It’s no secret that The One Ring is one of the most powerful cards you can play in Commander. It’s colorless, protects you on the turn it comes down, and can singlehandedly win the game by drawing a ton of cards for cheap. The card is so powerful, in fact, that it has become a Game Changer. Sadly, The One Ring also happens to be a mythic from a Universes Beyond set, making it extremely expensive. $75-$80 is a heck of a lot of spend on a Magic card, but if you’re willing to go without all of One Ring’s perks, you can find a similar effect for significantly cheaper.
After being highlighted by MTG content creator BenbatemanMTG, interest in Insight Engine, from the Edge of Eternities Counter Intelligence Commander Precon, is at an all-time high. It’s not quite as powerful as The One Ring, but in the right deck, it can do just as much work.
Insight Engine MTG
For three mana, Insight Engine offers a very similar draw effect to The One Ring. As long as you’re activating this card turn by turn, you’ll continually draw one more card per activation for just two mana. This can scale up quickly, especially with some support. That said, even without support, Insight Engine is worth your time if you can manage to activate it three or more times. While Insight Engine does pale in comparison to the aforementioned Game Changer, the amount of cards this card offers is easily worth the two mana activation effect, especially if you have some additional synergies with it.
Unlike The One Ring, Insight Engine uses a more universal counter type to track its draws. Charge Counters are easily abusable thanks to some existing support, allowing Insight Engine to scale ahead of schedule easily. Other cards that appear in the Counter Intelligence Precon, like Coretapper and the deck’s face Commander Inspirit, Flagship Vessel, can add additional Charge counters to Insight Engine, allowing it to draw a lot of cards quickly. You can also move Charge Counters around from other artifacts like Everflowing Chalice, using effects like Nesting Grounds. Later in the game, you’ll likely need more cards than mana, and this interaction can help repurpose your Charge Counters to ensure they’re doing as much work as possible.
Otherwise, Proliferating counters is an easy way to accelerate Insight Engine’s value, and lots of cards from Counter Intelligence are equipped to maximize this interaction. Patrolling Peacemaker is a natural upgrade to any deck that uses counters, thanks to Proliferating based on your opponent’s actions, and it works very well with Insight Engine.
Surge Conductor, on the other hand, is the absolute perfect card for Insight Engine, so long as there’s enough other artifact support in your Commander deck. If you play Insight Engine with a Surge Conductor already in play, you can draw two cards right off its first activation. Play some more artifacts, and you can be refilling your hand in no time.
Counter Intelligence, a Commander deck that offers both artifact and counter-based strategies, is the perfect home for Insight Engine, or The One Ring, for that matter, but this budget option can see play in a lot of other strategies.
Using Untap Shenanigans
Untapping Insight Engine on each player’s turn is yet another way to accelerate the value that the card can provide. So long as you have the mana to keep activating Insight Engine, you can resolve the artifact and draw six cards before your next turn even starts.
Unwinding Clock is the easiest and most on-theme way to accomplish this, allowing Insight Engine to untap every turn. So long as your deck has an artifact theme, you won’t need to worry about paying Engine’s activated costs either, since Unwinding Clock will also untap your mana rocks every turn.
If you’re running Insight Engine outside of an artifact focus, Seedborn Muse is the easiest way to maximize this card. Muse will untap all of your permanents each turn, including your lands, allowing Insight Engine to draw cards with ease. You’ll even be able to cast cards from what you draw with your leftover mana.
These untap shenanigans, especially when combined with Proliferation shenanigans, let Insight Engine do a lot of work, especially with Lady Octopus Inspired Inventor. Appearing in 40% of Lady Octopus Commander decks according to EDHREC, Insight Engine does everything that Lady Octopus needs in one card. The drawn cards give Lady Octopus more cards to cheat with and accelerate her own activated ability. Lady Octopus can cheat in Insight Engine itself, making the card as efficient as possible.
A Sudden Rush of Excitement
There’s no question that Insight Engine is a strictly worse One Ring, but it can still draw an absurd amount of cards. People are becoming more aware of it, too, thanks to BenbatemanMTG. After spotlighting the card, copies of Insight Engine have begun selling like hotcakes. In the past two days, over 200 copies have been sold, which is a meteoric rise considering ten copies selling per day used to be the average.
Despite this, the secondary market value of Insight Engine is yet to creep up, and there’s plenty of supply left for players to purchase. 668 copies of the base variant found in Counter Intelligence are still available on TCGplayer at the time of writing. For better or worse, this means current demand would need to remain steady for a long time to have a meaningful impact on price.
Even before a price spike happens, it’s clear there’s a lot of interest in Insight Engine. As a three-mana draw engine in Commander, this just makes sense. Thanks to this, it does feel like there’s a real chance the card’s price may end up climbing before too long. Whether or not this happens, however, remains to be seen.