Mana Club #5 - The Incredible Bulk
Featuring thoughts on overbrewing in Commander, a checklist for tournament success, and a giveaway proposal.
Short one today! Even sentences are gonna b short1. (jk that would be insane)
With Thanksgiving tomorrow, it’s been a light few days for "news” and I think I’m going to keep these midweek posts as a way to catch you up on what you might have missed having a life outside of Magic. I don’t know what one of those is anymore, so I dedicate my time in service to you, someone living a life as prescribed by a Home Goods pillow.
I also assume I have obligations as part of the holidays, although I am no longer trusted to make mashed potatoes after 2022.
There is no big speech about gratitude coming and lord knows hearing someone who is happy talk about what they’re giving thanks for is right up there with “dreams” and “how your fantasy sports team is doing” in terms of conversations I don’t need to have ever. Take care of yourself this week, possibly in a way that is reckless! Get an impulsive tattoo or a reserved list card or eat a whole something.
You have the permission of a guy who cannot make mashed potatoes sufficiently for his family.
Today’s Lineup
A Victimless Crime
I have purchased two (2) whole Arena cosmetics since I downloaded it six years ago: the scuffed sleeves and the pet rock.
These were both released as part of the April Fools skin, which was a big, fun swing that the Arena team took. You couldn’t actually buy the card sleeve until a few days later after people rioted in the streets to make it available. They were silly and, more importantly, cheap. Sometimes people will hit me with little reactions from Liliana or Karn that get further under my skin than they should.
I think one of them points and laughs at me? What the hell?
Cosmetics are largely lost on me. That being said, Draftsim has an idea I think is worth exploring:
If I’m going to pay to modify the look and feel of my game, I think it’s reasonable to expect I could customize it fully. As someone who was convinced my opponent was playing Dimir until they tapped out for a Day of Judgement this week, it would be nice to set their lands to art I recognize. I’m sure there are accessibility ramifications for players that have visual impairments.
The brilliant part is that this could be a feature that already exists. I wouldn’t know. I only see my screen.
The downside is that we give away free information when we do this. What that information represents, I’ll leave to you because I have my own opinion. A quick poll:
Regardless of your thoughts on the above poll, cosmetics are 100% information, which is net interesting. I also know that some pets are distracting for me, which is a net positive for my opponent. If there’s a horsey, I’m feeding it apples. This is non-negotiable.
Also, on an unrelated note, I was trying to feed the fire horse its apples before the game and it turns out you can’t because it hasn’t run out yet. Instead, it gets stuck in limbo in a position that we should perhaps work on:
The best idea I heard on a potential Arena goof was from Deathsie, who pitched messing with your opponent’s cards in real-time. Say you purchase Cheeto Fingers from the shop. Every time you mouse over a card on their battlefield, whoops, a little cheesy fingerprint smudge appears. Great gag. Worth every penny.
Give me a Diet Mountain Dew to knock over.
Bring Me Your Dan Frazier Stories
I was playing the main event at the now-defunct Magic Summet but brought some playmats to get signed. A buddy ran them around to the artists for me, which was a mostly painless process. Then came Dan Frazier.
Apparently, the guy in front of him in line really wanted to talk about high school Greco-Roman wrestling. Had intense questions about it. I’m guessing Frazier wrestled at some point and this person knew this odd fact and was trying to bond. By haranguing him with facts about wrasslin. Frazier is becoming increasingly annoyed. By the time my homie gets up there, he asks if he can get a “first sign” on the mat.
He writes it as small as he possibly can. I love this guy.
If you have a chance to interact with Dan Frazier, take it. I don’t want to be macabre and I wish him infinite life, but we don’t know how much time we have with the old school great Magic artists. His Facebook is a tremendous place.
Artists that are worth their salt tend to be interesting people and not Thomas Kinkade2. They’re cool roommates and uneven lovers. We follow the best of them into the caves of life without torches and when they give us advice, we listen:
Please leave your fun interactions with Dan Frazier or any artist in the comments.
