Thanks to the massive amount of new cards being released every year, it’s not uncommon for cards from decades ago to suddenly rise in price. Freshly spoiled Commanders or newly crowned competitive staples can give rise to the most bizarre synergies with cards that have otherwise been relatively useless.
That’s exactly what happened to Claws of Gix, an Urza’s Saga Uncommon that was reprinted in Time Spiral years afterwards. Thanks to a new combo that emerged at Pro Tour Edge of Eternities, and is still producing results over a month later, a surge in demand is driving prices to soar.
Claws of Gix
Despite seeing some experimentation before Pro Tour Edge of Eternities, Claws of Gix is largely spiking after becoming part of the most played Affinity shell following the event. Prior to its discovery, Weapons Manufacturing, despite looking like a powerful payoff for Affinity, was a puzzle that players didn’t know how to solve. The card can create a bunch of deadly Munitions tokens that deal two damage when they leave play, but there was no way to get rid of them.
Enter Claws of Gix. This card can sacrifice the Munitions for a single mana, gaining you life while acting as removal or direct burn damage. Making things better, Claws of Gix fully supports the main game plan for Affinity decks by being a zero-drop artifact itself, and can be tutored by Urza’s Saga, maximizing the card’s efficiency. That, combined with some copies of Engineered Explosives, has fully unlocked the capabilities of Weapons Manufacturing, allowing the payoff to see consistent play in Modern Affinity decks.
While that’s the core reason that Claws of Gix has seen a price spike, it does have some secondary functions in the Modern Affinity list. Lifelink creatures, namely Solitude and Atraxa, Grand Unifier, are particularly common in Modern nowadays, but with Claws of Gix, it’s generally easy to race the lifelinkers. Just sacrifice your attackers/blockers before damage is dealt, and your opponents won’t be able to gain life. Otherwise, in postboard games, you can use Claws of Gix to sacrifice your own lock effects that affect both players, like Blood Moon, to gain an unexpected advantage.
Claws of Gix sees almost all of its play in Modern, but it is seeing very little experimentation outside of that format. The card occasionally appears in Legacy artifact brews focusing on either Affinity or Painter’s Servant. The card otherwise makes very rare appearances in Duel Commander, but Claws of Gix is not a staple in either of these formats.
The Spike
Claws of Gix clearly started seeing extreme levels of demand right after its appearance in Pro Tour Edge of Eternities. Over 100 copies of the card across various conditions changed hands on TCGplayer after Affinity featuring Weapons Manufacturing went undefeated during day one of the Pro Tour. Despite the deck not appearing in the top eight, players kept using Weapons Manufacturing after the event, and prices only kept going up from there. Since then, Affinity has won the Chinese Regional Championship, as well as multiple events with over 200 players.
Prior to Claws of Gix appearing at Pro Tour Edge of Eternities, the card had floated around the $1 mark but has tripled in price to about $3.21 after repeatedly proving itself time and time again over the course of a month. Bizarrely, Lightly Played copies of Claws of Gix are worth even more for the Timeshifted variant of this card, likely because more copies are exchanging hands.
If you’re looking to save some money, moderately played and damaged copies of Claws of Gix can be found for under a dollar, excluding shipping, but factoring shipping in with prices, the cheapest these cards can generally be found are around $3. This is primarily for the Timeshifted version of the card; however, while all copies of the Urza’s Saga variant are $2.50 at the absolute lowest, without factoring shipping in.
As you may imagine, with only two relatively exclusive printings, foil copies of Claws of Gix are worth a fortune. Past sales for Timeshifted Foils are very minimal, but the only listed price for a foil Claws of Gix across copies, at the time of writing, is asking for an outrageous $307.
The Future Looks Bright
Claws of Gix’s price spike doesn’t look like it’s ending anytime soon, and there isn’t much of a reason for it to. Even this past weekend, Affinity continued to put up extremely strong results in Modern, and even better, the format completely dodged today’s ban announcement. To be fair, that was entirely expected, but it’s a point in Claws of Gix’s court nevertheless.
At some point, however, everyone looking to pick up a copy of Claws of Gix will find one. The Regional Championship season for Modern is still going strong, but it won’t be long before competitive Magic shifts its focus entirely back to Standard. When that happens, the demand for Claws of Gix will bottom out, and the card will start to find its real price point.
All of that said, it’s truly impossible to tell the future, but Claws of Gix looks like it will be worth at least a few dollars from here on out. It is possible that Affinity will move away from Weapons Manufacturing eventually, but the shell has stuck despite tons of testing, so this ultimately seems rather unlikely to happen soon.
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