Despite MTG Foundations finally launching this week, this set hasn’t been dominating the financial markets. Sure, there are plenty of exciting new cards and even some awesome Commanders, but it’s lacking any kind of precon. Due to this, players aren’t all after the same upgrades, which has mitigated the size of any potential spike.
While Foundations has had surprisingly little impact, for now, the same can’t be said for the Marvel x MTG crossover cards. From the moment the five new mechanically unique cards were unveiled, they’ve been causing all manner of price spikes. With only five new Commanders to pick between, each archetype has seen a great deal of interest from players.
They might not be the strongest, but Captain America, First Avenger is arguably the most interesting Marvel card, at least. Since their reveal, Cap has been consistently causing unexpected equipment spikes all over. With this in mind, it’s no wonder that Bureau Headmaster is spiking right now. If anything, it’s just a wonder they weren’t more expensive sooner.
Bureau Headmaster
- Mana Value: RW
- Rarity: Uncommon
- Card Type: Creature — Human Assassin
- Stats: 2/2
- Card Text: Equipment spells you cast cost 1 less to cast.
Equip abilities you activate cost 1 less to activate.
Bureau Headmaster is a very simple, but also very effective, MTG card. Unlike most modern cards, Bureau Headmaster doesn’t feature a wall of text catering to situational edge cases. Instead, this card only has two lines of text and is just quite simply good in any equipment-focused deck.
With this in mind, Bureau Headmaster is an obvious fit for Captain America, First Avenger decks. This deck wants to be playing a lot of equipment, whether that’s to throw, or just stack up on a major threat. In theory, Cap can do everything himself, since he can equip for free before throwing, but extra support is nonetheless nice.
As fun as Captain America’s throwing shenanigans are, this extra support is really what makes the deck work. At their core, Cap is still an equipment-focused Commander with plenty of room for all the usual staples. You’d be foolish not to be running Puresteel Padadin, Sram, Senior Edificer, and Ardenn, Intrepid Archaeologist.
With these cards in mind, you’ll also want to run a boatload of equipment to scale all your creatures into huge threats. This makes running Bureau Headmaster a welcome piece of added consistency. The cheaper your equipment are, the more you can cast, and equip, each turn. In a deck all about equipment, this is obviously a good thing.
The Spike
This time last month, Bureau Headmaster was selling for just $0.36 on average. We’d call it draft chaff, but the Assassin’s Creed MTG set wasn’t draftable, so that doesn’t really work. Regardless, this card clearly wasn’t in demand, even if it was generally quite useful in equipment-focused decks.
Once the Marvel x MTG crossover was revealed, however, Captain America, First Avenger made equipment decks exciting again. Unsurprisingly, this caused a rush of demand for equipment staples both new and old on October 18th. Looking at Bureau Headmaster’s sales history, in particular, there are multiple huge sales volume spikes around this time.
As usual, high sales tend to lead to low supply, which in turn causes prices to soar before too long. This is exactly what has happened this time around, as supply reached an all-time low at the start of November. Following a blistering day of sales, the price of Bureau Headmaster tripled to a dollar, but it didn’t stop there.
Throughout November, the price of Bureau Headmaster has continued to climb, especially over the past week. Technically, the market price has only hit a peak of $1.62, but recent sales are far higher. Due to the dwindling supply in the face of renewed demand prices now start at $4.17 including shipping. At the time of writing, the highest recorded sales are only at $2.99, however.
Notably, there is only one variant of Bureau Headmaster to purchase, as there’s no foil, borderless, or showcase variant available. In fact, this card can only be acquired as part of the Starter Kit and doesn’t appear in Boosters at all. This makes it rather difficult to get ahold of since this product is hardly the most opened in existence.
A Solid Spec
At the end of the day, Bureau Headmaster definitely isn’t the best MTG card in existence. That said it’s nonetheless a useful utility piece, especially in any in color equipment-focused Commander deck. With this in mind, there could be a fair bit of continued demand for Bureau Headmaster as time goes on.
Should this demand continue, Bureau Headmaster could prove to be rather scarce thanks to their rarity in the Starter Kit. It’s worth remembering that this card is also a Universes Beyond card, and is technically therefore more difficult to reprint. That said, the name Bureau Headmaster isn’t tied to a specific franchise or plane, so Wizards could feasibly reprint it.
For now, it remains to be seen how long this latest price spike will last. The scarcity of supply could result in it keeping some of the new value, but I’d be surprised if it stayed at $3. Ultimately, we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens.
