Few MtG cards provide as much utility and card advantage as The One Ring, an artifact that first stalls out your opponent by giving you protection from everything for a turn, then turns your life total into an ever escalating card draw engine. It's good enough to see play in powerhouse Legacy and Vintage decks, and makes nearly any Commander deck better. Combine all that with a mythic rarity and it's unsurprising that the most basic version of the card trades hands for $89, leaving many players searching for budget alternatives for their brews - cards like Insight Engine.
Insight Engine was printed in the Counter Intelligence Commander Precon, alongside August's MTG set Edge of Eternities. It's a non-creature artifact that costs two generic and one blue mana - but in order to do anything with it, you need to use its activated ability. For two colorless mana and tapping it, you can put a charge counter on it, then draw cards equal to the number of charge counters on it.
Speculators valued Insight Engine at $10 when it was revealed, but at launch you could get a copy for $1.70, and that quickly fell to a stable $1.10. That was until October 22, when - according to price tracking site MTG Goldfish - it began to rapidly appreciate. It's now sitting at $9.50.
What gives? On the surface, this card isn't even 'The One Ring at home', unless that home is situated in a really bad neighbourhood. You have to invest five mana to draw your first card, and a total of seven mana over two turns to draw a total of three cards. Woof.
But the price per card starts to look a lot more appealing as the number of charge counters on the Insight Engine increases. If your deck is geared up around Proliferating counters, the second time you tap the Insight Engine you might draw four or five cards. And unlike The One Ring, there's no risk of accidentally killing yourself with it when you get a seriously silly number of counters on the Insight Engine.
It's also not too hard to reduce artifact mana costs. If you're running an artifact deck, a Foundry Inspector or equivalent cost reducer will bring the mana cost of the first card you draw from it in line with (an undiscounted) The One Ring. A Forensic Gadgeteer can also reduce the cost of each activation.
All of which emphasises why The One Ring in such incredible demand; it's powerful in every single deck. Insight Engine is a brilliant card in the right deck, and a damp squib everywhere else. But that's half the fun of Commander, right? Finding a combination of cards that's more powerful than the sum of its parts.
As for why Insight Engine's price is spiking now, I have no idea - no promising new Proliferate or synergistic Artifact commanders have been revealed since the start of October. Perhaps stocks of Counter Intelligence are running out, and new buyers are having to compete for copies of this card - it's now the most expensive MTG card from the whole of Edge of Eternities Commander.
What do you think? Do you know of a new deck that Insight Engine fits perfectly into that explains the spike? I'd love to hear what it is in the Wargamer Discord community.
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