Over the past year, the Premodern format has continued to grow more and more popular. What started as a small, community-created format has since exploded to a fan-favorite environment. Its arrival on Magic Online only helped the format garner more attention than it already had, too.
Premodern’s continued growth has recently started to cause some major price spikes to numerous format staples. Now, it appears that Engineered Plague is next in line.
MTG Engineered Plague
As a whole, Engineered Plague provides a rather narrow effect. In order for Engineered Plague to truly pull its weight, your opponents need to be playing with lots of small creatures that all share a specific type. Yet, against opposing typal strategies, Engineered Plague threatens to completely take over the game.
Where Engineered Plague shines brightest is undoubtedly in Premodern sideboards. Many of the top black strategies in the format, including Mono-Black Midrange and Dimir Psychatog, commonly play the card in the board. While the card is meant to keep go-wide Typal decks like Elves in check, Premodern Goblins is certainly the biggest cause to this card’s high level of play. Goblins, in particular, are chock full of one-toughness creatures, like Goblin Lackey, that accelerate the board quickly. Having a one-card catchup mechanism that can even clean up Siege-Gang Commander tokens is a big deal.
Outside of Premodern, Engineered Plague does sometimes show up in Legacy Smallpox decklists as well. Given that many traditional typal shells like Elves and Goblins in Legacy have died down in recent years, however, the card is no longer a popular sideboard option in that format. Engineered Plague also makes a small EDH splash since it combines nicely with cards like Maha, Its Feathers Night. Even then, though, it only shows up in 1,440 decks according to EDHREC. With this in mind, there’s no doubting that Premodern’s increased popularity has been the driving force behind this enchantment’s rising price tag.
The Spike
For most of the last year, Engineered Plague has remained quite cheap. Its lack of demand, coupled with its reasonably high levels of supply, had kept it comfortably below $2 until December of 2025. Once Premodern was announced as a Magic Online format, Engineered Plague’s average market value began to increase alongside rising demand.
The ban to Parallax Tide only further heightened Engineered Plague’s appeal, too. Slower black decks have historically struggled to battle against the one-sided Armageddon. With it out of the picture, the typical homes for Engineered Plague are better positioned. Thanks in part to this, recent sales for near mint Engineered Plagues hover around the $10.47 mark, representing a 278% price spike since Premodern’s recent ban.
Importantly, though, there are a couple ways to pick up Engineered Plague at a bit of a discount. For players still looking for non-foil copies in near mint condition, the Urza’s Legacy variant is selling for $8.99 at the time of writing. While there unfortunately isn’t a big dropoff for moderately played or even heavily played copies from either set, there are at least damaged Seventh Edition copies on sale starting at $3.30, including shipping.
The Future
As is typical with most Premodern spikes, accurately predicting how Engineered Plague’s price will shift is extremely difficult. Premodern’s demand only seems to be rising for the time being, which in theory could keep the card’s price going up for the foreseeable future.
At the same time, though, Engineered Plague’s inability to make a big splash in any other format means that its value may be capped at a certain point. The supply of this card isn’t quite as scarce as other Premodern cards, either, thanks to it already seeing one reprint.
On the topic of reprints, a new one could plummet Engineered Plague’s value singlehandedly. With new bonus sheet printings inevitably on the horizon, it wouldn’t be too shocking if some Premodern staples eventually get reprinted.
Nonetheless, there’s no current indication that Engineered Plague will be reprinted in the near future. All of these factors make it tough to know exactly how Engineered Plague’s price tag will fluctuate moving forward. As per usual, we’ll just have to wait and see how things shake out.
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