Its kinda overshadowed by garruk and domnri, its a solid walker that often makes 1-2 slots in gruul but its not an auto 4 of like those 2.
Xenagos did make an appearance in Gr devotion at the PT, but the deck's 4 copies of Garruk stole the headlines. I suspect that some variety of Gruul deck will be competitive for most of the year, but the selection of walkers will vary greatly depending on the build (ramp vs. midrange) and what the top tier looks like in a given week. The R/G color combination is simply spoiled with a full grip of great walkers right now. Domri fits into pretty much every variation, but Garruk is strictly for ramp, Xenagos mostly for ramp but still useful as a midrange card (much like Lorwyn Garruk was), and Chandra seems best in midrange-aggro.
Xenagos is very popular in Block Constructed, but that is basically an MTGO-only format. The monstrous Gruul deck in Block feels like WotC basically handed it to us on a platter, so my instinct is that Xenagos sees more competitive Standard play over his lifetime than relative duds like Vraska did, and shouldn't fall to $6.
Stormbreath is a big deal in block, because at least three successful decks are running him: R/G Ramp, Big Boros, and Dega Goodstuff. Block is relevant enough online to contribute to price. R/G Ramp is something like 33% of the block metagame.
Elspeth is in the other two powerful block decks, and is seeing standard play, so she could be primed to go up too. Walkers in single-set block formats sometimes over-perform relative to their long-term viability, so I wouldn't bank on either her or Xenagos holding onto their value, but since both have already seen standard play and are in competitive block decks, I would expect them to stay above Vraska-levels.
The problem with $0.30 rares is that they are only that low in theory - not in practice.
If I want a playset of Alms Beast I can't actually get them for $1.20 online because shipping is going to eat into the cost. Also consider that I will have to wait 3 to 4 days.
I'm not saying that I should trade a kid 4 Alms Beasts for his 1 Soldier of the Pantheon.
Rather, when you are trading "junk rares" counting pennies because card A is $0.55 and card B is $0.35 seems like a waste of time.
Gotta agree with this. I rarely trade for non-foil bulk rares, and if I do I will just try to get them as throw-ins, and only if I anticipate actually playing with the card. I almost view them as being a completely different form of currency than normal rares. Theoretically they're worth ten cents, but it's far too big a hassle for me to bother cashing those dimes out. If I need bulk rares for a deck, I'll usually just wait until I am placing a bigger order online somewhere and piggy-back those onto it.
Counting pennies in a trade is beyond silly.
I don't actually view it as unfair trading when somebody "wins" the trade by a few bucks. In the long run, those kinds of margins aren't really going to make much of a difference unless you're at the extreme of the spectrum. Some kid with zero cash needs to get everything he can out of his trade binder to build decks, and some guy with infinite time can spend all day gaining incremental value. But most people in between are never going to notice in six months that they "lost" a trade by a small margin -- they might wish later that they'd held onto Card X, but that won't be because of the trade deficit.
I know a store in the area that does this. I understand the reasoning, it keeps you from having a huge run on some card that spiked, especially if some of your staff is new or otherwise doesn't keep up with those trends. Most of the people buying cards in your shop should be your tournament crowd, and you want cards to be in stock so you can help them finish their decks and keep them coming in every week. It doesn't do you any good if some guy swoops in and buys ten copies of something you undervalued and leaves you with none to sell to your regulars. That being said, I'm not going to buy anything from that particular store unless I do need it right then to finish a deck, because otherwise I can easily find it cheaper. And anything outside of Standard staples I do think they need some flexibility on, otherwise it will be difficult to move.
The LGS I usually attend has some things marked, but is 100% willing to haggle over nearly everything in the store, which is how I've always liked it as a buyer. I much prefer buying singles when the store isn't rigid about prices. If they're asking $4 each, I want to offer 3 for $10, and so on. Gimme the feeling that I earned a buck or two, while the saps pay full sticker.
I don't see how you could charge SCG prices for Standard cards at an LGS anyhow, unless you had a huge in-store tournament scene. Anyone who bothers to just go onto eBay Sunday night can have the new hot tech sleeved up on the cheap by Friday night. SCG is where you go when you need some obscure foil that nobody else has, because they usually have it, and often at a better price than eBay BIN's, and in MUCH better condition most of the time. If you're buiding a Standard deck and have any time at all to plan for it, you should never be paying those prices.
so what does each lose to, like where does GR ramp seem to have its weaknesses?
