We’re only a few days into Magic: The Gathering’s Final Fantasy preview season, and already the secondary market is starting to respond. This was always going to be a financially impactful set, given how well it’s been selling on pre-order despite massively inflated prices. Yesterday a key piece of Saga support spiked, and today the set’s new transform creatures got some love. Because of these cards Moonmist, a forgotten MTG common from original Innistrad, is experiencing a massive price spike.
Over the last few days, Moonmist has gone from janky bulk to a near $5 card. That’s a big move, and it really highlights how excited players are about Final Fantasy. Whether it ends up being a useful tool for transform decks or not remains to be seen, but for now players are boarding the Moonmist hype train en masse. If you were a regular player back in 2011, it may be time to go through your bulk boxes.
Horrors Of The Past
- Mana Value: 1G
- Rarity: Common
- Type: Instant
- Card Text: Transform all Humans. Prevent all combat damage that would be dealt this turn by creatures other than Werewolves and Wolves. (Only double-faced cards can be transformed.)
On the surface, Moonmist really isn’t the kind of MTG card you’d expect to see a price spike for. It was originally printed as a support piece for the Werewolves in Innistrad. Even back then, 14 years ago, it was too weak to see play. While flipping your Werewolves for free at instant speed can sometimes be a blowout, it just wasn’t worth a full card slot. It didn’t help that Werewolves was never really a popular deck, either.
Fast forward to today, and Final Fantasy is bringing us a new wave of Humans that transform into other creatures. Legends like Terra, Magical Adept, Clive, Ifrit’s Dominant, etc. While Moonmist was clearly meant to work with Werewolves, it actually flips any Human creature with a back side, no matter the type. This means it’s a way to circumvent the transform conditions on these new legends, some of which are pretty steep.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen new transform cards, of course. Each Innistrad set after the original has had some new ones, and the Magic Origins flip ‘walkers were another great example. In each of those cases, however, the juice simply wasn’t worth the squeeze. Either the transform conditions were simple enough to fulfill yourself, or the payoff on the back side wasn’t big enough to justify using a card to reach it.
Final Fantasy totally flips that script. Not only are the transform conditions here quite difficult, often demanding chunky mana investments at sorcery speed, but the back sides are incredibly powerful too. Flipping Clive gets you a 9/9 that fights a creature right away, for example, while flipping Sephiroth gets you a Blood Artist Emblem.
The MTG Moonmist Price Spike
For this reason, many Magic: The Gathering players are convinced Moonmist is going to enable power plays with the new cards. As is often the case with retroactive power-ups like this, the price of the card has shot way up. Just a few days ago, you could get a copy of Moonmist from original Innistrad for around $0.27. Today, after players have had a chance to build up the hype, the same copy will cost you around $4.89.
That’s a price spike of 2026%, which is pretty incredible to see for an MTG card like Moonmist. A big part of that is undoubtedly the card’s limited printings. While it is a common, it’s only been reprinted once since original Innistrad, and that was on The List. The List reprints aren’t exactly known for adding a lot of supply, which explains why the original has shot up so rapidly.
That said, The List version of the card is actually a lot more affordable at time of writing. It’s experienced a spike too, of course, but it’s still sitting at around $1.10 as opposed to nearly $5. This may just be an indication that the spike is young, and still has more to climb. It could also be an anomaly with the supply, since The List is much more recent.
List printings aren’t typically cheaper than their originals like this. In fact, in some cases, they’re actually more expensive. Regardless, The List version is the one to buy for now. Just so long as you don’t mind a little icon in the corner of your card.
Flippin’ Brilliant!
At time of writing, the Moonmist MTG price spike has really only been going on for a couple of days. This means it’s in a pretty volatile place in terms of long-term impact. From here, it could climb further and stabilize or crash back down as the bubble bursts and players cool on the card.
It’s hard to say which is more likely, but I’m leaning towards the latter. Moonmist is a nice piece in Commander decks built around the new Final Fantasy flip legends. Outside of that, however, it’s probably too niche to be worth a slot. Even in such a deck, it’s probably better just to run another two-mana ramp piece to help you flip your creatures yourself instead of this.
On the other hand, the specificity of the effect may keep the price high even if it doesn’t catch on. Because it refers to transform, there’s really nowhere Wizards can reprint this outside of a return to Innistrad. It missed the Innistrad Remastered window earlier this year, too, so the next opportunity could be a ways off.
There are also some genuinely powerful interactions with the card, even just with the small pool of flip legends we’ve seen so far. Most decks can utilize a Fog effect at some point in a game, too. If you’re in green and running a couple of flip legends, it could be worth considering.
For now, I wouldn’t recommend getting in on the card at $5. There’s a good chance you’ll get burned buying at that price, especially this early on in a spike. Grab The List version instead if you really want to try it out, but don’t look at this as an easy financial win.
