The emergence of Premodern over the last few months has had a profound impact on Magic’s secondary market. Following Premodern’s move to Magic Online, more games are being played than ever before. Not only has this unearthed innovations in an ancient fan-powered format, but it has also led to the first Premodern ban in 3 years.
While many Premodern cards are generically powerful, having some crossover in other formats, many cards are uniquely weak. Cursed Scroll, for example, is rather unplayable by today’s standards, but the card is all over the place in Premodern.
MTG Cursed Scroll
Cursed Scroll essentially offers a unique minigame that can easily be fixed in your favor. When you only have one card in your hand, this artifact offers a repeatable Shock, albeit for three mana. While this is quite a lot more than Shock usually costs, getting Cursed Scroll into play is cheap, at least. Even then, in most cases, this is a bad exchange, but the card is uniquely powerful in Premodern.
Like many of Premodern’s recent spikes, Cursed Scroll gained a ton of popularity following the ban of Parallax Tide. Since Parallax Tide is no longer around to effectively limit game length, Cursed Scroll has a lot more time to remove creatures and kill opponents.
Thanks to how weak creatures were in old Magic, Cursed Scroll can remove almost any relevant threat in Premodern. Whether you’re taking out Mishra’s Factory or Jackal Pup, Cursed Scroll will make it really difficult for your opponent to stick creatures.
Thanks to this, and the card being colorless, Cursed Scroll is widely adopted in aggressive Premodern decks. Even some control decks in the format use this card as a grindy creature removal tool, although this is more of a niche use.
Unsurprisingly, Cursed Scroll sees little to no play outside of Premodern. Casual Commander’s dire need for card advantage, combined with its singleton nature, means that Cursed Scroll will struggle to do anything. Despite this, the surge in demand from Premodern has been more than enough to push the price of Cursed Scroll up considerably.
The Spike
Despite there being over seven different variants of Cursed Scroll, only one of them is tournament legal. Thanks to being on the Reserved List, it has only ever been reprinted in supplemental World Championship products. Thanks to this, even with almost no demand, there’s never been much supply of Cursed Scroll to go around.
Prior to the Premodern ban, Cursed Scroll was still a $34 card, which is quite expensive for a repeatable Shock. After the ban, however, demand for Cursed Scroll increased significantly, pushing near-mint copies to $76 at the absolute cheapest. Most players are more likely to spend closer to $80 for a near-mint copy of the artifact nowadays.
Sadly, unlike other expensive Premodern cards, there aren’t huge savings available for Cursed Scroll, either. There is a damaged copy available for $60, but these cards may be unsuitable for tournament play. If you’re unwilling to take that risk, heavily played Cursed Scrolls start at $70.
Rock Solid
Thanks to its extremely wide amount of play in Premodern, the price of Cursed Scroll feels rather stable right now. The card is by no means broken in Premodern, so a ban isn’t likely, but it shouldn’t be going anywhere, either. Thanks to this, there’s a good chance it will stay at its current price, or potentially even climb, for the near future at least.
For better or worse, there’s no denying that the price of Cursed Scroll is heavily linked to Premodern’s success. Should the format itself fall out of favor over time, then the price of staples, including Cursed Scroll, could dip. Given how popular the format has been recently, this does seem unlikely, but nothing is impossible.
Ultimately, as always, it’s impossible to predict where this price spike will go, especially in the long term. As such, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens in the coming months and whether or not the metagame shifts.
Stick with us at mtgrocks.com: the best place for Magic: The Gathering coverage!