Top 5: Cards to Buy, Sell, or Hold, March of the Machine Edition

Buy: Faerie Mastermind

, also known as Yuta Takahashi, is the latest world championship card. As you might expect from this winner, it's a blue Rogue with flash and flying. It has a unique ability that works against any draw X effects but also with any main phase cantrips like , connive, or cycling. The older the format, the more card selection, cantrips, and card draw there is, which is the intended audience to begin with. Yuta loves Eternal formats like Legacy and Vintage.

The card peaked at €10 and has hovered around €8. Now it's just slowly picking up in price. Mastermind has not seen play in many places but further exploration is to be done. I expect it to climb in value from this point, as players try it out in their Legacy and Vintage decks, possibly also cEDH or Modern.

Right now there is one deck that runs four copies of this Faerie Rogue, and it does so purely because it's a Rogue. Rogues have started making waves in Pioneer, highlighted by this Top 16 finish in the most recent Showcase Challenge.

Foil copies follow a similar trend where the price was high initially, then started to decrease, and is slowly rising again. All in all, this card is underexplored, and considering its Eternal-format applications, I'd expect the price to increase long term.

Buy: Ozolith, the Shattered Spire

does not seem to have any impact on Standard. However, it does see play in both Pioneer and even Modern!

Sitting at around €5, this legendary artifact is quite cheap but bolsters counter-based strategies quite meaningfully. In Modern, shells revolving around have been hovering around tier two for a long time, with some inspiring results here and there, especially in paper. Ozolith essentially gives us Scales copies number five up to eight, while also serving as a mana sink and sporting the ability to be cycled away in case multiples are drawn. Being legendary is a trivial issue anyway when it can be sacrificed to at any point. I'd expect more success coming from these Scales strategies and consequentially a price increase.

The card hasn't really broken through yet in Pioneer, but the format has seen attempts at making a counters-matter deck work too. Ozolith might be the missing piece to the puzzle. On Cardmarket, you can even find copies below the trend price at €4, making it quite a steal.

Buy: Chandra, Hope's Beacon

This might be an odd inclusion, as there isn't much talk around —and that's precisely the point! The card sits at €3 and can be bought for as little as €2. Currently, it's as low as it's ever been despite commanding a €10 tag upon release. I think Chandra is a long-term sleeper. She's a mythic planeswalker that might not have a stable place now, but I have high hopes (beacon). First, she might get adapted as a mirror breaker in Rakdos shells in Standard or Pioneer. On top of that, when rotation comes, I'd expect Chandra to be one of the best top-end spells in the format.

Furthermore, she has combo potential. She works great with take-the-next-turn effects, granting you essentially two of them. The ability also makes for a kill with , since you deal 10 damage twice. As far as I'm concerned, this is a speculative buy worth the minimal risk at such a low price, especially if you are playing Rakdos in Standard or Pioneer already.

Buy: Rona, Herald of Invasion

Speaking of Pioneer, let's address the Wizard in the room. is a new twist on that already spawned an entire archetype. It can be useful in preexisting strategies, but it can also be a part of a cleaner Sultai deck, going all in on Rona. Thanks to the fact that Rona untaps itself whenever we cast a legendary spell is played, we can create an infinite-mana loop with and . The kill can then be or .

Rona has also been integrated into Esper Legends, a tier-one strategy in Standard. There are no combos here, unless you count the synergies with the , with , and with . Yet the card filtration Rona provides in a deck full of redundant legends is invaluable.

Despite the fact that Rona is a real combo player right now and people keep further innovating the shell, the card is worth just €2 and can be picked up for less than €1. I'd easily snag four copies for such a low price and would even consider going for foils that sit at three-ish.

Sell: Wrenn and Realmbreaker

The biggest flop in the set, I daresay. went from being highly hyped, to being dubbed a solid card, to becoming a second coming of . The planeswalkers biggest issue in gameplay is the fact that it does not untap the land. This makes it so that it needs to be played on turn four to have access to a blocker, which substantially delays the way everything plays out. There has been some talk of the card finding employment in Jeskai Ascendancy shells, but none of that has materialized.

I was excited when I opened it as my promo at the prerelease. I didn't sell it immediately though, and the price almost halved already. Overall, the card sees no play whatsoever and still commands €15 apiece. I'd expect it to stabilize at around €8, similar to Ob. It might have its moments in singular strategies, but it's going to be more of an exception than a rule. Don't be like me: Don't wait until it loses another 50%.

That's it for the March of the Machine installment of Buy, Sell, or Hold! Are you a Scales player? Are you going to combo people out with Rona and ? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

---

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, not of Cardmarket.