Featuring Features

Readers! 

I still haven’t really found a focus for what I’m writing, have I? While I bounce around, why not make my erratic movement productive and write about another completely random feature of one of the websites I’m allowed to contribute to? 

Specifically, there’s a report on the front page of EDHREC that’s easy to miss, but which I think is dense with finance information. I know this goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway - there is going to be a lot of info in here that a lot of you know already. However, I hope you’ll hang in there and allow me to summarize it for you. If this is new to you, fantastic, you’re one of today’s 10,000. 

Everybody ready? Yes, I realize that implies I need an intro to psych myself up before I start relaying information, we all have our crutches. OK, I’m ready, let’s do this. 

The Thing

When I said “dense with finance information” before, I meant literally physically dense. I’m referring to two reports, totalling 20 lines of text. Those 20 hyperlinks lead to some very valuable information and they can flag cards earlier than the methods I’ve discussed so far would have. I think, therefore, 20 lines of text being valuable enough that some days they’re all I check means it’s dense. If you can get three hits out of 20 hyperlinks (hits being something you found interesting enough to pursue as a potential card to speculate on or buy to play with) that’s a good day of surfing around for finance clues.

OK, that’s enough selling the thing, I still haven’t told you what it is. It... is a sidebar on the front page of EDHREC. 

On the right side of the front page of a website that gives its info away for free, below the randomly generated Commander of the Day and an ad for fabric softener (thanks for pausing adblock, you’re a peach) is a very easy way to kill an hour. 

I’ve talked before about using the different filters on the Top Commander page - last 2 weeks, last month and last 2 years. However, while two weeks gives you a lot of info that looking at a one week snapshot doesn’t, if you’re looking to get in before other people notice a card is starting to become scarce, looking at one-week trends is informative too, and you don’t even have to go through a bunch of menus. You’re always going to see the same two groups of Top Commanders - the commanders everyone will build the most for all time, and popular commanders, usually from new sets. Occasionally, there will be a surprise. Seeing Sam, Loyal Attendant in the list intrigued me. I decided to investigate. 

This was an easy one - the answer was staring me right in the face. I hope what happened is obvious to you, too. People adjusted their Sam, Loyal Attendant decks because Wilds of Eldraine released and gave those players a few more food cards to do food stuff about. Enough people adjusted or built new Sam decks. This is where it pays to know how EDHREC works - decks that are edited and saved are counted by some of the sites that EDHREC scrapes. If you know of a mitigating factor like that which could be inflating Sam’s metrics a bit, it’s good to factor that in before you decide whether to buy foil copies of Tough Cookie. 

One mouse click and we’ve already realized that releasing the LOTR cards right before a food set was deliberate and has people talking about food in Commander, which is good, because this time two years ago everyone was doing all of this food stuff but with treasure, and it sucked for fair decks. What else can we learn from looking at those two lists?

Hylda of the Icy Crown might have taken another few new updates before Hylda poked out above the pack, but in the last week she’s trending just below two commanders who were so impactful that they each got their own article. Her page on EDHREC is worth looking at.

As you can see from Angel's Trumpet’s graph’s peak’s - ok I’m sick of that bit already. Look, Angel’s Trumpet foils are currently at half of their historic high. Is someone buying a $40 Angel’s Trumpet to tap their creatures down with style? Probably not, but the foils spiking before gave the non-foils a nudge. It’s already up double its historic plateau at around a buck. Phyrexian Reclamation is played a lot but it’s also $5 after like five reprints; can Angel’s Trumpet hit $5 so you clear some money? I think so. I’ve only been looking at the graph a few seconds but I’m going to at least take these out of my “no one is looking for this on buylists but this HAS to be too good to sell as bulk” box. 

It’s not just the Top Commanders section that has info for us, though - down below the trending cards sometimes have a lot to tell us. 

Sometimes you click and there’s nothing doing under any circumstances. You see immediately that a new commander made more people play it, but it’s barely better than bulk so it won’t impact the price.

And sometimes you can tell what the answer is without checking, but it doesn’t matter because you’re not sure Hylda will get built enough for a mythic in the printer machine era to go up, but you check anyway. 

We’re pretty sure Icingdeath, Frost Tyrant is being added to decks because of Hylda and that it’s a clunky card, so not a lot of decks want to run it. Maybe you could try and target something like the Ampersand promo copies, or the borderless copies. Those look good and the foils are basically the same price as the non-foils. 

Here’s one that wasn’t immediately obvious the second you clicked on its page, though. 

If you look at the commanders using Emergent Ultimatum, none of them are really new. If you scroll down a bit, though, some of the cards played alongside it are a big clue. 

 

Unless I’m missing something, I think that one of the reasons there is extra interest in Emergent Ultimatum is that people might think that they can get these new Eldrazi spells and cheat two of them onto the stack. If I’m missing something, make fun of me on reddit, because you know something that I don’t. You can’t get anything colorless with Emergent Ultimatum, which sucks. Did you know Limp Bizkit released an album called “Still Sucks” in 2021? I assume some algorithm told them people type “does Limp Bizkit still suck?” into Google a lot. 

Finally, sometimes a card you’d been keeping an eye on, kinda, creeps up, and the trending cards section could give you a few days’ head start on the competition if they’re waiting for a market change to tip them off. Look at Realms Uncharted.

Realms Uncharted got a bump from Hazezon, Shaper of Sand. Not a ton of people built that deck, but the ones who did played this card at a rate of over 50%. That much demand for a card that was around $5 sent it up to $10 but it cooled off. If the card is trending again, it’s because of this guy.

Being able to repeatedly get back lands, including the lands your opponents didn’t want you to have when you resolved Realms Uncharted, seems good with Realms. People are about to start playing with Blossoming Tortoise, realize it doesn’t matter if your deck doesn’t have any creature lands, and play it more. I think if Realms Uncharted gets another bump, it stays above $10 for a lot longer. 

You have to do a little deduction and poke around a bit, but you can usually figure out why something might be trending and while I don’t usually think that card’s price matters all that often (we got lucky with Realms Uncharted imo), you’ll naturally navigate to pages that have other cards that are older and more scarce and are about to have the same demand. 

That’s all for me this week. Until next time! 

Check out these other articles:

Hidden Gems - There's No Place Like Homelands by Adam Berg

Competitive MTG Finance #2 - Pricey Commons by Edward Eng

New Horizons - Wilds of Eldraine by Matt Grzechnik