Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth has had an enormous impact on the secondary market. Most of these are still contained within the set. This is partially thanks to the set just being busted, but it’s also thanks to the amount of excitement for players to try their favorite characters out in a Commander setting.
While Lord of the Rings is the core thing impacting the secondary market this week, not everything is in that set. Other cards that some players have thought would spike quite some time ago finally have, thanks to some of the core mechanics returning in Lord of the Rings. Without further ado, let’s take a look!
Academy Manufactor
A common card to pop up in speculative topics, Academy Manufactor is great at making a mess of a board state. Whenever you create a Food, Clue or Treasure token, you instead get one of each.
As you may infer, this card becomes incredibly prevalent whenever one of these mechanics returns as a core part of a new set. This time, Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth cards care about Food tokens.
Food tokens are the core synergy for the Selesnya Hobbits archetype that you can draft. While this isn’t a particularly powerful strategy, it has allowed for cards that are even impacting competitive formats to see play. Samwise Gamgee, in particular, has turned the dreaded Cat Oven combo into an infinite kill combo.
This, of course, also makes for a fantastic upgrade to the Food and Fellowship preconstructed Commander deck. This will be a pervading theme in this week’s financial highlight, which makes sense considering that, compared to the other Lord of the Rings preconstructed decks, this one needs a bit of help.
Because of all the new Food support, Academy Manufactor has seen a huge uptick in interest, which has translated to a huge uptick in price. This card has almost tripled over the past week, raising to about $8 on average between versions. The card, through the month of May, was worth about $2.65 on average according to TCGplayer. Even though this card is selling for $8 for the most part, it is starting to spike towards $9.50 and more.
Blossoming Bogbeast
Continuing on with great Food and Fellowship upgrades is the Blossoming Bogbeast. Gaining two life, then pumping your board equal of life gained this turn when attacking, Blossoming Bogbeast does a strong win condition impression alongside a deck that synergizes strongly with food.
Whenever a card with a limited print run sees interest, prices tend to spike hard. This, unfortunately, is true for most cards that have only seen a printing in Commander decks, and Blossoming Bogbeast fits that mold.
Available in Commander 2021 only, Blossoming Bogbeast has increased from $2 to $10 (on the low-end of things) over the past week. There are multiple sales of this card for $12 or more (with $13.50 being the high end), but it looks like this price spike is somewhat unstable at the moment. The spike is definitely there, but this card is currently trying to find its price point.
Elanor Gardner
Elanor Gardner is seeing spikes across her iterations this week. Both the extended art and normal versions have seen substantial increases.
The reasoning this card is seeing such a spike? The card is a fantastic ramp tool alongside the new Food synergies. As long as you sacrifice a Food token on your turn, Elanor Gardner will find a basic land card and put it in play tapped. The card also happens to be somewhat difficult to open in Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth product. Becauase Elanor is the green Jumpstart Rare for the set, you cannot open it in Draft Booster packs.
This also gives the card a relevant foil and extended art multiplier since you can only open the base version of this card in Jumpstart product. Trying to find a different copy through Collector Boosters or Set Boosters is difficult at best.
Because this card synergizes with food, Elanor Gardner makes for a no-brainer upgrade to the Food and Fellowship preconstructed deck, so anyone interested in playing that deck and upgrading it will probably pick this up. Outside of that, anyone trying to play Samwise Gamgee in his various formats is probably interested in taking a look at this as well.
Overall, Elanor Gardner’s basic iteration has seen a massive price spike from less than a dollar to about $5 or more! Do note that there are outliers selling for $10 or more, and a good amount of the card’s most recent sales are about $10. This is a massive jump from 75 cents about a week ago.
Read More: Powerful and Pricey MTG Reprints Set to Receive First-Time Foil Treatments!
Ringwraiths
Thank god this card was not printed in the main set. The Ringwraiths would have been an absolute travesty to play against in Limited. Outside of that, this card slots in nicely with the new ‘Wraiths matter’ archetype that has a lot of support from this set.
Even in the context of that deck, however, Ringwraiths seems kind of lacking to be seeing a price increase. Six mana is a lot and, while re-buyable via Ring Tempts, this is not a very powerful effect in the context of Commander.
That’s because, well, it isn’t. The base iteration of this card isn’t really worth anything. Because it’s a Jumpstart Rare, however, anything past the base version of this card is tough to open, so it’s worth money.
Ringwraiths, in its base version, does not exceed a dollar. Finding a foil Ringwraiths is much more difficult, but upticks the price to about $4. Finally, an extended art Ringwraiths can go for about $5 on average, but has sold for $8 or more. This is the version that saw a massive secondary market uptick, only being worth 75 cents a week ago.
Read More: 25 Cent Lord of the Rings Cards May Shake Up This MTG Format!
