First, it helps many players who couldn't afford Modern or your precious Legacy to get into those formats. That is completely worth it. Second, it won't make Modern worse. The decks that want to be stupid goodstuff decks generally can already. What it will do is allow Esper Control players to have the same kind of manabase as WUR Control players. And that is better for the format.
Also, if it wasn't for fetchland reprints, I wouldn't be able to get into Modern completely until after I graduated from college and got a full-time job. There are many other people like me in this. So I am sorry that you lost a few hundred bucks, but many more people saved money that the people who lost money.
My Modern deck is Bant Conscription, and thus I will happily toss those full sets of Windswept Heath and Flooded Strand I already own into that deck, so yeah I completely get the frustration with wedge decks having better fixing than shard decks.
But I never had any sympathy for people who claimed they couldn't afford Modern because of fetchland prices. They were at most $10 when they rotated in fall of 2011, and everybody who had any brains kept theirs. People who started playing after that could have still gotten them easily for under $20 each until this year, and Modern had been around since August 2011 so it isn't as if this need for fetchlands came out of left field and took people by surprise. When shocks got reprinted and tanked their price, it was OBVIOUS fetches were going to spike, anybody who missed that boat had nobody else to blame.
This is just a giant bailout for people who made bad decisions over the past few years. And it comes after Aaron Forsythe basically told us there wouldn't be fetchlands this year, on which many of us made our decisions.
Your argument doesn't hold water for Modern players who came in the game after Zendikar block.
Your join date is prior to ROE, so I'm going to assume you got your ZEN fetches and held them. I bought three boxes of ZEN, traded for the few I didn't pull, and held onto my set.
I bought my ONS fetches in 2010 as well, to get into Legacy. My Heaths and Foothills have been sleeved up in my beloved Zoo deck for years now, and I got those for about $50 per full set. I assume the original versions will at least maintain $13 each if not more, meaning I technically didn't "lose" money if you look only at what I paid. But total collection value matters, and nobody should pretend it doesn't. This is a very expensive hobby, justified in large part by the fact that it has great resale value and often appreciates over time. If it didn't, eternal players would have to be frakin' nuts to own what we own.
Modern is NOT INTENDED FOR NEW PLAYERS. It is for people who have been playing for several years and have older cards. So why do I care if somebody who started playing in Theros block can get cheap manabases? If you joined after ZEN, you shouldn't just be sliding into Modern easily, it is meant for people who played competitively for years and have all these cards already.
I would rather not play Magic than play Theros Standard. It is not fair to say that I should have to suffer through bad Standards with increasingly weak noncreature spells, no combo decks, and falling power-levels. And all the while I will be losing more and more money with rotation. I tried to get into Modern because of that. And if you care more about your collection's value than the ability of people to actually play the game, then you are a selfish dick and Magic would be better off without you.
If you actually get into Modern, and start holding cards of value, you WILL care then. Eternal formats shouldn't be as easy to access as Standard, otherwise where's the sense of accomplishment? Should you be able to just start playing World of Warcraft with a level 80 character because you feel like it? Obviously Blizzard doesn't think so.
MTGS forums are full of people who said, at many times over the past 3 years, that they would get into Modern if only CARD X were reprinted. Then CARD X was reprinted, and they didn't start playing Modern, they just blamed some other card being expensive and kept throwing their money away on garbage Standard rares, because they don't think they should have to spend more than $10 on a card or whatever arbitrary price limit they invented in their minds. These people have been given chance after chance after chance to join Modern, but they don't. They will always find some expensive card to gripe about, reprints haven't gotten them in by now and they never will. My collection just keeps taking hit after hit after hit to no effect, it transfers value to WotC and the big retailers at my expense, not to the masses who keep refusing to show any foresight and just cry gimme gimme gimme ad nauseum.
Suck it up and move your elitist whining somewhere else please. For every one of you there's 10 more who don't have your collection so try to be a little less obnoxious. Thanks.
You wanna see "elitist", go to the pimp deck thread over at The Source. Those guys could care less, this doesn't affect them, they all have playsets of German foil ONS fetches, those aren't taking a hit. And they already have Beta Power, they don't need to leverage their $40 lands to buy into white bordered Moxes like I do. Those of us in the "middle class" of MTG, we're the ones who lost money tonight, it wasn't the elites at all.
