When Wizards of the Coast first announced it was making mechanically unique cards with Universes Beyond IP, one of the biggest concerns among fans was the question of reprints. Could WotC reprint cards from Universes Beyond sets at all, without signing fresh deals with rights holders? If a UB card became a powerful, multi-format all star, wouldn't it also functionally be a Reserved List card, never to be reprinted, with a price to match? That could be happening right at this moment, with MTG Avatar the Last Airbender's powerful mana accelerator Badgermole Cub.
At time of writing Badgermole Cub is the most expensive MTG card in Standard, currently sitting at $82 on MTG Goldfish. Some of that price is due to limited supply, as it's a mythic rare which players want a full playset of. Partly, the price comes from multi-format playability: it's an incredibly powerful mana accelerator for any deck running mana dorks, which is such a broad archetype that it sees play in Commander, Standard, Pioneer, Modern, and even Legacy.
I can't speculate on how the price will change once people stop opening packs of Avatar. There's a very fine line between a card that becomes a new staple of the eternal formats and a card that gets added to the MTG banlist for homogenizing the game. Other new cards might outclass it, or counterplay might develop that reduces its dominance without completely side-lining it.
But until those things happen it's reasonable to expect the card to stay expensive - and I have to expect that there are limits on how easily WotC can reprint it. While the Badgermole Cub doesn't feature a named hero from Avatar, it is a creature from the Avatar universe, and it features the earthbending mechanic, another key part of the Avatar IP. I don't know the details of Wizard's deal with Viacom or how it might affect potential reprints, but we haven't yet seen WotC reprint any unique UB cards.
Next year's Hobbit MTG set will be the first time WotC actually revisits a Universes Beyond IP, three years after its wildly successful Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth. WotC may be able to reprint in demand cards from the set, like The One Ring or Orcish Bowmasters, but the Hobbit set is being designed for Standard, while the original LOTR was made with Modern's higher power levels in mind. Any Middle-earth big hitters that people want reprinted will likely show up on a bonus sheet or in an ancillary tie-in product like a Secret Lair, not in the main set - if they return at all.
WotC does have a way to reprint mechanically unique cards from UB sets without creating another UB product - Universes Within. The firm has so far only used this to reprint cards from Secret Lair drops, putting out cards via the 'List slot' in its now deprecated Set Boosters, and as promos at Wizards Play Network stores. But the process is slow and supply is limited: we still haven't seen the Universes Within reprints of the cards in 2023's Tomb Raider and Doctor Who Secret Lairs, and none of the cards have been reprinted more than once.
At $82, Badgermole Cub is already closing in on the price of The One Ring, despite still being in print. Perhaps it'll be banned out of relevance, but if that doesn't happen, Modern and Pioneer players will have to contend with a format staple with Reserved List levels of supply - at least until WotC can straighten out how reprints work for Universes Beyond.
What do you think? Is Badgermole Cub overhyped? Is it so busted that it's certain to catch a ban? Or is it perfectly placed as a best-in-class card that still doesn't break the formats it's legal in? Let us know what you think in the Wargamer Discord community. To get a weekly round up of Wargamer's best stories, make sure you're signed up to the Wargamer newsletter.