Happy new year! This week's number one winner is because of Premodern. We also have Commander cards, and cards going up in anticipation of the Lorwyn Eclipsed spoilers coming up next week.
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.
Yearly Winners 2025
Happy new year! As is our yearly tradition, we're putting out a list of the winners and losers of the past year! Make sure you know what happened the past year with the following articles:
As a New Year's celebration, you can now subscribe to MTGStocks Premium for 10% off this week. Please use the code NEWYEAR2026 for 10% off forever when checking out through Stripe on both our Uncommon and Mythic tiers!
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!
This artifact creature from Alliances has been seeing play as a four-of in Premodern Devourer Combo decks, and recent league results have increased interest in the card. The deck posted a 5-0 finish in the Premodern MTGO Holiday League on December 26th and has been putting up consistent results in the format. The strategy revolves around getting Phyrexian Devourer into play through Tinker or by casting it with Sol lands and mana rocks, then using its ability to exile cards from your library and add counters equal to their mana values. Once it's large enough, you finish the game with Fling or sacrifice it to Altar of Dementia.
Being on the Reserved List means Phyrexian Devourer won't see reprints, and only the original Alliances version exists. Playing as a four-of in a competitive deck creates more demand than typical singleton Commander cards. Premodern has been growing as a format, and decks that perform well tend to see their key pieces increase in price. How this plays out long-term will depend on whether Devourer Combo maintains its position in the metagame, but the deck's recent performances have certainly drawn attention to the card.
| Phyrexian Devourer | | |
| Tinker | | |
| Altar of Dementia | | |
Landfall strategies in Standard have brought this enchantment from Avatar: The Last Airbender back into the spotlight. The card sat under a dollar for most of December, but recent tournament success from Mono-Green and Selesnya Landfall decks has driven demand considerably higher. Supply has been thinning out steadily as both Standard and Commander players pick up copies, pushing prices past three dollars with limited stock remaining on the market.
Earthbender Ascension gives you a 2/2 through earthbending plus a basic land onto the battlefield, making it a good ramp spell in Standard right now. The landfall ability adds quest counters each time a land enters, and once you hit four counters, every land drop starts putting +1/+1 counters on creatures while giving them trample. In Landfall decks, reaching four counters happens quickly, and the trample helps push damage through. The combination of ramp and a repeatable threat makes it particularly effective in the current Standard environment.
Commander play adds another layer to the card's popularity. It's showing up in well over 25,000 decks according to EDHREC, with that number continuing to grow as more players discover its value in Landfall strategies. Any landfall-focused deck can easily activate the quest counter payoff and start pumping the team. Whether the price continues climbing depends largely on Standard's metagame. Seven new Standard-legal sets are dropping in 2026, which could shift the metagame. However, the card seems positioned well as a multi-format piece, and I feel that it will stay popular in Commander decks that can use it.
| Earthbender Ascension | | |
| Earthbender Ascension (Borderless) | | |
This enchantment from Eventide has climbed significantly as Lorwyn Eclipsed spoilers ramp up. The card destroys a creature with a -1/-1 counter on it at the beginning of your upkeep, making it a repeatable removal spell in the right strategy. With blight being revealed as a core mechanic and the Blight Curse precon built around -1/-1 counters, demand for support cards like this has surged.
Crumbling Ashes is not new to commander and works well with commanders like Massacre Girl, Known Killer, Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons, and Volrath, the Shapestealer that can reliably create targets. Pair it with Harbinger of Night, which we discussed recently, and you're destroying creatures on repeat without much effort. The interaction with blight is less clean though. Since opponents choose where to place the -1/-1 counters from blight triggers, they can dump them on expendable tokens or small creatures instead of threats you actually want to remove. You might end up with no viable targets at all if they're careful.
That said, the card still has value. Having Crumbling Ashes on board forces opponents to think twice about where they're placing counters, and if you're controlling the board well enough, they may have no choice but to sacrifice their important creatures. Whether that's enough to justify the current price depends entirely on what else shows up in the full Blight Curse deck list. The biggest wildcard is whether Crumbling Ashes gets reprinted in the precon itself. Given how focused Blight Curse is on -1/-1 counters, including this card seems like a reasonable choice. If it does show up, prices will crash. Spoiler season starts January 5th and wraps up quickly, so we won't have to wait long to see how this plays out.
| Crumbling Ashes | | |
| Massacre Girl, Known Killer | | |
| Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons | | |
| Volrath, the Shapestealer | | |
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.
Rielle, the Everwise has been identified by the MTGStocks Premium Penny Stocks feature as a card that has reached its bottom and is starting a consistent uptrend.
| Rielle, the Everwise | | |
| Impostor Syndrome | | |
| Ugin, the Spirit Dragon | | |
