Until recently, Edge of Eternities was unsurprisingly dominating the MTG financial markets. While this set doesn’t seem to have a ton of overpowered staples, players have fallen in love with the setting. Thanks to this, there’s still plenty of demand for the set’s new preconstructed Commander decks, which are helmed by Spacecraft.
Despite being more than deserving of the financial spotlight, recently, another MTG set is back in vogue. In the past couple of days, multiple cards surrounding the Final Fantasy precons have spiked in price. Curiously, both of the recent Final Fantasy flavored price spikes have been for decades-old cards. Thankfully, unlike recent spikes, this one isn’t on the Reserved List, at least.
Spike Cannibal
Unlike many MTG cards from over two decades ago, Spike Cannibal is actually pretty good. On its own, you’re just getting a 1/1 for three, but it’s not hard to break this card. In Commander, especially, this card has a good amount of potential, thanks to having multiple opponents.
Beyond just having more targets in Commander, this format also usually has a fair few +1/+1 counters floating around. Even if your opponents aren’t explicitly leaning into that archetype, long-term buffs are unsurprisingly still popular and useful. As if that wasn’t enough latent potential, Counters Matter is the third most popular theme in Commander, according to EDHREC.
At the very least, if you time your Spike Cannibal right, you should get decent value for mana. Not only will you be left with a pretty sizable creature, albeit a vanilla one, but you’ll deny your opponents resources. As alluded to, this will be especially devastating if your opponent’s deck largely revolves around +1/+1 counters.
As the name suggests, this is exactly the focus of the Counter Blitz deck from Magic’s Final Fantasy crossover. With tons of counter creation, counter moving, and Proliferate triggers, this deck always has tons of counters floating around. This means it’s exceptionally easy to get a ton of value out of Spike Cannibal without much waiting around.
The Spike
When MTG cards suddenly break out, it’s not uncommon for the market price graph on TCGplayer to be a bit behind. Since this metric averages out recent sales, it can often take a bit to show a spike’s true scale. This time around, however, well… we don’t know what has happened here.
Despite what the graph above claims, Spike Cannibal has definitely been selling fairly consistently on TCGplayer. Looking back at recent sales, there was a huge surge in sales yesterday, seemingly causing a buyout. Currently, there are only three listings for near-mint copies of Spike Cannibal on TCGplayer, offering a total of five copies.
Yesterday, you would have been able to pick up a copy of Spike Cannibal for just $0.35. Considering this is a 27-year-old card that has never been reprinted, that doesn’t seem so bad. At the moment, however, you’ll have to pay at least $4.99 for a near-mint copy. As if this wasn’t enough, prices jump to $6.29 after that, where multiple recent sales have been.
Thankfully, if you don’t care about the condition, you can get copies of Spike Cannibal for significantly cheaper. At the moment, heavily played and moderately played copies are available for $0.69 and $0.75, respectively. Like the near-mint copies, each of these variants has seen a surge in sales in the past couple of days.
The Future
While Spike Cannibal does have a lot of exciting potential, at the end of the day, this card is a situational hate piece. You can’t guarantee your opponents will have tons of counters about, even if they are popular. On top of this, the card’s color identity may prevent you from using it even when the need arises.
For this reason, it’s not a massive surprise that Spike Cannibal really isn’t a popular MTG card in Commander. According to the card’s stats on EDHREC, fewer than 700 decks use this card. While defending against Counter Blitz may increase this count a little, it’s hardly going to become a super staple.
Now, we’d usually say that the price of Spike Cannibal is bound to fall as tastes change and new precons come out. This time, however, the Edge of Eternities precons clearly aren’t enough to completely change the Commander landscape. Considering how popular the Final Fantasy MTG set is, it’s not totally surprising that its precons have some staying power.
That said, we still don’t think that Spike Cannibal will remain as expensive as it currently is forever. Since this card sees basically no play at all, the long-term demand is incredibly suspect. Even if Spike Cannibal is deserving of more attention, it’s not like MTG players haven’t had time to take notice.
Ultimately, as always, we sadly can’t predict the future here at MTG Rocks. As such, we’re just going to have to wait and see what happens in the coming weeks and months.
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