite the MSRP.  I am still
quite bullish on almost all Modern staples, (the more recent the reprint the safer bet).  If you aren’t already, I recommend targeting Modern staples in trades.  Many casual players are still out there who cracked Modern Masters packs in hopes of living the dream and ended up with a handful of Modern playable cards sitting in their trade binders.  A couple of cards that haven’t seen reprint in awhile that I am a little more hesitant to acquire as speculation targets: [card]Remand[/card] and [card]Noble Hierarch[/card].

Modern:

Grand Prix Prague 2014 Decklists

I am happy to report that Jund is alive and well.  Four of the top 8 decklists fit the description (at least loosely) of what modern Jund has evolved into following the banning of [card]Bloodbraid Elf[/card].  Meanwhile, not a single copy of [card]Birthing Pod[/card] managed a top 8 finish with one copy in the top 16.  Going into day two, each of the following archetypes, U/W/R midrange, Merfolk, Urza-tron, Splintertwin, and Jund had at least one pilot that remained undefeated.  Birthing-pod strategies are surprisingly missing from that list, but a number of factors may contribute to this and we are only examining the results from a single tournament.  Consider the following decklist:

[deck title=Emanuele Giusti Grand Prix Prague 2014 Top 8 – Modern]

*2 Abrupt Decay
*3 Inquisition of Kozilek
*4 Lightning Bolt
*2 Maelstrom Pulse
*2 Terminate
*3 Thoughtseize
*4 Liliana of the Veil
[/Spells]
[Land]
*4 Blackcleave Cliffs
*1 Blood Crypt
*1 Forest
*3 Marsh Flats
*1 Misty Rainforest
*2 Overgrown Tomb
*3 Raging Ravine
*1 Stomping Ground
*2 Swamp
*2 Treetop Village
*4 Verdant Catacombs

[/Land]

[Sideboard]
*2 Ancient Grudge
*2 Grafdigger’s Cage
*2 Jund Charm
*2 Obstinate Baloth
*1 Olivia Voldaren
*2 Slaughter Games
*1 Sword of Light and Shadow
*1 Terminate
*1 Thoughtseize
*1 Thrun, the Last Troll
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

I would consider this particular Jund decklist relatively “stock” in the sense that there are no big surprises.  Liliana of the Veil is a four of in almost every Jund deck I have seen as of late, and I don’t believe that her current price point reflects her current popularity.  I could easily see price correction moving her price to $50.00 and higher during Modern season.  I saw copies earlier this week as low as $40.00 and she is trending upward as I write.  When did Olivia Voldaren become the four drop of choice in Modern Jund?  She has been showing up in recent MODO daily decklists as well, but I am under the impression that the general population of magic players would not think of this card as an auto-include in Modern Jund.  I might try to target a few copies now in trades as the casual appeal alone for this card can potentially drive its value upward. At less than $5.00 it feels pretty safe.  The versions of Jund splashing white tend toward Ajani Vengeant, and there were numerous copies of this card in a variety of archetypes.

Standard:

SCG Open Orlando Standard Decks

At the Star City Standard Open in the top 8 there were three copies of Mono-Blue Devotion, one copy of Mono-black, two copies of pseudo-Mono-Black plus [card]Blood Baron[/card] and [card]Sin Collector[/card] (otherwise known as B/W midrange).  Seems about par for the course.  Standard is clearly stagnate. [card]Liliana’s Reaver[/card] did make its way into the 11th place B/G devotion deck that Shawn Ellis ran.  I don’t really see any financial implications for the card, but it did seem like a reasonable card choice both contributing to devotion, strong on offense and defense, and a nice little upside.  I think that the four drop spot isn’t really contested and still belongs to [card]Desecration Demon[/card], but the hand disruption element to an unchecked reaver may be something worth trying out.

