Preamble: I was at the Pro Tour in Honolulu. It was a crazy good time, complete with midnight walks on the beach with foreigners, late-night drafting and all day Pro Touring. The Top 8 was incredibly diverse, and there were some cards that did some stuff financially.

Blah. Blah. Blah.

Also, blah.

This is all old news at this point. We know Siege Rhino is good. We know Pearl Lake Ancient is no longer bulk. We know Ari Lax gets really excited when he plays Magic.

The only question that now matters is, what’s next?

Pulling from the Pro Tour

I know everyone is excited about the Top 8 decks and will look for them to guide the future, and while that is true it’s also not the entirety of the story. That’s why these two pages, somewhat buried in the coverage, are so important. Making Top 8 not only takes a great Constructed deck and some favorable matchups, it takes a strong Limited game. The Top 8 decks don’t always feature what the “best” decks are in the metagame, it simply features which decks were played by players who did well enough in both Limited and Constructed to make the elimination rounds.

These lists, on the other hand, give us a few of all the decks that earned at least 21 points in the Swiss rounds, which means they went 7-3 or better. Finding trends in this is far more important than looking at the small snapshot that is the Top 8.

And here we find some cards that were completely missed during the Top 8 but could nonetheless prove important moving forward.

Let’s dig in.

Ashcloud Phoenix

This saw way more play over the weekend than you would expect, though no copies made it to the Top 8. This also made it onto the list of “cards the pros thought overperformed,” even if they weren’t playing it themselves.

This guy keeps the beats coming, and even though it’s not lighting the world on fire it is worth noting as a mythic. That said, it’s not cheap at $7 now, though many players don’t actually view it that high. Picking these up on the cheap is a solid plan, but I don’t love investing heavily at the current price.

Mana Confluence

Not as many copies as you would expect. As we move forward, we’re likely going to get more mana fixing, and this was already not the huge player on the weekend we expected. I loved this as a pickup at $10 when I began writing about it, but I feel like it’s a sell at $17 now. Take your profits and enjoy them.

Chandra, Pyromaster

I don’t love it as much as I did at $5, but at $7-8 I still think there could be some upside. I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat: if Liliana Vess can be $10 with a million printings, Chandra can easily pass that point. This is not a bad target moving forward.

In this particular case, I’m referring to the Mardu Planeswalker deck that had some success. But Chandra can fit into a variety of shells including Brad Nelson’s R/W Control deck, and I expect that versatility to continue during her time in Standard.

Red-White Heroic

Now we’re talking about some sweet decks. Favored Hoplite gets my deckbuilding juices flowing.

On the one hand, this deck—utilizing just Obelisk of Urd and Launch the Fleet as maindeck rares—looks weak and weird. But on the other hand, it did go 7-3 at the Pro Tour, and I know there were white-blue variants that also went at least 6-4.

It wasn’t played in the red-white list, but I saw more than one Hero of Iroas floating around the room. That’s something with a casual appeal to fall back on, and could be a nice riser since this represents something of a “budget” deck.

Temples, Painlands

I’ll second Sigmund’s call that these are still good pickups, especially Temple of Triumph. People are all excited about fetchlands right now, but the truth is you also need plenty of the old reliable lands to help get you there. These should hold value better than Khans of Tarkir over the next six months, which makes them attractive to pick up right now.

Speaking of Khans of Tarkir, I think I want to close this week by putting my thoughts out there on the future of this set as a whole.

What we're seeing right now is unprecedented. The average value of the singles in a box of Khans of Tarkir is $178 as of today. We have never seen this before at this point of a set's release, save for one time that I can think of. Magic 2010 massively outperformed expectations and we saw shortages of product in the first month similar to what we're seeing with Khans.

It's not often that Wizards underestimates demand for a product, but by all accounts that's what we're seeing here. The fact the Pro Tour had such a healthy metagame only adds to this, and it's a great sign for Magic moving forward.

That said, the ride cannot last forever. It just can't. As soon as new product comes in, store owners are right now busting the boxes to sell the singles rather than move the boxes at $100 apiece. Of course the TCGMid number (which calculates all 15 cards) is not the true representation of the "value" of a box, but keep in mind that Theros is just $127 right now and never reached the levels Khans did. In fact, no fall expansion in memory, even Innistrad, performed at this rate financially.

Will Khans be the set that breaks the mold and starts a new trend? It's possible, especially considering that the draft structure for this format means it won't be opened as much as Theros. And there was a lot of talk at the Pro Tour about this being the best draft format of all time. But still, until the numbers convince me otherwise, I see no reason why Khans prices won't be significantly cheaper a 6-8 weeks from now.

If you have any of the newly-popular cards, I have to advise moving them out now. Even if the expensive cards hold value, the less-prevalent-but-still-$5 rares like Rakshasa Deathdealer will see a halving in value. And as amazing as Dig Through Time is, it is extraordinarily difficult for a Fall-set rare to hold $10+, and I don't see that happening in a set with fetchlands.

I know none of this seems like groundbreaking information, but right now the general mindset seems to be that Khans is the set that keeps on giving. It’s two weeks after the release, and prices are actually higher than they were before. There’s a lot that plays into this, including the fact that so many of the cards are immediately playable in Standard.

But sooner or later it’s going to begin taking it all back, and you’ll want to have moved your holdings into safer places by then, because while the bubble may not burst, it will certainly deflate as we continue to draft what is one of the best draft sets ever made.

Thanks for reading,

Corbin Hosler

@Chosler88 on Twitter