The Magic: The Gathering card Diffusion Sliver seems to have undergone a huge price spike very quickly. According to MTG Goldfish's price tracker, this card was selling for just $2 a couple of days ago, but since then it has skyrocketed up to $12.40.
A quick caveat, I'm not seeing this card going for anything like that much on TCGPlayer, so it's possible this is a glitch in the matrix, but at any rate it definitely seems to be on the uptick.
Diffusion Sliver is a blue Sliver card that effectively gives all your Slivers Ward 2. It's a useful piece of protection in a five-color Slivers deck, making it much harder to pick off your swarm with targeted removal (which is already a bad strategy for combatting Slivers).
Sliver commander decks surged in popularity over the last couple of months, thanks to the artifact card Thrumming Hivepool - which is a great upgrade. As a result, recent Sliver cards that have only appeared in a single MTG set, such as Lazotep Sliver, saw a big bump in price.
What's interesting about this price rise, however, is that Diffusion Sliver has had another printing in the past, and this version of the card remains much cheaper - below $2. There's a simple explanation for this, though: The Diffusion Sliver card printed in Magic 2015 depicts a controversial humanoid Sliver.
Humanoid Slivers were a short-lived experiment that appeared in the 2013 and 2014 core sets. According to Wizards of the Coast writer and designer Doug Beyer, they were introduced for two main reasons. Firstly, it was thought that the Core Set products targeted at beginners needed approachable monsters with a wider appeal. They wanted Slivers with a face and personality.
Secondly, Creative believed that the well of distinct Sliver designs was running dry. "We had already seen two-headed slivers, two-clawed slivers, two-tailed slivers, brainy slivers, leafy slivers, spiky slivers - a lot of variations on that one design."
The decision to switch to a totally new Sliver was a controversial one, and thankfully, it seems like WotC received the message loud and clear. Modern Horizons brought back the old style of Sliver for some new designs, and then Commander Masters not only introduced a load more, it also gave some of the M14 and M15 Slivers reprints with new art, featuring the iconic old-Sliver look.
Diffusion Sliver is one of those reprints, and evidently it's much more popular than the original card.
Do you harbor a secret soft spot for the alternate Slivers? Share your heartfelt defence of the hated designs over on the Wargamer Discord. And don't miss our lists of the best MTG Commander precons or best MTG Arena decks.