Gleeful Demolition, an uncommon MTG card printed in Phyrexia: All Will be One, has almost tripled in price in the last week, rising from $1.10 to $3.20 according to average price data from MTG Goldfish. It’s likely that the spike is being driven by the Boros Convoke deck played in Pioneer and Standard, which just got a big boost thanks to a common card printed in Murders of Karlov Manor.
Gleeful Demolition is a red sorcery MTG card that costs a single red mana. It destroys a single target artifact, and if you happen to control that artifact, you create three 1/1 red goblin creature tokens. This pairs very nicely with the Boros Convoke strategy, which pays you off for having lots of creatures on the board that you can tap with the Convoke ability to pay for powerful red or white spells.
This archetype has been hanging around the Standard and Pioneer metagame for a little while, but the latest MTG set, MTG Murders at Karlov Manor, suddenly made it a lot more effective, thanks to the printing of Novice Inspector. For a single white mana the Inspector is a 1/2 white creature that creates a Clue token when it enters the battlefield.
An ideal game start for Boros Convoke is to play out a Novice Inspector (or a Voldaren Epicure, a red one-drop that creates a Blood token when it enters the battlefield) on turn one, then on turn two cast Gleeful Demolition to turn that token into three goblins. Three goblins, one Inspector or Epicure, plus a turn two land provide enough mana to convoke a chunky Knight-Errant of Eos into play. It’s an imposing board state that pressures the opponent early in the game and relentlessly throughout.
The Novice Inspector is functionally identical to Thraben Inspector, a multi-format all-star that isn’t legal in Standard, but is a key part of Boros Convoke in the Pioneer format. The printing of Novice Inspector has opened up that strategy for paper and MTG Arena Standard Decks. Pioneer decks can run both flavors of Inspector, making Boros Convoke a little more reliable there, too.
For more price spike stories, check out what’s happening to the Karlov Manor lands.