The Magic: The Gathering card Magistrate's Scepter has seen a pretty significant price spike in the last few weeks, thanks to synergy with one of the top Edge of Eternities commanders. Priced at just $0.90 in the first week of July, this artifact card has since jumped to $4.70 - a rise of 422%. That's for the cheapest version, from Core Set 2019, but older and foil variants are selling for a lot more.
An artifact card originally hailing from the 1999 MTG set Mercadian Masques, Magistrate's Scepter is an artifact that's designed to slowly build up charge counters and then use them to produce an extra turn. Since it takes a few turns to reach the three charge counters you need, and since the Magistrate's Scepter's abilities are pretty mana intensive, the artifact has remained a pretty niche card.
But the MTG commander in one of the new Commander precon decks, Kilo, Apogee Mind can turbocharge Magistrate's Scepter thanks to its ability to proliferate multiple times a turn. With a few tap and untap effects in your deck, it's not too hard to reach a point where you can use Magistrate's Scepter again and again, turning a lackluster artifact into infinite turns.
We've already covered how you can use cards like Pentad's Prism and Aura of Dominion to proliferate forever in a Kilo deck, and once you've got that going, one of the best things you can do is take infinite turns with Magistrate's Scepter. If you can't win the game after that, there's something very wrong with your deck (and also something funny about your playgroup - who doesn't scoop when someone hits infinite turns?)
This is far from the only card boosted by the new precons. For the World Shaper deck, for instance, cards like Tiller Engine and even the reserved list card Squandered Resources have risen a bunch. But, whereas these two cards have seen more explosive spikes than Magistrate's Scepter, both are now firmly dropping in price, whereas the Scepter has stayed level at its new (admittedly, not exactly bank-busting) value.
Which is your pick for the best Commander deck out of World Shaper and Counter-Intelligence? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord. And don't miss a date with our useful page on the MTG release schedule.