It’s all go in the world of Commander at the moment. Tarkir: Dragonstorm has hit the scene and is proving to be remarkably popular on all fronts. At the same time, Wizards is teasing a new Secret Lair Commander deck with a strong typal-focused theme. Of course, there’s always more on the horizon, too, with the Final Fantasy MTG set not being too far out.
Despite all these goings on, there’s still no matching the might of Deadpool, Trading Card. From the moment the Deadpool Secret Lair drop was announced and released on April Fools’ Day, players have been enamored. In particular, players can’t get enough of the idea of copying Deadpool to ruin their opponent’s day. This desire has even led players to scrape the bottom of the barrel, picking up some objectively worse MTG cards.
Mirror Gallery
Mirror Gallery is not a very good MTG card. It’s useful, don’t get me wrong, but there are simply cards that do its job better. By every metric, Mirror Box from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is a better card, and it’s not even close. This spiritual successor is cheaper, boasts more abilities, and is even a hell of a lot cheaper, too.
Despite not being the best choice to turn off the legend rule, Mirror Gallery is still useful in Commander. It’s especially useful, in fact, within a Deadpool, Trading Card deck. This is largely thanks to Commander’s deck size, singleton nature, and need for redundancy. If your deck is all about copying legendary creatures, you’ll need as many ways to turn off the Legend Rule as possible.
Since most Deadpool, Trading Card decks seem to be about just copying Deadpool, the extra redundancy is very much welcome. After all, with a card like Mirror Gallery in play, you don’t have to immediately sacrifice your Deadpool copies right after they steal a text box. This lets you actually enjoy using what you’ve stolen rather than just inconveniencing your opponents.
While Mirror Gallery might be worse than other available options, it’s still better than nothing. In Commander, the downsides of this card will very rarely factor in. Five mana is hardly an insurmountable cost, after all, and very few opponents will care about breaking the legend rule themselves.
Due to this, Mirror Gallery is a completely serviceable card that’s worth adding ot the 99. That was the case, at least, when it was still somewhat affordable. Recently, thanks to Deadpool, this card has seen a massive spike in price that may have you thinking twice about using it.
The Spike
Thanks to originally hailing from 2005’s Betrayers of Kamigawa, Mirror Gallery is a rather rare MTG card. To date, this card has only been reprinted once, via The List, which didn’t massively increase overall supply. Due to this, near-mint copies of the card are in short supply, especially following the recent surge in interest.
This lack of supply can most clearly be seen in the graph above for the original Betrayers of Kamigawa variant. While there was a spike on April 1st, only 12 near-mint copies of the card were sold on this day. That might not seem like much, but it’s evidently more than enough to drain supply, priming the inevitable price spike.
A few days later, the cost of Mirror Gallery started to climb from its starting price of around $4. Technically, as you can see above, the market price currently tops out at $13.71, however, that’s not the full story. Current listings for this variant of Mirror Gallery start at $33, and multiple sales have been made at this price.
Thankfully, since it’s slightly more available, The List variant of Mirror Gallery is marginally cheaper. Currently, near-mint condition listings for this card start at around $24, including shipping. Despite this, the market price for this variant has shot up to $29+ thanks to TCGplayer Direct.
Through this convenience-oriented program, players have spent upwards of $49.97 on a single copy of Mirror Gallery. While this has affected the market price of Mirror Gallery, thankfully, you don’t have to spend quite this much. No matter which variant you’re looking at, however, Mirror Gallery certainly isn’t cheap anymore.
The Future
Looking ahead, we can’t imagine that Mirror Gallery will stay this expensive for too long. As much as this card does have its uses in Commander, it’s hardly the best in its class. Unless you’re really going all-in on copying a single legendary creature, like Deadpool, you’re better off sticking to Mirror Box.
Speaking of Mirror Box, that card is currently selling for around $7, so the winner here is clear. As if this isn’t bad enough news for Mirror Gallery, copy-based decks are hardly the most popular archetype in Commander. Usually, it’s better to build decks that synergize and exploit a powerful Commander rather than just repeating its enters ability.
To make matters worse, most individual copy effects don’t even need Mirror Gallery to be useful. Cards like Spark Double and Sakashima of a Thousand Faces both get around the legend rule on their own. Thanks to this, most of the time you’ll never have a need for Mirror Gallery outside of a niche entirely copy-focused strategy.
At the end of the day, while Mirror Gallery seems destined to fall in price, it may not crash entirely. The Betrayers of Kamigawa variant will always be rare, after all, which is always enticing. Even if Mirror Gallery isn’t the strongest staple in MTG, there’s nonetheless an allure to physically rare cards.
Ultimately, we’ll just have to wait and see to find out what kind of fall will happen once the Deadpool demand dissipates. This will presumably happen once the Final Fantasy set gets closer to release, which will draw players’ attention.
