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Baneslayer Angel — The Perfect Storm

By Kelly Reid ⋅ November 27, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

When Tar­mogoyf reached the $50 mark, play­ers her­alded it as the end of days. Never before had Stan­dard seen a $200 play­set — even when a sin­gle deck dom­i­nated the for­mat, the key cards never reached past $25. A card that was vital to every aggres­sive deck shat­tered that mark and set a dan­ger­ous precedent.

Tar­mogoyf’s $50 price tag came from two major con­tribut­ing fac­tors — its cross-format via­bil­ity and its raw power. What was orig­i­nally assumed to be a 2/3 for 1G ended up being a 5/6 more often than not, and that kind of effi­ciency appealed to more than just Stan­dard play­ers. The third fac­tor, the fact that was printed in a “third set”, con­tributes more to its price than most peo­ple realize.

The phe­nom­e­non of the ‘Third Set’ isn’t alto­gether for­eign to Magic play­ers, but its effect is far more pow­er­ful than most peo­ple real­ize. Con­sider this — When Shards of Alara came out, peo­ple drafted three packs of Shards. Then, even when the lus­ter of the new set wore off and peo­ple ceased crack­ing boxes for sport, peo­ple still drafted triple Shards. That entails a steady sup­ply of Shards cards to the market.

If you’ve noticed that despite its con­stant use in Tier 1 decks, Ranger of Eos has yet to reach “elite” rare sta­tus, now you know why. Shards was out for long enough to sup­ply the mar­ket with more Rangers than it needed. Now, had Ruel’s invi­taional card been printed in Alara Reborn, it might not expe­ri­ence the level of resis­tance that is does right now. Why?

The third set phe­nom­e­non is to blame. See, when you have three months of draft­ing a set alone, then another three months of draft­ing it with one pack of the first small set, there’s a whole lot of card­board going around. Finally, when the third set comes out, every­one has every­thing from the first set they need. They’re well on their way to fin­ish­ing their play­sets of their sec­ond set cards, and the third set is only drafted for a few months before the next big set is released. Begin­ning with M10, the Core set con­tains new cards and has become a pop­u­lar draft for­mat, which has inter­est­ing impli­ca­tions for Alara Reborn. Released in the late Spring, ACR draft was sup­planted mid-summer by M10 draft. Third set draft­ing time was cut in half, since M10 was drafted until Zendikar’s release.

Banes­layer Angel, Stan­dard’s new record-holder, occu­pies a very sim­i­lar space to Tar­mogoyf. Her raw power is unques­tion­able, as shown by Bram Snep­vangers in the Worlds quar­ter­fi­nals. She’s playable in Extended as well as Stan­dard, and so help us all if a Legacy deck ever sleeves up Banes­lay­ers along­side Force of Will. There are two new fac­tors to con­sider since Tar­mogoyf was Standard-relevant. The first was intro­duced with Shards of Alara — Mythic rar­ity. Now, they said they’d never make a tour­na­ment sta­ple a mythic rare, but it’s clear they either bent the def­i­n­i­tion of “tour­na­ment sta­ple” a lit­tle, or just mis-evaluated the card. Be that as it may, Banes­layer is here to stay. It would be a crime not to reprint her in M11, but we might see a touch of mercy from WotC and have her be reprinted as a non-mythic rare. I wouldn’t count on it, but it might not be the worst idea.

The sec­ond new fac­tor is the inclu­sion of new cards in the core set. The core set now func­tions like a sec­ond “third set” in the yearly cycle, being drafted from mid-July until the end of Sep­tem­ber. As pre­vi­ously men­tioned, that’s only half the time a nor­mal third set is drafted. Boxes will be opened with the same fre­quency, in the­ory, but los­ing a huge amount of sup­ply due to a short­ened Lim­ited lifes­pan will have very heavy effects on a card’s price.

Banes­layer Angel is the per­fect storm. She’s got raw, format-defining power in spades. She’s got cross-format appeal. She’s a mem­ber of the anointed “Angel” tribe, which can usu­ally increase a card’s appeal and value by a sig­nif­i­cant amount. She’s a Mythic rare, and she’s a Mythic rare from a set that was drafted for 2 months in mid–2009. Most decks would be bet­ter if they ran Banes­layer. Many deal­ers are out of stock. The main issue is that there sim­ply are not enough Banes­layer Angels to fill out decks. That the M10 short­age kept some play­ers from buy­ing as much prod­uct as they orig­i­nally would have. In the sim­plest terms, Banes­layer Angel’s demand is as high as any card’s can be. The sup­ply? Lit­er­ally as scarce as a new card can be these days.

All that being said, if you’ve been ask­ing your­self, “Why is Banes­layer so expen­sive?”, there’s your answer. $55 may not even be the worst of it. Banes­layer Angel is sim­i­lar to Google stock. It looked expen­sive at its IPO, and every­where else along the way, but look­ing back, it was cheap all along. It’s hard to eval­u­ate this card because we’ve not quite seen this com­bi­na­tion of fac­tors before. The clos­est exam­ple is Exalted Angel, which was released in a large set as a rare and had nowhere near the power level that Banes­layer does. It is my per­sonal hope that Baneslayer’s price stops increas­ing. It’s bad for the game when the con­sen­sus best crea­ture in the for­mat can be priced in large frac­tions of a booster box. In most cases, you can wait out a card’s infla­tion from hype but in this case, trad­ing for Banes­layer at full price might be nec­es­sary if you plan to fill out a play­set before States.

Kelly Reid, editor of financial news site http://www.quietspeculation.com, has been playing Magic the Gathering since 1994. With 15 years experience in the game, his goal is to teach others to fund their gaming through proactive speculation and intelligent trading.

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