The Traft Checklist
I am ashamed to admit that I do not know who Traft is. Searching for “traft mtg” gives far too many geists. When Andrei Klepatch posted “Traft’s Checklist,” I also realized that I do not know how to prepare for tournaments.
I tried to apply this to my Qualifier Weekend run (2-3) on Arena and gave myself a measly one point for pre-event: I understood my matchups - they were bad for me! I did zero post-match analysis because I was in a rush to get back to Arena Direct boxes (walked with 8). And, well, post-event is right now!
I didn’t care enough.
This is the labor that it takes to be good at Magic. Do you like performing rigorous testing, research, AND personal inventories? Great, log the hours. If you (like me) find a lot of this dull, you probably skip a lot of steps. At that point, you have to admit that your ceiling is someone who might luck into a strong finish, but will probably toil in the mediocrity fields for a while.
We’re given a system of Organized Play that is, for most of us dogs, the car that we catch. Spiking your local RCQ feels great. A US Regional Championship last year was around 5500% larger than the average RCQ.
Dog catches car. Car is in Dallas and is very expensive.
A homie asked if I wanted to do a sealed RCQ in a couple weeks. I’m going with her, but after winding up with a mouth full of bumper too many times, it’s just for fun. It’s never too late to reevaluate your relationship with Magic and make it work for you.
Or get your checklist ready.
A Brief Cleanse
Bulk: So Hot Right Now
Anoint With Affliction is not a $3 card. I clocked strong price movement back on the 18th and one brave soul reposted my sage advice.
Annnnnd here’s the price chart since then:
Here we are, weeks (?) after Foundations release in a vibrant Standard environment (??) and the cards that are seeing the biggest price swings are… uncommons?
What uncommon do you think has since 165% growth over the last 30 days? Guess the chart!
You can click on the footnote3 for the answer. If you never want to know, there are SPOILERS IN THE FOOTNOTES.
We’re seeing a little movement on random standard rares like Hired Claw, Song of Totentanz, and Stormchaser’s Talent, but everything else feels flat. That is except for the cards sellers aren’t particularly incentivized to keep handy on platforms like TCGplayer and eBay: bulk uncommons.
The game is pretty simple: a card breaks through as a 3-4 of in Standard, sells through inventory pretty quickly, a few people make $1-2 more selling them in the short term until the big shops come in with a wall of them and the price returns to something reasonable. Here’s the price chart for Monstrous Rage:
At one point in August, I sold two copies of the WOE uncommon for $19. It’s obscene and I should write them a letter apologizing. But uncommons are where the cost of labor is the most felt.
Large shops and sellers have card sorting machines that automate a lot of this labor, but they still have to crack the packs, load the machine, and I guess deal with the inventory of it all. If you’ve never seen a machine in action, Jack Baumgartel was working on creating one, although there haven’t really been any updates in a year and the channel is mostly him rock climbing shirtless, which is also cool. Anyway, he made this video about the options:
About a minute in you see why he’d want to invent one: they’re car-level expensive. A lot of dental surgery expensive. So most of us li’l sellers manually sort and store what we rip. Here’s a live look at my laundry room:
There are tons of highly playable Magic cards in here that I’m not incentivized to list until we reach that peak problem point where major sellers are out. So, if you see a $3 uncommon you’re worried is going to go to the moon, sit it out. There’s always another wave coming.
My Friends Are Becoming Old Model Train Guys
I’ve never met one, but I think about Old Model Train Guys a lot. I bet podcasts were a real game changer for them. But does this guy put on his all purple suit and head up to the attic for a little train time? Because he didn’t start like this:
You probably start around here:
You have to start with a train or else you’re just making tiny neighborhoods which, how do you explain that to people? “Yeah, I just like to recreate places from the mid 20th century. Trains? Nope. Too busy for me.”