Ramp decks typically lay waste to decks like white weenie or R/x aggro, and on first pass I don't see many weaknesses those colors can exploit with this card pool, so at least you know where NOT to look. There's no Brave the Elements for white, so you'd be stuck with something like Cavalry Pegasus to try and force through the damage. I just wouldn't go there.
In general, ramp decks have trouble with Thoughtseize effects, and since Thoughtseize itself is in the format that may be one place to look. The "combo" aspect of ramp requires a balanced hand of acceleration and fatties, and if you can deprive the ramp player's hand of one of those you can stall them. There isn't much to re-fill a hand in this format, so the ramp player would be in topdeck mode.
The other natural predator of ramp is countermagic.
In either case, you typically need to back up that disruption with a fast clock, otherwise you still lose to ramp's endgame. Any recent time where a ramp deck was king, an aggro-control deck rose up to knock it from it's perch (as happened for CawBlade and then Delver during the PrimeTime era.) In block, I don't think the tools are there for an aggressive black deck to make good use of Thoughtseize. So I'd say some sort of U/x deck would be a good place to start looking. The poor mana-fixing in block severely constrains your options at this point.
I'm thinking of dropping the Nylea's for an aggressive 3 drop, but I'm loathe to give up trample for my fatties. The sideboard needs some work depending on what shape the metagame takes.
I was concerned about running Boon Satyr in the Nykthos variants, on account of occasionally missing double-green early, even though you want that double-green later for Nykthos activations to be bigger. I take it that in non-Nykthos variants, you've found Boon Satyr was easy to cast, which I would suppose to be correct.
A few quick questions though:
1. Is Nykthos not worth running in this list? You have several cards where the monstrous abilities would love some extra mana. Did you consider fitting 1-2 Nykthos in?
2. How did you settle on running three Poly's instead of the full set? I think I would always want one, and therefore max them out.
3. Given the apparent absence of control decks at this point, is a set of Ember Swallower really necessary? The mana looks to be awkward, and he attacks a deck that isn't there. Is the 4/5 body playing some key role on its own?
I don't see how that deck ever casts its spells. Double black and double red 3-drops with no BR dual land, double red and triple green 5-drops, mana fixing that dies to its own sweeper.... surely that deck isn't real? I can maybe, maybe see naya or one of the other two wedges with 2-duals and green in it working, but jund just seems too ambitious.
For reference, here's a list of the wedges and shards sorted by 1 or 2 duals:
I had the same thought. I've been working on Gruul Ramp this week, and early in the goldfishing-hands phase I concluded a black splash was impossible no matter the rewards. I suppose Naya isn't impossible, but supporting Elspeth's double-white off 4 temples and a set of Caryatids still seems rough. I think in addition to the aforementioned Voyaging Satyr, you'd need to go pretty deep and run things like Nylea's Presence -- which would backfire amazingly if Peak Eruption ends up seeing play.
At the moment I intend to stick with Gruul, then wait and see what the relevant creatures in the format turn out to be -- maybe Magma Jet or Lightning Strike would do some work. I'm going to try Commune with the Gods as my "digging for action" spell. It should hit every time, given the high creature density. You usually don't play that sort of spell in bigger formats because it's better just to run another big ramp target in their place, but in block I think it may be better than playing 4 sub-par fatties.
A format is more than the collection of Tier 1 decks that inhabit it.
My small-town area LGS had a Legacy tournament a couple weeks ago, and out of the blue we had 16 people show up. There was one guy with foiled out Burning Tendrils, about 5 other real-ish decks, a few people on suboptimal Burn lists, and some guys who showed up just because Legacy was their kitchen-table format and that's what they had decks for. These particular people don't show up for Standard.
Never underestimate the allure of "you can play anything". It doesn't necessarily seem that way on the 5K circuits, but Legacy as a format is bigger than the 5K's. They make it monetarily valuable to play and trade Legacy cards, but they are not the alpha and omega of Legacy play.
We tried to have a Modern tournament a week prior to that, and I showed up (I have my complaints with that format, but am totally willing to casually play it), but we couldn't fire it, coming up one short. The kitchen-table players showing up, as they did for Legacy, would have made the difference.
