I am confident that Mr. Vol is not worth this much.
But hey, more packs cracked for chase (mythic) rares equals more money for Wizards, so it’s all to the good.

Now that Shards of Alara is fully and officially spoiled (you can check it out the way I do by clicking here), it’s time to look at buying some cards. Ben Bleiweiss over at Star City Games runs a regular feature in his Insider Trading column called “The Financial Value of X” for each new set. This is premium (that is, paid) content, but if you have an SCG subscription, it’s one of the more valuable ways to countercheck your own thoughts on what might be worthwhile. Click here to read “The Financial Value of Shards of Alara”.
How I buy from a set
I have a standard procedure I now follow when each new Magic expansion comes out. First, I buy a full playset of commons and uncommons from the set (a playset is, conventionally, four of each card). This is by far the most affordable way to pick up these cards, and it saves me the hassle of trying to decide which commons and uncommons may be useful — this is especially important since cards in this rarity range can unexpectedly turn out to be really important to a build, and traders on-site at events like PTQs often don’t stock many or even any cards that aren’t rare. Second, I review the set and decide which of the rares I plan on buying separately. I pick up rares based on the formats in which I expect to play, as well as what I might play in those formats. For the moment, for example, there isn’t a block season or a lot of block events going on, so I haven’t given much thought to what the Shards block environment would be like. Standard is pretty wide open, so I’m likely to think about the full range of deck options there, even though I tend toward certain archetypes more than others. Over in Extended, I know I will be playing some Rock-like build, so I’m not even thinking about picking up cards from Shards that will work well with Affinity.
Whenever I talk about buying here, I am talking about Ebay, by the way. Ebay has consistently been the cheapest, most reliable source for playsets and singles since I returned to the game. I know some people are generally suspicious of Ebay, but I have had no bad experiences there. I imagine it helps to pay assiduous attention to the feedback people have received. The one “neutral” experience I had was a guy who lagged in sending cards out until I opened a Paypal complaint against him. That strikes me as a fine and low ratio of “problem to good experience”, given how often I used the service.
How I review a set
When I’m looking at some grouping of cards, whether it’s a new set, all the cards in Extended, the cards available in Lorwyn-Shadowmoor block, or something else, I go to Gatherer and sort the cards by cost. After some tinkering around, I found this was the most useful sort to go with, as it most directly serves the needs of figuring out “Which of these cards am I actually going to play, and how often?” Utility cards tend to live toward the low-cost end of things, whereas once you’re crawling up toward the top of the cost (the bottom of the Gatherer list), you’re looking at either the full-on casual-only Timmy cards, build-around-me cards or finishers that you use sparingly.
I look through the whole set to get a feel for what’s useful, then check out what Ben Bleiweiss has to say about it, then return to Gatherer review things a second time, noting which rares I want to buy, and how many copies of each.
Click through to the extended entry for my current buy list, with explanations.

Continue reading →

It’s felt a little bit like the recent spate of spoilers I’ve seen have been rife with Timmy cards. As most of my actual play is in tournaments, and I usually test out as a Johnny, that’s pretty much the one demographic chunk I usually don’t fit.
This week we have two great preview cards:

As BDM tells us in this week’s edition of The Week That Was, you probably want to see Vein Drinker in your sealed pool during the PTQ season for PT Kyoto. It’s a 4/4 flier for six mana that can pick off one smaller creature each turn — with “smaller” being a value that increases monotonically as the game progresses. If you stick the Drinker and they can’t get removal pretty quickly, you may well rule the board and then kill them in short order.
Is it constructible? Probably not.
Art’s awesome, though.
On the other hand, the Bant Charm, previewed in this article from new hall-of-famer Mike Turian, is definitely constructible. Destroy an artifact, remove a creature, or win a counterspell war. The mana looks awkward, but it’s going to be living in a Standard (and Extended) full of Vivids, hybrid duals, Reflecting Pools, painlands, and tribal duals.
Combined with treats like the Stoic Angel, the “Bant” color combination of blue-WHITE-green is seeming just darn cool. Consider that in addition to the block cards you’ve seen previewed so far, you get Wrath, Condemn, Oblivion Ring, Cryptic Command and more.
Nice previews, both.