Dodgy Little Hobbitses

Readers!

Now that the precons for Commander: The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth are revealed, you probably expect me to talk about the cards in them. That’s what you expect me to do, but rather than do what you expect, I’m going to do something unexpected to trip you up and keep you on your toes.

OK, let’s be honest - it’s me who wants to be kept on their toes. I wrote articles in a certain style for a long time, and while it worked, I’m really pushing myself to find a new format I like that I can do to death. For now, that means trying a bunch of new stuff. Today, I’m not writing about cards that got reprinted - I’m writing about cards that didn’t.

With the cards known, I am going to spend the next two weeks going deck by deck to pick out a few cards that would have made sense in the deck, are played in a large percentage of the decks that will get built when people buy the decks and upgrade them and which I think make less sense to reprint later, meaning their price has some upside. This will be fun, I promise. Let’s start with the bad guys.

Hosts of Mordor

Sauron, Lord of the Rings isn’t the only commander that will get built from the legendary creatures in this deck, but it’s currently the most popular. The best use for this is bouncing it and recasting it and using it to reanimate big, thicc bois from your yard. Some of the obvious ones are pretty cheap.

Both of these thicko sickos (Sheoldred, Whispering One and Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur) are a little on the cheap side following some reprints, and are very good candidates for the deck. People are putting them in a lot of decks, which means they show up high on EDHREC, which means more people see them, which means they go in more decks, etc. Big, expensive, very good choices like Terror of the Peaks exist, but cards around the $5-$10 range are much more likely to sell more to people who bought a precon to upgrade. 

Another caveat is that people who never played Magic before will see immediately how good these are and won’t know that a lot of people don’t play them because they’re salt-inducing. The way the community policed itself before won’t apply to people new to the community. I think one or both could have gotten a reprint, and we’re lucky.

I know I sound like a broken record if you’ve listened to my.. records(?) before, but Heartless Summoning is too cheap even now that it’s like three times what it was when I first called it. This is on its way up, it will be a year at least until they reprint it based on its current price trajectory, and we’ll have plenty of warning to exit before then. This is on an upward climb and it’s not done. This is still the only printing and Innistrad was... that can’t be right - 12 years ago? OK, wow, this card is in 6th grade.

Maybe buy this future $10 card now. It’s also cheaper on Card Kingdom and we all know what that means from last week. Yes, I know it’s only a penny cheaper, I’m joking, but, like, barely.

This has got to be a sign. This $10 card is gettable for closer to $5 than $10, and that’s an opportunity, my babies. 

Sheoldred, Whispering One	CardKingdom $9.49	TCGPlayer $6.81
Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur	CardKingdom $5.49	TCGPlayer $4.30
Heartless Summoning	CardKingdom $5.99	TCGPlayer $4.46
Entomb	CardKingdom $8.49	TCGPlayer $7.73

Riders of Rohan

Typically, I avoid foils, but foils of Thalia's Lieutenant under $10 are hard to beat. Even if this does end up in a Commander product, the foils will be untouched, and with this going in Humans decks in other formats where people foil the decks out, there is some real upside here. Unfortunately, the non-foil already got torched by a reprint. Here’s something that never got reprinted, though.

Foil copies of Mass Appeal are still under $1 and are drying out. The question seems to be - if this is good in this deck, why did it never go up before? I will answer that question I am pretending you asked with a question of my own - how many Human decks had blue in them before? Give up? It was a rhetorical question of sorts - the point wasn’t to stump you, it was to tell you I know how we can find out.

 

Did you know this dropdown was there on EDHREC? If not, you’re in luck because it has a ton of info. Let’s go to the page by clicking the word “Tribes” and locate Humans.

There are four Humans builds with blue in the identity, and, the most popular one, Katilda and Lier, doesn’t play the card because it’s a combo deck of sorts. Mass Appeal has, pardon the pun, mass appeal, and newer players will likely love a splashy card that lets them draw a ton in games with other new players where they can get two creatures out before some dork casts a Blasphemous Act. It’s also 12 years old, like we said, in low supply and easy to scoop the last few copies and get them repriced. I’m not saying we do a buyout to trigger a reprice, I’m saying the buyout has already happened, slowly and organically, and we can get a few copies to benefit from what is already happening.

 

Strixhaven: School of Mages was kind of the first set where all the base non-mythics are completely trash because everyone overbought trying to get a Japanese foil Demonic Tutor. 

The thing is, there are extended border foils and non-foils, and they look sweet and they’re both under $5. Blade Historian is seeing quite a bit of EDH play already, and the other commanders buildable from the precon, like Shadowfax, Lord of Horses will use this, too.

I didn’t expect a reprint, and since we didn’t get one, the non-foils are a buy at $1 and the extended art foils are definitely a buy under $5. This card was good before and got twice as gooder. Considering how confusing the split mana cost would be to a new player, it's unlikely this gets reprinted in a Commander product. The only risk to this card is them printing a 3/3 for next year, which is more likely than I’d like, and I hate it half as much as it deserves.

Thalia's Lieutenant	CardKingdom $1.79	TCGPlayer $1.03
Mass Appeal	CardKingdom $0.79	TCGPlayer $0.35
Blade Historian	CardKingdom $2.79	TCGPlayer $2.00

That’s my Alticle! Follow me on Twitter and tell me I’m a nincompoop or whatever, I welcome the engagement up to a point! Until next time!!!!!1

Check out these other articles:

A Penny Saved, a Mite Earned by Ryan Cole

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New Horizons: From Cute to Brute by Matt Grzechnik