Legacy:

SCG Open Orlando Legacy Decks

Yet another unique deck chock-full of answers to the [card]True-Name Nemesis[/card] showed up and took it down this week in BUG Delver.  This deck can proactively fly over [card]True-Name Nemesis[/card], with [card]Delver of Secrets[/card] or [card]Tombstalker[/card] or just kill it.  Not by coincidence we see another three copies of [card]Liliana of the Veil[/card] in this deck.  I see a trend here.  She’s everywhere.  Another card that shows up in the sideboard of the winning BUG list is [card]Grafdigger’s Cage[/card].  This card is also showing up in a number of places, and it’s incredibly versatile, with one or the other clause of text being very relevant in numerous match-ups in Legacy as well as Modern.
With the amount of discussion of True-Name Nemesis being an unfair card as of late, it is quite pleasing to only see four copies throughout two decks in the top 8 of the open this weekend.  The winning list did not have a single copy, and no one archetype had more than one pilot in the top 8.  One could argue that [card]Delver of Secrets[/card] is an archetype in and of itself, but I would argue that it is more of a super-type.  What is clear is that Legacy is incredibly diverse, rewards good play, and would appear to remain rather healthy despite the addition of [card]True-Name Nemesis[/card].

You have less than a month to sell your [card]Mutavault[/card]s or trade them away for something insane five minutes before a PTQ starts. This card should be in an event deck soon, and even if it’s not, demand can’t get much higher. There’s no upside left in the card, and it’s time to turn your copies into something else if you haven’t already.

Jan van der Vegt is apparently on the [card]Goryo’s Vengeance[/card]/[card]Through the Breach[/card] deck for GP Prague, but with a five-color manabase to support [card]Fist of Suns[/card] as a third way to cheat in [card]Emrakul, the Aeons Torn[/card] and [card]Griselbrand[/card]. I have no idea if this version of the deck is good, but you can get Fist for under $2 and its casual appeal will help mitigate the risk (it has a 27% spread, though some of this is likely due to potential hype about the deck). I think this is close to a free roll if you’re paying attention this weekend and can cash out before stores update their buy prices should the deck flop.

[card]Primeval Titan[/card] has a 15% spread and is 20 tickets on MTGO. These are both giant signs pointing towards the card going up fairly dramatically in the near future. It’s in some versions of [card]Scapeshift[/card] as well as the fringe [card]Amulet of Vigor[/card] deck. It’s also in the Green Devotion deck everyone has been secretly brewing at 3:00 a.m. I’ll admit I bought in pretty hard on these last week and I still like the price they’re at—between GP Prague and Pro Tour Born of the Gods in the short term, as well as Modern PTQ season coming in a few months, this bet feels hard to lose.

[card]Gemstone Mine[/card] is another interesting pickup. It’s in the [card]Fist of Suns[/card] – [card]Griselbrand[/card] deck I mentioned earlier as well as the [card]Amulet of Vigor[/card] – [card]Primeval Titan[/card] deck. Normally being in two fringe strategies wouldn’t be very interesting, but it also has a 30% spread and lots of demand outside of Modern. I don’t think Mine is an outright buy so much as a trade target, but it’s something to keep an eye out for during the next few weeks when you’re at events.

I cannot keep copies of [card]Cabal Therapy[/card] for more than a day or two. There are 32 total listings on TCGplayer right now and the internet is slowly drying up (Star City Games is completely sold out, for instance). I think this card could hit $20 or more over the course of a day and is a fantastic pick up.

Avacyn Restored is in the middle of a price adjustment. [card]Avacyn, Angel of Hope[/card], [card]Craterhoof Behemoth[/card], and [card]Griselbrand[/card] have seen significant increases over the past few months and I don’t think the set is done experiencing these kind of jumps. I love [card]Cavern of Souls[/card] as a pickup right now—this has real long-term potential to hit $20 or more in a few years with no competitive results, a la [card]Vampire Nocturnus[/card] before the reprint. However, the card also has real legs in Modern and Legacy Merfolk decks, which makes it even more appealing. Cavern isn’t a cash buy right now, but it’s a very solid trade target that I don’t think you can lose on in the long term.

