Weekly Winners 2023 - 37

This week all cards have been moving because of Wilds of Eldraine, with some new additions for constructed eternal formats.

Like every week, just in time for FNM, I'll tell you about the Magic: the Gathering cards that'll be the talk of the town tonight! Come discuss this week's price movements with us on Discord.

MTGStocks Update

I wanted to start off this article by telling you a little bit of what has been going on with the website the past week. As you might have noticed, the site was showing more errors than you're used to and maybe also slower than normal. Our database cluster used to be positioned in such a way that a machine from outside was able to approach it. We really wanted to get rid of this, since it's a vulnerability. We moved the cluster within a VPC (our own little network), and got rid of the outside machine to close this gap. This meant we also had to move the rest of our architecture within this VPC. We also noticed the database sometimes was being overloaded by connections when we tried to gather prices every day. This would lead to at least once per week Interests being up later than usual, because we'd have to manually intervene. That's why we set up a proxy in front of the database to handle these connections.

We obviously tried this on a testing environment first, and that seemed to all work smoothly. During our last maintenance we also applied this to production and that's when a lot started to go wrong. The migration itself went rather smoothly, but we quickly encountered degrading services which we couldn't put our finger on. The migration was too large to simply rollback, so we had to move forward. The past week we changed configurations, monitored, and made code more efficient every day to try to find what was causing these issues and have been working every day to try to make it better again.

It seems that since Wednesday the site has been running normally again without any major incidents. We'll keep monitoring it all and fix where needed. And while this has been truly frustrating and draining to resolve, we also realize that it may have been frustrating for you to use the site during this time. We're sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused when using MTGStocks. The good news is, as I already mentioned, that we seem to be doing well again. If you do encounter issues, please reach out to us through X, Discord, or e-mail. I'd also really like to thank everyone on the Discord server for providing me with feedback during this ordeal. It was really valuable.

Articles

The past few months we've been focusing on putting out more quality content, and I'd love to share the next few articles with you, since they're worth a read:

• Edward continues his exploration into the world of Pauper in Competitive MTG Finance #2, highlighting the value and potential of certain commons, while offering advice on which foils to buy or sell.
• Adam delves into Magic's past in Hidden Gems, spotlighting overlooked and underappreciated cards from the Homelands expansion for Commander. Yes, you read that right: Homelands. Unearth the treasures of this often overlooked set.
• In Modern Times, Corey explores high-potential Modern playables from Wilds of Eldraine, with a special focus on the black part of the color pie, and their potential impact on the Modern meta.
• Jason dives deep into the features of EDHREC, highlighting the value of overlooked reports and hyperlinks on the site's front page, and how they can flag potential finance opportunities in the MTG world in his Alt of the Deal article.

If you want to receive an e-mail in your inbox when a new article is published, you can enable it in your e-mail preferences and/or join the Discord.

Onto the Weekly Winners!

#1 Nesting Dovehawk $15.92 (+220%)

Let's start off by saying I don't think I've ever seen this card before. Nesting Dovehawk is a rare from Commander: March of the Machine that lets you Populate at the beginning of your combat. It also gets bigger whenever a creature token comes into play under your control. The card sees frequent play alongside Kasla, the Broken Halo as commander, but that's not really surprising as they both came in the same precon, Divine Convocation. It's also found its way into a few other decks like Gwaihir, Greatest of the Eagles, which obviously fits the Bird theme, and also works well with Gwaihir's last ability to create creature tokens.

$0.38$0.79

$7.04$7.99

The most logical reason for the recent spike seems to be the printing of Brenard, Ginger Sculptor in Commander: Wilds of Eldraine. Bernard gives all creatures that are either Food or Golem +2/+2 and trample. But the interesting part comes from its last ability that plays well with Nesting Dovehawk. When a nontoken creature you control dies, it can be exiled, and you can put a token into play that's a copy of that creature. But now it's a 1/1 Food Golem artifact as well. Meaning that when this ability triggers, the Nesting Dovehawk gets a little bit bigger, but now you also get to populate that token, making a copy.

What really strikes me as odd at this point is that the Extended Art version of the card is about half the price of the regular version. Also the average price of Extended Art is lower than the market price of the regular print. If you're looking to snag up a copy, I suggest you get the Extended Art version in that case.

Another thing that definitely helps with the price is that Nesting Dovehawk was featured in a recent episode of Game Knights in, you guessed it, a Brenard, Ginger Sculptor deck.

