Since Peter is away for the weekend, this week I'm going to give it a shot to write a Weekly Winners. So bear with me, and please be kind. Again, right in time for FNM, we'll tell you which cards will be the talk of the town tonight!
Usually we don't really like to spend a lot of time on buyouts or mere speculations. Since this spike happened since yesterday, I feel we should be addressing it. I mean, people will probably talk about this spike tonight at your FNM.
Stoneforge Mystic is one of the cards on the Modern banned list and sees play in one of the more prominent Legacy decks: Death & Taxes. This card is especially powerful with equipments like Batterskull or the Swords series. It also has not seen a real reprint since Worldwake, although it was printed as GP Promo.
So why is this relevant for the spike? Because on July 2, 2018 Wizards will be having their next Banned and Restricted announcement. That's only a few days away, and thus the speculation engine is on full throttle. You can imagine that if Wizards decides to unban our Kor Artificer, the price will sky rocket. If we look at a similar recent occurrence, the unbanning of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, the card jumped up to about double, and settled about 50% higher than its price before the spike.
Stoneforge Mystic was banned in Modern, since it gave players the possibility of putting a turn 3 Batterskull into play which is deemed too powerful. Also it can be seen as a way to simply toolbox whichever sword you need for a certain matchup. There have been discussions in favor and against unbanning SFM. In my opinion an unbanning does not sound too farfetched, since Jace also was put back in the Modern card pool.
Percentage wise, Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle might be a bit exaggerated, since it is actually based on the price of two weeks ago. If we would correct this for about a week ago, we would see an increase of about +70%. Valakut is played in Modern Scapeshift decks. With Scapeshift and 7 lands in play, you can sacrifice them all, find a Valakut and 6 Mountains, and deal 18 damage. Since in Modern we see a lot of shock lands, fetch lands and cards like Thoughtseize this usually is lethal. If not, you need an extra land it play to deal 21 damage.
In Core Set 2019 there is a reprint of Scapeshift, meaning a higher supply. Before the reprint, a Morningtide Scapeshift would cost you about $55 (now $45), while a Core Set 2019 version is less than $20. This leads to more people being able to afford buying into this deck. This however means that now Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle is in higher demand than it was before the reprint and also the bottleneck, driving the price up.
Not something that is happening over a week, but has been going on for 1 or 2 months. Grim Lavamancer is slowly going up for all prints. It was played as a 4-off in the winning deck of the MTGO PTQ.
If you don't have a playset of this, I'd suggest picking one up.
Arjen
Arjen has been playing Magic since Ice Age and has mostly played the Legacy format. Ten years ago he founded MTGStocks because he and his friends wanted to buy Magic singles at the right time to play with.
The changes around the Commander format are really having an interesting effect on the market. Fortunately, Pioneer and Modern are also making sure that things are moving.