Sea being the top dog does feel like an anomaly these days. Combo players are the driving force for that particular dual, as otherwise it wouldn't see any more demand than Trops do. Also, some of the decks running Sea don't run fetches, or run a small number compared to other Legacy decks, so a full playset of Seas is warranted -- whereas you can run any normal U/G/x deck with 2-3 Trops.
All the non-blue ones suffer from the problem of not working with Daze. The 3-color tempo decks often don't play their shard/wedge's non-blue representative, or if they do they limit it to one copy to fetch in weird mana situations.
I don't see straight RW ever being a popular Legacy choice, so you'd have to see some powerful RR or WW spell printed to make decks other than Zoo variants play it -- Zoo variants want it because of Fireblast, it's their version of needing islands for Daze.
I think they would not do anything exactly like this again. There was a lot of negative feedback about it, since it was a convention exclusive, super limited and very hard for anyone not going to Comic-Con to get. Hell it was hard to get if you were going to comic-con. Mattel did this with out WotC involvement, who already learned from the Commanders Arsenal how bad of an idea something like this is.
They may not do exactly this, but they may do something similar. There is precedent for WotC reprinting a notoriously limited print-run product in some similar form. The JvC duel deck got that Japanese-language reprinting in 2010 at a significantly higher volume. I could imagine something like that next year, as a way to capitalize off the perceived rarity of the black-on-black 'walkers by printing a comparable product with wider release.
River of Tears is an awful card IMHO. You can't always control what color it makes. This makes it pretty bad to me.
River was fine when what you needed was a land that cast Thoughtseize or Bitterblossom on your turn and Cryptic Command or Mistbind Clique on your opponent's turn. It does precisely that.
If your deck is a combination of black sorceries and blue instants or flash creatures, have at it, seems reasonable. I've played with it in UB Faeries and you rarely get screwed by it.
But that isn't a deck in Modern, and if it were there would still be many other decent mana-fixing options, so I don't see an upside. The Future Sight lands that have spiked like crazy all have something OTHER than producing mana on their side. Grove (still in Legacy) and Canopy do something other land choices can't do. River of Tears is good mana-fixing for certain UB decks, but that's all it ever will be, and it can't spike in price without more than that.
Goblin Marshal from UD is like 40 cents, so whatever EDH applications the planechase dude has, I'm not buying at $5+ and nobody else should either.
To be worth that kind of price, these planechase cards have to see significant Legacy play. There were 2 per deck, so unless you're a Baleful Strix or Shardless Agent that's rocking 4 copies in a Tier 1/1.5 deck, I don't see it. This goblin has all the hallmarks of something that moves up on paper, but then sits forever on eBay BIN's without a buyer.
Their foil sale had many cards at significantly below the eBay prices and the prices at the other couple online retailers that I use. So I would expect most prices to go back up at least somewhat after the sale and therefore do not reflect the new baseline price.
We pay .95 via PayPal/check if that is what you are looking for message "Mtgo traders".
Just be very very careful who you deal with when real money is involved.
Do you guys give trade credit at your B&M store (CapeFear) in exchange for tix? If so, what's the rate? Just wondering if there's any more efficient way to turn surplus tix into paper cards than just selling them for cash and buying the cards.
So, uh, these trigger whenever you sac them in any way, yeah?
I'm thinking this isn't bad for an Ertai deck. Any other decent ways to sac enchantments in standard?
Edit: I looked, there aren't any. Checking permanents now.
Edit edit: nope, nothing close to standard. Oh well.
I still thought it odd they worded them this way, rather than with "if you do, blah blah blah" so you couldn't just pop them to Gargadon. I guess, as somebody else pointed out, even if they just outright gave you the effect when you cast them, none are that far above curve. The green one would be a double Rampant Growth, the black one a slightly cheaper Mind Rot, the white one a slightly better Whitesun's Passage, and the blue a slightly cheaper Divination. A 1G double Rampant Growth would of course see play in constructed, even if you had to cast it on an elf or something first, so I presume they didn't put anything in Standard to make that work or else they'd have reworded these.
Xenagos did make an appearance in Gr devotion at the PT, but the deck's 4 copies of Garruk stole the headlines. I suspect that some variety of Gruul deck will be competitive for most of the year, but the selection of walkers will vary greatly depending on the build (ramp vs. midrange) and what the top tier looks like in a given week. The R/G color combination is simply spoiled with a full grip of great walkers right now. Domri fits into pretty much every variation, but Garruk is strictly for ramp, Xenagos mostly for ramp but still useful as a midrange card (much like Lorwyn Garruk was), and Chandra seems best in midrange-aggro.
