War of the Spark spoilers are upon us and impacting the market! A very interesting week in the world of magic card prices. And, again, one of the biggest Magic Classics is breaking records!
Not the biggest spike in percentage points this week, but still our #1 winner. Cards that are already $8 (even when reprinted) and spike this hard always have an interesting story to tell. Mycosynth Lattice is a perfect example of a spoiler spike. Suddenly some new card is spoiled that combo's with a card that's already popular; driving up the price.
In this case, Mycosynth Lattice's spike is caused by the new Karn planeswalker:
New Karn is an instant combo with Mycosynth Lattice. Lattice turns all your opponent's lands into artifacts and with Karn they cannot use them to tap for mana. A hard lockdown with only 2 cards. And you can run it next to Stony Silence increasing your chances to draw the card, or a tutor that can find it. If that's the thing you (or your EDH-deck) is into.
Pyromancer Ascension spike this week is a result of a speculative buyout. That gives me the opportunity to explain a bit about the different ways buyouts occur. Some think that buyouts are in general executed by an individual with a lot of dispensable income that just buys all copies of a card, waits for the price to spike and sells for a profit. Although this sometimes happens, those occurrences are rare. And when they happen, they usually target a (very) old card, that is mildly popular and low in stock in stores. The speculator won't have to buy many copies to buy out everything.
Completely buying out a card like Pyromancer Ascension on your own is a herculean effort. It spike was not the result of one individual going all out, but a combination of speculators that were looking for a good deal. With most cards, small-time speculators and finance enthusiasts browse forums and chats, watching coverage, checking tournament results to find underappreciated but potentially interesting targets. These are not the people that randomly select a card, buy every copy and then post photos with stacks of that same card on Twitter. These are people that love to follow every bit of news to be ahead of the pack.
Pyromancer Ascension is an example of a card that was bound to spike. A perfect storm for those into MTG Finance. Pyromancer Ascension saw an increasing amount of play in several (new) decks in both Modern and Legacy. Plenty of copies around, did well in coverage of major tournaments and its foil price spiked more than a week ago. Foils go first in these cases, since there are not many copies and after the regular printing spikes, the foils get even more expensive. Pyromancer Ascension is getting more relevant, and one can predict that the demand of players for the card will increase. Speculators jumped on that, driving up the price, before this would happen out of pure organic demand for the card.
And now we are at the point that Pyromancer Ascension's spike is in itself seen as validation for the power and usefulness of the card. Confirmation bias could kick in when people start explaining its price increase: it spiked, so it must be relevant and I want to playtest it as well.
Over the past few weeks, I've been using the #3 spot to keep you up to date about the biggest, hottest and most played staple cards in Magic. Every week, people are asking questions about the card choices. This week you could ask why I didn't cover Proteus Staff for instance, but instead wrote about Force of Will. Cards like Force of Will are already so expensive that they simply cannot spike with 200%. The only possibility is when Force of Will would suddenly be legal in Modern, but without getting reprinted. When Force of Will has an 11% spike, this means a lot more than a common spiking 600% because of a new combo.
(Sidenote: Proteus Staff spiked because of Fblthp, the Lost being spoiled)
I thought that maybe this week, because of spoiler season, all three winners would be spoiler spikes. But when both copies of Force of Will reach their all time high, that needs to be addressed. Its Eternal Masters printing is now $16 higher than the original printing. The artwork is beautiful and the card is printed in a Masters set on Mythic rarity. Making it more scarce than the original, that was printed as an uncommon.
Cheap Pickups
Please note: for our 'record low' we consider the price of the card over the past 7 years. Many cards have been even cheaper (a) decade(s) ago.
Umezawa's Jitte $18.63 - Record low and going down
Grim Flayer $7 - Record low and bottoming out
Primalcrux $5.95 - Reaching record low and bottoming out
