It’s no secret that preconstructed Commander decks can be big business. Not only are they great for Wizards of the Coast, often selling like hotcakes, but they’re great for players too. More often than not these decks are packed with fantastic reprints which can offer great value and/or bring prices down.
To top it all off, preconstructed Commander decks can also be a fantastic time for investors and MTG finance enthusiasts. Thanks to their popularity, these decks can cause some truly obscene price spikes. Should you get ahead of the curve and invest in a budget there’s the potential to make some serious money.
Aether Refinery
Once upon a time, Aether Refinery was a fantastic budget upgrade to the new Living Energy Commander deck. As the name suggests, this deck, which was released alongside Aetherdrift, this deck largely revolved around the Energy mechanic. This made Aether Refinery an obvious and easy addition to the deck’s 99.
Capable of outright doubling your Energy generation, this card can make the Living Energy deck sing. Unsurprisingly, this effect greatly empowers the new cards like Rampaging Aetherhood and Nissa, Worldsoul Speaker, allowing the deck to pop off. At worst, having this artifact sit around and accrue value is a worthwhile investment, even at six mana.
Beyond just increasing your Energy production, Aether Refinery has another trick up its sleeves. Each turn it can tap for two Energy, and then create an Aetherborn creature token. Should you have enough excess Energy to invest, you can make this Aetherborn seriously beefy. If you’ve also got a Doubling Season on the board, Refinery’s abilities go absolutely nuts.
Even without this pricy addition, Aether Refiny is still a great card on its own. For this reason, we highlighted it as one of the best budget upgrades for the Living Energy deck. At the time, this card was selling for just $0.22, which is a very small price to pay for an awful lot of power.
Outside of Commander, unsurprisingly, Aether Refinery doesn’t cut the mustard. This card is nowhere near powerful nor fast enough for Legacy and Vintage. For better or worse, Energy isn’t even a popular archetype in either of these formats. As such, the price of Aether Refinery purely depends on its current appeal in Commander.
The Spike
Thankfully, copies of Aether Refinery are still remarkably cheap, even though Living Energy has been out for a while. Once the deck was spoiled, there was unsurprisingly an uptick in interest, but there was enough supply to support that. Even now, there are still well over 100 near-mint copies of the card available for purchase.
Due to this supply, you can still pick up a normal variant copy of Aether Refinery for just $0.72. While this is still a moderate 227% price spike, there’s been significantly more movement elsewhere. The TCGplayer Market Price of the Extended Art variant, for instance, has seen a monstrous spike.
Prior to Living Energy being spoiled in late January, this variant was similarly selling for around the $0.22 mark. In early February, however, the price spiked massively and has been fluctuating ever since. Right now, this variant is supposedly selling for $3.33 on average. That’s a massive 1565% price spike in just over a month!
While the majority of listings for Aether Refinery are now around this $3 price, this spike is nonetheless surprising. Sure, Extended Art cards can be nice to look at, but the normal variant is available for significantly cheaper. If players are just looking for game pieces to upgrade their precons, the value of these cards should theoretically be equal.
Obviously, the supply of each card will play into this price difference, as Extended Art variants should be slightly rarer. Since the number of available listings is fairly equal, however, this explanation doesn’t really fly. Instead, it seems TCGplayer Direct has influenced this spike more than outright scarcity.
Recently, Direct by TCGplayer copies of the Extended Art Aether Refinery have been selling for around $8. Unsurprisingly, this has brought up the card’s average price, with new listings rising to follow suit.
The Fall
In Energy-themed Commander decks, there’s no denying that Aether Refinery is a good card. While its mana cost is rather expensive, the value that it provides throughout a game can be utterly obscene. That being said, even though it’s had a few themed precons, Energy isn’t the most popular archetype in Commander.
Due to this, the appeal and price of Energy cards tend to fall off rather hard when not in vogue. It appears we may already be seeing this, in fact, as Tarkir: Dragonstorm approaches. The price graph for the normal variant of Aether Refinery already shows a slight decline, however, this could just be further fluctuation.
Ultimately, due to this rampant fluctuation recently, it’s difficult to say just how expensive Aether Refinery will end up being. What is clear, however, is that this card will never be truly expensive. A final resting price of $1 isn’t unlikely, even for the Extended Art variant. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens since it’s impossible to properly predict the future.
Thankfully, even if Aether Refinery does fall off, there’s a new rising Commander archetype in town. Thanks to Tarkir: Dragonstorm, the price of many Dragons is unsurprisingly on the rise. While this set is still a ways from release, and there’s no telling what could be reprinted, there’s definitely the opportunity for specs to pay off.
