Hello, everyone and welcome to a new edition of the Daily Stock! We're a few days away from the Philippine Nationals where an estimated 500 players will play two days of Standard and Core 2019 drafts to decide who will represent the country in the World Championships in Spain this December. This will also be my gauge on how many Flooded Strands will be out there in the market, and if it is really deserving of the $100 that it currently commands. I'll talk about this development next week once I have more statistics, so let's focus on our featured card for today.

Another Battlebond mythic is on the spotlight, and it's funny that it took people some time to realize how good the card is. My initial thoughts on this card is that it's fringe playable in big creature decks for Commander and probably as a filler for Show and Tell decks. It has been sitting at below $3 for the entire duration of its existence and just like Brightling, which was our featured card the other day, it has already exploded out of the gates by hitting its all-time high of $19.49 today. It doesn't take much of a genius to see how powerful the card is, considering that it is only playable in older formats where it belongs to the best color in protecting its own resources. Although untested in actual events so far, I've already seen it showing up in the sideboard of some Sneak Attack decks online. Here's one for reference:

With a plethora of counter magic and some Blood Moon action, you could easily use Arcane Artisan off the board to capitalize on your Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and most especially Griselbrand, which almost guarantees you that you draw seven cards before anything could go wrong with the Artisan, without having to rely on Sneak Attack alone. At first glance, its ability might look a bit expensive and a bit slow, granted that you can't do anything with it at the moment that it hits the battlefield. This was one of the reasons why we might have overlooked how good the card is when it was initially spoiled, but now it finally makes sense why the card was printed as a mythic rare. Drawing a card and dropping a big creature at the same time is some pretty good pay off for three mana, all the more if the creature is something of Griselbrand's caliber.

There are lots of way to get your creatures into play without having to cast them, and only Elvish Piper is the creature that comes to mind when it comes to that regard. Arcane Artisan just gives you that extra lift with the ability to draw a card before resolving what you ultimately need it for. This card should be around for a while, and there will be lots of this in circulation for as long as people are opening Battlebond packs. This new price might stick, but I don't see it hanging around for a while. I'm a seller at this point in time. There are always better options than this card, and it just doesn't seem too reasonable to acquire one for this price.

At the moment, you could get copies of Arcane Artisan via multiple vendors in TCGPlayer for anywhere between $17.75 up to $19.13, while there are a few copies left via Card Kingdom for $19.99. StarCityGames and ChannelFireball are both out of stock, and they should be back with stocks soon whose price will depend on what the market value is. Foils are somewhere near $40, and should be good long term spec targets. I would probably move my personal copies at the moment and not lose sleep if it does increase in value in the future. I'm just not a fan of blue creatures that are conditional to become useful.

And that’s it for today’s edition of the Daily Stock Watch! See you again next time, as we check out a new card that should be on the go, or good enough for speculating. As always, feel free to share your opinion in the comments section below. And if you want to keep up with all the market movement, be sure to check in with the QS Discord Channel for real time market information, and stay ahead of the hottest specs!