A budget MTG card from Murders at Karlov Manor has seen a 520% price increase in recent weeks, and it’s all thanks to an increasingly popular Standard deck. On March 18, Aftermath Analyst cost a measly $0.44 (£0.35) on TCGPlayer. But as of April 16, that value has hit $2.73 (£2.19). MTGGoldfish saw a similar 420% spike in the same period.
A card that costs under three dollars isn’t going to break the bank, even if it does cost five times what it used to. But the change gives us a good clue as to how the previous MTG set has switched up the meta for Standard MTG decks. Namely, a Temur combo deck is a new rising star.
To explain the combo, let’s first look at what Aftermath Analyst actually does. The green two-cost creature automatically Mills three cards when it enters the battlefield. Then, if you pay four mana and Sacrifice the card, you can return all MTG lands from your graveyard to the battlefield tapped.
Along with cards like Fallaji Archaeologist, Aftermath Analyst gives you an MTG Mill outlet. Once you’ve got a decent pool of land in the graveyard, returning them to the battlefield triggers some fun new effects. Nissa, Resurgent Animist appears in many of these decks, allowing you to generate oodles of mana and add a load of MTG Elves or Elementals to your hand when you get all that land back on the battlefield.
But the real cherry on the Temur Control cake is Worldsoul’s Rage. You can spend any amount of extra mana you like when casting this, and the Sorcery will deal damage to a target equal to that value. Plus, you can add that many land cards from your hand and graveyard to the battlefield. In a nutshell, the strategy is this: generate as much mana as physically possible and deal a game-ending amount of damage.
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