Greetings, Speculators!

Who says you can't write an entire article about a single card?

The Card in Question

I'm known for clever puns but the title of this article is not among them. I literally just want to write about what's up with Stoke the Flames and what it means. I think there is a little more going on than is immediately apparent and it bears looking into. Maybe we can't learn a little bit about the next coming of Stoke the Flames and get out ahead of the next one.

What Getting Ahead Means

This is a card that hit $0.50 even on a website where you can lose a dime selling a card for $0.50. So what the holy hell is happening? I think there are several contributing factors at work. I don't feel like ranking them in terms of importance, so I will rank them in the order I think of them.

1) It's a Good Card

Stoke the Flames does four damage to a creature or player. This gives it lots of potential utility. For example, did you know that a resolved Stoke the Flames will kill an opponent at the following life totals?

• 3
• 1
• 2
• 4
• 8 ( Furnace of Rath variant may be necessary)
• 0
• 5 [citation needed]

That seems very useful for a red mage.

Also, Stoke the Flames kills the following creatures

Sometimes you only have two mana up and need to get the job done and the convoke can make the spell castable. Not only that, sometimes you are forced by Goblin Rabblemaster to attack with goblins you'd rather not always attack with, and tapping them to convoke can make sure they stay home.

A) It's in M15

No one really bought much M15. Core sets typically don't set sales records and they are being phased out. Not only that, it was never particularly appealing to draft it, which is a secondary way that cards from core sets end up in binders and collections.

There was a lot against it, frankly. At the beginning of M15 draft, a lot of stores still had boxes of Conspiracy left. Not everyone hoarded Conspiracy--quite a few stores blew through their entire supply because it was so much fun to draft. If you have the choice between drafting Conspiracy and drafting Core set, sometimes for the same price, there is no discussion to even be had. You snap draft Conspiracy, not close. As long as there were packs of sets that weren't M15 to draft, M15 didn't get drafted much.

By the time all of Conspiracy was drafted off, there was so much hype about Khans of Tarkir that people couldn't wait to not have to draft M15 anymore. While some sets will still get drafted after new sets come out, M15 was dropped like MTV dropped music videos. Again, none of this is a value judgment on M15 as a limited format (it wasn't bad, as core sets go, frankly) but it does help to explain why there are fewer loose copies of staple M15 uncommons floating around.

The rest of M15 wasn't remarkable. It speaks to the quality of the set that people would rather live in a world where Goblin Rabblemaster flirts with $20 than open more boxes of the stupid set.

There are no real other uncommons to speak of in the set and cards like Hornet Queen and Genesis Hydra are only starting to even be bought on their own merits, let alone used as the impetus for buying more packs. Being an uncommon in an underwhelming set can help your upside because people are not super willing to bust the packs when they can just buy the rares they need.

I) MODO Ruined Finance

There's no question that Magic Online is a bag of ass. Even people who are paid to produce MODO videos aren't because it's so hard to use, so broken and there are so few people playing on MODO right now.

To an extent, people don't want to play against that stupid Jeskai Ascendancy deck and that's a reason Modern is not firing eight-mans reliably, but let's not discount how bad the client is.

Version 4 seemed fine in Beta and I was looking forward to them busting a bottle of champagne against its hull and gently setting it off on its voyage. Instead, there were major holes in the hull just above the waterline, and when the boat is loaded to capacity with players, it begins to sink and the need to bail it out constantly becomes readily apparent.

People don't want to play Magic Online as much as they used to. To an extent, how bad MODO is right now is in M15's favor a tiny bit.

But other than the fact that they are doing a small thing to add more M15 packs to the pool, they're doing a lot more to hinder it by making people not want to play M15 drafts on MODO.

It's funny--irrespective of their colossal failures, even some things MODO is successful at is hindering M15. M15 is draftable on Magic Online but when it started, people had the option to do Tempest block flashback drafts. So you could crack a 100 -tix Wasteland at uncommon or you could get a Chasm Skulker. After that concluded, people were treated to Innistrad block flashback drafts. That's recent enough to still be fresh in everyone's minds, but having credible competition from fun formats is not going to bode well for M15 limited on MODO.