I just lost hundreds of dollars overnight. So people could have fetchlands that WON'T DO ANYTHING BECAUSE LANDFALL ISN'T AROUND AND THEY ARE NOT GOOD MANA FIXING WITHOUT REAL DUAL LANDS. But hey, gotta give the people what they want, even when they're wrong, and even when it causes Legacy players to lose hundreds of dollars in a snap of the fingers.
This is the absolute worst.
Not to mention, this makes Modern much worse, as manabases will be even greedier now.
First, it helps many players who couldn't afford Modern or your precious Legacy to get into those formats. That is completely worth it. Second, it won't make Modern worse. The decks that want to be stupid goodstuff decks generally can already. What it will do is allow Esper Control players to have the same kind of manabase as WUR Control players. And that is better for the format.
Also, if it wasn't for fetchland reprints, I wouldn't be able to get into Modern completely until after I graduated from college and got a full-time job. There are many other people like me in this. So I am sorry that you lost a few hundred bucks, but many more people saved money that the people who lost money.
My Modern deck is Bant Conscription, and thus I will happily toss those full sets of Windswept Heath and Flooded Strand I already own into that deck, so yeah I completely get the frustration with wedge decks having better fixing than shard decks.
But I never had any sympathy for people who claimed they couldn't afford Modern because of fetchland prices. They were at most $10 when they rotated in fall of 2011, and everybody who had any brains kept theirs. People who started playing after that could have still gotten them easily for under $20 each until this year, and Modern had been around since August 2011 so it isn't as if this need for fetchlands came out of left field and took people by surprise. When shocks got reprinted and tanked their price, it was OBVIOUS fetches were going to spike, anybody who missed that boat had nobody else to blame.
This is just a giant bailout for people who made bad decisions over the past few years. And it comes after Aaron Forsythe basically told us there wouldn't be fetchlands this year, on which many of us made our decisions.
Your argument doesn't hold water for Modern players who came in the game after Zendikar block.
Your join date is prior to ROE, so I'm going to assume you got your ZEN fetches and held them. I bought three boxes of ZEN, traded for the few I didn't pull, and held onto my set.
I bought my ONS fetches in 2010 as well, to get into Legacy. My Heaths and Foothills have been sleeved up in my beloved Zoo deck for years now, and I got those for about $50 per full set. I assume the original versions will at least maintain $13 each if not more, meaning I technically didn't "lose" money if you look only at what I paid. But total collection value matters, and nobody should pretend it doesn't. This is a very expensive hobby, justified in large part by the fact that it has great resale value and often appreciates over time. If it didn't, eternal players would have to be frakin' nuts to own what we own.
Modern is NOT INTENDED FOR NEW PLAYERS. It is for people who have been playing for several years and have older cards. So why do I care if somebody who started playing in Theros block can get cheap manabases? If you joined after ZEN, you shouldn't just be sliding into Modern easily, it is meant for people who played competitively for years and have all these cards already.
He didn't basically say anything. He said they like the idea of releasing dual lands in blocks of ten. That does not eliminate the possibility of that block of 2 dual lands being comprised of 2 different dual land cycles. What people thought was implied isn't the fault of WotC.
He said that WotC was caught off guard by the price spike in ZEN fetchlands, and not to expect anything soon on that front. I guess that was *technically* correct, unless they reprint those later in the set, but that comment was certainly misleading in light of this.
And to the poster a few spots above me, no, fetchlands aren't good mana-fixing unless there are dual lands with basic land types. They had threshold the first time and landfall the second time. On top of landfall, we had JTMS brainstorm ability, Oracle of Mul Daya, etc etc, last time. They grabbed the basic mountain in UWR superfriends just fine, but that was the only time their mana-fixing ability was particularly decent, and taht deck had Jacestorming anyhow.
Expect this to make Courser of Kruphix even better, as the only card in standard that actually synergizes with fetches. If I hear anybody complain about Courser's price after today, they should have known better as of this very moment.
