Spoiler season! Wait, didn’t we just do this?

Honestly, it feels like we did. Fate Reforged was not that long ago at all. But who cares? New cards! (I’ll run my retrospective set review next week and then give my prerelease primer for Dragons after that.

Before I get to spoilers, I want to announce a small project I’m starting, one I’ll report on from time to time in this column.

You may have heard of Pucatrade, a quickly-growing platform that a ton of people use to trade cards online, and a platform that our own Derek Madlem wrote about a few months ago. However, unlike many of you smart readers, I never made the jump in. My reasoning was that I have a retail store where I sell most cards, so trading for particular things isn’t really a thing a I do a lot of. Why bother?

Things have changed, and I’m ready to take the plunge.

Nothing’s really changed on my end. I still sell almost all of my cards at the store, and I still don’t need to play the Pucatrade market all that much. But I do have so many cards coming in right now that I can’t really stock them all at the store, especially the stuff that’s just $1-2. Shipping those off to a buylist doesn’t do me a ton, and the “dollar rare box” is full, with several thousands of cards waiting their turn in the box as well. So I’ve decided that rather than have so many of these cards sitting uselessly in boxes, I’m going to Puca them.

The end goal? Full-art Mutavaults. They’re beautiful, aren’t they? These cost a tidy 73,000 puca points apiece and I’ll be listing stuff that’s 1-500 points, but hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere, right? And, in the end, if I’ve turned thousands of essentially bulk rares into some beautiful Merfolk, I think that qualifies as “trading up.”

Moving on.

Spoilers!

Narset, Transcendent

This card is obviously super powerful, but I think it’s actually more difficult to evaluate in terms of the context of Standard. Is it better than Siege Rhino at four mana? I’m not sure what the odds of drawing a card with the +1 will be, but I imagine in the right deck it will be near 50%, which seems solid. The -2 is very, very good, and not just in Standard.

But the biggest selling point to me is the six loyalty. That’s a lot on a four-mana planeswalker that will be staring you down with seven loyalty on turn four.

Surprise, it’s starting at $50 on TCGPlayer. I really don’t think there’s much to say here, other than this will be very good in Standard and Commander. Until we see more movement in the price and more of the set, it’s both hard to say where it will settle or when it will be worth picking up. But I think the hype is warranted here. In an Esper deck (or any blue-white control deck), you can play this on turn four and likely have it survive an attack, then go wild with it on your next turn when you cast your five-mana wrath of choice.

Dragonlord Silumgar

$8-10 here, but I see this as another Pearl Lake Ancient or Aetherling, albeit one with much more appeal outside Standard. This is unlikely to ever be a four-of in a Standard deck, so I think the upside is limited.

That said, it’s way better in non-Standard formats than those other two, namely in Commander where stealing planeswalkers is a huge game. The problem is, I don’t see any point moving into this at current prices, but this is definitely one to keep an eye on. Long-term, foils will likely be a good play, because in Commander if this resolves you get to have a ton of fun.

Dragon Tempest

I get that this seems like nothing, and in all honesty it’s going to be a bulk rare before it’s all said and done.

But at that point I love picking these up. It may not be Crucible of Fire, but it’s going to behave similarly in price, and that’s good news for the long term. And who knows, maybe a Standard dragon deck will be a thing?

Ojutai’s Command

Unpronounceable Command is fun, but Cryptic Command it is not. Still, it’s very powerful. I don’t know if returning a Snapcaster and drawing a card in Modern is good enough, but I could see a few copies sneaking into Modern here and there. In Standard this does seem like a house, countering Rhino and drawing a card or gaining some clutch life.

Still, it’s hard to imagine this seeing more play than Dig Through Time did at its height. That card also saw tons of Modern play but could only hold a $10-15 pricetag for a month before falling back to Earth. I think that means Unpronounceable Command is destined to come down from the $9-10 it’s at now. But with this and Narset forming the basis of blue-white decks over the next 18 months, I can already tell I’m going to love both of these as pre-rotation pickups.

More Dargons

Mostly bulk, honestly. Some of them may see some fringe play, but as Jason put it on this week’s Brainstorm Brewery, EDH can only prop up prices for the best 20-30 Dragons, and none of these really fit the bill.

Still, I can already see this set being gold a few years from now when you find all these previously-bulk dragons in peoples’ collections and see they’re all worth a few bucks.

Sidisi, Undead Vizier

Exploit is a cool mechanic, and much better than megamorph (seriously, that’s all I can think of when I see it, loved that series). And as far as exploit cards worth taking in, this is at the top of the list when it comes to Commander. I love foils of this in the long term.

Dragonlord's Servant

This is not bulk.

I’ll repeat it, because you’re going to find them in bulk all over the place, and while it may be bulk for a while it’s not going to stay that way forever (see: Dragonspeaker Shaman).

This is not bulk.

That’s really what’s caught my eye so far. I’m sure by the time you see this there will be some earth-shattering spoiler that’s come out since I wrote this, but that’s just the way it goes.

Thanks for reading,

Corbin Hosler

@Chosler88 on Twitter