Prices are moving because of the Pro Tour and the upcoming Universes Beyond: Doctor Who set. We also managed to find a Commander card!
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.
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The past few months we've been focusing on putting out more quality content, and I'd love to share the next few articles with you, since they're worth a read:
In New Tool Alert Jason talks about a new MTGStocks Premium feature that helps him get some sweet deals! Consider subscribing to Premium to support us and earn back the monthly costs with the tools.
Matt talks about Commander Masters in his new iteration of New Horizons. Read about his thoughts on the Profiles cards and cycles in the set.
History, Restapled is back, giving some love to a couple of LOTR cards, and one underappreciated powerhouse from New Capenna.
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Today is the release date of Commander Masters, but before the set even released we're already in the next preview season. Previews have started for the Universes Beyond: Doctor Who set, and one of the new cards have led to Timestream Navigator spiking. Before we get into the previewed card, let's briefly discuss what this Human Pirate Wizard does.
It was bound to be broken at some point. Usually cards that grant extra turns already are very popular, and people will always look for ways to break them. Timestream Navigator is no different. For you get to take an extra turn, but you have to put it on the bottom of your library, meaning you won't see it for a very long time, unless you shuffle your library of course. But playing Soldier of Fortune isn't really a good way to find your Navigator again.
The card River Song was recently previewed at Magic Con: Barcelona. As could be expected from a Dr. Who set, there is some wacky stuff going on with time bending. For three mana you get to punish your opponents for scrying, surveiling, or searching their library. But, more interestingly, you draw cards from the bottom of your library rather than the top.
Pretty sure you can see the interaction with Timestream Navigator here. With these two cards there actually is an infinite turns combo with a little bit of set up. First off, you need to have the City's Blessing by having had 10 permanents along with a spell or permanent having Ascend. Next, you need to have Timestream Navigator and River Song in play with available and Timestream Navigator being able to tap. You activate Timestream Navigator during your upkeep, and put her on the bottom of your library. In your drawstep you'll draw from the bottom of your library, which is a known card and you re-draw the Navigator to your hand. During your turn you have to play Timestream Navigator, and do the rest of things you want to do during your turn. Rinse and repeat when your extra turn starts.
This combo leads to infinite turns, but each card you draw in your drawstep always is the Timestream Navigator, so you do need another way to draw extra cards and find your actual win condition!
That leads us to the second winner, which, percentage wise, should have been the first winner, but I liked Timestream Navigator a bit better! Soldevi Digger is an older card from Alliances and, more importantly, is on the Reserved List. As you may know, this means it will never be reprinted and thus the supply will always remain the same. This leads to these cards usually being far easier to manipulate pricewise.
Soldevi Digger lets you take a card from your graveyard and put it on the bottom of your library for . This is a repeatable ability, meaning you can do it as long as you have mana available. Bottom of your library? Where have I heard that before? It indeed went up because of the same reason as our #1 winner: River Song.
With these two cards in play, you can recur your biggest threats time and time again, because you can guarantee to draw it again. If you combine this with, for example, Time Warp you can get infinite turns as well.
Previously, Subtlety was one of the Evoke Elemental cards that wasn't as expensive compared to others like Grief or Fury. But after this weekend's Pro Tour, we saw Evoke Elementals have a big effect on the Modern metgame. Rakdos Scam, or Evoke as people called it at the Pro Tour, has a strategy that uses these free Elemental spells in a special way. They play the spell, and then bring it back after it dies or flicker it with cards like Ephemerate, to have a strong creature and two triggers.
However, in the Pro Tour we saw Subtlety showing up in Temur Rhinos decks. As you may know, in Rhinos the strategy is to cast Violent Outburst, for example, and Cascade into Crashing Footfalls. The beauty about these Elementals is that they have a quite high regular mana value, meaning the Cascade triggers won't hit them, but you can still cast them for their Evoke cost.
Subtlety's price went up by about $8 this week, but over the last two months, it has gone from about $6 to $30! And for the same reason we see an uptick in Crashing Footfalls, the win-condition of this deck. The card has gone up 51% to $3.59.
You know what, lets do a fourth winner this week to at least have one card going up because of Commander. It seems like Ghyrson Starn, Kelermorph is getting some more traction because of some newer cards. Ghyrson cares about sources dealing exactly one damage to players or permanents. Because whenever that happens, Ghyrson will do an additional two damage to that player or permanent.
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.
Foil has been identified by the upcoming MTGStocks Premium Rapid Riches feature as a card that is being wanted by traders and stores. Be the first one to be able to use this feature by being a Premium member!
That's it for this week. Make sure to check back next week for more Weekly Winners!
Arjen
Arjen has been playing Magic since Ice Age and has mostly played the Legacy format. Ten years ago he founded MTGStocks because he and his friends wanted to buy Magic singles at the right time to play with.
The changes around the Commander format are really having an interesting effect on the market. Fortunately, Pioneer and Modern are also making sure that things are moving.