So you probably think about trains. You think about the color of them, how many you want, how fast they’ll go. You need to lay down track and think about potential stuff for them to go through (tunnels) or under (bridges) or over (hills). That’s fairly static. The train chugs on.
Then, you’re creating a universe for them to exist in. I imagine this is the most dynamic part of the process. You paint little trees. You go for a walk and see a little pebble that would be #$%^ing sick on your hill. You have several alerts set up for discounts on seasonal decor. The train chugs on.
Configuration can change on a whim, using the hand of God to uproot entire houses in seconds. You can leave it untouched for a year and still fire it up next time you’re in the basement. Scale up, scale down, add detail or start from scratch. The train chugs on.
You are not going to believe this, but I believe this is a very heavy-handed metaphor for Commander. M. Knight Shyamalan, eat your heart out.
With a slight break in release cadence and a lot of us thinking, “How am I going to afford the holidays this year?” I wanted to talk about how many model train stations we’re all running. Because I worry the answer is, “An intervention-worthy number.”
I don’t want to be too judgemental here because I don’t know you. It’s entirely possible you can keep multiple tracks running while creating a tiny masterpiece each time.
intentional fallacy (noun)
the fallacy that the value or meaning of a work of art (as a poem) may be judged or defined in terms of the artist's intention
My concern is that, with so much new product coming out, it’s impossible to keep everything “current” when that’s so much of what we feel pressure to do. The idea of an evergreen commander deck has fallen by the wayside as most playgroups have an ever-shifting power level. In short, new cards rule. What stock Elf deck doesn’t want one of these:
I’ve been wracking my brain about this because of an excellent question from Florence on Bluesky about what I think are best described as “jumpscare cards” where you’re like, “I know the set that this was printed in and where tf did this come from?” It gave the following four cards as examples: Protection Racket, Cephalid Facetaker, Afterlife Insurance, and Terror Tide.
How many of those can you confidently give a color to, let alone the text of?
This year, 2,187 new cards have been printed. 10 years ago, we had 820 new cards. Those cards were printed in things called “blocks” and were pretty simple to keep track of. To figure out where a card is printed now takes a full on forensic investigation.
To be clear, I don’t think product fatigue is necessarily the problem. I’m sure a million new tiny trees get dropped every year for the model train community. They just don’t have eight different tracks to update and two more that are in the planning phase.
My jumpscare of the year was Pyrogoyf, which popped up in Vintage Cube. I had easily 10 games under my belt before I realized it triggers for another Goyf? I lost that game. Cool card, totally missed it because it had “goyf” in the name so who needed to read it? I only had one track to navigate this year (The Watcher in the Water), so no detours were possible. I could put a switch in the track, but I’m content where I’m at.
The train chugs on.
Mailbag
Thanks to Mr. Repulse for this week’s question:
“What’s your lukewarmest take on the state of the usefulness of “the data” (eg 17lands) for Limited nowadays?”
I’ll give you two answers, one practical and one more philosophical. First, people are bad at using 17Lands. Second, I don’t know how useful Best of 1 data is outside of Best of 1.
For the uninitiated, 17Lands.com shows you various statistics on everything from cards to color combinations to mulligans. It’s “the internet in the ‘90s” in terms of advancements in limited: a massive sea change that we’re still in the early days of.
The biggest mistake I see people make is talking about Game In Hand Win Rate without context. In Chrome, one of my home tabs is dedicated to the overall card data page, but I rarely look at it. I spend most of my time looking at specific decks.
If we look at Dazzling Angel, we have roughly the 2nd best common in Foundations. That doesn’t tell me much because I need to make a deck and decks require synergy and not piles of cards. If I look at Azorius, Angel is #2, which is its best deck. In it’s worst deck, Selesnya? It’s #3. It’s just a good card.
Squad Rallier is ~25th. In Boros it’s #23, but in Orzhov it’s #12. The worse a common is, the less flexibility it has. I want to prioritize cards that go in more decks, but I also can look at deck-level data and figure out where cards will overperform. Filter by deck more often! You will find gems here.
