Every so often, a really old card that many players have forgotten about spikes in price thanks to some potent synergies with newer designs. For example, when the Final Fantasy MTG Precons were all the rage, Spike Cannibal from way back in Exodus ballooned in price as a dynamic hate piece versus the Counter Blitz deck.
Today, we have a card printed 26 years ago to share that has risen in value considerably. Despite Edge of Eternities being all the rage right now, this card is at its best when paired with a specific Final Fantasy Commander.
Honor the Fallen
The card we’re discussing is Honor the Fallen. This weird piece of tech came out in Mercadian Masques and is extremely narrow. In most life gain Commander decks, there are simply better options.
Many life gain decks, such as those utilizing Karlov of the Ghost Council or Amalia Benavides Aguirre, reward you for being able to repeatedly gain life. Honor the Fallen only provides a one-time payoff.
At the same time, unless your opponents are naturally fueling their graveyards, there’s a good chance this instant won’t actually gain you much life at all. Compared to cards that reliably give you a huge life buffer such as Beacon of Immortality, Honor the Fallen falls short.
The Commander who can completely twist this narrative, however, is Hope Estheim. Hope Estheim encourages you to gain as much life as humanly possible. From there, your payoff is getting to Mill each opponent based on the amount of life you gained each turn.
This means that once you get your engine rolling, your opponents will naturally be filling their graveyards with creatures. Over time, Honor the Fallen threatens to gain you a boatload of life and potentially serve as a finishing blow.
On top of that, having the luxury of exiling all creatures from opposing graveyards can mess with any graveyard shenanigans. One downside of Milling your opponents is that you’re enabling Reanimator decks and the like. As an instant, casting Honor the Fallen in response to a reanimation effect may completely blow them out.
Besides Hope Estheim, a couple other Commanders that make decent use of Honor the Fallen include Ketramose, the New Dawn and The Gaffer. Honor the Fallen will have Ketramose attacking in no time and triggers The Gaffer’s card draw ability on an opponent’s turn for cheap. Nonetheless, no decks want this old card more than Hope Estheim shells.
The Spike
The graph above notably reflects the sales and price spike for moderately played copies of Honor the Fallen, but we’ll be discussing all conditions for the card in the details below. The market average for Near Mint condition has not yet caught up to current sales at the time of writing.
For almost the entirety of the last year, Honor the Fallen’s price has hovered well below $1. It wasn’t until the beginning of July that the instant’s market price eclipsed this amount, according to TCGplayer. Between July and August, the card managed to rise to nearly $2, which still isn’t a huge increase.
However, between August 4th and today, where things currently stand, the market price for Honor the Fallen would spike from just over $2 to $5.87. Demand for the card has been consistent, but not overwhelming throughout the last month, meaning that the price increase is likely due to a squeeze on supply instead of a massive increase in demand.
At the time of writing, there are a few poorly conditioned Honor the Fallen available for a bargain, but, for the most part, almost all listings for this card are above $9. Recent sales suggest that Honor the Fallen is consistently selling in between $7 and $9, with a few outliers at higher price points. This is likely the price you’ll be looking at if you want the card for yourself in the near future, at least in moderately played or worse condition.
In the last two days, Honor the Fallen sold for $10.95 or higher multiple times in better condition, showcasing an 820% price spike since the card’s lowest price point in the last month. Foil treatments are significantly rarer, and current listings reflect that with prices starting at $20.
An Interesting Trend
Overall, Honor the Fallen’s spike is an interesting case. Final Fantasy MTG was released back in June. For a card that clearly synergizes best with a Final Fantasy legend to see a demand increase and a spike nearly two months later is a bit strange. While Edge of Eternities did bring some support for the deck, such as Space-Time Anomaly, there doesn’t seem to be any major reason why Honor the Fallen would spike now.
It’s possible such an old card flew under the radar and took some recent discovery for players to ultimately get excited about it. After all, the aforementioned Spike Cannibal didn’t spike until mid-July, which is still well after the Final Fantasy Precons became available for purchase.
Given that Honor the Fallen isn’t a slam dunk in generic life gain Commander strategies, as hype for Hope Estheim dies down, there’s a good chance Honor the Fallen’s price will slowly decline. At the same time, though, with no reprints in sight, it may take a while for this nifty tool to circulate more in the secondary market. It’s impossible to truly tell the future, but Honor the Fallen seems a little too niche to stick around at these higher price points.
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