This week is the official dig into your collection for cards that are now suddenly valuable-week. All three winners this week are real head scratchers for everyone that doesn't fiendishly follow all new brews and deck techs on a daily basis.
So, once again, right in time for FNM, I will now tell you what cards will be the talk of the town tonight!
I have always wondered if it the similarities between the Goblin on the Urza's Saga printing of Gamble and those on the art of Goblin Lore was coincidental (they both have books). Especially because the cards are somewhat similar as well. If anything, casting Goblin Lore is a big gamble. Yes, you get 4 cards for 1R but you need to discard three, at random.
Goblin Lore is one of those cards that is waiting to be exploited by either a printing of a new card, or by some creative brewster that finds use for it. The only thing you need to do is turn that random discarding from a downside to a upside. And SaffronOlive from MTGGoldfish did just that, with his new budget Modern Mono-R Hollow One brew.
The deck revolves around getting creatures like Hollow One, Bloodghast and Prized Amalgam into play by quickly cycling, drawing and discarding through your deck. The power of Goblin Lore in this deck is best explained by SaffronOlive himself:
Burning Inquiry and Goblin Lore are probably the most interesting of our looting cards because they are random. Normally, discarding cards at random is a bad thing, since we risk discarding cards we want to keep in our hand, but Mono-Red Hollow One really doesn't care because for the most part, all of our cards are interchangeable and we just want to draw and discard as many cards as possible. The upside of Burning Inquiry and Goblin Lore is that since the discard is random, we get a better rate than if we had control over our discard (for example, Burning Inquiry draws and discards three cards for one mana, while Faithless Looting only lets us draw and discard two).
But, SaffronOlive is not the only brewer that used Goblin Lore in a Hollow One-deck. Especially on MTGO, quite some people have played the card in their decks and netted decent results in challenges and dailies. Here are a few examples:
Last week Circular Logic was the #1 winner: a pauper card that spiked because of the announcement that pauper will now be a Grand Prix side event format, in paper and not only on MTGO. And guess what happens: prices start to spike as speculators buy into the format, knowing that people will be excited to build new and 'cheap' decks. At least, that is the idea, especially when it comes to a format like pauper.
Gorilla Shaman is another example of a card that sees play in Pauper and is now more than $16 for a playset. Gorilla Shaman sees play in sideboards, that destroys artifact lands that are played in decks like Kuldotha Boros and Affnity. Just like many other older commons, Gorilla Shaman is a prime target for speculators: it has a low print run, a fairly unique ability (in the format) and there will be a demand for this card.
Spikes like this make me sad. Like I stated before, I'm not a speculator, but a player. When I hear of a new format to play at the Grand Prix I get excited. But seeing these kinds of spikes in a format that should, above all, be cheap takes away a large portion of that excitement. For the money I save on not building a pauper deck and the admission fee for the tournament, I can play several on demand booster drafts!
Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca is not only hot in Standard, it is also quite a popular fish in EDH. The CMC of 3 makes it easy to cast and it has sweet upsides for decks that mostly run merfolks. Surgespanner is a new and increasingly popular merfolk to add into your EDH Kumena deck.
The reason why is easy: with Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca, you draw a card for tapping three untapped merfolks. Which means that if you tap Surgespanner you can also bounce another player's permanent for 1U. Just look at Surgespanner and be honest: who doesn't want to tap that?
Cheap Pickups
When time allows I add in additional sections. Readers who knew the Weekly Winners from before probably remember the cheap pickups. These are card that are (seen in context of the price history of the card) cheap at this point in time. They might still be in double or even triple digits. Or they might drop even further. Cheap Pickups is not a buying advice, but a lean and mean report on interesting cards that are cheap right now.
