Hello and welcome back for another High Stakes MTGO article!

Unlike last week, this week was very calm for my portfolio—I barely made a half dozen purchases and sales all combined. Modern hasn't picked up as much as I wanted in December, so even in this sector things have more or less come to a standstill for me. With more triple Zendikar flashback drafts scheduled for early January, all of my ZEN positions have pushed back. I might be waiting another three or four weeks to find a better spot to sell those at high risk of a reprint in Modern Masters 2017.

Besides this, I'm still looking for good targets in the event Frontier breaks out in paper and/or MTGO. Rally the Ancestors has already spiked by 500%! At 0.03 tix there was really zero risk of jumping into this spec, but make no mistake—these 500-plus percentage gains are only a speculative smoke screen that will have no support until the format is at least recognized and supported on MTGO.

With two more weeks to go before 2017, let's review how this quiet past week went for me. The latest snapshot of my portfolio is accessible here.

Buys This Week

Again this past week I was trying to acquire cards that could potentially see big gains in the long-run if Frontier catches up as a popular format. I'm still trying to accumulate the cheaper cards, and as with Return to the Ranks, if those targets' sets have past the redemption window—which only concerns M15 at this point—even better.

Return to the Ranks is fairly versatile and can be played in different shells, including aggro and combo decks. Its price is currently sitting around 0.5 tix, and has already fluctuated several times between 0.5 and 1.5 tix. In a nutshell, a great entry price for a card with enough long-term potential in my opinion.

This one is a little bit of a gamble as Supreme Verdict could totally be in MM3. However, an uncounterable wrath for four mana may not be what Wizards wants to put in MM3. In addition, both MMA and MM2 don't have any Wrath of God-like sweepers, and Damnation is the much more obvious inclusion for MM3.

Finally, Supreme Verdict is still rather cheap in both paper and online versions, so the card isn't begging for a reprint either. All in all I think the chance of a reprint in MM3 are low overall.

The recent Return to Ravnica block flashback drafts dragged the price of Supreme Verdict below 1 tix. Assuming you find the gamble acceptable, now is a decent opportunity to buy a board sweeper that sees play in all eternal formats. Although I was watching this card for several days, I was too distracted to pull the trigger earlier and was only able to buy eight playsets, under 1.2 tix on average.

Sales This Week

Serum Visions didn’t make it into MM2, receiving a nice price boost when its absence was confirmed and reaching a surreal 12 tix in June 2015. After a crazy summer, the price settled down between 2 and 3 tix as we entered 2016.

Despite this blue cantrip being played in a myriad of Modern decks from aggro, to control, to combo, the price never took off again. My bet was that Serum Visions could see 5 tix again and even after Fifth Dawn flashback drafts it never happened. With a most recent peak at 3.4 tix, this is the best it has been in all of 2016.

This is the best and probably only opportunity I have to sell my Visions before a more-than-likely reprint in MM3. Gambling for a non-reprint in MM3 is too risky in my opinion. I'm closing this position with some profit, but it's not the easy double or triple I had envisioned.

This BFZ land is among several positions I'm looking to close with no or very minimal losses whenever possible, rather than holding them into the dark. So there you go—15 copies sold for a whooping 5.4% profit.

Since this past summer, the Glade was fluctuating between 1 and 2 tix. After the release of Kaladesh, the price rose to fluctuations between 2 and 3 tix. Even with the comeback of the red-green Aetherworks Marvel deck, this land doesn't seem to be heading higher. I'd rather try to sell a few copies now.

I had a good run with Prairie Stream and Smoldering Marsh, and not all lands of a cycle can be profitable—just ask my Magic Origins painland spec. However it is often necessary to buy into the full basket of five different lands to make profit overall. The ORI painlands are again an illustration of this principle.

Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger is the only foil mythic from BFZ that has rebounded from the slow price drop half of the BFZ foil mythics have been experiencing since this past summer. The other half of the BFZ foil mythics barely maintained their price.

I had banked on a little more stability, and even a slow and steady increase in price. So now that one BFZ foil mythic is in selling range again, I'm not going to stay undecided too long—especially since moving this type of card at a good price is difficult, considering the narrow demand.

On My Radar

Almost nothing new here for me. The one thing I'm monitoring closely these days is the evolution of the value of a full set of both Magic Origins and Dragons of Tarkir. While the value of a full set of ORI has barely taken off since I bought them, the value of a full set of DTK, on the other hand, is currently up by about 35%.

That's already a good number for a full set spec. While this may be only the beginning of a nice upward trend, I'm very cautious about expecting too much of a full set spec, even if DTK has a lot of to offer in terms of rares and mythics.

As for ORI, I'm expecting some upward movements now that the paper version of Jace, Vryn's Prodigy has grown by 25% over the past two weeks. With Frontier probably adding to the demand, this version of Jace may quickly get more and more expensive, in turn driving the value of online ORI full sets. That's just what I would need to sell my spec here.

Thank you for reading,

Sylvain