Nesting Dovehawk	CardKingdom $11.99	TCGPlayer $12.13
Nesting Dovehawk (Extended Art)	CardKingdom $11.99	TCGPlayer $11.44
Gwaihir, Greatest of the Eagles	CardKingdom $0.79	TCGPlayer $0.38
Brenard, Ginger Sculptor	CardKingdom $7.99	TCGPlayer $7.04

#2 Questing Druid $2.72 (+192%)

Wilds of Eldraine was released in paper exactly one week ago. Then we talked about the card Up the Beanstalk moving up quickly on release day. It was already clear that that card was going be pulling its weight in constructed (eternal) formats. This week however we see the effects of Questing Druid on these exact same formats.

Questing Druid is a 1/1 creature for that grows whenever you play a spell of any color other than green. It can however be sent on an Adventure when casting the "Seek the Beast" part of the spell, which is a Reckless Impulse or a Wrenn's Resolve, but on instant speed, both of which see or have seen play in several formats. When bound to a creature that can grow pretty quickly in the right deck, this seems like a pretty big deal!

It's putting up results in Temur Delver in Legacy, and also doing well in Gruul Pioneer decks. Of course the card is also powerful enough to have found a home in Standard. The combination of card advantage plus a rather powerful creature is obviously too good to pass up. If you can play the instant part at the end of your turn two, and then play the druid on turn three with maybe another spell, then it's already a 2/2. Cast two more spells before your next combat and you have a 4/4 body ready to attack on turn four.

Questing Druid	CardKingdom $5.99	TCGPlayer $2.76
Questing Druid (Showcase)	CardKingdom $5.99	TCGPlayer $2.86

#3 Agatha's Soul Cauldron $43.68 (+53%)

And another card from Wilds of Eldraine. This time it's one that was already anticipated by most to at least be popular. It started pre-selling around $30 in mid-August, went down to about $15, but will now cost you more than $40 to get a copy. Agatha's Soul Cauldron has a lot of text, so lets quickly break it down a bit. For , meaning it can fit in any color deck, you can spend mana as though it were many of any color. But you can only use this mana to activitate your creature's abilities. Its second ability states that your creatures with +1/+1 counters have all activated abilities of creatures exiled by the Cauldron. Lastly, you can tap it to exile a card from a (so anyone's) graveyard. If a creature was exiled this way, you put a +1/+1 counter on a creature you control.

Ok, so in short, you get to exile creatures from graveyards, and grant the abilities those creatures have to creatures you control. This apparently was quite interesting to play with in Modern. The Cauldron was quickly adopted in Modern Golgari and Hardened Scales decks.

This Golgari deck uses Agatha's Soul Cauldron to perform several types of combos. The most common is to get Yawgmoth, Thran Physician exiled with the Cauldron with two Undying (C1 & C2) creatures in play of which one (C1) has a +1/+1 counter and thus has Yawgmoth's abilities. You activate C1's ability to sacrifice C2 which will return with a +1/+1 counter and you place the -1/-1 counter on C1, which now no longer has counters. You also draw a card. Now you can do the exact same thing, but with C2 having Yawgmoth's ability. The combo will basically "infintely" draw you cards for one life each. If you do the above combo, but also have Blood Artist in play, you win the game.

There are also several other combos available when you play Walking Ballista and get that exiled under the Cauldron. You get to either ping your own creatures to make sure they keep dying and returning, or directly infinitely ping your opponents. It's really crazy what this card can do. But also it can double as a piece of graveyard hate, since it doesn't have to exile a creature.

Agatha's Soul Cauldron	CardKingdom $59.99	TCGPlayer $43.61
Agatha's Soul Cauldron (Extended Art)	CardKingdom $69.99	TCGPlayer $53.05

Cheap Pickups

Please note: for our 'record low' we consider the price of the card over the past seven years. Many cards were even cheaper (a) decade(s) ago. Also note: some cards are still going down, and might be even cheaper pickups next week.

Aurelia, the Warleader $4.55 - Moving up!

Aurelia, the Warleader has been identified by the MTGStocks Premium Penny Stocks feature as a card that has reached its bottom and is starting a consistent uptrend.

Avabruck Caretaker $6.65 - Moving down

Vengevine $4.71 - Moving down

Aurelia, the Warleader	CardKingdom $6.49	TCGPlayer $4.87
Avabruck Caretaker	CardKingdom $7.49	TCGPlayer $4.66
Vengevine	CardKingdom $5.49	TCGPlayer $4.36

 

That's it for this week. Make sure to check back next week for more Weekly Winners!