Weekly Winners (49)

05 Dec

by Peter

After two really interesting changes, week 49 proved to be a little less interesting. But I've got a nice mashup for you this week! Find out now which cards will be the talk of the town tonight.

Want to help me out? Pich me a tweet when you see someting interesting @MTGPeter

#1 Forced Fruition (+153,5% | $5,50) ALL TIME HIGH

Actually, not Forced Fruition is the real winner of this (and of last week). But it's really Nekusar, the Mindrazer that rings the bell. Forced Fruition is up with a whopping 153% because of that guy.

Just like Wheel and Deal last week, Forced Fruition is up because of it's synergy with Nekusar. He punishes your opponent for drawing cards and Forced Fruition makes that happen. Oh you want to play a 10630? That's allright, but that'll cost you 7 live!

An interesting detail: Wheel and Deal was up with 153.3% last week, just a .2% difference compared to Forced Fruition.

The real question with this card is: will it retain it's price? My answer is: probably not. There doesn't seem to be a real demand for Nekusar decks that run cards that are this expensive. It also seems rather random. The Nekusar EDH deck runs many other spells that work together with it. None of the other cards have showed a significant rise (or any change at all) in the past week. For reference, check out this blog to learn more about the deck.

Lets compare the three cards mentioned above in one graph:

What do we see? Wheel and Deal is on the way down after it's spike: -37%!

Also, there is no recent change in the price of Nekusar. It's just sitting there at $2.66. It's easy to get, you can just go out and buy the Mind Seize commander deck, but still, one would expect a change in price. Especially after the rise of Wheel and Deal and now also Forced Fruition. After it's release the card was at $4. And that was when all LGS were fully stocked with the product.

And please note that Commander 2013 is not widely available in Europe, compared to the U.S. In the states you can buy the EDH decks in the supermarket, while European LGs don't get enough product to even fill their pre-orders. So an increase in popularity of Nekusar decks would probably have an increase in price, because of European demand.

As long as Nekusar is not in extra demand, any correlating card increase will be bound to drop back in price. You can see that with Wheel and Deal already. And to be more exact, Forced Fruition is already -12% since last sunday.

#2 Spellskite (+14,6 | $10.30)

Spellskite was already up last week, and it's still going strong. Modern season is coming up, so players and traders are stacking up on staples they think that will be popular in 2014.

Spellskite is a good strategy against that other card we've seen in the interests last week: Splinter Twin. For just U (or two life) you can change it's target to something less useful. The same is NOT true for kiki-jiki mirror breaker's ability.

#3 Griselbrand (+9.4% | $17.91) ALL TIME HIGH

Griselbrand is just gaining and gaining in value. The card has been in the interests for the past few weeks. For the first time in a month the card has lost a little but of value. But still, its now at it's all time high.

The Demon sees play in several Legacy decks:

Sneak & Show
Reanimator
Dredge (some builds)
OmniTell (some builds)
Tin Fins

The Legacy reanimator deck is on the rise and just a few percentages away from entering the top-8 of best finishing decks. The popularity of Reanimator is not a surprise. Force of Will is less prominent in the current metagame. A bigger percentage of the decks in the metagame plays discard over countermagic. That increases the chances of the Reanimator decks, because decks that run discard tend to be (slightly) slower. Also, Reanimator has a nice G1 matchup against Show and Tell deck. Especially with the new legendary rules in place. Sneak and Show players won't be able to go off using Show and Tell. Unless they've checked for safety with Gitaxian Probe.

Also interesting!

After last week's post, I got some requests to write more about cards that are steadily rising or becoming more interesting slowly. So I'll be giving you some links to other interesting cards this week:

Ajani, Caller of the Pride: +12.5%