Andrew Shrout continues to show us that green-white is not completely dead in Standard. His results combined with the upcoming G/W temple in Born of the Gods would normally lead me to believe that buying into Standard G/W staples this month is an easy way to turn a profit, but I’m not sold in this case. Take a look at his list:

[deck title= GW Shrout]

[Creatures]

*4 Experiment One

*4 Soldier of the Pantheon

*4 Fleecemane Lion

*2 Skylasher

*4 Voice of Resurgence

*4 Banisher Priest

*4 Boon Satyr

*3 Mistcutter Hydra

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

*4 Advent of the Wurm

*4 Selesnya Charm

[/Spells]

[Land]

*8 Forest

*8 Plains

*3 Selesnya Guildgate

*4 Temple Garden

[/Land]

[Sideboard]

*1 Mistcutter Hydra

*2 Skylasher

*3 Unflinching Courage
*2 Last Breath

*2 Rootborn Defenses

*2 Polukranos, World Eater

*3 Glare of Heresy

[/Sideboard]

[/deck]

That’s 34 rares and mythics. Granted, eight of them are [card]Mistcutter Hydra[/card]s and [card]Skylasher[/card]s, but they could just as easily be [card]Ajani, Caller of the Pride[/card], [card]Loxodon Smiter[/card], or [card]Witchstalker[/card].

With around half the deck being made up of rares and mythics, I think any type of price increase will be spread out among too many cards for anyone to make any money. The lone exception is [card]Advent of the Wurm[/card] because everyone hated Dragon’s Maze, so the relative supply will be much lower. It’s also entirely possible that [card]Lifebane Zombie[/card] is actually the best pickup if we think G/W is going to be good, but it’s almost three times as expensive as Advent, so it has less upside. We can probably wait a bit longer before picking it up.

I invested in [card]Scavenging Ooze[/card] instead of [card]Mutavault[/card] this September. Oops. I like Ooze as a trade acquisition this month, if not an outright buy, while it’s price is so significantly depressed. I don’t think there’s much more time than that to get in because the temples coming in Born of the Gods should help make midrange strategies relevant in Standard again, which is where Ooze is at its best. Don’t get me wrong, [card]Sylvan Caryatid[/card] is the main reason to play Green in midrange strategies and Ooze will probably be riding its coattails, but I don’t think that matters. The promo hurts the ceiling somewhat, but I still think Ooze can hit $12 with broad demand once the format evens out a little.

It’s very interesting that Standard prices haven’t really moved much despite PTQs starting a month ago. At the same time, various older cards have doubled. We all have to learn the pricing patterns of the new PTQ schedule and how the different block structures fit within it. For instance, I’m staying away from all Theros cards until June (right before M15 and during Modern season). We haven’t had a big-small-small block since Scars of Mirrodin, when the playerbase was significantly smaller, and while I don’t know what drafting a set for nine months is going to do with this large a player base, I have a hunch.

Have comments? Please share below.

It’s been a quiet week in the MTG world it seems. Or maybe I haven’t been paying any attention. I was stretching to come up with a topic that was related to the MTG world and my wife recommend to “just give them a good old history lesson.” I though that was a great idea but it needed to be inspired. I wandered over to the Mother Ship (Daily MTG) and there it was, [card]Black Lotus[/card], as the Card of the Day. That’s the hallmark beginning of the impressive history of our game.

The earliest beer has been a topic of beer scholars for around hundred years. They have found more than 800 paintings on the walls of the pyramids and had temples dedicated to the goddess beer. Home brewing was an everyday occurrence, and existed as sustenance for the people of the time. There were also major breweries alongside microbreweries. There were different styles, ingredients, and regions. So let’s dig in to some fun stuff.

The Gods and Goddess of Beer

As I think we can all remember from elementary school, Egyptians life revolved around the culture’s gods and the stories that surrounded them. Beer was no exception to this rule. It was believed that Dionysus was the inventor of beer. There is a somewhat contradictory story that reads that Dionysus actually fled to Mesopotamia because he was disgusted that the Egyptians enjoyed beer. Take from this what you will, it’s all here to say that the gods and beer were linked right from the beginning. If, however, Dionysus invented beer and somehow humans got a hold of it, we would need to be able to produce more of it. Since we are not gods who can just create things from nothing, we needed a process of making it: brewing. With that process came the goddess Hathor (see statue). She was the “inventress of brewing.” Another name that she carried was “the mistress of intoxication.” The temple that was dedicated to her was aptly named “the place of drunkenness.”  We then have another goddess associated with beer, her name is Menqet. She was often seen with Hathor and carried the name “the goddess who makes beer” and also “overseer of the brewery women.”

