Consider the Mongoose

Probably taking a risk with the reference in this title considering a guy at FNM heard me talking about “Consider the Lobster” and started talking to me about Jordan Peterson which is the exact opposite of how I wanted that to go. Consider the Lobster is an essay by David Foster Wallace about the ethics of boiling sentient creatures set against the backdrop of a small town festival full of people whose answer to the question “do you find this preparation method barbaric?” is printed on their plastic bibs in red ink. I’m not going THAT metaphorical today, we’re not talking about the noble Lobster, we’re talking about the Nimble Mongoose. 

Nimble Mongoose was a Legacy staple in threshold decks. It was a 1-drop that was tough to kill and got bigger when you filled your graveyard with instants, something you were going to do even if it didn’t make your Delver of Secrets into an Insectile Aberration. Later, they printed Delver of Secrets, and we didn’t need our little Mongoose boy anymore. At its peak, foil copies were $50 and now they’ve lost over 60% of their value. 3 printings in huge Masters sets about a half decade after anyone cared about using the card were the final nail in the card’s tiny, shoebox-sized coffin. Reprints can hurt, but even with some non-ideal reprints, a Legacy card that doesn’t see much play anymore can still retain 40% of its value in the original printing. That’s all I wanted to say about Nimble Mongoose, honestly, I was hoping I could stretch that observation into an entire article but even my ability to vamp has its limits. 

Mongoose itself isn’t quite as interesting as it used to be, but it did make me mindful of something - threshold. Both the mechanic and the concept of a threshold, and, in this case, how it applies to prices. I (and don’t find an article from 2012 to “This you?” me with if I’m wrong here), to the best of my knowledge, am not the reason that there is a perception in the community that being in 10,000 decks on EDHREC means a card is played enough for the format to have an impact on its price. I sure hope I’m not. The thing is, the arbitrary “10,000 decks” threshold might apply to some cards, but there are so many other variables that it’s an entirely worthless metric and I’d like people to post some context rather than just going to EDHREC long enough to look at the number of decks it’s in so you can tell people it’s an “EDH staple.” There are like 100 EDH staples. They have their own page. 

Is everything on that page a staple? Certainly not! It’s sorted by % inclusion in eligible decks, not by total decks. Why? Because it’s not the list of Top 100 Artifacts and Lands. Everyone knows that EDH is a format that is defined in part by its color identity rules. You can’t just jam any old card in any old deck - the card can’t have mana pips (apart from reminder text, which makes Blind Obedience, a ridiculous card, quite a bit better) outside of the commander’s colors. You know this, we all do. But how often do you think about it? How often do we think “Hey, artfacts will be over-represented if we go purely by number of decks and it will push good, meaningful cards out of the Top 100?” 

Also, and here is where my blind spot was, EDHREC isn’t set up to help people spec; it’s set up to help people build. Sorting by the cards in the largest percentage of eligible decks based on their color identity helps people see non-artifact cards that are over-represented in their respective color combinations. It’s how this happens. 

These cards are all next to each other on the EDHREC Top 100 cards list (last 2 years). One is in 105k decks, one is in 50k decks and one is in 15k. They are all above the vaunted 10k copies threshold. But in the way that artifacts, lands, and some mono-color cards would be overrepresented if you sorted by raw inclusion, you have very many non-staples. Sanctum of All isn’t a multicolor staple, Sanctum of All is a Sanctum of All Shrines deck staple. It’s in all of the Shrines decks, and Shrines decks make up 9% of the total 5 color decks in the database. Does that make Sanctum a good spec? You tell me, it’s in 15k decks. It’s also under $1 despite being in a core set that came out the month we started Covid lockdowns, so no one drafted it. 

Does that mean EDHREC isn’t useful for picking specs? Quite the opposite - it’s practically the only site I use apart from MTGStocks. But there are two ways we could sort the “staples,” and either way you sort them the sheer magnitude of the big signals will crush any of the more subtle specs.

I wrote this because I would like people to stop using EDHREC inclusion data with no context to justify their specs. I would hate it if EDHREC became your absolute last stop when you’re thinking about specs - you decide you like a card, decide it’s an EDH staple, head to EDHREC to look at how many decks it’s in and BAM. You have an ex post facto rationalization for a card you already liked. “30k decks, that’s a lot.” Is it?

