A Penny Saved: December

Hello again everyone! Ryan here with another new style of article here on MTGStocks. Getting the word out about the cards that have grown in price from just one day ago is MTGStocks’ bread and butter. The prices are posted every day and you can set your watch by that schedule. But there’s another feature of the site that you might not know about: the Penny Stocks section that can be accessed with a Premium membership. Looking through the PS list, I’ve noticed a few that should be picked up for various reasons and thought that sharing them with everyone would be a nice way to show what smaller money moves can be made to help build a substantial card base worth at least a few dollars a piece without having to break the bank picking them up. THIS is MY bread and butter, buying the cards I come across that are lower money now and letting them sit awhile as they grow. While my friends build their Magic portfolios with Emerakuls and Craterhoofs, I scour my LGS’s binders for cards that are sitting low now, resting assured that their prices will grow as time goes on. Today I have two individual cards and one position for a set of borderless cards that I wish to tell you all about. So without delay, let’s start off with a reprint that fits this player's criteria quite well.

Unmask: Secret Lair

 

Honestly, I almost passed right by this card without thinking much of it. Special art reprints aren’t really to my liking. I tend to enjoy the original print run of cards, especially if they are from the pre-two thousands sets, but when I decided to look into this one I saw nearly no drops in its price and a constant, if slow, rise in the card’s value. Yes, for the first few months after its release the card had a steady decline in price, but since the market for them stabilized, it has seen a very constant rise with only a few drops in price that it has always recovered from. Also, the Unmask released in From the Vault has seen basically the same rises and falls, with the two cards sharing similar graphics on our pricing charts. As to WHY this card holds value, I’m fairly sure any player of the game can see that a card you can play by simply removing a card from your hand is almost always going to be one you’d want in your arsenal, and so it holds. If you want to run this card in a deck, or if you’re just looking for stable value in amassing a small scale collection, I’d say to pick this one up quickly.

 

Aura of Silence: Weatherlight or 10th Edition

 

This one caught my eye as being one of the few cards I’ve ever seen where the original printing is worth less than a reprint of it. Presumably this is because of the errata text printed onto the 10th Edition version making it clear that the card was directed at any opponent, not simply a single targeted one. Still, either version you would want to grab is sitting at roughly the same price point of between 4 and 5 USD, and that too is an interesting occurrence given that the price between two different printings of a card can be markedly different. No matter which of these two printings you are considering for your collection, I recommend you grab them while they are still in this price range. With the releases of Dominaria United and The Brothers' War, we’ve seen a large surge in the number of artifacts and artifact love coming out of each new set, and if anyone thinks that Phyrexia: All Will Be One is going to pull back on the artifacts it puts out, I recommend a good doctor and a long rest because that just isn’t happening. Its viability in play and its steadily measured price spikes on our graphs tell me exactly which card I’ll be picking up today. As a matter of fact, I think I need to hit my LGS now. You know, just in case.

 

Izzet Boilerworks, Boros Garrison, Azorius Chancery, Golgari Rot Farm, and Dimir Aqueduct (Each Borderless): Double Masters 2022

 

Now anyone who has access to the Penny Stock section of MTGStocks Premium can easily see that the only two of these that are actually in that section are Izzet Boilerworks and Boros Garrison, but I felt the need to highlight each of these. The two that have the most steady prices across our graphs are Izzet Boilerworks and Boros Garrison, but each has a price right around 1 USD as well as only currently having one borderless reprint each. This is what keeps the Double Masters 2022 versions thriving in the mind’s eye for purchase as well as for gameplay. Everyone wants the deck they play the most to have the best cards available, and when they’ve reached that goal the only place to move with it is to upgrade to the flashy versions, and the borderless version of these cards are definitely the flashiest of versions. Unless we see another borderless reprint of these cards the price for this printing of each will stay higher than others of the same name from other sets. On top of the premium nature of these cards the ability to bounce one land that can only produce one mana back to your hand to replace it with one that can produce two helps greatly with landfall decks, as well as giving players an edge in knowing that tapping just one land will produce for them two different colors of mana. Yes it comes in tapped, but if your opponent loses track of the fact that one of your lands produces two mana it could mean the difference between a well timed spell or a sourly gained loss.

These are just a few of the cards that appear daily on our Penny Stocks page and I will be writing again about others that appear on it as time goes on, but if you want a more regular update on which cards might be a good prospective buy that won’t put you into debt, you’d be well advised to sign up and view the page yourself. I invite each of you to do so, given that the Penny Stocks page is only one aspect of the Premium Membership that makes it worthwhile. I’ll have more for you soon, but until then I hope everyone has had a happy holiday season so far, and that you will continue to do so as we move closer to Christmas and New Year’s. Check your collections, have some fun, and always, ALWAYS sleeve your cards! It’s for the betterment of the single card buyers’ lives you know, always a good cause.