What’s shakin’ everyone? Hope you all had a fantastic holiday season! November and December are easily my busiest months buying cards, so I have been busy running to stores in the area, taking advantage of deals and dealing with people that have contacted me throughout the months. That doesn’t mean I haven't been paying attention to what is going on in the world! December might mark the end of the year, both for Magic and the rest of the world, but it is still full of fantastic happenings.

Prerelease and Release cards for Mirrodin Beseiged

The two prerelease cards:

Glissa, The Traitor BGG
3/3 Legendary Creature - Zombie Elf
Deathtouch, first strike
Whenever a creature an opponent controls is put into a graveyard from the battlefield, you may return target artifact card from your graveyard to your hand.

Hero of Bladehold 2WW
Creature - Human Knight
Battle cry (Whenever a creature with Battle Cry attacks, each other attacking creature gets +1/+0 until EOT)
Whenever Hero of Bladehold attacks, put two 1/1 white soldier creature tokens onto the battlefield tapped and attacking.

And the release:

Thopter Assembly 6
5/5 Artifact Creature - Thopter
Flying
At the beginning of your upkeep, if you control no other Thopters other than ~, return ~ to its owner's hand and put 5 1/1 colourless Thopter artifact creature tokens with flying onto the battlefield.

So, my initial reactions to these cards is….man, I am pumped for this new set! The Hero clearly has incomplete data so I don’t want to guess a price, but Battle Cry is something to pay attention to. It is obvious that a good goblin will go into Legacy Gobos, but if there were to be a Merfolk, Zombie, or Elf that has this ability too, well, watch out Legacy and Casual markets! The zombie would be of high interest in casual circles while the Elf and Merfolk could push their respective decks in all formats to even higher levels.

Glissa looks like a solid EDH commander as well as Limited bomb. Fits more in the Dinosaur limited deck rather than poison, but still a solid creature with 2 keywords that are dirty together. I don’t see her being THAT high in the end ($2-$5 range really) but who knows what else is to be spoiled.

The Thopter Assembly on the other hand, well, here is a card! This is also a clear limited bomb. Pay 6, get a 5/5 blocker for a turn, and then it bounces to bring you 5 1/1 dudes. This guy could quickly take over a game, especially if something like Strider Harness is in play. For its value, well, in type 2 it is battling with all the other insane 6 drops at the moment. It does have the advantage of flying, and we will have to see if that is better than some of the other abilities on Titans at the moment. I don’t know if the Affinity deck in extended wants this card, it might be a 2 of as a late game finisher (5 3/3s!), but this is something to possibly look at for Vintage or type 2 if a good artifact deck appears.

Mirran Crusader  1WW
Double Strike
Pro Black, Pro Green
2/2

Phyrexian Crusader  1BB
First strike
Pro white, Pro red
Infect
2/2

Quick thoughts: They are knights, so that is a good creature type to be. The white one could basically spell the end of the Vampire decks, even if they have Red, it is just a better SB option against them that they have to face. The Black guy is in an important spot in the infect deck curve. If a good one drop or some sort of burn/poison spell appears, this guy could see serious play. Being rares, I don’t see either being higher than $2, maybe $3 max.

Legacy B/R List

Survival of the Fittest, we hardly knew ya. It had 3-6 months of top tier play and then was axed. Personally, I don’t think it needed to go due to its horrible combo match-up and weakness to graveyard hate, but it’s gone and there's not much we can do. This thing could nosedive down to Oath of Druids level easily. It will stay high as people will be upset to lose so much money on it and others want to fill out EDH and Cube decks, but it will drop eventually. The addition of the judge promos will only hinder its price more. Time Spiral on the other hand, can we say “Grim Monolith?” If it does something broken in legacy, $30 easy; if not, it should hover around $10-$12 on its potential alone.

(The following paragraph are my opinions and not QS.com’s)

So I guess I need to bring up stores that have rejected buy orders on this card. Two points: A) You would think people would learn this would happen after the 1^st time they tried and B) You would think stores would learn that when they jack the prices on cards that are hyped but don’t do anything and then screw customers they lose doubly. Pretty sure the first few stores that don’t reject people’s orders on newly hyped cards are going to get such a HUGE PR boost that they will be heads and shoulders above everyone else and the small loss they take on the card will be more than made up for when people continue to return to that store. Honestly, I don’t see why they don’t just take the site down for 15mins, 11:55pm to 12:10am, adjust their prices, and not screw over anyone. Hint: If the store isn’t open to sell things, it can’t get gotten. And to those owners who complain that they have “lives”, these stores are your lives. STOP BEING LAZY, and actually do work, you might be surprised how easy it is. If I have pissed any of you store owners off by saying this or you agree and want help to implement my ideas towards greater customer satisfaction, feel free to contact me, I am not hard to get a hold of. (And Ladies and Gentlemen, this is where Kelly has been getting his rage from)

Worlds

Well, Worlds was pretty exciting. The Player of the Year race is going to a tie breaker, and T8 was full of blue! Well, that actually matters as little as possible. To get a true grasp of what happened, you have to look at the side events as well as the rounds, and even then the Extended part’s value is diminished with draws and scoops for points happening. The Standard portion was full of Blue decks doing well. Blue went from being dead during Jund times to being basically the nuts right now. Frost Titan is on his way down but Grave Titan is on his way up it looks like.

