So, this happened:

This is the official Banned and Restricted list update announcement, excerpted from the Wizards of the Coast homepage. Don't believe me? Here's the link, check it out for yourself.

You trust me, right? It's not in my best interest to lead you astray. My credibility as a writer and podcaster relies on being credible and if I go around lying to people about important information, it weakens my credibility. I'm in the business of bringing you accurate information.

But that's just me. Other people aren't in the same business I am, they're in the business of giving you the business. And let me tell you, business is booming.

There are a lot of moves to be made now that we know what is banned and unbanned, but I want to talk about what wasn't announced.

Conspicuously Absent

There were a few cards that went up in price significantly and it had nothing to do with today's actual announcement.

"There is no doubt," one redditor wrote (I'm paraphrasing), "that given the recent spike of Bloodbraid Elf, someone has inside information." People are obsessed with "inside information" and have been for years.

It all starts with an old chestnut in the finance community, the tale of Aluren. Aluren highlights two different kinds of events in MTG Finance and why it's important to understand the nuance between both.

Aluren

Aluren is a card. It's on the Reserved List and it puts creatures into play for free. It is the cornerstone of a Legacy deck that I haven't seen played in a long time. They printed Lobber Crew two years ago, and that gave the deck a brief resurgence, but for the most part, the deck doesn't see play. It's Tier 11 but also a lot of fun to play. I mean, Lobber Crew. As a potential win condition. You can't beat that with a stick.

Still, the deck, and therefore the marquee card, sat in relative obscurity for a while. Then, suddenly, all of the copies of Aluren started to go missing. Someone was buying them for some reason. But why? There seemed to be no explanation. Sure, it was never getting reprinted and technically it mattered in terms of a deck in Legacy, but that was justification after the fact, not an explanation for the sudden spike.

Then, an explanation came.

Imperial Recruiter, a lynchpin card in the deck, was announced as a judge foil. It was still liable to be somewhat expensive, but the availability of copies at any price was bound to renew interest in the deck, and if a playset of the card could be obtained for the same cost as one copy was before, it was likely that Aluren could be a real deck.

It ended up not mattering. The price of Aluren went up, but with no buyers at the new price, it slowly went back down. The deck never really went anywhere and Aluren became a textbook example of why not to buy into a card absent real demand. But Aluren selling out months before the announcement of Imperial Recruiter pointed to an obvious information leak. Someone had known about Recruiter coming down the pipe and had acted on the information. It was the only explanation for the Aluren spike (and subsequent plummet, absent real demand) that made any sense.

The unique thing about this case compared to other accusations of "inside information" deals with the logistics of getting this Recruiter out there. In order to get the card out to people, Wizards needs to have a company print copies of the card. This is sometimes outsourced to smaller companies that don't need to print as many copies as a full set and need to do this printing while the other cards are being printed elsewhere.

Any time you invite more people into your house, you invite more chances for information to get out. That's likely what happened here. Long before the card was announced, it had to be printed and lots of people at Wotc and the place that printed the card knew about it for months.

This is a different event that we saw this week.

Bloodbraid Elf went stupid bananas expensive based on pure hype and speculation. The Jim Joneses of the Magic community poured some honey in the ears of their flock and they went forth and bought out the internet. After all, Bloodbraid Elf was BOUND to get unbanned, right? Still, there was no concrete proof for this. I was vocal about not wanting to bet my money on Bloodbraid Elf, but the card spiked out of control. It was the most requested card on PucaTrade, signaling everyone on that site that there was a run on the card. Even people in the finance industry who didn't think the card wasn't getting unbanned couldn't convey that information without noting that the card was out of control.

A lot of people are saying that there was no inside information here, but the problem with that is that there were people with lots and lots of copies of Bitterblossom a year ago claiming they had inside information. People being tipped off to the Bitterblossom unbanning and arming themselves with copies, some which went for $100 the say of the unbanning, left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. Claiming there is no information leak is tough when the people who had Bitterblossoms claim they were tipped off.

Still, it's easier to keep things under wraps if all you have to do is keep it quiet until you make an announcement. Contracting a company to print cards is one thing, pointing out people can play with copies of a card they already have is another. There is still doubt that anyone has inside information about unbannings, or ever did, and the mysterious run on Bloodbraid Elf that turned out just to be runaway speculation bears that out.

This is a case of mass hysteria more than anything else. People forgot what Elf did to Modern in a few short years and they already want it back. Losing Pod and gaining Elf is just swapping one format-ruining deck for another. No thank you. As much as I like the idea of Boom // Bust Naya, players can't be trusted. They'll build Jund, and they'll build a ton of it.

If you lost money on Bloodbraid Elf by buying at the peak of the hysteria, I don't feel sorry for you.

I'm not sure which hinged more on gullibility and a lack of critical thought, the case of Bloodbraid Elf, or the case of Stoneforge Mystic.

If you bought Stoneforge Mystic, I really don't feel sorry for you.

This didn't pass the sniff test to me, but when it "leaked" Sunday night, the internet went nuts, and bought every copy of Stoneforge Mystic they could find. The font is all wrong on this and in the age of computers, everyone can take a screenshot and just post a clear picture. The cameraphone pic was clearly done to make it look like this was "smuggled" out of WotC smuggled up a Bothan Spy's butt or hidden inside a hollowed out book.

If you believed this, you don't deserve to have the money you lost, especially since this wasn't even the first obviously fake announcement of the week.

Fblthp brought us an update that heralded the banning of Treasure Cruise, though not in as many formats as we ultimately saw. Do you believe everything you read on the internet? Be selective, folks. Information reported here on Quiet Speculation and in my articles more specifically is designed to give you value. My motives for writing what I do is to make you all money (or help you make it yourself) and I'm motivated by that goal, not by trying to trick you into buying Stoneforge Mystics from me for an inflated price.

Someone made a lot of money on Stoneforge Mystics that had no business going up, and it may very well have been the same person who posted the fake "screenshot" that prompted the buyout.

Think about the sources of information before you act. It's not always so clearly a case of inside information when a card like Bloodbraid Elf spikes because, as we saw, that ultimately amounted to nothing. Don't buy motivated by faked screenshots that claim to be inside information, no matter how grainy the cellphone picture is. You could be left holding the bag and getting laughed at with no money to buy Grave-Trolls and Bobs like a good financier.