A Week Away, A World Apart

Whole Lee Baa Geez Zeus! What a week to be completely disconnected from the Multiverse! I don't even know where to start! For those of you who have been away like I have for the past week, some very significant things happened, which has a ton of financial implications! Lets just start with the easiest to dissect: Stoneforge Mystic.

I had noticed that Stoneforge Mystic had dipped a couple dollars the other day, and I assumed it was going through the recession that all ZEN block cards were getting into right now (Jace, TMS is currently 82.87), but Tron pointed me to this article posted last week on the Mothership. Stoneforge Mystic is being offered as a 2-of in the mono-white deck. Considering these decks sell for $25 each and Stoneforge is going for $25 each right now, something's got to give. As of right now, Stoneforge is going for $20.42 but I expect it to continue to slightly drop, maybe down as far as 16, but the pre-con will be selling for 35. In case you were wondering, the other pre-con is pretty terrible. It's trying to do way too many things at the same time leading to a whole lot of awkward.... Why is Overgrown Battlement even in this deck? But that's not what I'm here to talk about... Stoneforge Mystic is in an odd position because it's even seeing a ton of Legacy play now, so it's not like this card is simply going to tank in value because of this re-printing. However, it's so expensive that something is going to happen, and I think the value is going to tank a little. I recently traded for 2 when they were on their downturn, but now they're right back in the binder trying to get moved to someone who doens't know about this up to the minute trade tech.

Now for round 2 of big news from this past week: Magic 2012 spoilers! They're rolling in very slowly, but I'm eating them all up as they all roll in! Today WotC posted the mechanics article for 2012. There's not a whole lot of content in this article.... Basically just a keyword that will take some getting used to (Hexproof) and a keyword thats always been used casually, but is now official (dies). But there is one nugget I want to extract from this article and expand upon. I have mentioned it before, but Bloodthirst is returning mechanic in M12! Gruul was a super-aggressive deck 5/6 years ago, and Bloodthirst was a great way for the deck to gain momentum: once you start taking beats, the attacking player's creatures are much more efficient, and your rate of death increases exponentially. Remember how during Beseiged previews I was talking about how Standard was going to become much more aggressive? We saw U/B control fall off the face of the earth and was replaced by Caw-Blade, which places intense pressure on the opponent very quickly, and can set up an unbeatable board position by turn 4 (with counter back-up of course!). With M12 kicking around to replace M11, Worldwake will soon fall out of standard, and aggro with be the lynchpin of standard. We already have aggressive abilities like Battle Cry that make creaures more potent, and now we can pump them up even more!

In M11 we had scry as the return mechanic, which lends itself to control very well as they love their library manipulation. There were 5 cards with Scry in M11: Preordain, Forsee, Augury Owl, Crystal Ball, and Viscera Seer: 60% Blue. So now that we know that Bloodthirst will be the returning mechanic, I expect it will be based in the Jund colors, probaby 3 red cards, 2 green, 1 black, and 1 colorless dude for good measure. Once again we can look at this from a financial perspective and see what cards should be better than what theyre currently worth. My current aces in the whole? Hero of Oxid Ridge and Hero of Bladehold. While I was able to make some fast profit 2 weeks ago when I traded for 2 Hero of Oxid Ridge at 4 each then flipped them for 8 each 45 minutes later, in general these cards should be relatively cheap pickups. As I have mentioned before, Hero of Bladehold is an insane clock! A turn 4 Hero should lead to a turn 5 win, assuming you didn't stick your thumb up your ass and pretend like you were Draw-Go for the first 3 turns. Turn 2 Accorder Paladin, Turn 3 Mirran Crusader, opponent goes to 17, Turn 4 Hero, opponent goes to 8, Turn 5 swing for 22? Sounds fair to me!

Time for round 3, or what would be round 3 if I could remember what I was talking about....! I am very sorry for my lack of posts recently, but that is due to my incredibly busy schedule. I was originally writing this on Monday, but then couldn't finish it until I had 3 hours of nothing to do at work today, Wednesday. After this weekend my Eagle Scout Court of Honor will have come and gone, and I should be able to have time to write again, so I can flood you with my crazy ideas and financial advice. But since I aid there was going to be 3 topics today, I will write a little about the one that I thought of today: Counterbalance.

A couple posts ago I declared I was going to make a Counterbalance deck with Stoneforge/Bitterblossom as the win condition, but it instead became a WB disrupting aggro deck. I have been thinking a lot about Counterbalance, and I realized it's simply not where I want to be right now. Mental Misstep has changed the format so much (27 copies in the top 8 anybody?), at least for the short term, that every deck needs to change a little because of it. This creates an oil in water effect where the CMCs of everyone's decks are up and down and all over the carts, making Counterbalance a very hard card to lock down everyone with. Honestly I feel that to play counterbalance right now, you would have to re-build it for every tournament you go to based on what you feel the meta is. For example, theres a lot of Merfolk in my local meta (although based on what I have been reading thats the global case), so for a local event I would want more creature disruption, and would add a whole additional color for sweepers. In Europe theres more storm which means more 1s and 2s. Basically I don't have the time to constantly rebuild my deck, especially when I only play 3 rounds of tournament Legacy every week, to really make forcing counterbalance a worthwhile use of my time. I have been very satisfied rocking Dredge, Reanimator, ANT, and Painted Stone.

And now I conveniently remember what I was going to write about: Modern. But that's something I can easily write a whole article about on its own. Just as a news update for those who don't closely follow it, Modern is a new format that Wizards has released, but only for those in the Community Cup.

Quick Aside
{
The community cup is an annual event between 8 WotC employees and 8 members of the MTG community. Its a very casual event, and always cool to tap into.
}
End Aside

A new format for this event is called Modern, which theoretically will rotate like Legacy [read: it wont] and will feature cards from 8th edition/Mirrodin block forwards, which is when the Modern card frames came out, which is where the name came from. There is a short banned list, but I wont delve into that now, my graveyard is empty.

Anyways, thats all for me today, until next time stay classy!