Hello, everyone and welcome to a new edition of the Daily Stock Watch! Card prices aren't moving as fast as they normally would nowadays as people are getting geared up for what will be spoiled in Guilds of Ravnica. This is a common occurrence that I noticed whenever there's a hint that a new set that's coming out is pretty good financially (which is the case here with the return of shocklands in Standard and the planeswalker Masterpiece series) so the market won't be as busy as it usually is. Since buyouts account for a lot of market movement and those who are behind it are saving their ammunition for GRN, let's talk about a card that has been slowly climbing financially because it's the most solid answer to the biggest threat in Modern right now.

Hardened Modular is for real and you should be prepared for it if you're coming to a big tournament or probably even just for FNM. I'm now playing with the deck and I made it to the top eight of a PPTQ over the weekend by sleepwalking through the opposition as I barely encountered any trouble against the likes of Jund, Mardu Pyromancer, Humans, Ponza, and Bridgevine. However, I lost a to a Humans in the quarterfinals, thanks to him having some pretty sick luck besides the fact that he is well-prepared for the matchup. Having played Humans all season, I wasn't expecting him to have Stony Silence in his board (the other Humans I faced was using Spellskite to prevent modular shenanigans from getting out of hand) because it was very hard to cast consistently with the mana base that the deck is running but he was able to play Stony Silence, Kataki, War's Wage, and a pair of Dismembers to brutalize me in boarded matchups. Truth be told, the only solid thing that could stop the deck dead in its tracks, barring a resolved Nature's Claim as soon as it hits play, is Stony Silence.

Just how efficient is this sideboard card right now? The most powerful Control deck in the format just bullied his way to the championship with three copies of it in his sideboard in the most recent MTGO Modern PTQ.

As strong as it is already in the pre-boarded games, jhacer1 made sure that he won't be losing to Hardened Modular by breaching the usual two copies of Stony Silence in the sideboard. The card is so absurd in shutting down the whole deck as it basically turns every creature in the deck to a Grizzly Bear as modular is basically useless with Arcbound Ravager's ability disabled along with the rest of its mana sources (Mox Opal and Darksteel Citadel gets punished by Stony as well) Going forward, I expect any deck with access to white to just slam two to three copies of this card in their sideboard, which will then increase the demand for it and consequently raise its price as well.

There are tons of ways to hate on the deck before it became popular as Affinity has been around for as long as Modern is concerned prior to Hardened Modular's surge. However, you would only know the true power of this new tier one deck if you've played against it in an actual game, and only then would you understand that the closest thing to beating it down is with Stony Silence or a well-timed Hurkyl's Recall which I haven't seen being used for a while by any other deck that runs blue. At $7.32, I think that this is a must-have for every competitive deck that runs white and it should easily scale $10 in the near future for as long as Hardened Modular continues winning.

At the moment, supplies of Stony Silence are running low on TCGPlayer while StarCityGames and Card Kingdom are already out of stock of the Innistrad version and are left with a few copies of the Modern Masters 2017 version. Get yours now while you can as this will be a hot commodity going forward. You can't go wrong with whatever expansion you'll be getting -- you will be needing a lot of this in the stretch run if you want to win tournaments.

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!