We have some really fun cards to talk about, with a mix of Legacy, Commander, and a surprise fringe format. Enjoy this latest installment of Weekly Winners!
Like every week, just in time for FNM, I'll tell you about the cards that will be the talk of the town tonight! Come discuss this week's price movements with us on Discord and Reddit.
Next week we'll have the last Weekly Winners of 2022, and on December 31st I will post the annual "Top 100" lists of the past year. So keep your eyes open for that, since it's always very interesting to see what cards performed best (or worst) in the year.
Articles
People often ask, "What happens with a card after the spike?" Ryan goes into exactly that in his "Where Are They Now" series. Last Monday the latest article in this series discussed some cards that spiked in December 2021. Go read the full article.
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Onto the Weekly Winners!
Here is a rare from Universes Beyond: Warhammer 40,000. As we've seen in the past, these 40K cards tend to do pretty well because of the decks' popularity and their high power level compared to other Commander precons. Chaos Defiler, from the The Ruinous Powers deck, is a 5/4 trampler that can get rid of nonland permanents when it enters the battlefield and when it dies. In a game with multiple opponents it may not seem strong, because while you get to pick a nonland permanent controlled by each opponent, only one of those permanents gets destroyed, and at random. It's a decent effect that becomes much better when you're only facing a single opponent. And it doesn't even target, so abilities like Hexproof or protections don't matter.
So why is this card going up then? It seems like the most important part of the card is in its type line: Artifact Creature. As we've seen in the past couple months now, artifacts are doing really well since The Brothers' War. But it seems that this creature is going up because of a card we saw go up last week, and that card is Goblin Welder. People expect that Chaos Defiler may be working really well in Legacy Painter decks. Being able to use Goblin Welder to get this card from your graveyard onto the battlefield, destroying one of your opponent's permanents, and then the next turn sacrifice Chaos Defiler to the same Goblin Welder to get something else back seems good, since you get to destroy one of your opponent's permanents again.
Now you may wonder why people only "expect" this card to be good in that deck when this card was released over two months ago. That's because it hasn't yet been implemented on MTGO, where a lot, if not most, of Legacy brewing takes place. It's expected that these cards will appear on MTGO in the first quarter of 2023, and people are preparing for this by getting their copies now. This card was also discussed in the MTGStocks Discord server this week.
| Goblin Welder |
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| Chaos Defiler |
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Well, here is an odd spike if you've ever seen one. This rare instant from Invasion is going up because of a new fringe format called "Dandân". This two-player format revolves around the namesake card Dandân. Most older players probably have a few laying around, since the card is not very good. Back in July you could buy it for about $0.25 and foils for about $3. But now a foil version of this card will cost you about $30 due to this strange format's sudden increase in popularity.
So what's this format about? Dandân (or Forgetful Fish) is an 80-card, two-player format where both players play off the same deck and share the same graveyard. Other than that, the rest of the game is played with typical Magic rules: take your opponent from 20 to zero or deck them (this last win condition is especially challenging, since you share a deck). All you need to play is the deck, as listed below, and dice to keep track of life totals.
Now with that out of the way, we can talk about how it connects to Crystal Spray. The card appears twice in the deck list, and people are buying it to play the format. The cards Crystal Spray, Mind Bend, and Vision Charm can act as removal by targeting your opponent's Dandân and changing the word "Island" to "Forest", meaning they would have to sacrifice it. But then you have Dance of the Skywise, for example, that can save your Dandân. There are plenty of strategies in this deck, but it is a bit of an odd-ball.
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| Dance of the Skywise |
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| Mind Bend |
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| Crystal Spray |
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While percentage-wise this card went up far more than the previous winner, I wanted to talk about it last. Ravenous Baboons did indeed to go up 93%, but in absolute value that difference is slightly less than a dollar. I tried looking around for a valid explanation for this card to suddenly go up, and ended up on EDHREC. I already had my suspicion that it had something to do with the recent Monkey commander in Jumpstart 2022: Kibo, Uktabi Prince. This seems, to me, the only plausible explanation.
Ravenous Baboons is a Monkey (updated in errata from an Ape) that fits well within the Kibo, Uktabi Prince theme. For you get a 2/2 Monkey that destroys a nonbasic land. This is, especially in commander with a lot of utility lands, something that can be very useful. It was printed back in Exodus 24 years ago and has never received a reprint. So we can conclude that the supply is relatively low and the demand relatively high with the popularity of Kibo, making the card go up.
| Ravenous Baboons |
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| Kibo, Uktabi Prince | |
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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. Also note: some cards are still going down, and might be even cheaper pickups next week.
Loran of the Third Path has been identified by the MTGStocks Premium Penny Stocks feature as a card that has reached its bottom and is starting a consistent uptrend.
| Ob Nixilis, the Adversary |
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| Loran of the Third Path |
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| Razorverge Thicket |
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That's it for this week. Make sure to check back next week for more Weekly Winners!
