A new year, a new Magic: The Gathering price spike, and this time it's not some obscure, dusty relic from the reserved list but a card you have probably heard of. It's The Scorpion God, one of the evil Bolas-created god cards from the MTG set Hour of Devastation.
This card was selling for just $1.50 in mid-December, but it started ramping up over the Xmas break, and today copies are going for $10, a rise of 566%. Meanwhile, foils are priced at an outrageous $42 - up from five! So if you've got one of those you should dig it out right away!
The reason for this price spike is pretty straightforward. It's just another in a long line of -1/-1 counter cards uplifted by Lorwyn. The Scorpion God is one of the best card draw engines you can have in a deck based around this mechanic, and we have reason to believe there'll be a lot of support for the -1/-1 counter theme in the first set of this year's MTG release schedule.
These negative counters are kind of an unexplored mechanic in Magic: The Gathering. Wizards usually prefers to use +1/+1 counters as an easily trackable buff, and as a rule it avoids including both types within the same set. But there's a keyworded -1/-1 mechanic in Lorwyn Eclipsed: blight!
The blight cards we've been shown thus far are in black and green, but there's also a Jund Commander precon deck called Blight Curse coming with this set which will presumably provide a lot of support for the theme. The Scorpion God would likely be a perfect fit for this deck.
Too perfect a fit, I think. If I was buying up copies of Scorpion God in the hopes of it spiking further, I'd be quite worried about this precon. The god card has never had a reprint outside of a Secret Lair, so it's high time it got one. The odds seem pretty good that it'll be included in the deck, at which point, presumably, the card's value will tank. Non-foil copies, at any rate - foils should be fine!
We won't have long to wait for the big moment of truth, as the precons are being shown off on January 5, and January 6.
Are you looking forward to Lorwyn Eclipsed? Come get excited with us in the Wargamer Discord!