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Common MTG card that's great in Pauper and EDH spikes 400%

Double Feature versions of the Magic: The Gathering card Kessig Flamebreather are rising high in price, thanks both to Pauper play and Final Fantasy.

Kessig Flamebreather art

The MTG card Kessig Flamebreather is spiking. This pinger from Crimson Vow is appearing in multiple decks right now, and while I'm a little untrusting of MTG Goldfish's claim that normal copies of the card have doubled in price from $1.50 to $3 - as I'm not seeing that in the wild - we can see from sales data on TCGPlayer that the 'Double Feature' versions are way up in price.

These black and white variants have shot up in recent weeks, rising from about $1 - 2 to $8 - 10, while foils have spiked from $15 to $25.

MTG card Kessig Flamebreather

Kessig's rise comes partly thanks to increased play in Pauper - a format we don't often get to write about in these price stories. When Kuldotha Rebirth was added to this format's MTG banlist back in March, Red decks had to shift things up dramatically and switch to a more traditional Burn style deck.

Mono Red Synthesizer is now a pretty popular archetype, one that uses pingers like Thermo Alchemist and Kessig Flamebreather, alongside a bunch of traditional burn spells, to whittle down the opponent's life total swiftly and without mercy.

It also uses cards like Faithless Looting to filter out lands and keep the hand stocked, as well as Sneaky Snacker, which can't be cast but is cheated into play using these looter effects.

MTG card Sneaky Snacker

Kessig Flamebreather is one of the best pingers you can play in an archetype like this - better than Firebrand Archer thanks to its more defensive statline and better than Erebor Flamesmith since it works with all non-creature spells.

But Pauper isn't the only cause of elevated interest in this card. Because once again, this is another card that works well with the MTG commander Vivi Ornitier. Are you sick of seeing him yet?

The MTG card Vivi Ornitier

To keep it brief, Flamebreather is a pinger, and Vivi is giving Ghyrson Starn, Kellermorph stiff competition as the premier pinger commander. An additional synergy is that Harmonic Prodigy is one of the best cards you can pair with Vivi, instantly doubling the amount of mana he can produce. And Harmonic Prodigy doubles up Kessig Flamebreather's effect too, letting him deal twice as much damage.

In truth, EDHREC shows that most Vivi players aren't running the card. There's so much good stuff you can do with Vivi, from card draw effects like Curiosity, to combos like Quicksilver Elemental, and of course you need to run dozens and dozens of cheap non-creature spells. A card like Flamebreather, which basically feels like a contingency plan for when your commander gets blasted, may not make the cut.

The MTG card Harmonic Prodigy

But given how many Vivi Ornitier players there seem to be, even a small percentage of them speccing into this card is enough to have a huge impact, especially since Pauper fans will have recently reduced the number of spare copies floating around.

It's quite amusing how much collectors are now prepared to spend for the Double Feature variants of cards like this, given how widely criticized their look was at the time. There were lots of reasons why that supplemental MTG set was disliked, though. A poor draft experience and lack of any bonus sheet or reason for players to buy the same cards they'd already been playing with for months also helped to sink it.

So my guess is that because the set sold poorly, its cards are now much rarer than you might expect, and years later players are no longer so irate about the 'lazy' black-and-white treatment.

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