I am so, so excited. As someone who owns near a set of all the Onslaught fetches, I do not care. I am happy that people get to play the game they love to play, and that I get to actually enjoy that game with them
You know, every time something like this happens, there's always somebody like you who pops on, claiming to own all the reprinted cards and be happy they were reprinted. I'm not buying it, are you a WotC plant? I didn't know anybody happy their Legends cards were turned into dollar rares in 1995, and I don't believe anybody who owned ONS fetches would actually be happy to lose hundreds of dollars unless they were just so rich it didn't matter.
I was trying to buy paper Moxen to play a hatebears deck in GenCon next fall, I could have sold the Strands I wasn't using, or my MTGO Deltas, and gotten a huge part of the way towards another Mox. Now that's trashed.
God bless the reserved list. I should have done this last year, but I'm damn sure doing it now, I'm getting rid of anything with any value I possibly can to move into reserved list rares from older sets.
I just lost hundreds of dollars overnight. So people could have fetchlands that WON'T DO ANYTHING BECAUSE LANDFALL ISN'T AROUND AND THEY ARE NOT GOOD MANA FIXING WITHOUT REAL DUAL LANDS. But hey, gotta give the people what they want, even when they're wrong, and even when it causes Legacy players to lose hundreds of dollars in a snap of the fingers.
This is the absolute worst.
Not to mention, this makes Modern much worse, as manabases will be even greedier now.
First, it helps many players who couldn't afford Modern or your precious Legacy to get into those formats. That is completely worth it. Second, it won't make Modern worse. The decks that want to be stupid goodstuff decks generally can already. What it will do is allow Esper Control players to have the same kind of manabase as WUR Control players. And that is better for the format.
Also, if it wasn't for fetchland reprints, I wouldn't be able to get into Modern completely until after I graduated from college and got a full-time job. There are many other people like me in this. So I am sorry that you lost a few hundred bucks, but many more people saved money that the people who lost money.
My Modern deck is Bant Conscription, and thus I will happily toss those full sets of Windswept Heath and Flooded Strand I already own into that deck, so yeah I completely get the frustration with wedge decks having better fixing than shard decks.
But I never had any sympathy for people who claimed they couldn't afford Modern because of fetchland prices. They were at most $10 when they rotated in fall of 2011, and everybody who had any brains kept theirs. People who started playing after that could have still gotten them easily for under $20 each until this year, and Modern had been around since August 2011 so it isn't as if this need for fetchlands came out of left field and took people by surprise. When shocks got reprinted and tanked their price, it was OBVIOUS fetches were going to spike, anybody who missed that boat had nobody else to blame.
This is just a giant bailout for people who made bad decisions over the past few years. And it comes after Aaron Forsythe basically told us there wouldn't be fetchlands this year, on which many of us made our decisions.
I just lost hundreds of dollars overnight. So people could have fetchlands that WON'T DO ANYTHING BECAUSE LANDFALL ISN'T AROUND AND THEY ARE NOT GOOD MANA FIXING WITHOUT REAL DUAL LANDS. But hey, gotta give the people what they want, even when they're wrong, and even when it causes Legacy players to lose hundreds of dollars in a snap of the fingers.
This is the absolute worst.
Not to mention, this makes Modern much worse, as manabases will be even greedier now.
- No more modern pro tour means less innovation for modern
- No more modern PT means less advertisement for the format, less new players wanting to get into it, less growth.
- Change in PTQ system means that there will no longer reliably be many dozens of modern PTQs with hundreds of players around the world every year, reliably, which also drums up interest for modern, innovation in decks for modern, and generally is the lifeblood of the format. Sure there will be some modern PTQs now but the new PTQs will only have less than 100 people.
- No increase in modern GPs to facilitate this combined with a 5 month gap in modern GPs, the format will basically not exist in people's minds for half the year.
- No fetches in khans because they design 2 years in advance and can't react in time to the desperate situation on the ground
Is it just me, or is this a recipe for disaster for the format? Do they actively want to shrink it? That might actually be the case. They'll throw us a lifeline with modern masters 2 in june, but that will be it.
