Reprint Jace, Vryn's Prodigy - Or Ban Him

Have you seen Standard deck prices lately?

Is having a Modern price of entry for Standard play healthy for Wizards? I don't think so. Standard playability drives much of the market to open currently legal boxes, driving Wizards' sales up. Modern is a safer format to get into because you won' t be turning your deck over year after year. If the price for standard-legal and modern legal decks is close, it would follow that more people might chose to move into Modern. Take a look at the top four Standard decks as of 10/7/2015.

(MTGO Standard Meta report, 10/7/2015)

Their average price, taking the meta percent into account is $560. Wowzers! On March 4th, I did the same analysis of average deck prices and we were at $340 then. That is a 64% increase. What is going on?

Jace, Vryn's Prodigy is going on, that's what. Back in March, the highest priced deck was Abzan Midrange at $440. Now, the highest priced deck is nearly $700, and the lowest priced deck is over $400. The current cheap deck, Abzan Aggro, doesn't have any Jaces. Jace is currently holding a hair below $70. That makes a playset $280, which is only $5 less than then #2 deck in March, RW Aggro. That's right a playset of one card right now in Standard is going for about the same price of an entire Tier 1 deck back in March.

Vryn's Prodigy is everywhere. Five of the top eight decks in the format are playing a full set of Jace's. Every deck playing blue has four copies of Jace. Either he is warping the format (ban hammer?) or he's due for a reprint. We simply can't have the price of entry to Tier one Standard be $600 - $700. It's bad for the game.

Vryn's Prodigy needs a reprint to bring his price and therefore the price of Standard down. Hangarback Walker, Gideon, and the fetch lands aren't helping, but Jace is the dirty little wizard behind the insane price increase for Standard decks. He needs to be in the next duel deck, the one with the planeswalkers. Maybe he could be printed in the new Commander set. Either he needs to be reprinted or he needs to be banned from Standard.