Unsurprisingly, the Final Fantasy Magic: The Gathering crossover has no shortage of iconic characters. While the set only has space for so many new cards, many of the franchise’s most familiar faces have already been spoiled. We’ve seen Cloud, Sephiroth, Lightning, Vivi, and countless more.
Beyond showcasing iconic characters, many of the new Final Fantasy cards are seriously impressive. Offering powerful abilities and combo potential, there’s a lot to be excited about. So far, however, the MTG financial markets have been surprisingly picky. Since spoiler season started on Saturday, there have only been a few monstrous price spikes, which is rather odd.
Now, however, it seems that MTG players have found their new favorite card. Since their reveal, Vivi Ornitier has been making major waves, causing multiple price spikes. For better or worse, this Final Fantasy IX character seems to have a particular affinity for older, rarer cards.
Blazing Shoal
Examing solely its core function, Blazing Shoal is hardly the most flashy or exciting MTG card. At worst, this Arcane Instant is a useful mana sink in Commander, allowing you to buff a single creature. In the grand scheme of MTG, however, this is hardly the most exciting pump spell or win condition. After all, if you’ve got infinite mana, you may as well just cast Fireball.
Thankfully, while Blazing Shoal is a bit meh on the surface, it does have a trick up its sleeve. Rather than paying for this card normally, you can exile a red card from your hand. This allows you to buff the target creature by its mana cost, without spending any other mana. Ideally, this turns Blazing Shoal from a late-game pump spell into a compelling early-game threat.
That said, Blazing Shoal is still just a pump spell, and the most expensive red spell is only Volcanic Salvo. While this seems pretty meh, especially in Commander, it does work wonders with Infect creatures. This synergy caused Blazing Shoal to be banned in Modern; however, having multiple opponents in Commander stops it from being broken.
Ultimately, Blazing Shoal hasn’t been a popular card for the longest time due to this weakness, but Vivi Ornitier is changing things. By buffing Vivi, you can use their ability to create a massive amount of mana. Using Volcanic Salvo once again, you’ll be able to activate Vivi and create 13 mana.
While you can only do this ability once before the buff disappears, this ramp could easily turn a game’s tide. At the very least, exiling a 5-cost card with Blazing Shoal would let you ramp out Quicksilver Elemental incredibly quickly. From here, you’ll have an infinite mana generation machine that should practically guarantee victory.
The Spike
While there’s an undeniable synergy between Blazing Shoal and Vivi Ornitier, it’s admittedly not game-breaking. That being said, if you’re building a Commander deck around Vivi, it’s worth considering this card for a spot in the 99. Realizing this potential, a fair few MTG players have been rushing to pick up copies of Blazing Shoal while brewing.
While this surge of demand is nothing new in MTG, the price spike to Blazing Shoal is a little unusual. For the longest time, this card was only worth around $1.31, and plenty of copies sold at that price recently. Looking at the sales history, most of the over 100 recent sales were at this price. More recently, however, prices began to ramp up quickly as near-mint supply dwindled.
Alongside the price increase from low supply, TCGplayer Direct appears to have also played a significant role here. Currently, near-mint copies of Blazing Shoal that are available through this program start at $17.57. Recent sales data indicate a few sales at massively elevated price points like this.
To date, the most that has been paid for a near-mint copy of Blazing Shoal is $17.95, however, new listings start at $16.47. At minimum, this means that Blazing Soal has seen a 1157% price spike over the past week alone. While this price spike does seem especially volatile, it’s also present on the card’s original printing.
Much like The List variant, which we’ve been looking at until now, supply for this variant is incredibly limited. Only ten near-mint copies are left available for purchase on TCGplayer at the moment. Listings for these copies start at $16.25, and that doesn’t even include shipping.
The Future
Personally, when looking ahead, I’m not so certain about how well Blazing Shoal is going to do financially. There’s definitely potential for shenanigans and powerful turns, but it’s necessarily an auto-include. Compared to Quicksilver Elemental, this card doesn’t do enough on its own, and its potential is limited by deck construction.
That said, Blazing Shoal does play well with Vivi, so many MTG players may still choose to use it. Evidently, there’s a lot of demand due to this, as the recent price spike has demonstrated. Whether or not this price will stick around is the real question, however, since prices shot up so quickly.
Rather than being a steady spike over time that had sellers gradually charging more, Blazing Shoal went from 0 to 100. Due to this, there’s a real chance that most casual players won’t be willing to pay the $16+ asking price. If this happens, sellers will have no choice but to lower prices to actually shift their stock.
Right now, it’s unclear which way the price of Blazing Shoal will go. If enough MTG players actually want to run this card, then $16 might not be too steep. It’d hardly be the most expensive MTG card in existence, after all. That said, given its past price point, it could easily be too dear. It really could go either way.
Ultimately, we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens. Try as we might, we can’t predict the future, so we’ll have to see what time has in store. Until then, there’s still plenty more to be revealed during the Final Fantasy spoilers season.
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