Nowadays, it feels like every MTG set that releases has a card that impacts a format, at least for some time. Even March of the Machine, the Aftermath, the worst set of the year by far, featured Nissa, Resurgent Animist, which impacted Modern until Up the Beanstalk completely took it over.
The Lost Caverns of Ixalan had a few cards that heavily impacted the Pioneer format. Geological Appraiser impacted the format so harshly that it got banned in short order. Quintorius Kand is still floating around as a one-card combo, but that deck isn’t nearly as potent as the Appraiser deck was.
After the bans have come and gone, the most impactful card from The Lost Caverns of Ixalan may be Inti, Seneschal of the Sun. Well, that or Tishana’s Tidebinder.
Tishana’s Tidebinder caught on rather quickly, showing quite a powerful Modern presence. It took until the unban of Smuggler’s Copter, however, for Inti to show its true potential. Now that it’s here, players are starting to buy into it.
Inti, Seneschal of the Sun
Inti saw some interest as soon as the card was spoiled in The Lost Caverns of Ixalan spoiler season, but few expected the card to even make significant Pioneer impact. While Inti is still somewhat niche in Modern, the card is all over the place in Pioneer. This, in large part, is thanks to the sudden unban of Smuggler’s Copter. Inti generates value when discarding cards, and Copter’s loot ability puts Inti into overdrive.
The combination of Smuggler’s Copter and Inti has created a new type of Rakdos Midrange deck in the Pioneer format that top-eighted last weekend’s gigantic 1300-person Atlanta Regional Championship. This variation of the deck plays lower to the ground with threats like Inti and the aforementioned Copter to present a quicker clock. The card selection and generation from Inti and the Copter mean that the deck almost always has something to do, allowing Rakdos to get aggressive while not running out of steam. Of course, Inti can be destroyed, however.
While a majority of Inti’s play is in Pioneer Rakdos Midrange lists, the card sees a healthy amount of play in Dual Commander (and is decent in Commander as a result), and sees fringe play in aggressive Standard strategies and rogue Modern strategies like Jeskai Ascendancy combo.
Inti, Seneschal of the Sun, for a small period of time, was only worth $1. Any who got their playset for this price seriously cashed in, as the card is beginning to sell for over $5 on TCGplayer just a month later. The market value of this card sits at $4.59 at the moment for its normal variant, but Inti is commonly selling for $4.50-6 currently.
The booster fun variant of Inti is selling for a bit less, commonly selling for between $2-3.
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Cursed Totem
Many players have bizarrely identified that Cursed Totem is continuing to see price spikes. This began a few weeks ago with an older variant of the card but seems to have picked back up, as foil iterations of the Modern Horizons 2 reprint have blasted off into the stratosphere.
Cursed Totem mainly sees play in Modern as a sideboard card. Thanks to the addition of Agatha’s Soul Cauldron in Yawgmoth combo strategies, cards like Pithing Needle that shut down effects associated with a named card are no longer good enough to combat the archetype. You can simply exile your Yawgmoth under the Soul Cauldron and grant your other creatures the same activated ability, rendering the Needle moot.
Since the entire Yawgmoth strategy revolves around the activated abilities of creatures, Cursed Totem can reliably shut the deck down, regardless of whether Yawgmoth is Cauldroned or not. It doesn’t matter which creature has Yawgmoth’s ability if none of them can use it anyway.
The foil variant of Modern Horizons 2’s Cursed Totem began spiking in price in mid-November, but really began to take off at the beginning of December. Originally at $8, Cursed Totem’s market value spiked to $23! Cursed Totem’s nonfoil variants have also been spiking, but the price difference isn’t quite as drastic.
The One Ring Plummets
If you’re in the market for a copy of The One Ring, now may be a good time to pick one up, as long as you don’t mind the bundle variant of the card.
The One Ring not only sees tons of Modern play, but its also one of the best cards in the entire Commander format. Granting protection the turn it touches down, and offering to draw a ludicrous amount of cards, there’s little that The One Ring can’t achieve.
Understandably, a card this powerful is bound to be rather expensive. The standard variant of The One Ring currently has a market value of $53! The borderless poster variant of The One Ring still has a market value over $100!
The cheapest version of the The One Ring, however, is available in the Lord of the Rings bundles. Considering how popular this card turned out to be, making one a guarantee in a sealed product was a slam dunk move from Wizards of the Coast.
This copy of The One Ring has been falling in price quite heavily. While the normal variant of the Ring still has a market value of $53, this one has a current market value of $33!
The card may continue to drop, but if you’re in the market to acquire one of the hottest MTG cards in the game right now, $33 is not a bad deal for The One Ring at all! Copies of the card have been selling for as little as $20, so keep an eye out for deals.
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Godzilla Cards Picking Up Interest
Thanks to the hit move Godzilla Minus One, MTG players seem eager to explore the world of Godzilla on the tabletop. A crossover for these titanic giants was offered to players back in Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths, and a majority of those crossover cards are ticking up in price. If you want to read more about it, check it out here.
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