Yesterday, Wizards of the Coast massively overhauled the Standard format with seven shocking bans. Now, players are scrambling to find out the best decks in the new metagame. When the dust settles, it seems inevitable that some newly crowned Standard staples will spike heavily in price. At the moment, however, it’s too early to know what’ll be good, let alone invest in it.
Despite Standard being surprisingly quiet, from a finance perspective, the MTG markets are still moving. One New Capenna Commander card, in particular, has steadily been climbing in price over the past few months. Now, this card has reached a surprisingly impressive price point considering its humble beginnings.
Agent’s Toolkit
For the longest time, Agent’s Toolkit hasn’t been a particularly popular MTG card. As soon as the Streets of New Capenna Commander decks launched, this card’s value fell off entirely. This isn’t surprising, as most MTG decks can’t make a lot of use out of the toolkit Agent’s Toolkit offers.
Essentially, Agent’s Toolkit gives you four different useful counters that you can put on four different creatures. Once this is all said and done, you can pay to sacrifice it too to draw a card, which is always nice. Getting all this for three mana is a sweet deal; however, most decks simply don’t need it.
Sure, giving a bunch of creatures different buffs is nice, but Commander has tons of cards that provide generally good value. Due to this, Agent’s Toolkit has been left mostly forgotten until the Counter Blitz precon was first announced. As soon as Tidus, Yuna’s Guardian was revealed in mid-February, Toolkit suddenly saw a massive spike in popularity and price.
When you can move around the counters Agent’s Toolkit provides to create one superpowered creature, it’s a lot more exciting. Alternatively, you can put each counter where it’s most effective, rather than having to strategically time which creature you play. This gives the card tons more versatility, which pushes it into the realms of playability.
Notably, Tidus isn’t the first time that Wizards has printed a Commander that can move counters around. That said, there’s no denying that Tidus is popular, which has caused a new rush of demand for copies of Toolkit. As usual, this has pushed the card’s price up, albeit rather steadily.
The Spike
Winding the clocks back a whole six months, before Tidus was first revealed, Agent’s Toolkit was just worth $0.23. This low price point has been fairly consistent for the past few years, as it’s often difficult to use Keyword Counters. Once Tidus was spoiled, however, the price of Toolkit steadily began to creep up.
A massive surge of sales pushed Toolkit up to $0.50; however, the climb didn’t stop there. As you can see on the graph above, sales for this card have been fairly steady since Tidus was revealed. Notably, shortly before the Counter Blitz deck was fully spoiled in mid-May, things ramped up quickly.
Jumping from around $1.40 to $4.75, Agent’s Toolkit quickly became a fairly expensive Commander card. For better or worse, however, it wouldn’t stop there. More recently, this card spiked in price again in mid-June, pushing copies up to a $7.60 average.
Currently, new near-mint listings for Agent’s Toolkit start at $7.84, although that doesn’t include shipping. Factoring in that additional cost, you’ll have to pay at least $9.15 for a copy of Toolkit, and that’s the cheapest you’ll get. Currently, Extended Art copies are even more expensive, with listings starting at $9.87.
Notably, the supply of Agent’s Toolkit is very limited, as there are only 31 normal variant listings left available. As you might expect, the Extended Art variant is even more scarce, with only 23 listings. Due to this, the price spike we’re currently seeing may not be over yet.
The Future
As mentioned, thanks to the low supply of Agent’s Toolkit, there’s a non-zero chance that it gets more expensive in the short term. Low supply has historically caused some pretty obscene price spikes, although a 3256% spike is obviously already pretty big. Even in the past three months alone, Agent’s Toolkit is still up 905%. That being said, while things might continue trending up this week, sales may soon plateau.
Since Toolkit isn’t that amazing as a card, even in a Tidus deck, there will be a point at which it’s simply not worth it. With prices at around $9 already, it’s likely we’re fast approaching that point. As much as Commander may be an expensive format, MTG players still want to get their money’s worth.
Beyond the short term, it seems almost guaranteed that Agent’s Toolkit will fall in price before too long. As with most Commander-based price spikes, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that tastes change over time. When new cards and precons get spoiled, old decks tend to fall out of favor. This, in turn, causes the price of upgrades to crash since they’re no longer in demand.
With this in mind, the future doesn’t look so bright for Agent’s Toolkit. Edge of Eternities might only have two Commander decks, and Marvel’s Spider-Man doesn’t have any, but we’re getting tons of new cards still this year. As a result, it seems like it’ll only be a matter of time before prices end up falling.
Where exactly Agent’s Toolkit will end up price-wise is anyone’s guess at this point. Hitting $10 in the short term seems inevitable, but it could easily lose half that value over time. Ultimately, we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens in the coming weeks and months.
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