Weekly Winners 2023 - 29

One winner from Lord of the Rings, but the rest are moving because of Commander Masters.

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.

Articles

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 Horizons Matt dives into the Secret Lair Summer Superdrop 2023 to see if it lives up to previous drops.
• Jason's article, Crunch Time, tells you how to deal with a reprint set, like Commander Masters, from a finance standpoint. He guides you on how to crunch the numbers during previews to see which cards ain't happening.
• Harvey's Over and Under for this month tells you which card you should pick up, and which card you could get rid of.
• Have you ever heard of the Commander format? In this small-time, niche format, Steve tells you which cards are on the verge of becoming staples there, in History, Restapled - Un- For the Money.

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Onto the Weekly Winners!

#1 Sauron's Ransom $7.73 (+768%)

It seems we've found one of the most underestimated cards from the The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth set. Sauron's Ransom is an instant for that'll get you some extra cards into your hand. However, your opponent also gets a say in what cards you may get. Usually cards that give your opponents a choice are labeled as bad right out of the gate. In Magic, you usually shouldn't let your opponents make decisions for you. In this case, however, it doesn't seem like that much of a problem.

The card sees play mainly in Modern and Legacy, and the occassional Vintage deck. In Modern it's being played in Dimir Control decks along with Orcish Bowmasters, while in Legacy it shows up in Grixis Delver decks. Being able to keep your mana open and play Sauron's Ransom at the end of your opponent's turn is a big deal in control decks. Also, since the current metagames are overrun by Orcish Bowmasters, this instant gets around the "draw" clause of the Bowmasters, since you're not drawing cards.

Some people are saying that this card is better than Fact or Fiction, where you get to reveal five cards and your opponent separates them into two face-up piles. For one mana less, Sauron's Ransom looks at the top four cards, but you'll have one face-down pile. Nevertheless, it seems like this is not really an issue. When you know your deck, the boardstate, and the cards in your hand, you can make educated decisions on what pile to keep.

It'll be hard to reprint because of the name, and is unlikely to appear in regular expansion sets, thus seems bound to Universes Beyond or Masters sets.

Sauron's Ransom	CardKingdom $2.79	TCGPlayer $1.54
Sauron's Ransom (Extended Art)	CardKingdom $2.79	TCGPlayer $1.99

#2 Ichormoon Gauntlet $7.74 (+69%)

Remember when Ichormoon Gauntlet was previewed? The first presale price was around $34, and still slightly over $20 during release. This card was going to be "bonkers." "It'll break Planeswalkers!" It was then several months later and the card could be bought for about $4.50. It was even mocked only three days ago in a Twitter thread asking whether you still remember when people were losing their minds over it. To be fair, the tweet has had over 40k impressions, so it did get some extra eyes on the card.

In the Commander Masters preconstructed decks, there's a deck called Planeswalker Party with Commodore Guff as its commander. This week the decklist was previewed, and lo and behold, there are, besides Guff himself, 17 planeswalkers in the deck. It seems people are already looking for cards to upgrade this precon, and Ichormoon Gauntlet comes to mind. Each planeswalker being able to Proliferate is pretty good when you have a bunch of them on the battlefield.

Ichormoon Gauntlet	CardKingdom $7.99	TCGPlayer $7.33
Commodore Guff	CardKingdom	TCGPlayer $1.56
The Chain Veil	CardKingdom $13.99	TCGPlayer $7.39

#3 Slivers

Let's talk a bit about Slivers. As you're probably aware, in Commander Masters there'll be a Commander deck called Sliver Swarm. The commander of this set is Sliver Gravemother, which was announced some time ago. This immediately got people hyped up, because Slivers have always been a popular creature type to build around. Since Slivers all boost each other, existing Slivers will only get better as more are being printed. This week the decklist for Sliver Swarm was revealed and most people weren't really excited by it.

So now you may be wondering: why are we discussing a decklist from a precon? Well, a bunch of Slivers and Sliver support cards went up this past week. And most notably, these are the cards that seem to be missing from the precon. With Slivers bound to become more popular once the set releases, some cards are clear upgrades to the deck. Let's start with the glaring miss from Wizards that should have been a no-brainer to include in this deck, especially since one of the main critisms about it is that the manabase is very poor.

Sliver Hive shot up this week with over 200% to a whopping $41. Whenever you start building a Sliver Commander deck, probably before you even picked your commander, you just know you're going to include this card. Since Sliver decks are often five colors, this land fixes your mana and gives you a mana sink later on in the game.

We could argue whether this card should've been in the precon. There are several five-color Slivers that can be your commander, this being one of them. They obviously couldn't include every legendary Sliver (most notably because Sliver Queen is on the reserved list), but in this case they only included Sliver Hivelord, which is probably the one that least needed another reprint. This made The First Sliver go up with over 70% to about $45.

The same can probably be said about Sliver Legion. A walking Coat of Arms for Slivers that makes your army pretty strong. It went up last week over 60%, making it a $35 card.

Sliver Gravemother	CardKingdom	TCGPlayer $10.59
Sliver Hive	CardKingdom $23.99	TCGPlayer $22.23
The First Sliver	CardKingdom $32.99	TCGPlayer $35.75
Sliver Queen	CardKingdom $299.99	TCGPlayer $310.04
The First Sliver (Retro Frame) (Foil Etched)	CardKingdom	TCGPlayer $34.00
Sliver Legion	CardKingdom $49.99	TCGPlayer $45.16
Sliver Legion	CardKingdom $44.99	TCGPlayer $50.99
Sliver Legion (1149)	CardKingdom $39.99	TCGPlayer $46.91

#4 Eldrazi

For pretty much the same reason as Slivers, we're seeing Eldrazi cards moving up. Yesterday the decklist for the Eldrazi Unbound deck was previewed. People immediately went over the list and bought out the glaring cards missing from it. Our Premium users actually saw this happening when a "Minute Mover" alert went out over Discord telling them the price of Eye of Ugin was moving up rapidly with 13% to almost $13. The users that acted on this were able to get their copies in, and were happy when a little later a second alert came in notifying them the card had shot up an additional 234% to $44.

So while we're on the subject of this card, lets discuss it a little bit. Eye of Ugin is one of those cards that made Eldrazi good in Legacy, along with Eldrazi Temple. Since it was printed at Mythic back then and barely saw any reprints, the price has remained rather high. It's definitely one of the cards that would have fit nicely in the precon deck, but isn't included. You can imagine people wanting to upgrade the Eldrazi Unbound deck would want to add it. It shot up overnight from about $12 to $44, an increase of 272%.

We also saw Emrakul, the Promised End move up 58% to $60, and while this is a big jump, its still nowhere near its all time high of $96. Nevertheless, the card sees play in Modern and occasionally in Legacy. Being able to control your opponent's turn can be backbreaking for anyone.

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.

Kenessos, Priest of Thassa $4.00 - Moving up again!

Kenessos, Priest of Thassa has been identified by the MTGStocks Premium Penny Stocks feature as a card that has reached its bottom and is starting a consistent uptrend.

Two-Headed Hellkite $5.06 - Moving down

Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth $8.46 - Slowly moving down

Kenessos, Priest of Thassa	CardKingdom	TCGPlayer $4.20
Two-Headed Hellkite	CardKingdom $5.99	TCGPlayer $4.20
Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth	CardKingdom $10.99	TCGPlayer $8.65

 

That's it for this week. Make sure to check back next week for more Weekly Winners!