The Modern Horizons 3 Magic: The Gathering card, Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student, is spiking in price thanks to a surge of play in Modern. This card was already pretty pricey thanks to various high-powered Legacy and Vintage decks, and sat at $20 at the start of the week. Since then it’s seen a sharp rise of 140%, and according to the tracker on MTG Goldfish, the Mythic Rare is currently valued at quite an expensive $47.90.
Part of the cycle of double-faced MTG planeswalker cards released in Modern Horizons 3 earlier this year, Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student has a claim to fame: she’s a one mana planeswalker. Well, sort of.
Tamiyo starts out life as a fairly weak creature. Three toughness on a flying body makes her a reasonable blocker for the cost, but she has no power, so can only serve as a speedbump to slow down aggro decks.
But if you’re able to draw three cards in a turn, you can transform her into a planeswalker which can weaken opposing creatures and bring your spells back from the graveyard for a second cast.
Tamiyo enables that herself to some extent by making Clue tokens, but also, the newly unbanned card, Faithless Looting, instantly flips her.
With Tamiyo and Faithless Looting combined, it isn’t very hard to have a planeswalker on the field by turn two, which can be difficult for an opponent to deal with. What’s more, Tamiyo’s -3 ability, which is probably her most useful feature, has synergy with Faithless Looting as well, since it relies on having a well-stocked graveyard.
At first, we assumed it was this combo driving the price spike, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, while the latest Modern Challenge on MTG Online shows plenty of Tamiyo decks, nine in the top 32, not a single successful deck runs Faithless Looting alongside her. Instead, we can see that she’s appearing alongside other unbanned cards, sometimes with Splinter Twin, and sometimes with Mox Opal.
Let’s look at the Splinter Twin decks first, as they’re more varied. Tamiyo appears once in a Splinter Twin Wizards deck, alongside Snapcaster Mage, Thundertrap Trainer, and a whole bunch of instants and sorceries (Flame of Anor provides an easy way to flip her).
She appears once in a Grixis deck focused on sticking Splinter Twin on Psychic Frog. This one’s looking to draw lots of cards anyway, so can also quickly flip Tamiyo. She also shows up once in a Temur Tarmagoyf deck, where, to be honest, I can’t really say I fully understand her inclusion.
In Mox Opal decks, Tamiyo is useful for the extra artifacts she provides with her clue generating ability, which can – for instance- turn Opal’s mana generation online. These decks can then usually find a way to flip her later in the game for added value. It’s a damn good deal for just one mana.
As for what these decks look like, one player saw success with a classic artifact build containing Urza, Lord High Artificer, but by far and away the most powerful Tamiyo deck in the meta is Temur Grinding Station. This archetype uses a bunch of cheap or free artifacts, plus Underworld Breach, to keep untapping Grinding Station again and again, ultimately milling out the opponent.
We’re still in the highs of celebrating The One Ring’s destruction, happy to see anything new in Modern that wasn’t put there by Modern Horizons 3. But if Grinding Station keeps showing such strong results, I think the Modern fanbase is going to sour on it very quickly, as it seems really irritating to play against.
If you’re interested in changing TCG prices, take a look at the most expensive MTG cards. Or for more generals news, take a look at the MTG release schedule.