Commander 2014 is coming soon, and it's a good time to get prepared. Do we want to preorder these? Do we want to focus on singles? Do we know which cards will be worth money?

There are a lot of things that can happen with Commander finance, so let's just delve into a few things that we learned from the last batch of Commander decks.

Sealed Decks as an Investment?

$95? That's pretty good for what was, consensus-wise, the worst of the Commander 2011 decks! If you can triple up with a hold for a few years, isn't it a no-brainer?

Commander 2014 promises good cards, too. Won't completionists want the full set of 2014 in a few years and be willing to shell out? Won't a Mono-Blue deck with Teferi as its Commander command a high price, sealed and in mint condition, in a few years? Isn't sealed product a pretty reliable investment?

The Issue

Commander 2013 is a better glimpse into the fate of Commander 2014 one year on than 2011 would be, and what I'm seeing out of Commander 2013 is troubling. I don't have a ton of sealed product stored up--I sold a few of my sets off to make sure my playgroup could build new decks (I call this move the "investing in guaranteed future customers"), and because I wanted to build more decks. Yeah, I like EDH now. Sue me.

Initially I really liked the idea of trying to figure out which of the Commander 2013 decks was going to be the next "Heavenly Inferno" and be worth five times MSRP two years later. I liked "Power Hungry" as the deck to get there.

In addition to having Prossh, Skyraider of Kher and Shattergang Brothers, both of which are solid generals, the set contained Primal Vigor, a card that I figured would be worth around half of what a Doubling Season goes for. EDH isn't a format where you choose between Primal Vigor and Doubling Season--EDH is a format where you cut a land if you have to in order to run both.

What are we seeing for sealed Power Hungry decks one year later?

One year on, which is half the time it took Heavenly Inferno to go from $30 to $120, we're seeing a buyer's market for sealed Commander 2013 product. What happened?

Put simply, True-Name Nemesis happened.

The Ultimate Chase Rare

What happens when you have a $40+ card in a $35 precon? Besides the obvious glut of self-important posts on the Magic finance subreddit about how MTG Finance is "OMG So EZ", that is. When you have a card you can ship for $200 a playset right before a Legacy event and you can snag them, plus 99 other cards, for $120 a four-pack, you have a lot of people suddenly become MTG financiers overnight.

Five years before I wrote my first article on MTG finance, even I knew that you should pay $12 for a Rat's Nest precon deck with an Umezawa's Jitte in it. I went around to every WalMart and Target in town in search of Rat's Nests and built a Legacy collection trading the Jittes away at $25 a pop. Good times.

When a card is as obvious as an arbitrage opportunity as TNN was, you're going to see the decks sell out very quickly. True-Name Nemesis took Legacy by storm, cementing Stoneforge Mystic as a $20+ card forever, and making Stoneblade a real force to reckon with, something Legacy really hasn't recovered from.

When Scavenging Ooze began popping up in Legacy decks, there was a bit of a run on Counterpunch decks, but nothing like what we saw with True-Name Nemesis. As evidenced by the reprint in M14, Ooze was a card they could easily reprint in a Standard core set to control the price.

True-Name Nemesis is much trickier. Reprinting it in Standard is completely obviously not an option, relegating it to a possible judge foil reprint or some other sort of extremely limited print run. That projected price stability coupled with the mad scramble to get ahold of these two-player-game-ruiners led to a perfect storm of high demand and low supply.

Wizards solved the problem by agreeing to reprint the decks as needed, but retailers soon complained that ordering more decks to get True-Name Nemeses to their customers was akin to buying cartons of Neapolitan ice cream because you keep running out of chocolate. The other decks, which were less desirable to speculators, were selling to EDH players at a slower rate and piling up. Wizards introduced another policy, one where they would include two copies of Mind Seize, the deck that contained Nemesis and three random other decks, thus making reordering a little less of a folly.

Increased Supply

As you can see, the players who wanted their cheaty merfolk got their cheaty merfolk. The supply caught up to demand and the card is stabilizing under $20. It no longer makes sense to run out and buy a Mind Seize to get a True-Name Nemesis because stores are mostly out of them, and you can find a play set of Nemeses online for $60ish. The furor has died down, but it left in its wake a lot of shattered financial dreams.

Everything printed in Mind Seize that wasn't True-Name Nemesis started out as value, but it soon became valueless. I put out the call that I was willing to buy the 99 cards from a Mind Seize for $5, and at first people laughed, but the more they tore into those decks, the better that deal began to look. Sol Ring, a card that managed to maintain a steady $5 price tag through myriad reprintings, began to flag. Command Tower once seemed like a very solid long-term pickup, but a foil printing became the chase version and its inclusion in Mind Seize made it start to tail off as well.

