Its a ChannelFireball World, We Just Live Here

Conley Woods - 1st
Paulo Vitor Dama Da Rosa - 2nd
Luis Scott Vargas - 3rd
Josh Utter-Leyton - 5th
Ben Stark - 14th
Shuuhei Nakamura - 16th
Owen Turtenwald - 33rd
David Ochoa - 37th
Brian Kibler - 54th
Martin Juza - 90th

Player of the Year: Owen Turtenwald

If that isn't a dominating team, I don't know what is! This past weekend, the last World Championships occurred in San Francisco. To absolutely no one's surprise, team Fireball dominated once again. In case you haven't noticed..... they win everything! Or at least if they don't win, they put a couple people in the top 8 in every single Pro Tour and most GPs. As you can see above HALF of the world's top 8 was Channel Fireball players! Conley Woods went 6-0 in Standard, 6-0 in Draft, and 4-2 in Modern, though his 2 losses were intentional scoops to PV and LSV to help them both get into the top 8 themselves. Unfortunately, team Fireball was playing arguably the worst deck possible for a best of 5 series, and so they all made quick departures from the top 8. Regardless, their domination can't go unnoticed!


So one of the important things to us commoners from worlds is how the results can affect the financial market. What's the big story of the weekend? Olivia Voldaren!

November 16th: 5.71
November 17th: 10.58
November 18th: 18.50
November 19th: 17.14
November 20th: 16.74

The card rose 324% in just 2 days! However, that being said: it has already dropped $2 in as many days, so the initial buzz is over, and we need to figure out where this card will reside. My guess is 13. I think Olivia is absolutely legitimate, as I played her at States to much satisfaction. This card has nothing but potential as people have already been musing about maybe putting her in a Jund control deck using other bombs like Daybreak Ranger to gain advantage on the board without investing more cards, and ultimately overwhelm the board and drop bombs. These are both decks that prey upon the current all-aggro metagame (called it last year!), and while I can't see that changing in the next two months, if amazing control cards come out of Dark Ascension (releases Feb 3) then we can see this deck disappear overnight, and in turn Olivia goes too.

So if Olivia is going up, something has to go down to balance the price of the pack, right? Well here are the other staple Innistrad prices:

Liliana: 38
Snapcaster: 27
Geist of Saint Traft: 16.5
Garruk Relentless: 26.5
Skaab Ruinator: 6.5
Isolated Chapel: 7
Clifftop Retreat: 3.5
Sulfur Falls: 5
Hinterland Harbor: 5
Woodland Cemetery: 5
Stromkirk Noble: 7

The few premium cards up top haven't shifted much, but notice how almost all of the dual lands have sunk about $2 (BW not moving and RW making up the difference). Skaab Ruinator has dropped off the face of financial relevancy though, as it is only a 1-of in any deck that wants to play it.

The next place we can attack financial scenes is through modern. However, there hasn't been too much coverage of modern. In fact, there are hardly any obvious dominating decks! Here is the majority of the data I have found, and clearly there is just a mess of random numbers and hardly helpful deck names. For Example: UR Faeries went 4-1. That sounds like a fantastic idea for a deck, but I have NO CLUE how I would start to implement that in practice.

This next PTQ season is Modern, so there will be tons of data rolling in soon, at which point random cards start exploding in price. But at the very least Shock Lands aren't a bad thing to be trading for right now....

Worlds was amazing! Congrats to Conley for his 17-3 run, congrats to Iyanaga for winning individual Worlds, and congrats to team Japan for winning the team event! That's all I have for today! Until next time, stay classy!

Ryan Lackie
Ryan.Lackie92@gmail.com
@ThingsILack