WTF? (Why That Foil?)

Readers! 

The plan for this week was to talk about all of the cards that cannot be in the Commander Masters precons now that almost all of the cards are known, and while I found a lot of “hits,” I also wondered if any of them mattered. I’ll show you what I mean, briefly. 

This is a list of the high synergy cards from the EDHREC Commander page of Zhulodok, Void Gorger, the new Eldrazi commander from Commander Masters. I went through and looked at which of these are in the deck and which aren’t. Kozilek, the Great Distortion is in the deck; its price will go down. Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger is not in the deck; its price could go up. Could, mind you. Are people going to run out and spend $40 on an Eldrazi that was $28 last week or are they just going to pick from the myriad cheap Eldrazi to go with the deck they just bought that’s basically good enough to take to the LGS without changing anything?

Figuring out which $20+ cards could go up and maybe back down felt like it wasn’t great advice. If you want Eldrazi to play with, get them before they go up more, but if you already know the card you want, you don’t need me manually looking things up for you. You want me to teach you to do that yourself. I did that already, I don’t want to do it this week because I’d rather give you some advice you can use. Instead of looking directly at what cards Commander Masters can move, why don’t we go looking for some cards that did move and see if we can figure out why. I’ll be looking in an area of MTGStocks I have avoided for the most part: foils. 

Foils aren’t as easy for me to understand as non-foils are. There are a bunch of rules to learn. The decreasing quality and increasing quantity happening at the same time that the game in general began to fart lots of worthless product at us to get us to spend our pandemic bucks playing the lottery made it a pretty messy market I was keen to stay out of.

The thing is, you have to look at the foil Interests page, too, and if it makes as little sense to you as it does to me, good. We finally found something we both don’t know off the top of our heads. Let's figure this out together, and if we find a bunch of specs quick, you can get out early and hit the beach, or whatever you do to discharge some of your existential dread. I like to paint sunsets and scream into a pillow for hours, how about you?

Late last week, the page was pretty weird.

I’m conscious of the fact that this is very small, and if you’re on a phone you’ve already navigated away. So look at the thing, but don’t worry about having to read the thing. I’ll read the thing, I just want you to know where the thing is and what it looked like last week when I was looking at it. 

The top two cards are flagged as being likely the result of some sort of pricing quirk associated with someone putting a weird number on their card in an inventory system and it getting scraped if the last cheaper copy sells. There are some other reasons a card like Vine Trellis with other, better foil printings and no real new reason for the card to be relevant could go up, but almost none of those reasons are for demand. We’re skipping the flagged cards, Vine Trellis and Auratog. Auratog might have a real reason for the price going up, and the supply is certainly very low, but I’m fine looking at cards that are more instructive. The next one on our list seems very instructive to me. 

Foil copies of Sisay's Ingenuity from Planeshift experienced a very sharp increase in price this week. The first thing I do is check EDHREC.

Right off the bat, this card is not played much. But is it played in anything new?

 

Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief is the newest deck, and it’s the deck that has the most copies of this card. What I think happened is just that stock of foils was low, because that’s true of cards from this era, and people wanted to foil out Ivy because it’s full of cheap cantrips. I’m guessing. If you want to comb back through Ivy decks to figure out what happened here, be my guest, but I’m inclined to move on. 

Ingenuity stuck out to me because it’s common. There are a lot of foil common and uncommon cards on this Interests chart, and it’s a bit unusual when the price suddenly doubles. Sometimes, like in the case of Ingenuity, we didn’t find a good reason or learn anything about other cards, but more likely than not, you will find something. 

Let’s look at another card, Lawbringer.  

Lawbringer’s price went up sharply last September, which could coincide with the release of a Rebels-typal commander in early 2023, but it seems unlikely. We have a few clues from EDHREC, but not many. 

Could inclusion in these three decks, perhaps in Otharri, Sun's Glory, have done it? Some other format? What's inventory like?

We have $3.50 copies on Card Kingdom, while the cheapest Near Mint of the 39 foils listed on TCG Player is $10. Something is weird here, but whenever a card was worth $10 as a near mint foil one place and a third of that elsewhere, maybe you risk the $7. 

 

Maybe you extrapolate and buy a similar card with a similar lack of inventory. 

Maybe you stay away. Personally, I’ve been staying away, and that’s why I seem way less certain about why things are the way they are with some of these older foils with really low inventory. Sometimes it’s a new deck, sometimes it isn’t. 

Some cards are very obvious in hindsight, but sort of instructive. 

Let’s talk about one we could have seen coming. 

Illusion of Choice spiked hard in foil way back when Streets Of New Capenna was printed (because of Tivit, Seller of Secrets), so we have a second spike of a low-inventory foil that has a unique ability and could become relevant. Did it become relevant lately? 

Sure did. What’s instructive about Illusion of Choice is that it doesn’t interact with Magic the way most cards do. It’s got a very narrow usage, but it was from a set that wasn’t bought as much as more recent sets. It was also longer ago than people think. Whenever there’s a card that people are buying lots of copies of speculatively, if there are a few foils to polish off, the low inventory can serve as an impetus for them to disappear. Foil copies of very, very narrow cards like Illusion of Choice are hard to reprint, even harder to reprint in foil, and useful every time they re-enter that design space, something they have to do a lot now that they have harnessed the power of Dr Who to put three years’ worth of products in six months. 

Sometimes you see trends - it’s not just the foil copies of Lawbringer that are in motion, several other Rebels all made the list the same week, including Whipcorder, Task Force and Cho-Manno, Revolutionary. It makes me think one person could have done this, but if the stock is low on other foil Rebels from that era, those prices could be next. You can go to Otharri’s page on EDHREC, then use the dropdown menu underneath it to only include cards from Rebel typal builds. You can see exactly what’s in the deck and check the foil prices and inventories of those cards on MTGStocks to see if anything is poised to go up. 

The foil Interests page on MTGStocks doesn’t just have useful info, it has clues you can use to find other interesting cards. Thanks for reading, and I hope you learned a few new tricks this week. Until next time! 

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