The Earliest Home Brew

It is not a surprise, then, that the people who made the beer in this culture were the women. At home the women would have often brewed the beer as it may have been considered a task akin to cooking daily meals. Reasons for this might have been that beer was safer to drink than the water and it was also a source of calories and nutrients. They were not yet using hops to preserve their beer, so this home brewed beer would have been much lower in alcohol content. Therefore, it would not have been able to keep infections at bay for very long. So it would have been consumed very fresh, possibly as soon as the primary fermentation was complete. If the beer is only being made at two to three percent alcohol, it would only take a few days to completely ferment and would need to be consumed within a few days. It seems like it would not be unreasonable to say that they may have been brewing at home two or three times a week.

If you read my Grain to Glass post, you’ll have a good idea how beer makes into your glass. The process used in ancient Egypt, however, has been hotly debated. In the last thirty years, the argument has been distilled down into what we can actually discern from the information that’s left to us. The debate stems from a long artistic interpretation tradition of beer scholars. Scholars took art on the walls of the pyramids and used it to discern ingredients, processes, and other elements of the beer culture in ancient Egypt. These interpretations have led to some misconceptions, but it is now generally agreed that the beer was actually made from bread that had lots of yeast added to it. It was lightly baked and then stomped to break it up much like wine grapes. It would have been put into a large vessel for fermentation, then strained and put into a jar to be sealed for storage or transportation.

Big Business

Wait a second, I just said that these beer would have been made every few days and drunk very quickly. But just like we have big breweries today, there were big breweries back then. Egyptian beer was produced at such high volumes that breweries were able to supply all the local demand as well as leave some left over for export. The most popular beer from Egypt would have been from a city called Pelusium. It was so popular, in fact, in later times it was exported to Rome. Ian Hornesly writes in his book what this exported beer might have looked like.

“The possibility exists that we are looking at an ancient equivalent or our much-exported “India Pale Ale” from the ninetieth century. Beer destined for export must have had some “keeping quality to them, maybe via a herbal addition. Maybe IPA actually signified ‘Imperial Pelusian Ale’ ”

Making a Living

With all of this beer being brewed in Egypt and imported from abroad, you might wonder what it is that they did with it. Or maybe you don’t, drinking it seems like a fairly obvious answer, but that is only part of the story. Beer and bread were actually a means of payment for working certain jobs. One person might be paid four khar (ancient Egyptian unit of measurement) of emmer (a type of wheat) and 1.5 khar of barley per month. This works out to roughly 202 kilograms or 444 pounds of grain per month. The person being paid does not receive this as raw grain, but rather receives it in its processed form of beer and bread. To put this into some perspective, it takes around 10 pounds of grain to make five gallons of 4%-ABV beer. So, 444 pounds of grain will make you 44.4 five-gallon batches of beer. Each five gallon batch of beer yields around 55 bottles, so in the end you end up with 2,420 bottles of beer per month, or 80 per day. There are, however, a great number of caveats to these calculations, not all of which I will be able to discuss here. I’ll mention a couple, though, the first one being that one person’s wage would probably be feeding a whole household. It would also be fair to say that a given household might want some bread during a given month, which would cut down drastically on the amount of beer it would get, especially with a larger family. So after these, and still other, allowances have been made, it’s probably fair to say that a worker would earn about a six pack of beer per day. Not too bad if you ask me.

And finally I’ll end with a list of names that the Ancient Egyptians would have called the varying styles of beers.

Dark beer, Sweet Beer, Thick Beer, Iron Beer, Garnished Beer, Friend’s Beer. Beer of the Protector, Beer of Truth, Beer Which Does Not Sour, and Beer of Eternity. I personally want to try the Friend’s Beer and the Beer of Truth, which was drunk by the 12 gods who protected the Shrine of Osiris.

There’s much I have sadly had to leave out, but I’ll have another swing at the ancient Egyptian beer culture one day. Until that day, I’ll leave you with the main resource I used so you can go dig in for yourself if you’d like. The book is called The History of Beer and Brewing by Ian S. Hornsey, Published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in Cambridge, England.

