While MTG Marvel Super Heroes has since taken the internet by storm, it wasn’t long ago that an unexpected ban announcement did the same. With four massive Modern changes, one of Magic’s biggest formats is changing quickly. Between bans and unbans, all kinds of old decks are now being brought back to the forefront. Thanks to this, some cards that are getting more popular, like Generous Ent, are now rising in price.
MTG Generous Ent
In most cases, Generous Ent is not a very powerful creature. The card is, frankly, quite poor on-rate in most constructed formats, offering an ok creature for six mana. Forestcycling, however, makes this card playable, allowing you to repurpose Generous Ent for a land in the early game. This gives the card some flexibility, allowing it to either fulfill the role of a curvetopper or a mana fixing.
This is doubly true for decks that can reanimate Generous Ent, like Modern’s Living End archetype. Using its namesake spell, Generous Ent can be brought back into play following its Forestcycling ability. While this archetype has been part of Modern for quite some time, the unbanning of Violent Outburst just made it a lot more competitive. Living End can now be cast for three mana at instant speed, increasing the popularity of the strategy immensely.
Thanks to this unbanning, Living End is now putting up consistent results in Modern. With dozens of league 5-0s and some top-eight Challenge results, the deck certainly feels like it’s back. While Living End hardly seems to be the power outlier that some were worried it would be, the deck is a viable competitive choice in the Modern metagame.
Outside of Modern, Generous Ent sees a massive amount of Pauper play. The creature is much more valuable there for six mana, allowing it to see play in almost every green deck in the format. While totally fine as a fair threat, Exhume is also capable of turboing out the tree as early as turn two. Because of this, despite Living End being the cause of the spike, Generous Ent’s Pauper play may have also triggered a buyout.
The Spike
Despite a bizarre buyout, Generous Ent’s price tag didn’t start fluctuating until Violent Outburst was unbanned on May 18th. This is, in part, thanks to steady demand throughout, with 20 copies of the card being moved daily. Now, the cheapest near-mint copy of Generous Ent is available for $4.04 after shipping, representing a 213% price spike from the $1.29 pricepoint a month ago.
There are some slight discounts for lightly played, but they aren’t worth writing home about. With Generous Ent available for $3.53 at the absolute lowest price, you’re likely better off just getting the card in better condition. If you want to splurge, however, you can find Showcase Scroll Generous Ents starting at $8.
A Long Future Ahead
Thanks to seeing a wide variety of play, Generous Ent feels like a card that should get more expensive over time. On top of seeing Modern play and being a Pauper super-staple, Generous Ent is also popular in Commander, appearing over 28,400 different decks. Thanks to this, as supply for the card dries up, there’s a fair chance that it could get more expensive.
That said, with The Hobbit right around the corner, Wizards of the Coast has the perfect opportunity to reprint Generous Ent. While the card is quite powerful, it still seems in line with Standard’s current power level, making this a real possibility. Should Generous Ent get reprinted, its price tag should plummet to the ground, as a common should.
All of that said, as usual, it’s impossible to tell the future, especially with something like Magic’s secondary market. For all we know, Generous Ent could become competitively irrelevant overnight, dropping the card’s price to rock bottom. For now, though, only time will tell for sure what happens to this Ent.
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