Too, Reverse In Works It

This will make you laugh.

Semi-unsolicited, though not unwelcome, but definitely not fully solicited, my editor gave me the perfect focus for this series by suggesting that if I want to do a series that feels new, maybe I shouldn’t only talk about how to use EDHREC. The thing that’s good about EDHREC is that it’s a quick reference for seeing why something is spiking. That data that EDHREC helped you make sense of had to come from somewhere, though, and MTGStocks has access to that same data. 

Using EDHREC to find potentially mispriced cards is cool and useful, and I made money doing it and so did my readers, but it’s only half of how the system works. You could use MTGStocks to find the cards that are spiking right away and use EDHREC before the price goes up much more reliably. Finance info updates in real time, EDHREC does not.  

It was such an obvious thing for him to say, but it hit me so hard I thought he might have meant it as an insult at first. Like, of course, I should obviously be helping people use MTGStocks to become better at discovering trends. I think I can still show you a few of my old EDHREC tricks, but also talk about the suite of tools we have at our disposal on MTGStocks. Since I am just coming around to obvious things, let’s talk about an obvious tool - the Interests page. 

It takes a little practice to start to notice which things are cyclical. Checking this page daily takes literally a minute and is a host of information at a glance. I’m sure you all know that. I’m really trying to spend this article building up to an arc, and if the first part of that arc sounds obvious, please bear with me. This is going somewhere.  

What’s not always obvious is why some obscure cards are going up. All of the Lord of the Rings stuff that has had a few weeks of testing to determine its relative playability, and therefore demand, is fluctuating a ton, and the rest of the cards seem a bit like noise. Now, it’s obvious to try and figure out why a card might have gone up by checking to see if it’s in any new decks scraped by EDHREC. 

One card caught my eye before they were even done focusing after the page loaded. Let’s take a look at this weird price spike and see what EDHREC tells us.  

Touch of Darkness

As you can see, Touch of Darkness experienced a pretty decent-sized spike in 2018. Then most of the hype died and it slowly drifted back down. The thing is, when that happens, if it were to spike again, people wouldn’t be able to still get these out of bulk boxes and dollar binders, or from their shoe box of rotated standard formats. It’s happening to Touch of Darkness again and the price went nuts. 

 

Now, you don’t really need EDHREC to tell you that it’s too late to make any money on this card. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, but telling people when to sell a card feels like very narrow advice for a mass audience, so I’m not saying the play here is to sell Touch of Darkness. I’m saying that Touch of Darkness is a canary in a coal mine, and if we go a little deeper, I’m sure we’ll find… well, what we would literally find in this unfortunate metaphor is woozy miners. Metaphors are hard, let’s look at more pictures.  

Touch of Darkness isn’t exactly getting played in a ton of decks as of the last time the scraper finished cycling. It might not register on EDHREC for another few days, and it’s already gone way up. What good is knowing ahead of EDHREC if it’s still too late to make any money? Because it’s not. It’s too late to make money on Touch of Darkness, unless you had them already. But, it’s not too late to make money on the rest of the cards in the deck, and that’s where finance data can give you as many clues as starting on EDHREC and working toward MTGStocks. Knowing Touch of Darkness is spiking means that when EDHREC does tell you why this went up, you’ll know exactly which other cards to buy. Let’s see if we can figure out a few decent specs from just this one card. First stop is its page on EDHREC. 

If this seems like less to go on than you’d hoped, then we’re exposing a few of the inherent weaknesses of relying on EDHREC like I… you know, suggested everyone do. Anyway, EDHREC only goes back two years, so it can’t tell you why Touch of Darkness spiked in 2018. It can tell you, though, that the most likely culprit is King of the Oathbreakers, a card that recently came out in paper and people are now starting to build the decks. But Touch of Darkness spiked so we would know where to look, and it looks like King Of the Oathbreakers is the next page we should check out. 

 

So, let’s not. Let’s take the less obvious path and look somewhere else first - let’s scroll down the page to High Synergy cards.  

Unlike when you are on a Commander's page, this High Synergy section is cards that are in the same deck alongside this card. Has Heaven's Gate gone up, too? I mean, of course it has, but let’s check anyway.  

