Maelstrom Wanderer is probably one of the best decks, assuming you have the correct cards to support it. The deck gets infinitely better when you have Mana Crypt and Mana Drain, the latter of which has produced almost all of my turn 2 to 3 wins.
How are you getting turn two wins off a Mana Drain in a MW deck? /boggle
I would assume either rolling Time Walks or Food Chain.
What in the sweet house of Moses are you countering on turn one with Drain that nets significant mana?
Whoops, sorry guys, meant turn 3 to 4, not sure if my list as it is now could actually win on turn two. A lot of times these wins happen because people accelerate into their 4 casting cost generals on turn two, which nets me +4 mana on turn three, which is almost a guaranteed Wanderer punching someone in the mouth, and possibly a game winner if I flip into anything that lets me cheat out an Eldrazi (Bribery, Tooth and Nail, etc.) or any infinite combo (Palinchron/Deadeye, etc).
While Maelstrom probably isn't the absolute fastest deck, nor the most powerful, I do enjoy the fact that the general is essentially a one card combo. You don't really care if it gets countered (it's often a net gain if you have enough mana) and you don't need to flip anything specific since a bunch of cards that you can run will generally end the game if they resolve (T&N, Jokullhaups, Food Chain, etc).
This thread is really fascinating to read, and is full of awesome things I would have never even thought of! Keep the posts coming guys
Maelstrom Wanderer is probably one of the best decks, assuming you have the correct cards to support it. The deck gets infinitely better when you have Mana Crypt and Mana Drain, the latter of which has produced almost all of my turn 2 to 3 wins.
Yeah, mana confluence's price is crazy, and so is athreos, god of passage.
They're both good cards but this price is just the initial hype. Athreos isn't that good, I've seen lots of games where he's just a dead draw. You need to have a board presence for him to be good.
The fact that Mana Confluence is $15 kinda irks me, given that City of Brass is only about $4-$5. So basically what vendors are saying is that this card is triple the price just because it is Standard. One of the things I dislike about Standard.
Keep in mind that City of Brass has had 8 or so (Arabian Nights, Chronicles, Fifth Edition, Sixth Edition, Seventh Edition, Eighth Edition, Modern Masters, JSS Promo Foil) printings while Mana Confluence hasn't even been out for two months.
Pharika, God of Affliction
Athreos, God of Passage
Mutavault
Deciede
Temple of Malady
Kruphix, God of Horizons
$15
For
3 SOldier of the Pantheon
3 Prophet of Kruphix
1 Dictate of Kruphix
1 Voice of Resurgence
1 Progenitor Mimic
2 Rest in Peace
1 Kiora, the Crashing Wave
1 Temple of Abandon
3 Reaper of the Wilds
Whoever got pile B got massacred in my opinion. A has way too much value and playability compared to B.
If everyone was to actually hold onto these duals and staples like the people in this thread claim to be doing, Legacy will be on the way out. SCG won't back a format where they have no cards to sell to the players of the format they are propping up. If duals become that scarce, all the other Legacy staples will skyrocket as well. There will be no availability.
wrong. if legacy is dead as you say because people hoard duals, then when the tournament scene is dead, people will liquidate their cards. An equilibrium price will then be met somewhere down the line with demand decreasing and supply slowly increasing due to people cashing out.
Yup! Just like vintage, which we all know is as healthy as ever. /s
Vintage doesn't have a multi-thousand dollar dollar weekly tournament circuit attached to it.
He spoiled a fringe Modern deck that was already seeing some play. The deck is basically an All-Hate deck and has many enchantments, including Ghostly Prison and Runed Halo, 2 cards that have also spiked recently. It is a Mono White deck with basically only Sigil of the Empty Throne to win (unless you count 4 Mutavault). I haven't played it or played against it, but it seems even better hate than Death and Taxes for the current format.
Any time an odd card goes up in price, blame Travis Woo.
This didn't have as much to do with Travis Woo as it did with a bunch of cards being way under priced. The first offender was Endless Horizons which had been sitting at around $2-3 forever and had been slowly gaining trajectory on MTGStocks. Since it was easily found in dollar boxes at a ton of Local Game Stores people started picking them up as throw-ins during trades. Eventide was a massively under printed set (I think Aaron Forsythe said something about how nobody opened it,) and the card was already seeing play in a Mono-White Enchantment-based Modern deck that was popping up on Magic Online every now and then. Most of the cards had already gone up due to previous usage (see: Runed Halo,) so Endless Horizons was the natural next step which caused a decent number of copies to be picked up at the old market price. After a decent amount of the cheap copies were bought up someone in the financial community saw that there were almost no copies left on TCGPlayer and decided to buy the rest (about 10-20 copies) for a very small amount of money and "reset" the price by eliminating all of the copies left and replacing them with copies at what the person thought was the "correct" market price. This is what happened the following morning:
Since MTGStocks scrapes data from TCGPlayer it was pretty easy to "reset" the price just by spending a couple dollars and buying out TCGPlayer (which ended up only being 10-20 copies of an already cheap card). And what about our friend Sigil of the Empty Throne?
Awfully familiar isn't it? Same thing applies as it did to Endless Horizons. Here we have a card played in multiple formats (Legacy, EDH, Modern) that is relatively under priced! Considering that most pieces of the Mono-White Modern Deck were going up the obvious next target was this fellow.
Please understand that the point of this post is not to brag or to make people outside of the finance community upset. The purpose of writing this little post is to educate people on why these things happen! The truth of the matter is that the information about both of these cards going up at some point or another was on the internet (in the case of Endless Horizons there was a mass insider-email from MTGPrice about it almost a month and a half ago,) for anyone that wanted it. People can stay uneducated, blame Travis Woo or blame the fictional MTG Finance Boogeyman that /r/MTGFinance and other websites seems so obsessed with, but the truth of the matter was that these spikes were poised to happen for a long time, if you missed out on picking up copies of either card for whatever reason then you only have yourself to blame.
