The MTG card Rot Hulk has seen a significant price spike, making it one of the most costly undead creatures around. According to MTG Goldfish, it was sitting pretty at $15 at the start of this year, but has steadily crept up to $30 over the months. Then this week it jumped up to $73 on April 7. But already, it seems, the spike has peaked, as today it’s fallen back down to $52.50.
This seven-mana zombie card is pretty scarce for the simple reason that it’s not been printed in any regular MTG sets. Instead, this is a unique card from the Game Night introductory box, which had one original card for each MTG color. That makes the supply of this card pretty limited, which is a shame when it has such a good effect for Commander, but obviously nice for the people who have a copy.
MTG zombie EDH decks are the place Rot Hulk does its work, so we’d typically assume a new zombie commander is the cause of this spike. Previously, the card jumped from $10 to $40 around the release of Midnight Hunt, where players wanted it for their Wilhelt the Rotcleaver decks.
And there is a brand new MTG commander that cares about zombies. Gisa, the Hellraiser gives all zombies (and skeletons, but zombies are so much easier to build around) menace and +1/+1. And she makes zombie tokens whenever you commit a crime. So perhaps this is why Rot Hulk is jumping up in price?
Then again, something seems off here. Gisa is not a bad commander by any means, but she’s not the sort of legend you’d expect to drive a price spike. She’s certainly no Mr House or Obeka, Splitter of Seconds. So far, ‘only’ 191 Gisa decks have been logged on EDHREC, and only four of them have Rot Hulk, so something else must be going on here.
Some quick math offers a possible solution. In the 31 months Wilhelt has been available 1,600 decks led by him and containing Rot Hulk have been uploaded to EDHREC. Of those, 450 (28%) were uploaded in the past four months (13% of the total time he’s been around for). So it may simply be that demand for this card has built up and finally outstripped supply, leading to the price spike we’re now seeing.
We can’t identify a ton of new cards that would make Rot Hulk loads better than it was before (though Geralf the Fleshwright seems like a fun one from MTG Thunder Junction), so it’s likely the overall popularity of Wilhelt is increasing, rather than the proportion of new Wilhelt decks containing Rot Hulk going up.
That’s all the analysis we’re doing on this one, but for more stories about expensive MTG cards, check out the Thunder Junction infinite combo driving a spike, or last week’s Obeka-related price rise.