I have a better idea. Instead of moving our arbitrary line to 50k or whatever, let’s abandon these arbitrary thresholds altogether. The database is growing (and not at a steady rate), and there is no way to factor in all of the variables to come up with a new one. Let’s let it die and focus on the variables we’re accustomed to ignoring, because those are each and of themselves metrics, and all of them are superior to either a raw inclusion or percentage of eligible deck inclusion threshold. 

Is the Card on the Reserved List?

It’s lazy, but this is also easy mode. Travis Allen and I had a fairly lengthy conversation about whether The Gitrog Monster would make Realms Uncharted go up, and while I thought it might, I didn’t write about it because Realms Uncharted is a bit of a distraction when all you needed to do was buy copies of Squandered Resources for a couple of bucks. Realms Uncharted made some people some money, but Squandered Resources made me all of the money. The latest heyday of any and all RL cards going up just on principle so dudes cashing out their fartcoins and setting some cash aside before they spent the rest on buttcoins had a more stable place to park their money is over. You can’t just buy a card on the RL and expect it to go up anytime soon. However, if a new deck makes something on the RL relevant again, expect a nice pop. 

How Old is the Card?

Bolas's Citadel can be in 150k decks on EDHREC and stay around $8 - it’s played an absolute ton and has multiple printings. 150k copies is a lot, but it’s not putting a strain on the entire market. You’ll never see a [set]Mirage[/set] rare in that many decks because the size of the Mirage print run is a mere fraction of the runs that have included Citadel. It’s how a Mirage Uncommon like Withering Boon can put up numbers like this.

Is the Card Going to Go Up Because of One Deck or Multiple?

This tells you how much time you have to pick up and dump the card, and the problem with these sorts of specs is you need a lot of people buying at once for the price to go up, so the spec needs to be obvious enough that builders will find the card without having to wait for EDHREC data to be posted for the set. If it’s obvious enough for people to buy in, there will be a ton of competition for the older, priced-too-low copies and a lot of those orders get canceled due both to them selling out too quickly across multiple platforms and also just greed. If a new planeswalker that goes infinite with The Chain Veil comes out, that card will spike, but they’re already pretty expensive. Meanwhile, there is no competition for cards played in a lot of new decks. 

62.5k is a lot of decks, is this a good spec? Well, I don’t know, is it played in any decks?

Sure is! So do I like it as a spec? Not necessarily. There are so many copies of [set]Modern Horizons 2[/set] non-mythics out there and Sanctum Weaver is going to be reprinted long before it flirts with the $10 threshold. If you’re getting in at $2, you’re likely to double up after fees, best case scenario. It’s in too many decks to get cheaper than it is now but it’s in too many boosters to go up that much. 

Instead, I like an older card, even with a few reprints as long as the reprints are old, that is more likely to get a [set]The List[/set] reprint in its worst treatment than it is to get a genuine reprint. If it could be played across a lot of decks that came out in the last 3 months and not as much before, maybe something that spiked in the last few years which means there are almost no copies in dollar boxes at the LGS to backfill market demand and is still under the radar, I’d pick a much different enchantment. 

Intruder Alarm spiked in 2019 due to Prime Speaker Vannifar, went up recently again due to [set]Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty[/set], and the Mystery Booster Cards and Secret Lair Series copies weren’t enough. Intruder Alarm seems much better poised to do something given the small number of copies out there, even as more get added. Card Kingdom is also selling these for twice what TCG Player is (NM are a bit more, caveat emptor), and when you can get a card you have your eye on for CK buylist, you can make a tidy 20% just dropshipping them. I’m not saying do that, I’m saying Card Kingdom has a decent amount of faith in the card since they’re currently paying in credit what a NM copy is right now on TCG.

How many decks is Intruder Alarm in? I’m not going to tell you, that’s sort of my point. There are so many factors that go into a card’s viability as a spec, let’s dispense with only using a lazy and ineffective one when it comes to EDH. If I can find a decent spec like Intruder Alarm in 30 seconds just by doing the opposite of what a lot of people are doing, it might be time to dig a little deeper when we try to justify our specs. Thanks for reading; until next time! 

Squandered Resources	CardKingdom $14.99	TCGPlayer $17.98
Sanctum Weaver	CardKingdom $1.99	TCGPlayer $1.04
Intruder Alarm	CardKingdom $8.49	TCGPlayer $8.77

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