For someone like me who's tried to promote the format by word of mouth, putting up posters, spending a lot of time and energy for this format I love, this is a big old slap in the face.
Modern won't die from this, but it will be hurt.
I agree this is a huge hit to Modern. The fact that it had 2000+ player GP's -- even with all the crying about fetchland prices from newer players -- definitely showed there was some real interest there, and they're just throwing it to the back of the bus now. I fully expect most stores to just run Standard PPTQ's to maximize attendance and their own profits, no matter the season.
I think the price of fetchlands is a red herring, it clearly wasn't hurting the format that much, and many players just kept theirs -- it was in standard just under 3 years ago, not a long time. If you had a collection to build Modern decks from, you probably already had been playing Standard since Zendikar, or you were a recent player trying to buy your way into a format all at once and that's always going to be expensive. I don't think fetches would have been a good fit in Khans as a reprint anyhow, because how many basics do you really want to play in your three color wedge decks? They would have been an ok, but not great, option. I suspect if/when they reprint them, if it's in a block set, they will do it with the return of landfall so that fetches are actually powerful.
Yeah I'm assuming they went that route of reprinting them in a block set. I'm not sure they NEED to take that route, these things haven't even been out of standard a full three years yet, but IF they do it the cards should follow normal economics of box price. Recent sets are so vastly overprinted, the market should be saturated by them. I really don't think Standard players will want or need a full set of them because they may not be good in Standard without help. Even mono-red players and Vampires players wanted them last time because of landfall and shuffling synergies, that may not be the case next time. RAV duals were needed by Standard players, and still made it down to under $10 on some of them. Is Arid Mesa more than a $5 card if it's in a contemporary overprinted block set and has only marginal use in Standard? I doubt it.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and ultimately decided to sell the blue ones I wasn't currently using. Part of my reasoning is that I expect they would hit sub $10. I was listening to the discussion on this week's Brainstorm Brewery podcast and practically yelling at the stereo when one of the hosts claimed they'd all be worth $15 or more.
For those of you who didn't play during ALA/ZEN and ZEN/SOM standard, they were worth $8-10 at that time. That environment included: Jace (basically a Brainstorm), Lotus Cobra, Knight of the Reliquary, Bloodghast, and Searing Blaze. Nearly every decent deck was playing one of those cards from summer 2010 through summer 2011. Fetchlands had awesome enablers the last time they were in Standard. But the fact is that they are NOT particularly awesome mana-fixing if all you can fetch is basics. If they were reprinted just to reprint them for price reasons, without the support of the landfall mechanic, they might not even see much play in Standard. I liked having them as mana-fixing for UWR Superfriends to pull the one basic Mountain to cast Ajani Vengeant, but if Jace-storming wasn't a function of that deck I would have played any other available enemy-colored fixing had there been any.
Ravnica shocklands were legitimately good in Standard, and didn't require any enablers to be good. So yes, they can hold a $10-15 tag after being reprinted twelve ways to Sunday. Fetchlands, OTOH, simply aren't good unless they design an environment for them to be good, and that's the part people are missing.
This is not to cause panic, but all of these cards are within (SCG price hike likely coming) range EXCEPT for Usea which is close.
Their price hike range (I can't prove it but have watched patterns) seems to be around $20 or less once cards hit a certain value (which duals do)
What this really means, is we could easily see any/all of these duals get pushed up another $25-50 this weekend alone!
It kinda makes me wish I invested in Tundra instead of Trops. However, both grew about $20 on their low end this past week.
Which blue dual is most in demand changes over time. As somebody else pointed out, Tundra was once the highest-priced blue dual, then USea took over and held it for years through inertia. Volcanic Island was sucking hind teat among blue duals when I was buying into Legacy back in 2010; at that time, Volc's were about $40 while USea was at $80, Trop was $60 and Tundra was $50. U/B was once the primary color pair for combo decks, and now U/R is. U/G was the primary color pair for "fair" blue decks, but now U/W is taking that slot.