Anyone else notice that Aurelia, the WarleaderFoil jumped up to $40? I guess it was only a matter of time. Foil mythic angel effect I suppose.
A bunch of people talked about this a month or so ago and decided to go in on it since it was sitting at around $15 per which was insane for a foil mythic angel. Myself and others picked up a couple playsets of the foil versions up until the point where someone bought out ABU for all their foils at $23 each. After that ABU's buylist price was raised to what they were originally selling it for and the rest is history.
Unfortunately there's usually little to no premium for miscuts that don't at least show a tiny bit of another card. Could be worth a couple extra bucks to a hardcore miscut collector though!
Pretty sure Urzassedatives is referencing the twitter post where someone took a picture of the "scavenger hunt" card that will be given out tomorrow at PAX that is themed after M15. The event is called "The Hunt" and has nine things you can take pictures of, each of which put you into a drawing to win a trip to PAX Prime. One is a picture of Jace, one of Nissa, one of Gideon, one of Chandra, one of Liliana, two of Garruk (one of him looming over you and one of you and him ready to attack something?) and the last picture being you and three other friends doing something "heroic".
Hell, it's about time.
Whoops, sorry guys, meant turn 3 to 4, not sure if my list as it is now could actually win on turn two. A lot of times these wins happen because people accelerate into their 4 casting cost generals on turn two, which nets me +4 mana on turn three, which is almost a guaranteed Wanderer punching someone in the mouth, and possibly a game winner if I flip into anything that lets me cheat out an Eldrazi (Bribery, Tooth and Nail, etc.) or any infinite combo (Palinchron/Deadeye, etc).
While Maelstrom probably isn't the absolute fastest deck, nor the most powerful, I do enjoy the fact that the general is essentially a one card combo. You don't really care if it gets countered (it's often a net gain if you have enough mana) and you don't need to flip anything specific since a bunch of cards that you can run will generally end the game if they resolve (T&N, Jokullhaups, Food Chain, etc).
This thread is really fascinating to read, and is full of awesome things I would have never even thought of! Keep the posts coming guys
Keep in mind that City of Brass has had 8 or so (Arabian Nights, Chronicles, Fifth Edition, Sixth Edition, Seventh Edition, Eighth Edition, Modern Masters, JSS Promo Foil) printings while Mana Confluence hasn't even been out for two months.
Whoever got pile B got massacred in my opinion. A has way too much value and playability compared to B.
Vintage doesn't have a multi-thousand dollar dollar weekly tournament circuit attached to it.
This didn't have as much to do with Travis Woo as it did with a bunch of cards being way under priced. The first offender was Endless Horizons which had been sitting at around $2-3 forever and had been slowly gaining trajectory on MTGStocks. Since it was easily found in dollar boxes at a ton of Local Game Stores people started picking them up as throw-ins during trades. Eventide was a massively under printed set (I think Aaron Forsythe said something about how nobody opened it,) and the card was already seeing play in a Mono-White Enchantment-based Modern deck that was popping up on Magic Online every now and then. Most of the cards had already gone up due to previous usage (see: Runed Halo,) so Endless Horizons was the natural next step which caused a decent number of copies to be picked up at the old market price. After a decent amount of the cheap copies were bought up someone in the financial community saw that there were almost no copies left on TCGPlayer and decided to buy the rest (about 10-20 copies) for a very small amount of money and "reset" the price by eliminating all of the copies left and replacing them with copies at what the person thought was the "correct" market price. This is what happened the following morning:
Since MTGStocks scrapes data from TCGPlayer it was pretty easy to "reset" the price just by spending a couple dollars and buying out TCGPlayer (which ended up only being 10-20 copies of an already cheap card). And what about our friend Sigil of the Empty Throne?
Awfully familiar isn't it? Same thing applies as it did to Endless Horizons. Here we have a card played in multiple formats (Legacy, EDH, Modern) that is relatively under priced! Considering that most pieces of the Mono-White Modern Deck were going up the obvious next target was this fellow.
Please understand that the point of this post is not to brag or to make people outside of the finance community upset. The purpose of writing this little post is to educate people on why these things happen! The truth of the matter is that the information about both of these cards going up at some point or another was on the internet (in the case of Endless Horizons there was a mass insider-email from MTGPrice about it almost a month and a half ago,) for anyone that wanted it. People can stay uneducated, blame Travis Woo or blame the fictional MTG Finance Boogeyman that /r/MTGFinance and other websites seems so obsessed with, but the truth of the matter was that these spikes were poised to happen for a long time, if you missed out on picking up copies of either card for whatever reason then you only have yourself to blame.
A bunch of people talked about this a month or so ago and decided to go in on it since it was sitting at around $15 per which was insane for a foil mythic angel. Myself and others picked up a couple playsets of the foil versions up until the point where someone bought out ABU for all their foils at $23 each. After that ABU's buylist price was raised to what they were originally selling it for and the rest is history.
Unless the reprint had a huge print run like say... Commander 2014, I think you'll be fine
You have the most desirable copy of Imperial Recruiter, those tend to hold value even with reprints.
http://imgur.com/HuEoTAv
Boxes of RTR can easily be found on major websites for much less than $110 for either of those purposes.
NM-EX+ is pretty much NM for all intents and purposes, usually if a card is less expensive than normal it's probably closer to EX in my experience.
The EX-PLD copies depend on how old they are, stuff like Mercadian Masques singles are going to be closer to PLD while newer will be closer to EX.
I've never had problems with customs here but I used to live in Toronto and know how awful getting out of country mail is in Ontario