While Final Fantasy is coming for its crown, The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth is still an incredible MTG set. There’s no denying this set sold incredibly well thanks to its flavor, staples, and The One-of-One Ring. To top all this off, the set also had a fantastic collection of highly-desirable Box Toppers.
In total, Wizards created 30 Realms and Relics Box Toppers. Each of these cards was a reskinned reprint from throughout Magic’s history, and there were a lot of fantastic hits. Cards like Cavern of Souls and Ancient Tomb were already worth tons of money, but these reprints pushed it to the extreme.
The Party Tree
The Party Tree, also known as The Great Henge, is an absolutely fantastic MTG card. Once a true Standard stable, The Great Henge is currently only played in Commander, but it’s amazing in that format. Offering ramp, life gain, and card draw for potentially incredibly cheap, this card does it all in green decks.
Unsurprisingly, The Great Henge is incredibly popular in Commander in a wide range of decks. Not only is there the synergy with +1/+1 counters, but this is basically free if you have some giant creatures. With this in mind, it’s little wonder that The Great Henge is most popular in Dragon-based decks, according to EDHREC. The card is so impressive that it’s currently on the Game Changer watchlist.
For better or worse, there’s not much else to say about The Great Henge from a card perspective. As much as it is a powerhouse in Commander, what you see is what you get. Finance-wise, however, this card is a fair bit more complex.
The Spike
To date, The Great Henge has only received three printings. Following its debut in Throne of Eldraine, it’s only reappeared as The Party Tree Box Topper and in Commander Masters. For better or worse, this means that the card is still seriously expensive, selling for $65 at a minimum.
Unsurprisingly, as we mentioned earlier, The Party Tree variant comes with a Lord of the Rings tax stapled onto it. As if this wasn’t bad enough, there’s also a rarity tax, since this variant is a Box Topper. Thanks to these factors combined, Box Topper copies of The Party Tree currently sell for around $88.
Over the past few months, this price has steadily been climbing over time, but this variant hasn’t exactly spiked. There have been some recent sales in excess of $117, however, this is an outlier within a sea of reasonable sales. Curiously, there is one variant of The Party Tree that is selling for much closer to this heavily spiked price.
In a strange turn of events, the non-foil variant of The Party Tree is significantly rarer than the foil variant. This is thanks to it only being found in one slot within a Collector Booster 31% of the time. Since this slot can include any Realms and Relic card, the odds of pulling each individual card are a shade over 1%.
Thanks to this increased rarity, very few non-foil copies of The Party Tree are available on TCGplayer. Realizing this, MTG players have been buying them up recently, pushing the card’s price to new heights. Recently, this variant has been consistently selling for $111, and new listings now start at $175, which is truly wild.
The Future
Usually, we’re pretty pessimistic about most price spikes that we see. As much as interest in a new staple or synergy may be high for a moment, interest ebbs and flows over time. The Great Henge, however, is basically guaranteed to always be a staple within Commander. Obviously, reprints may happen to bring this card’s price down, but The Party Tree is unlikely to ever be reprinted specifically.
On top of this, rare Lord of the Rings cards have routinely proven to be rather lucrative. We’ve seen this time and time again with the Showcase Scroll cards, even though they were hated upon release. Similarly, the set’s Borderless Poster cards are seriously expensive, even if the cards themselves aren’t that special.
With this in mind, I’d expect that The Party Tree, non-foil copies especially, are going to stay expensive for quite some time. Ultimately, as always, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens, so no one can properly predict the future. That said, it’ll definitely be worth watching to see what fancy foil and rare variants the Final Fantasy set has in store.