Weekly Winners 2018-4

This week is the official continuation of the dig into your collection for cards that are now suddenly valuable-week. Or in other words: not that much new things happened in the world of magic card prices. We have seen some spikes of course, but they are almost all a variation on the cards we saw spiking last week.

Once again, right in time for FNM, I will now tell you what cards will be the talk of the town tonight!

#1 Seahunter $5 (+165.9%)

 

Seeing a card like Seahunter always gives me warm, fuzzy feelings inside of sheer nostalgia. It was during the Mercadian Masks block that I first started playing tournaments at my local LGS. Back in the day we had no webshops and sites like mtgstocks.com to keep track of prices. You really had to trade or buy singles to get the cards you needed. No spikes, no buyouts, and the only pricelists were those in the Duelist and Inquest. And in that first tournament I had the audacity to bring my freshly built Rebel deck. To be stumped in a game where my opponent dropped a Seahunter in his deck, and right there and then I learned that there was a 'rebel for Merfolks' now.

Rebels/ mercenaries are good in what they do: fetching a card you need from your deck, making you less dependent on luck. Doubly so in Commander, where any kind of tutor ability helps you to find that one-off in a haystack of other one-offs. And considering the popularity of Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca commander decks, it is no surprise that Seahunter also gains in popularity.

To put things in perspective: it did not spike that hard. +165.9% is far less than the spikes we have seen in the past weeks. And my guess is that Seahunter is more likely to go further up than down. Here is why:

• Seahunter is from an older set with a small print run in comparison to today's sets.
• It is a rare from a set with said characteristics
• It has a unique ability in blue, and especially in merfolk decks
• It was never reprinted
• It gained more popularity just this week; so we are early in the netdecking cycle
• It will probably not be reprinted (maybe, just maybe in a merfolk vs. X deck)

Like I said, rebels and mercenaries are good. I really love rebels. I actually still have my rebel deck from back in the day. It has transformed over the years, but I still play with it regularly. It now includes cards like Mirror Entity, Oblivion Ring, and Millstone. It is the oldest deck I have and it turns 19 years old in 2018! And it still kicks ass!

 

#2 Goblin Lore $14.00 (+154.55%)

 

Goblin Lore is back! It was the #1 winner Last week and back as the #2 this week. Goblin Lore stacked another $8,50 on its price since last week and that means that it actually gained more value this week, compared to last week.

It doesn't happen very often that a card wins that much in successive weeks. Usually a hard spike is followed by a gradual dwindling of the price until it hits a plateau, or a gradual increase. That is what it looked like for Goblin Lore as well, up until wednesday, when the card spiked again. This time it was bought out completely, across all printings.

 

#3 Bloodbraid Elf $4.98(+67.11%)

 

Ah yes, another eternal classic: Bloodbraid Elf. Banned in modern and sees fringe play in Legacy. In this case, fringe play means that the decks using it are not tier 1, but you will still have quite a big chance to run into it during Legacy tournaments in your local LGS. Legacy gives playes the opportunity to stop playing magic for over half a year (or longer) and still be able to perform pretty decent when you break your dry spell in a tournament.

But Bloodbraid Elf's spike had nothing to do with Legacy. February will bring a new banned and restricted update, and maybe, just maybe, Bloodbraid Elf can be unbanned in Modern. David Ernenwein published a nice series of articles on Bloodbraid Elf in Modern and the possibility of an unbanning. In his fifth part: evaluation, he concludes that a Bloodbraid Elf wraps up a data analysis of the impact of a unbanning. Nice work! I really urge you to read all the 5 parts. He concludes there are pros and cons of freeing the elf:

• Pro - Midrange Jund will be Tier 1, at or near the top of the metagame.
• Con - Midrange Jund will be Tier 1, at or near the top of the metagame.

That’s it. At the end of the day, the decision on this card comes down to whether or not you want Jund back to its old, format-dominating glory. That is the extent of its effect. Bloodbraid has never had as great an impact in any other deck, and there is no reason to believe that it ever will. If we unban Bloodbraid Elf, it will boost Jund. If that’s what you want, then you support an unbanning. However, I urge everyone to consider the impact of the unban before picking a side.

Speculation around a possible unbanning of a card often has an impact on the price of a card. In the case of Bloodbraid Elf, this comes on top of it being a target of speculators ever since it was printed. And especially since it was banned in Modern (and can be unbanned). Like most of those cards it has a unique ability, and it is a tournament card in Legacy and it will be in Modern once legal. We now just have to sit and wait: will it be unbanned?