In terms of overall usefulness, I have argued a lot about this and I’m tempted to trust smart people. When Noor Singh, team lead for Sanctum of All, tells me that internally they don’t put much stock in 17Lands for Pro Tour testing, I listen to her.
“If a card we don't like has a high GIH, we try it more but we don't treat the data as super meaningful,” told me during testing for PT Markov Whatever.
(Editor’s note: When I reached out to Noor to ask if it was cool to quote her, she gave me the following wisdom that I couldn’t not include:
“The other way to phrase it is: if a card has a really high GIH, it can't be bad. Cards with low GIH could be losing because they're synergy cards, which muddies the data, but when the number is high*, that means something about the card is really good and we need to take note. My go-to example of this is Chimney Rabble, which we at Sanctum thought was just fine until it was the top performing common for a bit. We tried it out and were pleasantly surprised with how it slotted into the format *Usually my number for this is >58% but it's just vibes”)
Best of 3 tends to have weaker competition, so data pulled from those numbers is less reliable AND has a much smaller sample size. You can filter for “top drafters” in Best of 1, but you again run into sample size issues. Draft data might be a novelty for Arena users and that’s about it.
Odds and Endstep
No Holds Barred Vintage Cube is here and it’s maybe my favorite thing to do short of Omniscience Draft. If you need to escape the family over the next few days, this is your hatch.
If you are buying cards this weekend, consider checking out my store! TCGplayer is running their store credit special but I also offer “store credit” in terms of discounts when you order directly with me. DMs are forever open.
Thanks to Decked Out for the shout out on National Editor’s Day! Working with the crew over there for the past couple years has been a real treat. Give them a sub if you’re not already watching.
Ben Weitz has the stories behind Pioneer Masters. I haven’t looked at the set yet but Ben is a GOAT.
From the “Does Wizards Hate Draft?” Department: Starting with Aetherdrift, play booster boxes will go down to 30 packs per MTG Scribe. What are we even doing here?
This Week’s Giveaway
Saturday, I’ll be dropping a mystery giveaway. I think the way I’ll structure them in the short term is:
I’ll pick a random subscriber each Saturday. If you’re a paid subscriber, you get double entries.
No email notifications. You have to read the column to see who wins. Or skip to the end. Whatever works for you.
If no one claims that week, I’ll roll it over to the next.
If you have a better idea, hit me with it! Otherwise, that’s the plan.
Thanks to Alex, John Dale, Jose, and Casey for your paid subscriptions. It makes all of this possible. You also gave Seymour four treats this week. Let’s chunk this boy up.
Passing the turn,
Jake
Bonus Seymour of the Week
My favorite game to play when you have no stuff is The Game Of Four. We made it up one day when we were pretty 🥴 and it’s easy: you can only use words with four or fewer letters. So everyone sounds kind of head woundish. It drives my wife insane.
Have fun with the pronunciation of this jerk’s name, btw. KinkAde sounds like a beverage filled with various “roots” that promise “longevity.”
Elspeth’s Smite.
I definitely think that one needs to set some sorts of limits on what parts you truly pay attention to and spend money, be it just a flat-out total budget, limiting yourself to one deck but going hard for that, or setting a budget for individual cards - I've come to like the "cheaper than a booster" threshold, though even then I often prefer falling even lower, around 3€ is probably my maximum sweetspot currently. It adds some limitations but I do also appreciate those, since there's genuinely interesting selections when you can't run some staple pieces (like, one's choice of black boardwipe get a lot more interesting when Damnation and Toxic Deluge are out of the picture, and you can see some alternatives I noticed in the "jumpscare cards" I first posted).
Plus, there's also something kinda positive to be said about genuinely being surprised by a piece of cardboard when you're as into the weeds as one has to be to read a substack about Magic. There'll always be more cards, but I'm largely content focusing on the smaller pieces nowadays.