The Magic: The Gathering card Agent Frank Horrigan has seen a spectacular spike in price. At the start of the year, this Fallout-themed UB card was only worth 90 cents, but in the past week especially it's been picking up steam, and now sits at a whopping $17.50.
This super mutant in power armor has seen its value surge because it's a decent upgrade option for the new Commander precon deck Blight Curse. The Lorwyn deck seeks to plop -1/-1 counters all over the shop, and gets a lot of benefits from both placing these counters and killing stuff with counters on it.
Agent Frank Horrigan can help with that. He's one of the best proliferate cards available in Jund colors, and when you play him, assuming you've done your job and spread counters around, he'll have a massive impact the turn he comes down. After that, he lets you proliferate twice a turn, and is a big beater that's hard to face in combat.
That said, seven mana is a lot of mana for a creature that's not particularly hard to remove with spells and the Fallout 2 boss really needs to stick around to be fully worth the investment. Plus, this creature doesn't create counters himself, so sometimes you might find yourself in a rough spot where he's not doing so much.
Contagion Engine, which can proliferate and make -1/-1 counters, might actually be a better option at a similar CMC.
Horrigan was recommended by the Command Zone in their Blight Curse upgrade video posted four days ago, which is probably the main reason why this card has gotten so pricey. In fact, their video went up on January 15, and the card shot up from $2.30 to $39 the same day (it's now come down a little ways). Case closed, I think!
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