Heaven's Gate

Huh. I’ll be real honest here, I didn’t expect that to happen. This wasn’t a bit I worked out ahead of time, I literally wrote that sentence then switched tabs. Heaven’s Gate is functionally a second Touch of Darkness in a deck that can run white. Horobi, Death's Wail, the only Commander to play any real number of copies of this card since its 2018 mystery spike, can’t play white. There was demand for Touch in 2018 for some reason, demand for Heaven’s Gate in 2021 for some reason, then there was only demand for the black one, then a black and white commander came out that’s using lots of copies of both - I think we basically just hit on the first card we checked.  

If we go to King of the Oathbreakers’ page right now, what do you think we’ll find there?  

This seems to be an indication that while it doesn’t have high synergy with King of the Oathbreakers yet, that’s because it’s used in other decks about as much as it is in King. Remember, Heaven’s Gate spiked in 2021 so the decks that are using it are still in the database, but the decks that use Touch of Darkness aren’t. That means you get Heaven’s Gate in Top cards.  

And you get Touch of Darkness all the way down in the Instants. Oh, hey, weird, Touch of Darkness costs more on TCGPlayer than it does on Card Kingdom. We all know what that means. Meanwhile TCGPlayer still has (or had when I wrote this) copies of Heaven’s Gate for less than Touch of Darkness is selling for. I think Heaven’s Gate would have been a good spec last week. Maybe it still is today, you’re in my future. Good luck future people, I hope you snag some copies of Heaven’s Gate.

 

I noticed something and did a double take. Remember above I took a screenshot of the High Synergy section of Touch of Darkness’ page? I saw the High Synergy section on King of Oathbreakers’ page and thought it was the other picture. That’s not interesting, but the fact that Cauldron Haze and Scapegoat were on both pages is, and we should look at those two at minimum. 

Cauldron Haze and Scapegoat

Cauldron Haze still has a bit of supply, and it’s unclear how much King of the Oathbreakers is going to push a card like Cauldron Haze, but here’s a few points to consider. First of all, like zero Eventide bulk exists. It’s super hard to come by bulk from that whole year because planeswalkers made Magic grow faster than they were ready for. Secondly, I said Touch was a canary - Cauldron Haze could be a slightly larger animal, like a woozy miner. Don’t worry, the miners in this metaphor made it out of the mine safely and then they got workman’s comp, don’t worry about them. Worry about how much a Cauldron Haze foil goes for.  

See how much the foil is diverging from the non-foil? Another canary perhaps. It’s a reminder to check the prices of all of your bulk foils from that era - back then foil meant something, and they’re probably mostly flat, too.  

There are no foils of Scapegoat, and it looks like there’s a lot of stock. If there’s a lot of stock of a very cheap card like Scapegoat, just know that there are a ton of copies of it that don’t seem worth listing, so TCGPlayer selling out just means more people list them for 40 cents rather than 30. I don’t think that’s a winner, but it was worth checking. You know what DOES have a foil? Pollen Remedy.  

Pollen Remedy’s foil is moving, but not as quickly. This is Cauldron Haze’s second or third time to shine, but if the same deck that’s putting pressure on Haze is putting pressure on Pollen Remedy, we should see what the stock is like on those foils. 

42 listings. I’m not saying “Look how easy it would be to buy this out,” but rather “Look how much organic demand has made copies dwindle.” I think this has potential. 

I think we’ve pointed out some places where relying solely on EDHREC is less useful, where MTGStocks found me the info I was looking for faster and showed us where to look, so when the “Why did this spike?” question starts to get asked, you already know what’s going to spike next. Thanks for reading, and thanks for the feedback on how the series is evolving, also. Until next time! 

Touch of Darkness	CardKingdom $16.99	TCGPlayer $26.95
King of the Oathbreakers	CardKingdom $0.49	TCGPlayer $0.31
Heaven's Gate	CardKingdom $13.99	TCGPlayer $22.19
Cauldron Haze	CardKingdom $1.99	TCGPlayer $2.80
Scapegoat	CardKingdom $0.59	TCGPlayer $0.49
Pollen Remedy	CardKingdom $0.35	TCGPlayer $0.23

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