Xenagos is very popular in Block Constructed, but that is basically an MTGO-only format. The monstrous Gruul deck in Block feels like WotC basically handed it to us on a platter, so my instinct is that Xenagos sees more competitive Standard play over his lifetime than relative duds like Vraska did, and shouldn't fall to $6.
Elspeth is in the other two powerful block decks, and is seeing standard play, so she could be primed to go up too. Walkers in single-set block formats sometimes over-perform relative to their long-term viability, so I wouldn't bank on either her or Xenagos holding onto their value, but since both have already seen standard play and are in competitive block decks, I would expect them to stay above Vraska-levels.
Gotta agree with this. I rarely trade for non-foil bulk rares, and if I do I will just try to get them as throw-ins, and only if I anticipate actually playing with the card. I almost view them as being a completely different form of currency than normal rares. Theoretically they're worth ten cents, but it's far too big a hassle for me to bother cashing those dimes out. If I need bulk rares for a deck, I'll usually just wait until I am placing a bigger order online somewhere and piggy-back those onto it.
Counting pennies in a trade is beyond silly.
I don't actually view it as unfair trading when somebody "wins" the trade by a few bucks. In the long run, those kinds of margins aren't really going to make much of a difference unless you're at the extreme of the spectrum. Some kid with zero cash needs to get everything he can out of his trade binder to build decks, and some guy with infinite time can spend all day gaining incremental value. But most people in between are never going to notice in six months that they "lost" a trade by a small margin -- they might wish later that they'd held onto Card X, but that won't be because of the trade deficit.
The LGS I usually attend has some things marked, but is 100% willing to haggle over nearly everything in the store, which is how I've always liked it as a buyer. I much prefer buying singles when the store isn't rigid about prices. If they're asking $4 each, I want to offer 3 for $10, and so on. Gimme the feeling that I earned a buck or two, while the saps pay full sticker.
I don't see how you could charge SCG prices for Standard cards at an LGS anyhow, unless you had a huge in-store tournament scene. Anyone who bothers to just go onto eBay Sunday night can have the new hot tech sleeved up on the cheap by Friday night. SCG is where you go when you need some obscure foil that nobody else has, because they usually have it, and often at a better price than eBay BIN's, and in MUCH better condition most of the time. If you're buiding a Standard deck and have any time at all to plan for it, you should never be paying those prices.
Ramp decks typically lay waste to decks like white weenie or R/x aggro, and on first pass I don't see many weaknesses those colors can exploit with this card pool, so at least you know where NOT to look. There's no Brave the Elements for white, so you'd be stuck with something like Cavalry Pegasus to try and force through the damage. I just wouldn't go there.
In general, ramp decks have trouble with Thoughtseize effects, and since Thoughtseize itself is in the format that may be one place to look. The "combo" aspect of ramp requires a balanced hand of acceleration and fatties, and if you can deprive the ramp player's hand of one of those you can stall them. There isn't much to re-fill a hand in this format, so the ramp player would be in topdeck mode.
The other natural predator of ramp is countermagic.
In either case, you typically need to back up that disruption with a fast clock, otherwise you still lose to ramp's endgame. Any recent time where a ramp deck was king, an aggro-control deck rose up to knock it from it's perch (as happened for CawBlade and then Delver during the PrimeTime era.) In block, I don't think the tools are there for an aggressive black deck to make good use of Thoughtseize. So I'd say some sort of U/x deck would be a good place to start looking. The poor mana-fixing in block severely constrains your options at this point.
I was concerned about running Boon Satyr in the Nykthos variants, on account of occasionally missing double-green early, even though you want that double-green later for Nykthos activations to be bigger. I take it that in non-Nykthos variants, you've found Boon Satyr was easy to cast, which I would suppose to be correct.
A few quick questions though:
1. Is Nykthos not worth running in this list? You have several cards where the monstrous abilities would love some extra mana. Did you consider fitting 1-2 Nykthos in?
2. How did you settle on running three Poly's instead of the full set? I think I would always want one, and therefore max them out.
