Have you been looking for an inexpensive tribal, aggro, combo deck with a silly name to play in Standard? rAllies is the deck for you!Read more

This week, the biggest finance news is the continuation of the Ensnaring Bridge spike. Last weekend 8th Edition Ensnaring Bridge was bought out, increasing in price from $20 to $40. This week Stronghold and 7th Edition followed, and as a result Ensnaring Bridge was the most viewed cards this week on the site. While it might be tempting to blame Free Win Red, I believe the real reason for the increase is the continued camera time and success of the Lantern Control deck in Modern. It was on camera last weekend at the SCG Invitational, and again this weekend at the SCG Players' Championship. While the price may decrease a bit in coming months, I don't expect it to fall all the way back to $20; the supply is low enough to keep the price high, even if Lantern Control starts to fade away.

In Standard, a lot of the cards we've been talking about are showing gains. Painful Truths was up 83 percent to $2.50, Infinite Obliteration up 14% to $1.50, and Pia and Kiran Nalaar jumped 21% to $1.76. While seeing these cards increase in price is far from surprising, they do make good examples of a simple trick to figure out where the demand is coming from: check the foil price. Infinite Obliteration foils are going for about $3 (about two times the non-foil version) while foil copies Pia and Kiran Nalaar and Painful Truths are pushing $15 (between 6 and 10 times non-foils copies). Large multipliers like these suggest play in non-rotating formats. As such, it's fairly safe to assume that upticks in Modern play from Pia and Kiran Nalaar (in Grixis Control) and Painful Truths (in BGx) explain their price increases, while the Infinite Obliteration increase is likely from Standard hype. It's a good way to stop Eldrazi, and more Eldrazi are coming next month in Oath of the Gatewatch.

Finally, with The Year of the Flashback starting on Magic Online, I'm going to start giving a weekly reminder about cards to sell from the upcoming flashback format. 8th Edition, starting December 30th, is first up and I would sell just about everything possible from the set. Most important are Blood Moon and Tron lands since they also show up in 9th Edition which will be drafted in a couple months. If you can get by without them for a few weeks (or moths), sell them now while Blood Moon is 40 tix and the Tron lands are over 1 tix each and rebuy them, either in a couple weeks, or if you can wait, right after the 9th Edition drafts in a couple months. While it might seem premature to talk about the flashbacks, prices are already starting to dive Choke for example is down from 4.5 to 2.6 tix. On Magic Online, it will be better to act early than to wait too long.

The good, the bad, and the ugly of the decision to add a sixth color to the multiverse. Read more

The five most viewed cards on MTGGoldfish this past week were:

1. Jace, Vryn's Prodigy (Magic Origins)
2. Painful Truths (Battle for Zendikar)
3. Ensnaring Bridge (Eighth Edition)
4. Monastery Mentor (Fate Reforged)
5. Gideon, Ally of Zendikar (Battle for Zendikar)