It looks like they're all headed for $200+ soon. Which is ridiculous for a card that has THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND COPIES in existence, but I guess offering this kind of price is what it takes to get anybody to part with dual lands these days. I think the prices skyrocketing may be causing people to fear that if they sell out, they're never going to be able to afford to get back in. That's basically what happened to me with Vintage, so I know it weighs on my mind. The higher blue duals go, the LESS I'm willing to sell them, because it makes me think that -- despite all reason, and what I know to be true about print runs -- the price might keep going up and I'd be locked out of the format. A buy price going up is supposed to generate MORE sellers, but psychologically these price hikes might be doing the opposite. They can get excess stock onto the market this way, but regular players are just going to cling to their blue duals more tightly.
Leonin arbiter was about 1.00 - <1.50 only 2-3 days ago. It is almost a 2-3 dollar card today and soon to be a 5$ rare IMHO.
It should be, limited print run and old set. Only 1 print run and a 4-off in a upcoming Modern deck due to being a budget version of a pretty competitive deck.
SOM was a very big seller, and that was a traditional large-small-small block so SOM packs were heavily drafted. I would hesitate to call any rare from that set scarce in any way, shape or form. SOM block was among the first to enjoy the huge boom of new players from DotP converts. I think Leonin Arbiter is one of those cards that tons of people probably have sitting around in piles of bulk, and maybe an adjustment to $3 is what it takes to get them pulled out of bulk boxes and onto the market. So $3 seems reasonable under the circumstances if it's seeing play, but there are way way WAY too many copies of that card out there for it to go much higher. A few bucks is the minimum price something needs to be for anybody to bother selling it as a single or putting it in a trade binder. The number of people trying to build whatever the Modern version of D&T is that contains that card can't be enough to drive it beyond that.
I am one of the folks that got cut out by that bit of speculation, as I was foiling out a deck and contemplating them a month back at $20 each. In terms of rarity, foil Spell Pierce is presumably MUCH more common than foil Daze or foil Brainstorm, which are both in the $100-ish range, so I think a push to $60+ won't last unless there's a corresponding increase in the others. I am of the view that foiling out permanents is more important than foiling out spells, and would rather blow $140 on a foil SFM on eBay than on a pair of foil Spell Pierce. If there's enough folks like me that prioritize the permanents over the spells, I think the price will settle out. This is a spell that will likely be reprinted in MM2 so more foils should hit the market, which would drive the price back to around the $10 that Spell Snare occupies.
Flashback drafts create a surge of new supply on the market. If you prepare for it and have the tickets to spend, you can grab good deals during that week and for about 1-2 weeks thereafter, before prices start creeping back up. Some cards that see play only in fringe strategies or as 1-2 copies in sideboards remain at a depressed price indefinitely. Linvala is a good example, they've done triple ROE a couple times (because it was a great draft environment) and it kept Linvala sub-20 online.
Just checked the PT lists, and it was at 2-3 copies each in Pod, and showed up as a 2-of in a SB of a hexproof Slippery Bogle deck.
I did see it in a GW Aggro list at the top tables Saturday in St Louis, but it faded late in the tournament I guess because it didn't end up placing.
I keep expecting this to fall, and foils probably shouldn't be at $60-$70 if it's just a couple copies in one deck, even a popular deck. But I suspect price memory and inertia is keeping this where it is, maybe people just aren't willing to sell at a discount and figure they'll keep using it for awhile and just hang onto it.
If you actually get into Modern, and start holding cards of value, you WILL care then. Eternal formats shouldn't be as easy to access as Standard, otherwise where's the sense of accomplishment? Should you be able to just start playing World of Warcraft with a level 80 character because you feel like it? Obviously Blizzard doesn't think so.
MTGS forums are full of people who said, at many times over the past 3 years, that they would get into Modern if only CARD X were reprinted. Then CARD X was reprinted, and they didn't start playing Modern, they just blamed some other card being expensive and kept throwing their money away on garbage Standard rares, because they don't think they should have to spend more than $10 on a card or whatever arbitrary price limit they invented in their minds. These people have been given chance after chance after chance to join Modern, but they don't. They will always find some expensive card to gripe about, reprints haven't gotten them in by now and they never will. My collection just keeps taking hit after hit after hit to no effect, it transfers value to WotC and the big retailers at my expense, not to the masses who keep refusing to show any foresight and just cry gimme gimme gimme ad nauseum.