Style of the Week: Wheat Beer/ Hefeweizen

Hey everyone!  Sorry for the hiatus. I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays.  I have been debating a lot of the future of this column and I’m writing a mini-article to bring the series up in the new year.

What’s changing, you ask?  I will be making the articles more poll-driven, with multiple per article to help shape the deck, as well as including some caveats for the inclusion of some cards in certain playgroups.   The goal is to have a deck built mostly by the community and I want to involve everyone as much as possible in the process!

How Competitive is Your Playgroup?

Today, I want to discuss the different ways to approach Commander from a playgroup perspective.  A lot of people have different views on how Commander should be played (French rules, don’t be a dick, etc.), but it’s important to match your deck’s competitiveness with those of the people you play with.  A lot of people play Commander as a more casual format for gunslinging fatties and generally just having a good, stress-free time.  Other people are coming just to win.  They are the kinds of guys that will play [card]Azusa, Lost but Seeking[/card] with [card]Crucible of Worlds[/card] and [card]Strip Mine[/card]. Some groups have a bunch of people playing Commander pre-cons straight out of the box.  You need to find the sweet spot to maximize the enjoyment of everyone at the table, because in the end, you can’t play Commander with a bunch of people that don’t have fun.

Figuring out how competitive your playgroup is is the key to having fun playing Commander.  There are a number of things you should consider when determining how people want to play the game.  The most obvious is the choice of Commander. Some Commanders are generally just much more abusive than others and consequently lead to much more competitive decks.  [card]Azusa, Lost but Seeking[/card], [card]Sharuum the Hegemon[/card], and [card]Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind[/card] are some of the more competitive Commanders.

Another thing to consider is what kind of spells they are playing.  Are the blue decks loaded with counterspells?  Is anyone playing Eldrazi? How synergistic are the spells that they are playing with their general?  Is the Sharuum player playing a [card]Mindslaver[/card]?

The last thing I look for is how much mana denial and acceleration they are playing.  Generally speaking, most players would rather play more acceleration and not much mana denial.  Only the highest tier of competitive players will end up playing cards like [card]Armageddon[/card] or recurring [card]Wasteland[/card]s and [card]Strip Mine[/card]s, and then you should be ready to fight to keep your mana.

I generally rate decks on a scale of 1 to 5 to determine how I should approach playing with that group.

1.  Precons:  They may not be homemade, but the power level of most of the cards is pretty low and the decks are pretty fair. Due to the fact that the decklists are readily available and you may know most of the cards in them, I think they are the lowest power level on the totem pole.

2. Rough Home Brews:  These are usually first-iteration decks that probably don’t have a mana curve and have a lot of pretty bad niche cards that haven’t been cut yet.  Many cards may be acting as filler while more expensive and powerful cards are purchased.

3. More Refined Brews:  These decks are usually third- or fourth-iteration decks that have fewer useless cards and better mana curves.  Most of the power cards are included unless they are very niche. These decks are a bit more competitive.

4. Final Version:  These decks are the last iteration of building and are when people usually start foiling them out.  They’ve committed to the card choices and have the most powerful versions of all spells to win.

5. Ultra Competitive: These decks are piloted in tournaments and personally I think ruin all the fun of Commander.  The only difference between Final Versions and Ultra Competitive is that Ultra Competitive decks include large amounts of mana denial.  I am a supporter of players being able to cast spells and having an interactive game.  Losing a game to a well-timed mana-denial spell is just the worst.

Matching your deck’s amount of “trying” is really important to get the most enjoyment out of playing Commander. Making sure you aren’t causing anyone to not have fun is imperative.

[poll id=”6″]

[poll id=”7″]

Investing 201: Tracking

Buy low sell, high. Double down when the dealer shows a six. Never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this—always track your progress. Ahahahahahaha…..haha…..ha………….

In today’s world of investing, the media will all too often glorify a wild call that went right. A hedge-fund manager can make dozens of bad investments, but if he calls the surprise fall of a major company, then he becomes the hero of Wall Street. In fact, unless it’s a high-profile individual, the media almost never tracks results. This leads many investors to jump on a bandwagon with three flat tires (or the Wild West equivalent).

