The red rare MTG card Urabrask’s Forge has seen a significant spike in the past few months. The cheap card has more than doubled in price, and now sits at $1.80 on MTG Goldfish – still very affordable, but far pricier than it was, and seemingly still on the way up.
Urabrask’s Forge has been a bulk rare ever since Phyrexia All Will Be One released. An aggressive card that’s been just a little too slow to make it in the current Magic: The Gathering Standard meta, the artifact has cost around $0.50 for as long as it’s been around.
So what’s the reason for this MTG card’s sudden success, which could be set to catapult it out of bargain bin bulk rare status? Well there may be a number of factors. It seems to be seeing play in rakdos aggro MTG Arena decks, where it provides free fodder for sacrificing. It also looks to be slipping into the sideboard of aggro decks in other MTG color combinations, from mono red to gruul.
EDH is often the driver of card price spikes, and there is a new MTG Commander that works really well with Urabrask’s Forge. It’s the MTG Doctor Who card: The Master, Multiplied. This card essentially shuts down the sacrifice part of Urabrask’s Forge’s ability. If you have The Master out, you get to keep the token at the end of your turn, making this one of the most synergistic cards in the deck.
The trouble is though, that despite its unique ability the Master, Multiplied doesn’t appear to be a super popular Commander – at least not yet – with only 295 decks listed on EDHREC.
Another mystery around this card is that the regular, non-foil card now seems to be the most expensive version. You can get foil printings, or variants with extended art, for less money than the baseline card.
We’ve seen prior instances where an alternate art was unpopular, and actually made a card less valuable, but this doesn’t seem to be the case here – perhaps there are just more copies with extended art floating around, for whatever reason?
At any rate, this is an interesting little spike, and it’s worth watching to see where the card goes from here. For more stories on expensive MTG cards and changing prices, check out this unbanned Commander card that’s rocketed up, and this MTG dinosaur that’s also on the rise.