Players have had access to Modern Horizons 3 cards for nearly two weeks now, but the new meta is far from solved. New decks and strategies are cropping up left and right in every format, not just Modern. Naturally, this is causing some movement on the secondary market, as once-overlooked gems finally get the price tags to match their power. Wrath of the Skies is one such card, the latest MTG board wipe good enough to see eternal play.
Wrath Of The Skies
Wrath of the Skies is our big headliner for today, and it’s an MTG card that more than feels up to the job. Essentially, it’s an X-scaling board wipe that hits not just creatures, but artifacts and enchantments too. What makes it so good, however, is all the flexibility and nuance it possesses. Paying X just gets you Energy, which you can then choose to spend on the Wrath effect or not. This synergizes nicely with other powerful Energy cards, such as Galvanic Discharge.
Alternatively, you can ignore the X entirely. On its own, Wrath of the Skies can sweep up every creature, artifact, and enchantment that costs 0. You get this effect for just two mana. This effect covers all tokens, as well as popular eternal mana rocks like Chrome Mox. For this reason, the card is seeing plenty of play in Modern, including four slots in a tournament-topping Jeskai Control list.
Unsurprisingly, the card’s price has shot up as a result. Copies have jumped from around $1 to around $4 over the last week, representing a jump of around 300%. That rises to 400% if you’re looking to snag a Retro Frame copy. Honestly, this still feels fairly low for a card as powerful and versatile as this. If you have any interest at all in playing Control, or Energy decks, moving forward, I’d grab some copies of this sooner rather than later.
Wish
Of course, Control isn’t the only ship the tides of Modern Horizons 3 have lifted. Ruby Storm has also proven itself a real player in Modern since the set launched. The deck relies on Ral, Monsoon Mage and Ruby Medallion for mana reduction, builds up a huge stack of Ritual and draw spells, and finishes opponents off with a classic Grapeshot for 20 or more.
Interestingly, though, the deck doesn’t actually play Grapeshot in the main. It instead relies on four copies of Wish to fetch it from the sideboard. This gives you an extra spell to cast during your Storm turn and protects Grapeshot from any opposing disruption until the moment you need it. Clever stuff. Most Ruby Storm lists are running four of this overlooked rare from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. This means that copies are now around $8 rather than the $2 they once were.
This is a jump of over 300%, on the copies you can actually find. At the time of writing, TCGPlayer is very nearly sold out of the card altogether, across all printings. Is this hype warranted? Perhaps. Wish is completely useless in Commander outside of specific house rule playgroups, and it’s outclassed by better options like Burning Wish in Legacy and Vintage. For this reason, the only scenario in which the card could feasibly shine is the one in which it finds itself right now.
Pinning your financial hopes on a card whose price hinges on a single deck’s success is a risky game indeed. Grab the card if you want to try out Ruby Storm, but don’t think of it as a long-term investment. I foresee this one being as volatile as the deck it’s part of.
Through The Breach
It’s a big week for Modern combo pieces. Our next financial spotlight is Through the Breach, a card that has been performing beautifully in the new Gruul Eldrazi lists we’ve seen popping up. The card is used to drop an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn into play much earlier than intended. Not a new idea by any means, but with all the new Eldrazi support in Modern Horizons 3 it’s now more viable than ever.
As a key component of this powerful new deck, Through the Breach is starting to pick up in price. Copies are now around $3, whereas last week they were around $1-$1.50. This is a big increase percentage-wise, but the card is still very affordable. Especially considering the results the deck has been putting up in recent Modern events.
That said, WOTC has a history of banning combos and interactions they deem “unfun,” and there’s little less fun than having all of your lands eaten on turn three by a Breached-out Emrakul. The card is even banned in Commander, after all. It’s worth keeping that in mind because this could well be a deck that eats a ban if it keeps up its winning streak. At the current price, that’s not much of an issue. That being said, beware of putting any serious money into Breach; you won’t get it back if the ban hammer hits.
The Shriekmaw In The Room
Before we wrap this piece up, I wanted to mention a few wild outliers among the financial spikes of the past week. If you keep an eye on the MTG market, these cards will have been conspicuous by their absence so far. I’m referring, of course, to the Time Spiral Remastered Retro Frame versions of Shriekmaw and Gurmag Angler.
Over the last few days, both cards have apparently jumped from around $0.50 to around $50; spikes of over 10,000%. This is almost unheard of in the MTG finance world and should set alarm bells ringing in the heads of any experienced player. Alarm bells that, it turns out, are more than warranted.
These spikes are the result of a single $1,234 sale of each card. Since TCGPlayer works off of averages, those single outliers were enough to bring the average price for each card to around $50. This could be some kind of automated error, based on the ‘1234’ value, or a deliberate attempt at market manipulation. In either case, it’s artificial, and not an accurate reflection of either card’s value.
The same can be said of the price jump experienced by Ayula, Queen Among Bears this week. Despite having no real demand outside of Commander, the card has jumped from around $1 to around $3. The reason? A number of $4.93 sales of the card, all bumping the average up. As with the cards above, it’s hard to tell if this is a scheme or an honest mistake. But all three of these are great case studies of why looking into a card’s sales patterns before buying, especially if the price is high, is a must in MTG finance.
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