This leads us to where we are now.

You are looking for ways to improve your MTG finance skills. You are learning the ropes and listening to Brainstorm Brewery (if not, then you can’t be very serious about it).  The Brew Crew each have thriving business interests and MTG finance cred in the community. And while they each track their own investments, this is the first time that they are taking the steps to review their podcast picks and share the results with the readers.

Methodology

Valuing

Every MTG financier purchases from different sites and trades for different values.  Some pick up a copy of a card at FNM, others buy 100 deep from TCG Player. However, most sites move up and down together over time.  So while the difference between TCG Player and Star City Games makes a difference for a single trade, for our tracking purposes all that matters is that we use the same source and the same investment amount for each trade. We are also using retail prices without accounting for commissions, fees, or buy-listing. We are assuming the retail value of the cards is the value of your portfolio.

Investing

In order to keep the high-value cards from overshadowing the cheaper cards, we will be “investing” $100 into each pick, buying two $50 cards or 10 $10 cards. This will sometimes lead to odd card amounts. For example, we would need 22.22 of a $4.50 card. You might be thinking, you can’t buy .22 of a card! Don’t freak out. The percentages scale just fine. “What about sales?” you ask. “You can’t profit from selling!”

On the contrary: If you sell a $100 card for cash, and then it drops to $1, your cash value is 100 times more than if you had done nothing. Also, if you know a way to short-sell magic cards, please call me ASAP!

Timing

Unless a ‘Crew member specifically mentions a change in opinion or an initial target price, we are assuming that you held onto or avoided the card based on the original recommendations. To that end, there will be two time-frames examined: the 30 days following the recommendation and the value of the card at rotation. Why rotation? Two reasons:

1. Standard card values are directly affected.

2. In this batch, rotation is at least six months following the Brew Crew pick.

Measuring Performance

There are many ways to measure performance. You could list total right and wrong. But what if someone is right 51% of the time, but all the bad picks drop 90%? What if someone is wrong 75% of the time but their wins are all 1000% gainers? Here’s the plan: we will be listing the Brew Crew’s win/loss percentages and their total combined returns. So, a 50% gain on card A and a -25% loss on card B will result in a portfolio gain of 25% and a win loss of 50/50.  Also, due to market inefficiency and transaction cost, any moves under +/-20% are considered “flat performers” for our purposes.

Results

Every person who plays Magic has a little MTG finance in them. Much like the player psychographics made famous by Mark Rosewater (Timmy, Johnny, Spike) there are also MTG finance psychographics: Alex and Gordon. Alex is the guy who, as a kid during Alpha, lost a little value when he traded his extra Mox for 10 awesome creatures to finish his collection.  Gordon (greed is good) Gecco is the guy who offers you buylist prices for your cards and SCG prices for his. More on these guys later.

Please remember these results are from a short time frame—a season if you like. Every season will have different challenges and timing.

Here are some teasers to whet your appetite:

• Which Brew Crew member had a better season average than the Baseball Hall of Fame hitter Hugh Duffy?
• Which Brew Crew member did in six months what Wall Street titans couldn’t do in 12?
• Which Brew Crew member offered three trades on one podcast that EACH returned over 90% in under six months?

Stay tuned for future installments to see how the Crew members did on their picks!

Remember when we asked podcast listeners to volunteer to listen to old Brainstorm Brewery episodes and to tell us what our picks of the week were and what we said to do? Well, the data is in and Brian Dale has analyzed it and above is the introduction to his series where he will present the data and help you figure out which kind of investor you are and whose opinion you find yourself agreeing with more. Is one of the ‘Crew under or over-performing consistently? Are all four members making a net profit with their picks? The most important component of MTG Finance is accountability, and this series looks to keep the ‘Crew on their toes—their picks will be scrutinized. What’s going to come out? That’s half the fun! On behalf of Brainstorm Brewery, I would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who volunteered to mine our old episodes for this data. We hope when you see how it’s presented in this series you will agree it was worth it. – Jason Alt