Weekly Winners 2024 - 43

Modern, Legacy, and Commander are responsible for this week's winners. These are the good weeks!

Like every week, just in time for FNM, I'll tell you about the Magic: the Gathering cards that'll be the talk of the town tonight! Come discuss this week's price movements with us on Discord.

If you want to receive an e-mail in your inbox when a new article is published, you can enable it in your e-mail preferences and/or join the Discord.

Articles

Check out our other great content from this week.

Price Memory, Speculation, and the Commander Bans by Harvey McGuinness

How is the Modern Meta Shaping Up Post-Nadu? by Corey Williams

If you want to receive an e-mail in your inbox when a new article is published, you can enable it in your e-mail preferences and/or join the Discord.

Onto the Weekly Winners!

#1 Underworld Dreams $8.99 (+200%)

This enchantment, with a somewhat restrictive mana cost of , will deal one damage to your opponents whenever they draw a card. That means every card, so also including the first one they draw during their draw step. Where this enchantment usually is seen as punishment for your opponents drawing cards in Commander games, they also see play in "group hug" decks where you play cards that will let everyone draw cards. Another obvious commander it'll see play in is Nekusar, the Mindrazer.

$6.62

But the reason for the spike seems to be the front-facing commander of the Endless Punishment precon, Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls. This week definitely isn't the first time we've talked about this commander. Valgavoth cares about your opponents losing life. Whenever they do so for the first time on their turn, Valgavoth will grow and you get to draw a card. The interaction with Underworld Dreams seems pretty obvious. You're going to guarentee that your opponents will lose life each turn with it and thus benefiting you. In hindsight, I'm a little bit surprised this interaction hasn't been noticed earlier.

Underworld Dreams	CardKingdom $6.99	TCGPlayer $8.99
Underworld Dreams	CardKingdom $7.49	TCGPlayer $6.55
Underworld Dreams	CardKingdom $7.99	TCGPlayer $17.82
Nekusar, the Mindrazer	CardKingdom $2.29	TCGPlayer $1.45
Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls	CardKingdom	TCGPlayer $6.62

#2 Pre-War Formalwear $4.25 (+270%)

Our next winner as an Equipment from the Universes Beyond: Fallout set. This Equipment returns a creature with mana value three or less from your graveyard to the battlefield and when you do you get to equip it to that creature. Besides that, Pre-War Formalwear will give the equipped creature +2/+2 and vigilance. Now with that out of the way, lets talk about why it's going up. Because while we're always in preview season nowadays, it doesn't seem like there are any new cards previewed that works amazingly well with Pre-War Formalwear.

A noteworthy event is that the Fallout set has become available on MTGO this month, meaning that a lot of people now can start brewing with these cards. Often new archetypes or cards are being experimented with on MTGO since you can get a lot of games in for (relatively) cheap and it's easy to find people to play against. And not only that, if there's some new tech that works, and a deck does well in a league, the decklist gets automatically posted online for the whole world to see. And with Pre-War Formalwear it seems like that's exactly what's happening.

Pre-War Formalwear is showing up in Legacy Yorion Death & Taxes decks. It can be tutored up with Stoneforge Mystic and can get you a creature back from the graveyard since most creatures in the deck are three mana or less. And while the card was already seen in the wild in paper, with it being released on MTGO more eyes are now on it.

Pre-War Formalwear	CardKingdom $1.99	TCGPlayer $4.25
Pre-War Formalwear (Extended Art)	CardKingdom $4.99	TCGPlayer $2.94

#3 Disrupting Shoal $18.50 (+595%)

Before we get started with this winner, let's mention that (at least for now) only the Betrayers of Kamigawa print and the foil version of the Ultimate Masters print seem to be spiking as much as this. The regular Ultimate Masters print can still be had for much lower. Now, with that out of the way, we can talk about the card itself. And while it's definitely not dissimilar from Force of Will or Force of Negation, it generally is a worse card than those.

As you can see, Force of Will has no restrictions. You have to exile a blue card and pay one life and you can cast it for "free." And with Force of Negation you only have to exile a blue card, but you can only pay that cost when it's not your turn and you can only counter noncreature spells. With Disrupting Shoal you gotta have the right blue card in your hand if you want to counter a spell. Back in 2018 we discussed this counterspell when it spiked because Jace, the Mind Sculptor was unbanned in Modern and people figured you had to make sure you'd be able to counter it. Back then there also was no Force of Negation, so this was the best free counterspell available.

But now we have another four mana threat that's running rampant within the Modern metagame. The blue Goblin Charbelcher decks have been doing really well lately and have shown us that the archetype is the real deal. It runs zero lands and many double-faced cards that can double as landdrop. And that's pretty neat to always have a hand full of cards with a certain mana value. That means you have some choices of what to discard to Disrupting Shoal when you have to make sure you push your combo through. The free counterspell is showing up in these blue Belcher decks and often four copies are played in the lists.

Disrupting Shoal	CardKingdom $3.49	TCGPlayer $18.50
Disrupting Shoal	CardKingdom $1.99	TCGPlayer $8.51

Cheap Pickups

Please note: for our 'record low' we consider the price of the card over the past seven years. Many cards were even cheaper (a) decade(s) ago. Also note: some cards are still going down, and might be even cheaper pickups next week.

Kindred Charge (Borderless) $4.25 - Moving up!

Kindred Charge (Borderless) has been identified by the MTGStocks Premium Penny Stocks feature as a card that has reached its bottom and is starting a consistent uptrend.

Three Tree City $19.93 - Moving down

Sorin the Mirthless $3.11 - Stabilizing

Kindred Charge (Borderless)	CardKingdom $7.49	TCGPlayer $4.36
Three Tree City	CardKingdom $22.99	TCGPlayer $19.84
Sorin the Mirthless	CardKingdom $4.99	TCGPlayer $3.13