The preliminary prices on Magic cards, estimates released before the cardboard is actually in circulation, are always way too high and come down quickly, everyone knows that. So it’s been pretty surprising to see multiple Lost Caverns of Ixalan MTG cards undergo big price spikes in the past week. It seems these cards were undervalued just prior to the November 17 release date.
The Magic: The Gathering cards we’ve seen rising in price are Roaming Throne, Tishana’s Tidebinder, the MTG planeswalker card Quintorius Kand and the MTG dinosaur Trumpeting Carnosaur. Each one has gone up in price by at least 95% in the past week, according to MTG Goldfish prices. Below we’ll cover each price spike individually, and the likely causes.
The new mechanic Discover, basically a new and tweaked version of MTG Cascade, is much to blame for the buzz. Cascade has long been a major fixture in Modern; its ability to cheat spells of a certain mana cost into play is just too easy to abuse. It seems now its little brother Discover is also going to be making waves in Pioneer.
That explains our first two card spikes, Quintorius Kand and Trumpeting Carnosaur, as these cards each have a Discover ability. Trumpeting Carnosaur rose 345%, from $2.20 to $9.80, while Quintorius has gone from $5.30 to $11.70, a jump of 120%.
Both of these cards are going off in Pioneer and work with the same basic combo strategy, stuffing your deck full of high mana cost cards that either have cost reductions (Leyline Binding) or can be exploited in other ways (ramping off Beanstalk Giant).
The only low cost cards in your deck (and therefore your only Discover hits) are clone cards like Spark Double. The plan then is simple: ramp until you can play Trumpeting Carnosaur or Quint, and start the Cascade – sorry, Discover – chain, getting multiple copies of each one thanks to your clones, and draining your opponent to death with Quint’s ability.
Wizards of the Coast looks to have printed a weapon to fight back against the dark forces of Cascade and Discover, however, in the form of another spiking card, Tishana’s Tidebinder. This card is great because it can counter triggered abilities, shutting down loads of popular effects. It’s gone from $9.30 on release to $18 now, close to doubling in price.
Tidebinder is seeing play right now in Modern, but not Pioneer yet, where it’s being used by Cascade decks such as Crashing Footfalls to shut down the mirror match, and plenty of strong . It’s also, like another spiking card, being played in lots and lots of Merfolk MTG commander decks.
Finally, we have Roaming Throne, which is spiking for its own reasons, unrelated to meta shifts in constructed formats. Basically this card is great in a ton of tribal decks, since it doubles triggered abilities from the MTG creature type of your choice. It’s being used in all the Ixalan precon decks, and with loads of other commanders besides. The card is up to $18.20 from $9, a price spike of just over 100%.
For more Magic price stories, check out the most expensive MTG cards. Or try out these MTG Arena codes to get yourself some freebies.