It gets worse.

Even if M15 were jumping on MODO and everyone were super jazzed to be busting those virtual packs and battlin' with Jorubai Murk Lurkers and Kird Chieftains, there is a simple truth that affects all of MODO finance right now, not just M15.

The trading system is broken.

With no convenient mechanism for trading cards between players and between players and bots, it's incredibly difficult to put together a redemption set. Couple that with the fact that the price of redemption recently increased from $5 to $15 which is not a big deal for a good set but most certainly is for a bad one. Couple that with a reduced window of time that people care at all about even bothering to try to redeem M15 on MODO and you have a real lack of new M15 cards ending up in the market.

Whereas most sets will see dedicated MODO redeemers burning the midnight oil to turn those sets over and sell them on eBay or to dealers, you're seeing that to a much lesser extent with M15. I feel like M16 is very likely to be the same way. Redemption is a significant avenue to injecting cards into the market and enforcing the overall price of a set, and with this mechanism broken, prices are bound to do some funny things.

False Signals

Some who caught a few flirtations with 4 full tix on MODO thought that the price might catch up in paper, provided the metagames lined up between paper and MODO the way they mostly always do. Ordinarily a spike on MODO is indicative of a potential spike in paper, but with MODO as broken and terrible as it is right now, even veteran financiers weren't prepared to call this card the next $4 uncommon.

Ironically, fledgeling financiers latched onto the news and there was a bit of buying activity on TCG Player following a reddit posting about the MODO price spike. This may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy to an extent, but that effect was obscured by all of the other factors that are conspiring to keep the price of Stoke the Flames high.

Not Without Precedent

It isn't just these factors that are keeping the price of Stoke the Flames at such a high price. Narrower cards have seen pretty decent price points in the past.

While not quite the $4 we're seeing now, Boros Charm also isn't quite as likely to be as ubiquitous in Standard as Stoke, not to mention the fact that Gatecrash was opened a bunch more than M15, if only because it was drafted for a longer period of time (though not three packs at a time for its entire run the way M15 was).

The reprint didn't help Boros Charm a ton, but it didn't come until well after Boros Charm established its peak price. I'm not here to discuss which looks better long-term, though Charm likely gets the nod due to its ability to do four damage for two mana without tapping any creatures and its useful other modes. Burn spells that hit creatures aren't really at a premium in the narrow selection of decks in Modern likely to run Boros Charm, otherwise people would play fewer Lava Spikes and more Volcanic Hammers.

There are a lot of other examples of uncommons that peaked at a much higher value than anticipated. Dismember comes to mind, though the sites that provide handy graphical data don't price back that far.

What to Do With Stoke?

Well, that's an easy one. Sell those before December, because in December...

...this is happening. The FNM promo for the month of December is going to dump some more Stokes onto the market, and sexy ones, too. FNM promos didn't do much to help keep the price of Dismember or Experiment One high and it's not going to do Stoke the Flames any favors, either.

While a ton of Stoke the Flames aren't likely to get dumped in from MODO redemption or people busting M15 packs, I don't know that there is much growth potential for Stoke at this point. Save 10% for the next guy and all that, and try to cash out now if you want my advice.

The Next Stoke in Flames

I haven't seen any spoilers for the next set, but there is a possibility of the next $4 uncommon being in it so we should be ready to spot it while it's still preselling for $0.50-$1 like the other uncommons. I would look for the following factors.

• Is it likely to be a four-of in the deck that plays it?
• Do its colors narrow it to a small range of decks or can it be played across many wedges?
• Does it do what it does better than any other card in Standard?
• Does it have Modern or Legacy applicability?
• Will MODO still suck then? (Yes, it will)

If I spot anything as the spoilers come out for the next set, I'll likely stick my neck out and write an article about it. In the mean time, buy all the bulk you can. I get shipped cards like Stoke in Flames in bulk all the time and free money is always appreciated.