Last week, many MTG players, including ourselves, cottoned on to the fact that Insight Engine is actually quite good. Far beyond just being useful in some niche Commander decks, this card feels like a retrain of an overpowered icon. Admittedly, while this card follows in The One Ring’s footsteps, it is missing a few key features that hold it back.
Despite these drawbacks, Insight Engine is still a very powerful MTG card that’s worthy of attention. Now that MTG players are giving it exactly that, we’ve seen its price spike dramatically in the past week. With supply at an all-time low, there’s a non-zero chance this spike isn’t over yet, either.
Insight Engine
For three mana, Insight Engine can potentially give you all the card draw you’d ever need. Unfortunately, to get all this card draw, you do have to pay for it each turn. Unlike The One Ring, Insight Engine costs two to activate, which is a lot worse than paying with life. That said, it doesn’t take long for this card to be well worth the price.
Even without any extra help, the scaling on Insight Engine makes it an absolute card draw machine. Admittedly, paying five for one card is terrible, but the more times you activate it, the better things get. After four activations, you’ll have gotten ten cards for 11 mana, and it only gets better after that.
Beyond just being powerful on its own, Insight Engine also works wonders with any Proliferate or counter-doubling effect. Unsurprisingly, this makes the card play perfectly alongside Kilo, Apogee Mind. For better or worse, Wizards was well aware of this synergy, as Insight Engine was printed in the Counter Intelligence precon alongside Kilo.
Outside of the MTG precon it was printed in, Insight Engine is slowly being adopted elsewhere. Most recently, Lady Octopus, Inspired Inventor has become the go-to place to play this card, thanks to its artifact cheating shenanigans. Alternatively, Tekuthal, Inquiry Dominus is also a fairly popular home for Insight Engine thanks to its Proliferate potential.
While Insight Engine does have a few solid homes, it hasn’t become an auto-include in every blue Commander deck overnight. Despite this, there’s nonetheless been a steady surge in demand, which has pushed prices up.
The Spike
This time last week, when we were pointing out the potential of Insight Engine, copies were selling for around $0.89 on average. This price point was largely thanks to the immense amount of supply that was readily available on TCGplayer. When we first covered this card, there were over 600 copies still available, although sales had started to increase.
Since our article highlighting the card, sales have admittedly slowed down somewhat. While the peak of 200 sales per day was temporary, strong sales did continue long enough to drain the supply. Currently, there are only 13 listings for near-mint normal variant copies of Insight Engine on TCGplayer, which only offer 60 copies in total.
Technically, prices for these near-mint copies start at $0.89; however, that doesn’t take shipping into account. When including shipping, the price suddenly jumps up to $5.88, which has been the price of most recent sales. This marks a 560% price spike over the past week, but thankfully, there are still some deals to be found.
Currently, the Extended Art variant of Insight Engine is selling for significantly less than the default frame. Thanks to being found in Collector Boosters, it appears there’s more supply of this variant available, despite arguably being more desirable. With 87 near-mint listings on TCGplayer offering 220 copies, there’s still a fair amount of supply available.
Thanks to this increased supply, prices for this variant start at just $2.21 right now. With sales for this variant looking strong, however, it may not stay at this price for long. Notably, despite being found in Collector Boosters, there aren’t any foil variants of Insight Engine to further increase supply or collectability.
The Future
In the short term, it feels like Insight Engine is bound to get more expensive. As much as sales have slowed down recently, the lack of supply makes a continued price increase look inevitable. At the very least, the Extended Art variant is bound to catch up in price eventually as players snag the few remaining bargains.
After that, predicting the future unfortunately becomes much harder. Realistically, it feels like Insight Engine is strong enough to maintain a $5 or even $10 price point, but that’s hardly guaranteed. It all depends on whether or not MTG players have actually discovered this card’s potential, or if investors are trying to get ahead of things.
If the former has happened, then Insight Engine could soon be established as one of the best draw engines in MTG. Should investors be in control, however, then a lack of genuine demand will likely cause the price to crash eventually. That said, holding this card as a long-term spec should Charge Counters return could prove profitable in the long run.
Ultimately, as always, we sadly can’t predict the future. Due to this, we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens in the coming weeks and months. Even with that in mind, don’t be surprised if you end up seeing Insight Engine more around your Commander tables going forward.
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