What will the Khans of Tarkir fetches sell for?

Hi Everyone!

In my article earlier this week I mentioned that allied fetch lands are coming back. Now that I have had a few days to consider what will be the forces acting upon the fetch land prices, I wanted to tell everyone about it.

If we go back in time a little and look at the Return to Ravnica shock lands, we see that they had a turbulence price wise their entire time in standard. I think this will be less true of shock lands. The reason is that fetches don’t seem so good in standard with no shock lands to fetch. It’s possible that they could do a cycle of lands that are a basic type that can make other colors of mana (like Murmuring Bosk) and then it could be just as turbulent. The other reason I don’t think prices will be so erratic because cards that are good in the “eternal formats” (I include Modern in this grouping along with Legacy and Vintage). The eternal formats seem to have much less price turbulence. It won’t all be smooth sailing, but it won’t be like the shock lands that were awesome in standard and modern, and almost never saw play in the older eternal formats. I think it’s going to be a smooth ride for the fetches through Standard...It’s possible that the fetches could barely be playable in standard. I don’t know right now.

My favorite tool when making decisions is research. Let’s have a look at the closest thing to this that happened fairly recently, the enemy fetches from Zendikar (have a look for yourself…it’s tedious and boring for a lot of people so I left the data out of this article). Unfortunately, Modern didn’t exist when they first came out, neither did Vintage Online. Fetches were as low as $3 in Zendikar standard days. I think they will be higher this time around.

My prediction is that the reprints of the Onslaught allied fetches will settle in the $7 to $10 range while they are in standard. I think they will be a great investment.

One last interesting thing I read in another article is that it’s possible that the allied fetches open new Modern deck choices. At first it sounded like nonsense until I realized that a lot of modern decks (scapeshift, UWR, and Jund) all have very shaky mana bases and taking out a key land really hurts. It’s really possible that decks with color combinations that don’t have access to the best mana with enemy colored fetches could emerge as competitive decks with the addition of more fetch lands.

One cautionary note I wanted to make: The new 2 set blocks and no core sets gives Wizards a lot more new “planes” to visit than before (twice as many to be exact). It seems to me like they could be using this opportunity to reprint cards that are expensive to make them accessible at a faster rate than before.

Mtg Confidant