The MTG financial markets can be notoriously volatile at times. Whenever a new card gets announced, there’s always a rush to buy the latest and greatest synergistic gems. Similarly, whenever a new deck explodes onto the scene prices can spike to an astronomical degree. Sometimes, however, it seems MTG cards just spike randomly, for basically no reason at all.
Right now, there are a lot of reasons for an MTG card to spike in price. Tarkir: Dragonstorm spoilers are just around the corner, and the Spongebob Secret Lair has been commanding major attention. We even got a new Final Fantasy spoiler not too too long ago. Despite all these exciting prospects, Faerie Bladecrafter is seemingly just spiking because it wants to.
Faerie Bladecrafter
Hailing from the Wilds of Eldraine Commander deck Fae Dominion in 2023, Faerie Bladecrafter is a fairly niche MTG card. Obviously, it’s a great card within a Faerie Typal deck, however, it won’t see much play outside of that. If you don’t have a reliable way to dish out +1/+1 counters, then you won’t get much value from its second ability.
Technically Faerie Bladecrafter could work within a +1/+1 counter-focused deck. Looking at EDHREC, however, the majority of this archetype is green or Selesnya-based. Thankfully, Golgari does see some play, thanks to Skullbriar, the Walking Grave, but it’s nonetheless more of a niche choice.
With this in mind, it’s no wonder that Faerie Bladecrafter doesn’t see a tremendous amount of Commander play. Since it’s only eternal legal, this card doesn’t see a great deal of competitive play either. This hasn’t changed recently too, as there’s not any spicy Legacy Faerie deck running around breaking the meta.
This begs the question, why on earth is Faerie Bladecrafter spiking right now? That’s… a very good question, actually, and we haven’t the foggiest. From what we can see, there are no exciting new synergies with this card or exciting new decks. The last Faerie to be printed, in fact, was in MTG Foundations, so that shouldn’t be causing any spikes.
The Spike
To put it lightly, the spike to Faerie Bladecrafter is incredibly strange. A sensible explanation could be a steady draining of supply, however, that doesn’t work here. On TCGplayer, there are still around 100 copies of each variant available for purchase. There’s not even been a huge rush of sales that would have sellers capitalizing on a demand surge.
By all accounts, it seems that Faerie Bladecrafter shouldn’t be spiking. Yet, over the past month, prices have increased by 240%. In mid-February, this card was selling for $1.10 on average. Now, however, prices have climbed as high as $3.74. What’s even weirder, is that players have sent upwards of $9.98 on a single copy of this card.
Thankfully, the standard price of Faerie Bladecrafter is a long way from that near $10 peak. Right now, you only really have to pay $0.70 if you want a near-mint copy. While prices do increase steadily from this lowest listing, it’s clear that something is going on. That something, in particular, is TCGplayer Direct.
It isn’t uncommon for TCGplayer Direct to be responsible for amping up a price spike. Since the cards available through this program often sell for a premium, they can heavily affect the market price average. That appears to be exactly what’s happening here, however, it still doesn’t make sense why this would happen.
Typically, we see the greatest influence from TCGplayer Direct when a card is in high demand. Whenever a new deck appears on the scene, many players are happy to pay the premium for the added convenience. For a card like Faerie Bladecrafter, however, that’s both not popular and not in demand, it doesn’t really make any sense.
The Future
Given that this price spike appears to have come from nowhere, it seems incredibly unlikely it’ll stick around. There’s already very little demand for Faerie Bladecrafter, and that’s unlikely to change soon. Unless the Final Fantasy MTG set has a ton of interesting Faerie cards, there’s not much reason for Bladecrafter to be seeing play.
With this in mind, it should only be a matter of time before the price of Faerie Bladecrafter falls. When it does, it’ll likely settle back around the $1.10 mark that it was selling for before. Ultimately, while it’s very unlikely this baffling spike will continue, Faerie Bladecrafter is still a decently powerful card.
Since it’s a fantasy game, Wizards will inevitably print more Faeries in the future. When this happens, the price of Faerie Bladecrafter may shoot up for real this time. Whether or not this will actually happen, however, remains to be seen for now. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens, whenever a new Faerie Commander inevitably gets printed.
