As expected, it hasn’t taken long for the new Edge of Eternities Commander decks to cause some serious market movements. Yesterday, following the reveal of the World Shaper precon, Zask, Skittering Swarmlord spiked hard in price. Today, now that the Counter Intelligence deck has been revealed, it’s the turn of Filigree Vector.
Filigree Vector
Hailing from the March of the Machine Commander decks, Filigree Vector is a fantastic upgrade to Counter Intelligence. Yesterday, in fact, we highlighted how Wizards really missed an opportunity to reprint it. While it’s not the most expensive counter-focused MTG card, it offers everything the Counter Intelligence Precon could want.
For starters, Filigree Vector can dish out +1/+1 and charge counters across your entire board. Given that the central theme of Counter Intelligence is based on these types of counters, this is a pretty strong effect. It’s so strong that it could be worthwhile to bounce Vector repeatedly; however, the deck doesn’t run these effects by default.
Thankfully, bouncing Filigree Vector isn’t the only way to get additional value out of it. So long as you have extra artifacts lying around, Vector offers an easy Proliferate effect too. While this seems all well and good, as it is a powerful effect, it’s not perfect in Counter Intelligence.
In Commander, it’s not rare for players to have an abundance of Treasure, Food, or Clue tokens. Throw the new Lander Tokens into the mix too, and there should be no shortage of artifacts to sacrifice. Counter Intelligence, however, runs very few powerful token artifact generators. Your best bet is Threefold Thunderhulk, but that’s hardly the most exciting synergy.
Thankfully, you can still use Filigree Vector’s second ability situationally since the deck is almost entirely artifact creatures. Even if you don’t use this effect, however, dishing out counters to your entire board is still massively powerful. As a result. It’s no wonder that MTG players have been rushing to pick up copies of Vector.
The Spike
For the longest time, Filigree Vector has hardly been the most popular MTG card in Commander. According to EDHREC, Vector is largely played alongside Brimaz, Blight of Oreskos, as part of the Growing Threat precon. As you might expect, a few Artifact-themed and Proliferate-focused decks also run Vector, but it’s by no means a staple.
Due to this low demand, Filigree Vector has been fairly inexpensive for a long while. This time last month, Vector was selling for around $2.63 on average. As you can see above, there’s not a tremendous amount of consistent interest, although occasional peaks do happen. In the lead up to the recent precon reveals, however, it seemed players have been starting to invest.
Anyone who has been investing in Filigree Vector is sitting pretty right now. Following the reveal that it wasn’t reprinted in Counter Intelligence, demand for Vector has shot up. As usual, this has caused the card’s spike to spike dramatically overnight. What was once a sub $3 MTG card is now selling for just under $14.
While the supply of Filigree Vector copies has been drained dramatically, thankfully, there are a few deals to be had. The Extended Art variant of Vector, for instance, still has a few cheaper copies left available on the market. These, however, are also in short supply, as there are only five sub $10 listings available.
The Future
While there’s no denying that Filigree Vector is now an expensive MTG card, the real question is whether or not this price will hold. As usual, this is a rather difficult question to answer, since we sadly can’t predict the future. That said, we can look back at past trends to try and determine what happens next.
In the short term, Filigree Vector will likely continue to spike in price, at least a little. High demand and low supply is the perfect recipe for an expensive MTG card, after all. Looking further ahead, however, the waters start to get rather murky.
On the one hand. Vector isn’t exactly the strongest card in Commander. While it can dish out counters, charge counters importantly, the vast majority of decks don’t need this effect. Edge of Eternities and the Counter Intelligence precon will change that somewhat, but it’ll hardly reinvent the format.
Due to this, you may expect the price of Vector to drop before too long; however, that’s no guarantee either. Looking back at past price spikes, Commander exclusive cards tend to hold their value rather well. Since the supply of these cards is limited, and not everyone deconstructs decks, prices can remain high.
That said, prices are unlikely to remain at the current peak forever. A jump from $3 to $14 is no small feat, after all. Subsequently, we can surely expect prices to end up a little lower than they are now, even if that’s around the $10 mark. Ultimately, this is just a prediction, so we’ll have to wait and see what actually happens.
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