3. Given the apparent absence of control decks at this point, is a set of Ember Swallower really necessary? The mana looks to be awkward, and he attacks a deck that isn't there. Is the 4/5 body playing some key role on its own?
I had the same thought. I've been working on Gruul Ramp this week, and early in the goldfishing-hands phase I concluded a black splash was impossible no matter the rewards. I suppose Naya isn't impossible, but supporting Elspeth's double-white off 4 temples and a set of Caryatids still seems rough. I think in addition to the aforementioned Voyaging Satyr, you'd need to go pretty deep and run things like Nylea's Presence -- which would backfire amazingly if Peak Eruption ends up seeing play.
At the moment I intend to stick with Gruul, then wait and see what the relevant creatures in the format turn out to be -- maybe Magma Jet or Lightning Strike would do some work. I'm going to try Commune with the Gods as my "digging for action" spell. It should hit every time, given the high creature density. You usually don't play that sort of spell in bigger formats because it's better just to run another big ramp target in their place, but in block I think it may be better than playing 4 sub-par fatties.
My small-town area LGS had a Legacy tournament a couple weeks ago, and out of the blue we had 16 people show up. There was one guy with foiled out Burning Tendrils, about 5 other real-ish decks, a few people on suboptimal Burn lists, and some guys who showed up just because Legacy was their kitchen-table format and that's what they had decks for. These particular people don't show up for Standard.
Never underestimate the allure of "you can play anything". It doesn't necessarily seem that way on the 5K circuits, but Legacy as a format is bigger than the 5K's. They make it monetarily valuable to play and trade Legacy cards, but they are not the alpha and omega of Legacy play.
We tried to have a Modern tournament a week prior to that, and I showed up (I have my complaints with that format, but am totally willing to casually play it), but we couldn't fire it, coming up one short. The kitchen-table players showing up, as they did for Legacy, would have made the difference.
All the non-blue ones suffer from the problem of not working with Daze. The 3-color tempo decks often don't play their shard/wedge's non-blue representative, or if they do they limit it to one copy to fetch in weird mana situations.
I don't see straight RW ever being a popular Legacy choice, so you'd have to see some powerful RR or WW spell printed to make decks other than Zoo variants play it -- Zoo variants want it because of Fireblast, it's their version of needing islands for Daze.
They may not do exactly this, but they may do something similar. There is precedent for WotC reprinting a notoriously limited print-run product in some similar form. The JvC duel deck got that Japanese-language reprinting in 2010 at a significantly higher volume. I could imagine something like that next year, as a way to capitalize off the perceived rarity of the black-on-black 'walkers by printing a comparable product with wider release.
River was fine when what you needed was a land that cast Thoughtseize or Bitterblossom on your turn and Cryptic Command or Mistbind Clique on your opponent's turn. It does precisely that.
If your deck is a combination of black sorceries and blue instants or flash creatures, have at it, seems reasonable. I've played with it in UB Faeries and you rarely get screwed by it.
But that isn't a deck in Modern, and if it were there would still be many other decent mana-fixing options, so I don't see an upside. The Future Sight lands that have spiked like crazy all have something OTHER than producing mana on their side. Grove (still in Legacy) and Canopy do something other land choices can't do. River of Tears is good mana-fixing for certain UB decks, but that's all it ever will be, and it can't spike in price without more than that.
To be worth that kind of price, these planechase cards have to see significant Legacy play. There were 2 per deck, so unless you're a Baleful Strix or Shardless Agent that's rocking 4 copies in a Tier 1/1.5 deck, I don't see it. This goblin has all the hallmarks of something that moves up on paper, but then sits forever on eBay BIN's without a buyer.
Do you guys give trade credit at your B&M store (CapeFear) in exchange for tix? If so, what's the rate? Just wondering if there's any more efficient way to turn surplus tix into paper cards than just selling them for cash and buying the cards.
I still thought it odd they worded them this way, rather than with "if you do, blah blah blah" so you couldn't just pop them to Gargadon. I guess, as somebody else pointed out, even if they just outright gave you the effect when you cast them, none are that far above curve. The green one would be a double Rampant Growth, the black one a slightly cheaper Mind Rot, the white one a slightly better Whitesun's Passage, and the blue a slightly cheaper Divination. A 1G double Rampant Growth would of course see play in constructed, even if you had to cast it on an elf or something first, so I presume they didn't put anything in Standard to make that work or else they'd have reworded these.