As players digest the new Edge of Eternities spoilers, the secondary market has reacted quite strongly to them. Slivers across the board have seen price spikes of varying sizes thanks to the new Thrumming Hivepool. Similarly, lots of sacrifice-themed cards are seeing price spikes after the Commander precon World Shaper was spoiled in its entirety.
Most of the price spikes on the secondary market right now are a reaction to Edge of Eternities, but there are still a few late bloomers spiking because of cards from Magic’s recent hit crossover Final Fantasy. Tombstone Stairwell is a Mirage Reserved List card that breaks current trends, but is soaring to the moon.
Tombstone Stairwell
In the right context, this Reserved List card is very powerful. Tombstone Stairwell will create 2/2 Black Skeletons with Haste on each player’s turn equal to the number of creatures in their graveyard under their control. These creatures will disappear at the end step, but not before the player gets to push some damage across the table with them.
Without some additional synergies, Tombstone Stairwell is not a great card. Because it triggers on upkeep, the caster will be the last person to benefit from Tomestone Stairwell’s effect. Worse yet, they’ll have to pay a Cumulative Upkeep cost just to let it stick around. This is a lot of trouble for a card that benefits the entire table.
As you may imagine, it’s very easy to break parity with this card. Whether you care about Zombies, tokens, or just have a lot of creatures in your graveyard, Tombstone Stairwell can create a massive temporary army. All of that said, Final Fantasy introduced a Commander that goes beyond even these synergies.
The main reason why Tombstone Stairwell appears to be spiking appears to be because of its inclusion in Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER Commander decks. This Commander cares about creatures dying, offering a Blood Artist trigger for each instance. Once four creatures die, you get to flip Sephiroth and get a permanent emblem of the Blood Artist ability.
This means that, as long as a player has four creatures in their graveyard, Tombstone Stairwell will flip Sephiroth in one turn. If you manage to untap with both the Stairwell and a flipped Sephiroth, you can repurpose all of your tokens into card draw, refilling your hand and draining your opponents. When considering this combination, it’s no wonder that Tombstone Stairwell is seeing a price spike.
The Spike
Thanks to being a Reserved List card, the supply available for Tombstone Stairwell is very limited. That has exacerbated this price spike somewhat, allowing the card to balloon far higher than what its demand suggests it should.
237 copies of the card have sold the past month, with a steady increase in demand near the end of June, which isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things, but for a Reserved List card, it is quite significant. Yet, Tombstone Stairwell has spiked from $14 to $82. The price chart above is somewhat misleading, as a majority of that price spike has happened over the past few days. Yesterday, Tombstone Stairwell started consistently selling for $50 and up, while today it has breached $80. While these prices are only based on a few sales, the cheapest copy of the card on TCGplayer at the time of writing is for $82, and there are currently 14 listings on the site.
Because this is a Reserved List card, there are no other copies of Tombstone Stairwell available. Other leading stores in North America are all out of stock for the card at the moment. So, for now, unless you can find a sneaky deal on another site, it’s difficult to find any copy of the card for less than $80.
The Future
Tombstone Stairwell doesn’t need a lot of demand to spike to crazy levels, but once that demand goes away, there’s a good chance the card will fall significantly. Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER is basically the perfect Commander for this card, and a majority of the sudden demand purely seems to be because of that card.
So, once players move on to new MTG sets with new Commanders, Tombstone Stairwell will likely drop back down in price. While the card does synergize well in Zombie decks, as well as other decks that want creatures to die, its higher price point may act as a deterrent for Commanders with larger color identities that have better options for cheaper.
That said, this is the highest price that Tombstone Stairwell has ever been in the last 15 years, and by a significant margin. As a result, while the $80 high probably won’t stick around, we doubt that Tombstone Staiwell will just go back to being a $10 card. The card will likely land somewhere in the middle, but where that will be is anyone’s guess.
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