The more interesting stuff happened in the side events

Standard Events breakdown over 4 events:
White Weenie: 2 T8s, 1 Win
Valakut: 10 T8s

Blue/White Control: 5 T8s

MassClone: 1 T8

Boros: 5 T8, 1 Win

RUG: 1 T8, 1 Win

Blue/Black Control: 2 T8

Mono Black Control: 1 T8

Vampires: 4 T8, 1 Win

BUG: 1 T8

G/W Token: 1T8

Pretty diverse field, not a whole lot of surprise really. The G/W Tokens and Mono Black Control are both kind of new to the scene; could be something to work on if you are tired of the current decks. The cards involved were nothing surprising. Oh wait, that Poly-Clone deck Thingy too. I have a friend that collects Clones (has nearly 1300 plus some Miscut, Crimped and Summer Magic Clones), and he will go crazy over this deck. Clone will copy either Frost Titan or the best creature on your opponents side. This might just be a pile of a deck that got lucky, but it has a card that hasn’t seen play in forever in Clone and Mass Polymorph, so they might be elevated slightly above bulk price.

Legacy Events: Break down over 2 events that were viewable were:
Team America: 3 T8s, 1 Win
Merfolk: 2 T8s
Charbelcher: 1 T8
Ad Naus: 1 T8
Hive Mind: 1 T8
Show and Tell: 3 T8s
Survival: 2 T8s, 1 Win

New Horizon: 1 T8

Zoo: 1 T8

Scapeshift: 1 T8

Quick notes: The Scapeshift deck was G/R/U with 4 Horn of Greed and 4 Personal Tutors. It’s also another deck with Tabernacle and Exploration. Could be something to look at or even speculate on with the Horns at this point.

Extended Events (1 PTQ) :

Omen/Gate: 1 T8, 1 Win

4cc: 2 T8

Boros: 1 T8

Scapeshift: 2 T8

Rock: 1 T8

Ooze: 1 T8

Quick Notes: Ooze might be real, and not just a flash in the pan like most of Conley’s Decks. I am sure there is still room to improve it and it will be exciting to see what it does. Other than that, nothing too big that will raise prices, just keep things stable really.

Vintage Events:

Oath: 2 T8, 1 Win

Tezz: 2 T8

Tezzless Tezz: 2 T8

Workshop: 2 T8

Quick notes: I won’t pretend to know anything about Vintage (I think Vintage and Magic are 2 different things actually), but the lack of a Fish deck surprises me. I do love see Oath winning, it was the first deck I had ever fully foiled out (and the last), until they banned Oath…grumble grumble

MTGO:

Well, turns out that everything extended skyrocketed this past week. Multiple cards tripled in price and well, the format is now pricey as all hell. I missed the boat on cards due to real life dealing so there was a ton of profit to be had. The stuff that hasn’t jumped too much that you can potentially speculate on are: Gilt Leaf Palace, Windbrisk Heights, Mosswort Bridge, Profane Command, Mirrorweave, and Stigma Lasher. These are all ~1 tix each and could see at least a 100% rise by the time the season rolls around (BRB, going to go by 10-20 of each).

This leads me into an announcement. During the first week of the year, I am going to be starting a MTGO article series. It will be published every Thursday due to most updates occurring on Wednesday downtime. I will do my best to give you my reaction and opinion on the change financially as well as give you stats on what is doing well in the previous week’s events and what is sneaking up on people. If there is anything else you want to know on about MTGO, feel free to recommend it in the comments below!

New Year’s Resolutions:

Here are mine, quite a few too.

General:

Make stomach flat (got that last inch to go, gotta beat Kelly to it too)

Find a new job in addition to adding at least 10 more independent consulting jobs

Pay off one half of my student loans

Magic:

Win 1 PTQ

Accumulate 10 Pro Points

Money at 2 GPs

Get bankroll up to 5 Figures.

Qualify for every MOCS season on MTGO.

Looks like I got a busy year! Let me hear yours in the comments below!

Buy High/Sell Low

Buy High:

1) I guess anytime I make money playing Fantasy Football I can’t complain

2) Extended Season- Probably my 2nd favorite format behind Legacy, I love Cryptic Command!

3) New Years Eve- Favorite drinking night!

4) A good Kelly Reid rant!

Sell Low:

1) Dumb Luck in Football- Lost $1k 1st place prize by .2 pts, losing 115.12 to 114.95. FML

2) Aaron Rodgers- Thanks for 2.56 pts, ugh

3) Cliff Lee- @%!^ You

4) My Roommate- She isn't nice. Didn't even wish me happy b-day in November. Ugh, the dog is nicer!

Contact
E-mail: tennis_stu_3001@hotmail.com
MOTL: stu55
AIM: stoopskoo15
Store: The Vault- Greensburg, PA