While there’s no shortage of great stuff, one of the best bits of the Final Fantasy MTG set is the new Summons. Fusing Sagas and creatures together, these temporary threats can be fantastically flavorful value engines. Due to this, it’s no wonder that many MTG players and Final Fantasy fans are keen to build around them.
If you too are looking to do exactly that, there’s only one real option in Commander. As much as cards like Narci, Fable Singer and Satsuki, the Living Lore offer great utility, there’s no beating Tom Bombadil. Due to this, it’s little wonder that this staple Commander has been increasing in price over the past month.
Tom Bombadil
In Commander, nothing comes close to Tom Bombadil when you’re building a Saga-based deck. For starters, Mr Bombadil is the only Saga Typal Commander who offers access to all five colors of mana. This allows you to play all the best Sagas and accompanying support cards, which is always a major boon.
On top of this, Tom Bombadil is also a rather competent threat, since they can easily gain Hexproof and Indestructible. While you do need to jump through some hoops to make this happen, any Saga Typal deck will do this naturally. Once done, Tom Bombadil can threaten to dish out a lot of Commander damage, especially if your Sagas focus on supporting him.
Speaking of Sagas, Tom Bombadil can essentially replace one Saga every single turn. While a pesky once-each-turn clause limits this ability, it nonetheless offers an obscene amount of value. So long as you still have a Saga in your deck, Tom will find it and put it onto the battlefield for completely free.
On its own, this ability is obviously very powerful, especially since it helps to keep Tom’s other ability online. As if it wasn’t good enough already, however, it’s possible to get around the once each turn restriction through Proliferate. Using spells like Steady Progress, Serum Snare, and Brokers Confluence, you can cheat out Sagas on your opponent’s turns.
Thankfully, Proliferate isn’t the only way to get additional value out of Tom Bombadil. By using double-sided Sagas and cards that transform into them, you can keep value on the board. Curiously, Tom Bombadil only cares about resolving the final chapter of a Saga, not sacrificing it, which can be exploited.
The Spike
Ultimately, there’s no question that Tom Bombadil is the strongest and best choice to lead a Saga-based Commander deck. MTG players have known this since The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth was first released. To date, Tom sees play in over 12800 Saga-themed Commander decks, and that number is surely only going to increase.
Despite being the best choice for a Saga-based deck, Tom Bombadil is surprisingly cheap. For the longest time, normal variants of this card only sold for around $1, however, prices have been increasing recently. In early May, Tom Bombadil was selling for $1.80, but the price has now spiked to $5.09 on average.
While this is a fairly impressive spike, it’s only a 180% rise in a few weeks. In the same amount of time, the Showcase variant of Tom Bombadil has been on an even more exciting journey. Starting out at $1.59, it seems this variant wasn’t as desirable as the card’s main printing. Now, however, the price has spiked just over 300% to now be worth $6.61 on average.
Thankfully, while the market price for this variant has spiked significantly, near-mint listings do start slightly cheaper. There are still a few copies left around the $5 and $6 mark, which feels about right given Tom Bombadil’s power. Should you want to spend a lot more money, however, Wizards has given players a fair few options.
Not only does Tom Bombadil have a Showcase Scrolls treatment, starting at $40, but there are Surge Foils too. These Surge foils currently start at $61 for lightly-played copies, but, miraculously, that’s not even the more expensive variant. Instead, that honor goes to the Borderless Poster variant, which sells for $157 on average.
The Future
While Final Fantasy has caused Tom Bombadil to spike in price, if anything, it’s just a surprise they weren’t more expensive sooner. As mentioned, this card is the clear best Commander for the archetype, and Wizards prints new Sagas fairly often. Despite this, Tom has spent most of their existence being worth less than $2.
This low price was likely due to the abundance of supply for Tom Bombadil, even though they’re a mythic. As Magic’s best-performing set, at the time, The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth was printed and opened more than anything else. For better or worse, this meant there were tons of copies of every card floating around.
Alongside having a fairly plentiful supply, it’s worth noting that Saga Typal is a fairly niche archetype. Due to this, the overall demand is somewhat limited, however, it increases with each Saga-focused set that releases. As we’re seeing now, this can result in a fairly impressive price spike, which may not come down soon.
Not only is Final Fantasy bound to have some staying power, but Tom Bombadil is a tricky card to reprint. As a Universes Beyond card, Wizards may struggle to reprint this card without changing its name and art. While this has happened before, it hasn’t happened very often, which is somewhat concerning.
Ultimately, as always, there’s no way to properly predict the future, even if we can look at past trends. Realistically, it seems that Tom Bombadil will see a long-term bump in price, but whether or not that’s the case remains to be seen.
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