The Magic: The Gathering card Keeper of the Nine Gales has soared in value on the secondary market, going from just $2 on May 20 to $9.69 on June 9 according to MTG Goldfish. That's a pretty swift ascension of 360%.
This card hails from a very old MTG set: 2003's Legions. Other than a stint on the List, Keeper of the Nine Gales has never had a reprint since, so it makes perfect sense that it was susceptible to a spike.
This creature is designed to be played in a bird tribal deck. If you tap it and two other birds, its effect lets you bounce any permanent you pick to its owner's hand - even lands! It's pretty rare to be able to activate an effect like this repeatedly, and especially at this mana value, even if it is limited to once per turn.
What's great about this power in EDH is you can leave it up as protection for your own permanents against removal, while also threatening to nix the worst thing on the board. Once you start bringing in untappers, things get seriously silly.
So why would there have been an uptick in bird-based decks? Well, obviously it's the chocobo cards from the new MTG Final Fantasy set that are to blame. These intriguing creatures are designed to work well in bird and land-based decks, giving avian appreciators plenty of new and interesting deck-building opportunities to mess about with.
Though playing second fiddle to some of the big character reveals during spoiler season, these cards still represent one of the most beloved parts of the Final Fantasy franchise. They're a very hyped-up part of the set - especially thanks to the ultra rare chocobo cards that are Final Fantasy's biggest chase items, and have already started showing up like golden tickets.
While most of the chocobo cards are green rather than blue, there is notably a chocobo MTG commander - Choco, Seeker of Paradise - in the Bant color identity. There's not really any extra strong interaction between Choco and Keeper of the Nine Gales, but Choco wants to be attacking with as many birds as possible, so the basic synergy holds.
What's interesting to me is that so far only 858 Choco decks featuring Keeper have been logged on EDHREC - it's not an obvious inclusion, and only 36% of players have decided to use it. This doesn't seem wholly sufficient to explain the spike, otherwise why didn't it pop off during Bloomburrow, which brought in a popular new bird commander Kastral, the Windcrested?
Perhaps it's an additive thing and Kastral used up many of the copies in circulation, allowing Keeper to spike now? Or perhaps the injection of new chocobo cards has increased players' interest in bird decks in general? I've seen that some players are using them in casual Derevi decks, and this seems like the perfect home for Keeper of the Nine Gales, thanks to its untap effect.
As a member of the MTG Finance subreddit pointed out last month, the whole creature type seems to be getting a lot more support of late.
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