Time to Pay 2/10/2016

So the fans got what they wanted. Another modern Pro Tour. It was very entertaining to watch the pros do battle in the post Splinter Twin world. We saw your every day decks like Affinity and Infect. We saw the power of the new Eldrazi archetype. And we saw what appeared to be a draft deck with a Modern mana base win the whole thing courtesy of Jiachen Tao. But, perhaps most importantly, we saw the ever changing unstable Modern market explode as the weekend went on.

Before we get into the specifics, I'd like to share some information I got from some of the pros that played in the tour. I watched several streams on Twitch before the pro tour began and I asked each of the individuals their thoughts on having a Modern pro tour. All 3 of them stated they preferred Standard or Legacy over Modern in fear of what could happen to the market. Because let's face it, Modern is kind of WOTC's baby.

Now let's take a look at a few examples of what happened with the market over the weekend.

First there are the individual cards that, most notably, skyrocketed in value. Cards like Chalice of the Void and Eye of Ugin. Near $20 cards respectively before the tournament began. At one point during the tournament Chalice actually hit a high point of $50 and Eye of Ugin reached a high value of $48. Both now seem to be settling in the lower $40 range, nearly double what they were before the tour. Other cards increasing by $10 or more of note are Inkmoth Nexus and Noble Heirarch. Typically we see them in the range of $33-$34. Since the tour we can now get them at the bargain price of near $44 each. Other items of note here are the $1 rares that at one point in the weekend were actually over $10 such as Eldrazi Mimic and Reality Smasher. Both are respectively under $10 at this point, but you're getting to see the trend here. If that isn't enough here's two more insane examples. Painter's Servant is now all the way up to $33! Previously at a mere $5-$7. And our last example. Worship. A simple $1 card right? Wrong. You will now be picking them up for $18 at the mid range cost. We won't even talk about the high end of these cards.

There are even a few decks I want to point out in terms of the market and values. Just to show what the previous section equals out to in the big picture of deck building for the format.

Each of the following decks have a value in the weeks before the pro tour and after. (AVERAGE BASED ON TCG PLAYER)

Affinity: BEFORE- $900-$950 AFTER- $1100
Infect: BEFORE- $650-$700 AFTER- $900-$950
CoCo/Chord BEFORE- $1200 AFTER- $1700
Urza Tron BEFORE- $1000 AFTER- $1200

Now I know there will be those that argue that the prices will come back down over time. But how long will that take? Let's use Grove of the Burnwillows as an example. It was $50-$60 before the banning of Splinter Twin and Summer Bloom. Post banning we saw it jump up to $80 or so in expectance of it being THE deck in Modern. Well, it hasn't exactly been on fire since the bannings. In fact, Grove only was in a winning deck thanks to JUND not Tron. And with Tron on the decline in results (And possibly even popularity,) Grove is still a staggering $83.

With these insane spikes in Modern after PTOGW, the question remains, How much will you pay for another Modern Pro Tour???