The Final Fantasy Commander decks have all been completely revealed, and there’s a lot of hype surrounding them. Fans of Equipment shells are bound to enjoy all that the Limit Break Commander Precon has to offer. Meanwhile, Reanimator enthusiasts may get a kick out of the Revival Trance deck and all the shenanigans Terra, Herald of Hope brings to the table.
As the new legends garner a ton of attention, it makes sense that some elite card upgrades to the Precons would spike in price. For example, Inventory Management quadrupled in price due to its synergy with Cloud, Ex-SOLDIER. Now, it appears a neat counter-distributing Creature has risen in value as it pairs perfectly with Tidus, Yuna’s Guardian.
Slippery Bogbonder
Despite being green, Slippery Bogbonder offers a fantastic amount of protection for four mana. On the surface, Slippery Bogbonder just gives a creature a Hexproof Counter and allows you to buff it with other counters you have. While this is a useful layer of protection and resource management, the real strength comes from Slippery Bogbonder having Flash.
Thanks to this ability, you can use Slippery Bogbonder as instant speed protection against removal. This allows you to fizzle your opponent’s spell, while also creating a threat that’s incredibly difficult to remove without board wipes. Due to this strength, Slippery Bogbonder has long been a popular card in Commander, especially alongside Me, the Immortal and Skullbriar, the Walking Grave.
Thanks to keeping their counters as they move between the Command Zone and the battlefield, both these Commanders are fantastic with Slippery Bogbonder. Additionally, Bogbonder also works great alongside Perrie the Pulverizer, who cares about each unique kind of counter.
While Bogbonder does have a fair few homes in Commander, none of them are that popular. Due to this, it’s no surprise that the card has been fairly inexpensive for the longest time. This, however, has changed now that the Final Fantasy MTG set is drawing near. Now, all attention is drawn to Tidus, Yuna’s Guardian, who excels alongside Slippery Bogbonder.
Tidus’ ability to move Hexproof counters from creature to creature creates fantastic synergy with Slippery Bogbonder. While you can only move counters at the start of combat, this nonetheless lets you always keep your biggest threat protected. You can even go all in on Tidus, using Bogbonder’s own counter-movement ability, to win via Commander damage if you like.
The Spike
As mentioned, Slippery Bogbonder has long been a fairly cheap Magic: The Gathering card. This time last month, copies of both the original Commander 2020 printing and the Streets of New Capenna Commander reprint sold for around $2.50. While this isn’t a lot of money, it is more than copies of Bogbonder used to be worth.
Before the face Commanders for the Final Fantasy Commander decks were revealed on February 17th, copies of Bogbonder sold for $1.75. Now that the Final Fantasy precons have been revealed in their entirety, Slippery Bogbonder has spiked once again, and more impressively this time.
Currently, near-mint copies of the original Commander 2020 printing are selling for $6.66 on average on TCGplayer. Curiously, the Streets of New Capenna Commander reprint has a similar market price of $6.57, but current listings are significantly more expensive. On TCGplayer, the cheapest near-mint listing for this variant is currently $8.94.
Despite this high price tag, copies of this variant have sold for upwards of $8.99. Potentially, this could indicate MTG players are willing to play that much for the card, or it could just be overzealous investors. In any case, the results are the same, as Slippery Bogbonder is now over twice as expensive as it used to be.
Speculation
Ultimately, as we’ve seen a lot recently, the price of Slippery Bogbonder is tied to the Final Fantasy Commander decks. While these decks are bound to be immensely popular and in demand, nothing is popular forever. Due to this, once Final Fantasy is all said and done, and players have had their fill, Bogbonder’s price will fall.
Sadly, it’s impossible to predict where the price of Slippery Bogbonder may fall to once Edge of Eternities and Marvel’s Spider-Man start getting spoiled. In theory, it could fall back down to the pre-spike price of around $2.50. While this seems sensible, there’s bound to be some long-lasting demand from Tidus, Yuna’s Guardian players.
Due to this continued demand, Slippery Bogbonder could end up being worth a couple of dollars more than it used to, in the long run. For the short term, there’s potentially even more spike to see, since the Final Fantasy MTG set isn’t out yet. While this could be true, the Commander decks have been revealed for almost an entire week at this point.
Since we already know the decklists for Tidus’ deck, Counter Blitz, players can pre-buy upgrades to their heart’s content. While not everyone will do this, the rush in demand for Slippery Bogbonder may already be over. At the end of the day, however, we can’t predict the future, so we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens.
Until then, it’ll be worth looking around in your collection to see if you’ve got any Bogbonders lying around.
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