After a brief respite to talk about an innovation in Modern, Final Fantasy is back in the spotlight once again. Specifically, another upgrade to one of the precons has spiked in price over the past few days. While upgrading these decks is a little dubious, it seems a few mechanical favorites are emerging from the pack.
Recently, we’ve been seeing a fair few price spikes for the Counter Blitz and Scions & Spellcraft decks. While we’ve seen a lot of attention focused on the former recently, today’s spike is thanks to the latter. Specifically, there’s a great synergy with Y’shtola, Night’s Blessed, which has caused Sigil of Sleep to spike over 700%.
Sigil of Sleep
Sigil of Sleep is a deceptively good MTG card. On the surface, it looks like a pretty meh way to remove a creature from the board each turn. While it’s cheap, you’d need to attach this to a creature with an evasion ability if reliable combat damage is your goal. Thankfully, while it’s the most obvious strategy, you don’t need combat damage to make Sigil of Sleep work.
Rather than specifically needing combat damage, Sigil of Sleep will work with any form of damage at all. This makes it perfect for any creature that can reliably deal damage to one, or ideally each, opponent without combat. As alluded to previously, Y’shtola, Night’s Blessed has a fantastic synergy with this card, thanks to damaging each opponent.
All you need to do to make Y’shtola work is cast a noncreature spell with mana value three or greater. Thankfully, the Scions & Spellcraft deck is absolutely loaded with these, so you should have no trouble activating her ability. This means you can constantly be bouncing threats from each opponent off the board.
While Sigil of Sleep is cheap and easy to activate, it can only hit creatures. This shouldn’t stop it from putting in work in Commander, but it definitely hampers its utility somewhat. Additionally, it’ll be worth watching out for removal, since Sigil of Sleep will definitely turn Y’shtola into a must-kill threat.
The Spike
While there’s no denying the synergy between Sigil of Sleep and Y’shtola, Night’s Blessed, this spike has been rather slow going. As you can see above, players have clearly been picking up copies in the past month, but the price didn’t explode immediately. Curiously, Sigil of Sleep hasn’t been a popular card for quite some time, even though its synergy isn’t exactly new.
What’s even more curious is the fact that Sigil of Sleep took its sweet time to spike in the first place. Y’shtola was first revealed way back in February, and the Scions & Spellcraft deck didn’t debut until May 12th. Despite this, MTG players started buying up copies on May 5th, which quickly started to drain the available supply.
Since that date, we’ve seen a steady stream of sales, which have made near-mint copies of Sigil of Sleep rarer than they were already. To date, this card has only been printed once, first in Urza’s Destiny, and then in Duel Decks: Venser vs. Koth. Unsurprisingly, both of these variants have been spiking recently, Urza’s Destiny much more so.
This time last month, copies of Sigil of Sleep were selling for just $0.88. Even after the first sales spike, prices only reached around $1.50, which isn’t too dear at all. As time has gone on, however, fewer and fewer copies have been available, which has caused prices to rise significantly. Now, a single copy of Sigil of Sleep will set you back $7.49.
Unfortunately, the more recent Duel Decks: Venser vs. Koth printing doesn’t offer a discounted deal at the moment. If anything, this variant actually appears to be rarer, given the lower volume of sales recently. Currently, outside of a $6.40 copy, near-mint prices for this printing start at $13.
The Future
If you’ve seen any of our recent articles on Commander-based price spikes, you’ll know this song and dance already. We can’t predict the future, but most Commander-based spikes aren’t here to last. For better or worse, tastes change as new preconstructed decks are revealed, so usually these spikes don’t last.
To make these recent spikes an even harder sell, the Final Fantasy precons are all deeply flavorful. With so many new cards and new art throughout, upgrading these decks impacts the flavor heavily. While not every MTG player will care about this, it appears to be limiting sales somewhat.
All that said, I’m nonetheless surprised that Sigil of Sleep hasn’t been more expensive for a long time. As mentioned, this card has long had some good synergies in Commander and is arguably deserving of seeing more play. While its color might be somewhat limiting, it’s not like multicolor Commanders are unheard of in MTG.
In any case, it feels like there’s a semi-decent chance that some of this current price spike may stick around. Having this extra attention on Sigil of Sleep may give it the attention it properly deserves going forward. Considering this card is 26 years old with very few printings, it should at least have rarity going for it.
Ultimately, as always, we can’t predict the future. Subsequently, we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens in the coming months.
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