You wanna see "elitist", go to the pimp deck thread over at The Source. Those guys could care less, this doesn't affect them, they all have playsets of German foil ONS fetches, those aren't taking a hit. And they already have Beta Power, they don't need to leverage their $40 lands to buy into white bordered Moxes like I do. Those of us in the "middle class" of MTG, we're the ones who lost money tonight, it wasn't the elites at all.
Your join date is prior to ROE, so I'm going to assume you got your ZEN fetches and held them. I bought three boxes of ZEN, traded for the few I didn't pull, and held onto my set.
I bought my ONS fetches in 2010 as well, to get into Legacy. My Heaths and Foothills have been sleeved up in my beloved Zoo deck for years now, and I got those for about $50 per full set. I assume the original versions will at least maintain $13 each if not more, meaning I technically didn't "lose" money if you look only at what I paid. But total collection value matters, and nobody should pretend it doesn't. This is a very expensive hobby, justified in large part by the fact that it has great resale value and often appreciates over time. If it didn't, eternal players would have to be frakin' nuts to own what we own.
Modern is NOT INTENDED FOR NEW PLAYERS. It is for people who have been playing for several years and have older cards. So why do I care if somebody who started playing in Theros block can get cheap manabases? If you joined after ZEN, you shouldn't just be sliding into Modern easily, it is meant for people who played competitively for years and have all these cards already.
He said that WotC was caught off guard by the price spike in ZEN fetchlands, and not to expect anything soon on that front. I guess that was *technically* correct, unless they reprint those later in the set, but that comment was certainly misleading in light of this.
And to the poster a few spots above me, no, fetchlands aren't good mana-fixing unless there are dual lands with basic land types. They had threshold the first time and landfall the second time. On top of landfall, we had JTMS brainstorm ability, Oracle of Mul Daya, etc etc, last time. They grabbed the basic mountain in UWR superfriends just fine, but that was the only time their mana-fixing ability was particularly decent, and taht deck had Jacestorming anyhow.
Expect this to make Courser of Kruphix even better, as the only card in standard that actually synergizes with fetches. If I hear anybody complain about Courser's price after today, they should have known better as of this very moment.
You know, every time something like this happens, there's always somebody like you who pops on, claiming to own all the reprinted cards and be happy they were reprinted. I'm not buying it, are you a WotC plant? I didn't know anybody happy their Legends cards were turned into dollar rares in 1995, and I don't believe anybody who owned ONS fetches would actually be happy to lose hundreds of dollars unless they were just so rich it didn't matter.
I was trying to buy paper Moxen to play a hatebears deck in GenCon next fall, I could have sold the Strands I wasn't using, or my MTGO Deltas, and gotten a huge part of the way towards another Mox. Now that's trashed.
God bless the reserved list. I should have done this last year, but I'm damn sure doing it now, I'm getting rid of anything with any value I possibly can to move into reserved list rares from older sets.
My Modern deck is Bant Conscription, and thus I will happily toss those full sets of Windswept Heath and Flooded Strand I already own into that deck, so yeah I completely get the frustration with wedge decks having better fixing than shard decks.
But I never had any sympathy for people who claimed they couldn't afford Modern because of fetchland prices. They were at most $10 when they rotated in fall of 2011, and everybody who had any brains kept theirs. People who started playing after that could have still gotten them easily for under $20 each until this year, and Modern had been around since August 2011 so it isn't as if this need for fetchlands came out of left field and took people by surprise. When shocks got reprinted and tanked their price, it was OBVIOUS fetches were going to spike, anybody who missed that boat had nobody else to blame.
This is just a giant bailout for people who made bad decisions over the past few years. And it comes after Aaron Forsythe basically told us there wouldn't be fetchlands this year, on which many of us made our decisions.
This is the absolute worst.
Not to mention, this makes Modern much worse, as manabases will be even greedier now.
I agree this is a huge hit to Modern. The fact that it had 2000+ player GP's -- even with all the crying about fetchland prices from newer players -- definitely showed there was some real interest there, and they're just throwing it to the back of the bus now. I fully expect most stores to just run Standard PPTQ's to maximize attendance and their own profits, no matter the season.
