The Edge of Eternities Commander preconstructed decks are, perhaps, some of the best Commander products that Wizards of the Coast has ever created. On top of being incredibly synergistic, with just a few upgrades, it’s easy to tune World Shaper into a deck that can compete with much stronger Commander decks built from scratch. That makes them a great way for newer MTG players to get into Commander, which is exactly what these decks should be trying to do.
While upgrading World Shaper into something much stronger is easy, there are a few key cards needed in order to turn this precon into a combo machine. Zuran Orb is perhaps the most necessary of those.
MTG Zuran Orb
Zuran Orb has a long history of appearing in various combo strategies across formats. Traditionally paired with Titania, Protector of Argoth to make a massive board of elementals, Zuran Orb commonly appears in decks that either care about sacrificing permanents or want to reanimate a series of lands from the graveyard. The card commonly sees play in cEDH decks like Korvold, Fae-Cursed King and Lumra, Bellow of the Woods as a result.
Since World Shaper cares about sacrificing lands and bringing them back, Zuran Orb is the perfect card to completely revolutionize how the deck works. With Hearthhull, the Worldseed in play and fully Stationed, each land you sacrifice will cause your opponents to lose two life. Sacrifice all of your lands to deal massive damage, and bring them all back with an effect like Splendid Reclamation. This fuels your Zuran Orb with more ammo, easily closing a majority of games. As long as you have 10 lands, this little combo will rob your opponents of all their life. In a deck focused on ramp, this is rather easy to achieve.
While Zuran Orb is mainly used for ending the game out of nowhere, the artifact can also be a helpful source of incremental lifegain when necessary. This isn’t really the reason to play Zuran Orb, but in my experience, tuned Hearthhull decks at a Commander Bracket 3 table need to be focused. Otherwise, the Hearthhull player will just win the game from nowhere. When you’re being focused, the incremental life can help you set up another board to protect your life total while you assemble the rest of your pieces.
Zuran Orb is one of the most important cards to turn World Shaper into a fun land-based precon into a combo engine that can end the game out of nowhere on turns 4-5. As one of the most important upgrades for this deck, a price spike for Zuran Orb makes sense.
The Spike
There are a few printings of Zuran Orb out there, and they all used to vary quite heavily in price. The recently reprinted Modern Horizons 2 variant of Zuran Orb was significantly cheaper than the rest. This spike brings the price of this Zuran Orb copy closer in line with the other, rarer variants.
At the beginning of July, this Modern Horizons 2 Zuran Orb was only worth about $0.42. When more details for World Shaper began to be revealed, a massive amount of Zuran Orbs sold out relatively quickly. Between July 6th and July 11th, 879 copies of this Zuran Orb variant exchanged hands on TCGplayer alone. This lines up with the reveal of the full World Shaper decklist on July 9th, solidifying the deck as the reason for this spike.
Since then, Zuran Orb slowly spiked to a market high of $2.10 over the last few months, showcasing a 400% price spike, but things are starting to cool down slightly. According to recent sales, Zuran Orbs in near mint condition are generally selling for $2 at the moment.
This is still significantly cheaper than the other three variants of Zuran Orb available to players, mostly due to a difference in supply. A near mint Zuran Orb from Ice Age generally costs between $3 and $4, according to recent sales. This is the only other copy of Zuran Orb that was printed in an MTG set, and Ice Age was printed 29 years ago.
The other two printings of Zuran Orb are a bit more scarce. One is a From the Vault promo that has a market value of $16.23, but generally seems to sell for between $17 and $19 according to recent sales. The other is a very recent Secret Lair reprinting from Alien Auroras, which goes for about $11.23 for its nonfoil variant, and $19 for its Galaxy Foil one. Notably, Zuran Orb was one of the Galaxy Foil cards that was unaffected by the poor quality complaints.
While all of these non-Modern Horizons 2 copies have seen price spikes, they’re not nearly as significant as the cheapest variant of the card, which has, by far, seen the most demand of any copy of Zuran Orb.
The Future
As is the case with many of the spikes discussed here recently, Zuran Orb’s financial movement is the result of a Commander product. Spikes caused by Commander-related sources are commonly somewhat temporary. As interest moves away from old cards and towards new ones, cards propped up by past Commander product tend to calm down.
Zuran Orb’s price spike, in particular, is a little steadier than most of these. It’s already beginning to come down, suggesting that the orb is starting to find a price point already, but most spikes for these one-hit wonder Commander cards are very sudden. Zuran Orb’s happened over a longer period of time. This could suggest that Zuran Orb is more likely to find a price point somewhere between its current one and its original starting point instead of crashing back to 45 cents.
All of that said, it’s impossible to tell the future for certain, so this could be entirely inaccurate. Past trends suggest that Zuran Orb is now beginning to find its true price point as demand fades, but anything could really happen. Either way, if you’re looking to upgrade your World Shaper deck, Zuran Orb is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle.
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