If you’re looking for a powerful Commander preconstructed deck to upgrade, World Shaper is proving to be extremely lethal. The deck isn’t bad right out of the box, but with just a few degenerate upgrades, your Commander precon will start killing players as early as turn five.
Just add a few sacrifice outlets, like Zuran Orb, and some consistent ways to play lands from the graveyard, Hearthhull, the Worldseed turns into a death combo machine when fully Stationed. This is by no means the strongest Commander strategy out there, but it is very easy to upgrade this deck into a menace with just a few cheap pieces.
Since this deck gets a lot deadlier when upgraded, there is now a lot of interest in cards that synergize with World Shaper, more so than the average interest that a new Commander precon creates. Yet another potential upgrade is spiking in price as a result.
MTG Valakut Exploration
For a majority of Commander landfall decks that can run it, Valakut Exploration doubles as both a card advantage engine and a win condition. Impulse draws triggered by Landfall are valuable in any deck focused on playing multiple lands, but the extra cards you find won’t be wasted. Valakut Exploration will convert your extra cards into damage, putting them into the graveyard in the process.
In a dedicated Landfall deck, creating 40 land drops in the late game is a lot more realistic than you might think, but in World Shaper, you’ll rarely need to trigger Valakut Exploration that many times to win. Once you upgrade World Shaper, you generally win the game by sacrificing all of your lands and bringing them back in one big turn. Hearthhull, when fully Stationed, will deal tons of damage during these sequences. Valakut Exploration just adds one more damage to each land, creating very clean game-winning sequences.
This also gives you a great outlet to continue getting value out of your combo turn when Hearthhull gets removed. Even if you can’t kill an opponent, Valakut Exploration should, essentially, make it so you never run out of cards. Because Valakut puts cards in the graveyard at the end step, you can even use Crucible of Worlds effects to recur lands that you may not have been able to play from exile.
All of this makes Valakut Exploration a great upgrade for World Shaper. You naturally drop a lot of lands, allowing Valakut Exploration to create a lot of card advantage in the early and mid games, but the card easily supports your win condition when you try to close the game.
The Spike
MTG Valakut Exploration started spiking in price after a massive surge of demand that occurred at the beginning of July. 87 near mint copies sold between July 8th and 10th. Considering that the full decklist for World Shaper was revealed on July 9th, this makes a lot of sense. It was confirmed that Valakut Exploration would not see a reprint in Edge of Eternities, and as a result, the card began to spike.
Since then, Near Mint copies of Valakut Exploration rose from a $0.78 market average to $2.51, representing a 221% price spike. That said, the current sales and listed sales for Valakut Exploration are even more expensive than this, factoring in shipping. Recent sales consistently range from $2.30 to $3.50, and foils seem to have a very small premium compared to the nonfoil printing.
Despite Valakut Awakening never seeing a reprint since its debut in Zendikar Rising back in 2020, there is a showcase variant of the card that had an even more aggressive spike than the traditional variant. Despite the spike happening over a small period of time, however, the secondary market value of these variants is identical. Near Mint copies of the Showcase Valakut Exploration have a market average of $2.53 at the moment, spiking from $0.78. Demand is more spread out for this variant compared to the traditional one, which is a common pattern seen when a card spikes. The traditional variant is usually bought out first since it’s the cheapest, and rarer variants of the card begin to follow afterwards.
Despite the increased demand for Valakut Exploration, there are still a lot of copies of the card available. Between the traditional and borderless versions alone, there are about 142 listings for the card, suggesting that there’s still a lot of supply for players who want to purchase a copy of this card.
The Future
Like any Commander-based spike, Valakut Exploration’s price increase likely has a time limit. It’s very common for demand increases based on Commander products to only be temporary. Magic: The Gathering’s release schedule is always in motion, after all. The more new things players have to get excited about, the more attention is placed on new things, and moved away from World Shaper.
While World Shaper will eventually see a lot less attention, there are a few things going for the precon. This appears to be among the last Commander precons we’re getting for the rest of 2025, which means that this will be one of the easiest ways for new players to start playing Commander with their friends. Not only will Spider-Man and Avatar not have Commander precons, at least a the time of writing, but Universes Beyond sets are likely to onboard a bunch of new and returning players. These two things might mean that the demand for World Shaper will remain consistent for longer than usual.
Even if, or when, World Shaper starts seeing less interest, Valakut Exploration is just a great card in a popular Commander archetype. World Shaper wasn’t the first deck interested in a landfall-based advantage machine, and it won’t be the last. The card plays well in exile-matters decks as well, which gives it another point of potential demand.
All of this is to say that Valakut Exploration’s current spike is unlikely to last, but the card isn’t a bad one to pick up for your collection. It will likely see surges in demand in the future, as long as it’s not reprinted, that is. All of that said, it is impossible to truly predict the future, as anything can happen in MTG’s secondary market. All we know for now is that Valakut Exploration looks like a popular upgrade to World Shaper, and for good reason.
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