Worse still, Nekusar, the Mindrazer was a pretty unfair card. With its price essentially bulk, not only was a potentially valuable card relegated to dumpster fodder, it became so insanely easy to get the 99 cards of the deck that aren't TNN (and TNN is pretty useless in EDH anyway, let's be real) that everyone was building Nekusar decks. Being ahead of a few key spikes like Font of Mythos and Teferi's Puzzle Box made me a lot of money, but Nekusar became the new D-bag deck to play at the shop and EDH as a social format suffered.

It wasn't just the 99 cards in Mind Seize that became essentially trash. If the supply of the other four decks had been printed and shipped according to demand, we'd see what we saw with Commander 2011--the few copies left sealed selling for a large markup. With a glut of the other decks that shipped essentially as packing peanuts to keep the Mind Seizes company in the box, the demand will never catch up.

While Power Hungry with its Prossh, Primal Vigor and Sol Ring seems like a good investment in a world where there is one copy of the deck for those who want one and not many more, we don't live in that world. We live in a world where there is a Primal Vigor for every person who wanted a True-Name Nemesis (and four of them for every person who wanted four Nemeses) and they're sitting on shelves, unclaimed. While Commander 2011 was printed using the "spaghetti" method of distribution where they threw some decks at a wall to see if they stuck, Commander was established as an insanely popular format by 2013 and they printed a lot of Commander 2013. And when there was a run on one of the decks, they printed even more.

Mind Seize selling out quickly had a very curious effect on the attitudes of EDH players buying the decks, also. Despite forming their own opinions about the decks they wanted to play, when they started to see Mind Seize selling out, EDH players started to demand Mind Seize decks themselves. Grixis is a somewhat popular choice, and Nekusar is a good general, but for a few weeks, Mind Seize was the most-requested deck even from EDH players.

Four decks with full stacks and one deck with one or zero copies left sent a signal to EDH players that the Grixis deck was better for EDH than it actually was. Not only that, they figured if they only had $30 to spend this paycheck on cards, why not get the deck that you won't be able to get next week and buy the other ones later? Players who wouldn't ordinarily have had much interest in the Mind Seize deck were buying it out of proportion with what its actual playability would have demanded.

Eventually EDH demand will catch up with the supply of decks, but will it happen quickly enough? We had a nice, long gap before. Eventually people realized that Animar, Soul of Elements was bugnutty and Riku of Two Reflections allowed people do degenerate things and Mirror Masters sold well. Eventually people realized "Political Puppets" was a deck they'd only bought to get the Flusterstorm out of it and what they really wanted to do in EDH was attack with angels and demons, driving up the price of "Heavenly Inferno". Eventually, what was going to happen happened.

Do we have that luxury this time around? People are going to realize the Naya deck doesn't suck and there is huge combo potential with Marath, Will of the Wild and that Mayael the Anima decks are great fun. But with Commander 2014 breathing down Commander 2013's neck, will it come in time?

What's more likely is that we're going to see a fire sale on the Commander 2013 decks. That will exacerbate the problem we have with a glut of cheap Sol Rings and Command Towers. There are very good cards in Commander 2013, and when it becomes cost effective to buy the deck in bulk, the singles prices may drop from where they are now.

What to Expect for Commander 2014

I wasn't sure if there was going to be a $120 deck in Commander 2013, but I figured if there was going to be one, it would be Power Hungry. Even considering how many copies of Mind Seize we saw busted, thereby reducing the chances of finding an unbusted one "in the wild", I still didn't think the deck with the best card would get there, but rather the best deck overall. Look at Political Puppets and Counterpunch from 2011--both with chase cards and both worth little more than MSRP now.

It ended up not mattering, as a generous reprint policy ("we'll reprint as needed") gave way to an even more generous reprint policy ("we will ship you a greater percentage of the deck you really want"). I think Commander is a much more popular format now, people are used to the idea of buying all of the decks rather than just the one they think is good and speculators are savvier about identifying chase cards before the sets are even released. I don't expect sealed product to be that good an investment for Commander 2014 any more than it was for Commander 2013.

If you have sealed 2013, hang onto it. If there is a fire sale on retail stores' part, hold. There is still a chance your sealed decks will be worth something in a few years. Even with new product getting printed, the specific cards in the decks you have aren't getting reprinted in that configuration, nor are they likely to reprint anything that was part of the "15 brand new cards" touted on the label. Let everyone else panic as Commander 2014 pushes Commander 2013 off of the shelves. People are about to get really fearful about Commander 2013, and Warren Buffet says when that happens, it's time to get greedy. If they want to sell Power Hungry at $10, I'm buying.

Similarly, people are about to get greedy with Commander 2014, trying to find the next True-Name Nemesis. I may be among those being fearful.