I think the price of fetchlands is a red herring, it clearly wasn't hurting the format that much, and many players just kept theirs -- it was in standard just under 3 years ago, not a long time. If you had a collection to build Modern decks from, you probably already had been playing Standard since Zendikar, or you were a recent player trying to buy your way into a format all at once and that's always going to be expensive. I don't think fetches would have been a good fit in Khans as a reprint anyhow, because how many basics do you really want to play in your three color wedge decks? They would have been an ok, but not great, option. I suspect if/when they reprint them, if it's in a block set, they will do it with the return of landfall so that fetches are actually powerful.
For those of you who didn't play during ALA/ZEN and ZEN/SOM standard, they were worth $8-10 at that time. That environment included: Jace (basically a Brainstorm), Lotus Cobra, Knight of the Reliquary, Bloodghast, and Searing Blaze. Nearly every decent deck was playing one of those cards from summer 2010 through summer 2011. Fetchlands had awesome enablers the last time they were in Standard. But the fact is that they are NOT particularly awesome mana-fixing if all you can fetch is basics. If they were reprinted just to reprint them for price reasons, without the support of the landfall mechanic, they might not even see much play in Standard. I liked having them as mana-fixing for UWR Superfriends to pull the one basic Mountain to cast Ajani Vengeant, but if Jace-storming wasn't a function of that deck I would have played any other available enemy-colored fixing had there been any.
Ravnica shocklands were legitimately good in Standard, and didn't require any enablers to be good. So yes, they can hold a $10-15 tag after being reprinted twelve ways to Sunday. Fetchlands, OTOH, simply aren't good unless they design an environment for them to be good, and that's the part people are missing.
Which blue dual is most in demand changes over time. As somebody else pointed out, Tundra was once the highest-priced blue dual, then USea took over and held it for years through inertia. Volcanic Island was sucking hind teat among blue duals when I was buying into Legacy back in 2010; at that time, Volc's were about $40 while USea was at $80, Trop was $60 and Tundra was $50. U/B was once the primary color pair for combo decks, and now U/R is. U/G was the primary color pair for "fair" blue decks, but now U/W is taking that slot.
It looks like they're all headed for $200+ soon. Which is ridiculous for a card that has THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND COPIES in existence, but I guess offering this kind of price is what it takes to get anybody to part with dual lands these days. I think the prices skyrocketing may be causing people to fear that if they sell out, they're never going to be able to afford to get back in. That's basically what happened to me with Vintage, so I know it weighs on my mind. The higher blue duals go, the LESS I'm willing to sell them, because it makes me think that -- despite all reason, and what I know to be true about print runs -- the price might keep going up and I'd be locked out of the format. A buy price going up is supposed to generate MORE sellers, but psychologically these price hikes might be doing the opposite. They can get excess stock onto the market this way, but regular players are just going to cling to their blue duals more tightly.
SOM was a very big seller, and that was a traditional large-small-small block so SOM packs were heavily drafted. I would hesitate to call any rare from that set scarce in any way, shape or form. SOM block was among the first to enjoy the huge boom of new players from DotP converts. I think Leonin Arbiter is one of those cards that tons of people probably have sitting around in piles of bulk, and maybe an adjustment to $3 is what it takes to get them pulled out of bulk boxes and onto the market. So $3 seems reasonable under the circumstances if it's seeing play, but there are way way WAY too many copies of that card out there for it to go much higher. A few bucks is the minimum price something needs to be for anybody to bother selling it as a single or putting it in a trade binder. The number of people trying to build whatever the Modern version of D&T is that contains that card can't be enough to drive it beyond that.
I did see it in a GW Aggro list at the top tables Saturday in St Louis, but it faded late in the tournament I guess because it didn't end up placing.
I keep expecting this to fall, and foils probably shouldn't be at $60-$70 if it's just a couple copies in one deck, even a popular deck. But I suspect price memory and inertia is keeping this where it is, maybe people just aren't willing to sell at a discount and figure they'll keep using it for awhile and just hang onto it.