Price Trends: Magic: The Gathering Cards Climbing in Price - 11/12/2024
By Peter Day •
We want you to have the best information available when you price cards on the TCGplayer Marketplace. So to help you get the most from your inventory, we’ve put together a downloadable CSV report of Magic: The Gathering cards that have dramatically increased in Market Price in the past 30 days.
(Note: This report only considers Near Mint copies of cards with at least five sales between October 12 and November 10, 2024.)
Here are ten highlights from that report. First, we have the five cards that gained the most value in the past 30 days after starting with a Market Price of $5 or less.
Top 5 Price Increases—MTG Cards $5 or Less
#5 Unholy Annex // Ritual Chamber (Borderless)
- Set: Duskmourn: House of Horror
- Increase: +$5.99
- Current Market Price: $7.74
Unholy Annex has been everywhere in Magic (and our market reports) this month. Besides being a key piece of Javier Domínguez’s first-place deck at Magic World Championship 30, it’s also been showing up in top Pioneer decks and in Commander decks that want an upgrade to Phyrexian Arena. Plus, the “Rooms matter” commander Marina Vendrell has turned out to be one of the most popular commanders in Duskmourn, which has boosted the price of all the borderless room cards like this one.
- Set: Zendikar
- Increase: +$6.82
- Current Market Price: $9.96
Blade of the Bloodchief rose a little in price back in June with the release of Basking Broodscale in Modern Horizons 3. The two cards combine to create unlimited colorless mana and an infinite huge Broodscale, but the combo didn’t really take off until Broodscale decks started popping up in MTGO events in October.
That deck placed 11th at a $10k NRG event on November 2, so every version of Blade of the Bloodchief has taken off in the last two weeks.
- Set: Commander: The Lost Caverns of Ixalan
- Increase: +$7.31
- Current Market Price: $9.61
Every version!
- Set: Ultimate Masters
- Increase: +$8.76
- Current Market Price: $11.13
The deck that won that NRG event was another relative newcomer to Modern: Mono-Blue Belcher, a landless combo deck that uses Disrupting Shoal as free protection for its linear game plan. Disrupting Shoal only has two printings, one of which from Betrayers of Kamigawa (2005), so players who want Near Mint copies are mostly stuck with the Ultimate Masters version.
- Set: Jumpstart
- Increase: +$9.29
- Current Market Price: $13.36
Neyith of the Dire Hunt spiked after the reveal of Wolverine, Best There Is in the Marvel Secret Lair as players looked for ways to ensure Wolverine could connect with opposing creatures to trigger his end-step ability. Neyith has only been printed once, back in the original Jumpstart in 2020, so supply is low enough to make it sensitive to this uptick in demand.
Next, these are the five cards that gained the most value in the past 30 days after starting with a Market Price over $5.
Top 5 Price Increases—MTG Cards Over $5
- Set: Revised Edition
- Increase: +$25.92
- Current Market Price: $505.10
Revised copies of Tropical Island have rebounded a little after spending the last four months on a downward trajectory. The card hit its peak for the year of $530 near the end of May following a huge spike in February, with both the start and end of that spike punctuated by small-scale buyouts.
None of these movements seem to reflect any particular change in the demand for this (or any other) Magic dual land. They’re just the capricious ups and downs you tend to see with a card on the Reserved List. Notably, Tropical Island is still nowhere near the all-time high of $966 it reached during July 2021, near the height of the pandemic-era collecting boom.
- Set: Commander: The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth
- Increase: +$31.48
- Current Market Price: $263.37
Tales of Middle-earth is over a year old now and the window for reprints under the Tolkien licensing agreement is closing, so the Rings of Power-flavored Sol Rings have all been steadily ticking up since May. It doesn’t hurt that the finale to the second season of a show named after those rings aired in October.
- Set: Revised Edition
- Increase: +$31.79
- Current Market Price: $651.05
Just like Tropical Island, Volcanic Island is rising marginally at the mercurial whims of the Reserved List market. The spike isn’t as dramatic as it looks, and it means even less.
#2 Jeweled Lotus (Extended Art)
- Set: Commander Legends
- Increase: +$41.24
- Current Market Price: $122.92
The Commander Rules Committee banned Jeweled Lotus in Commander (the only format where its rules text has any relevance) on September 23, which sent the card’s price plummeting. But those prices rebounded just as quickly as fans bought the card in droves—possibly to play it in defiance of the CRC, or on the suspicion that the ban wouldn’t stick, or because they simply missed the announcement.
Now sales of Jeweled Lotus have all but dried up, with every version on TCGplayer showing listings well below their last Market Price. This Extended Art version isn’t an exception, and I think this spike reflects lingering uncertainty over the future of this card rather than any kind of sales opportunity.
- Set: Urza's Saga
- Increase: +$79.31
- Current Market Price: $230.33
Unlike the other two Reserved List cards we just covered, Tolarian Academy’s most recent spike was actually motivated by something: a huge buyout on September 30, followed by higher-than average sales in early October.
The timing lines up with the announcement that Wizards of the Coast would be taking over management of the Commander format from the Commander Rules Committee, following an appalling harassment campaign against the CRC after their aforementioned controversial ban. Speculators were likely betting that WotC will eventually unban Tolarian Academy in Commander, though so far WotC hasn’t made any changes to the format’s ban list.
Speculators also purchased other old cards that have been banned in Commander forever like Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary, Fastbond, and Yawgmoth’s Bargain
By selling these cards online, you can reach a broad audience of customers who are willing to pay what these cards are truly worth. Download the November 2024 Price Trends Report to review every Magic card that went up in value this month. Then list those cards on TCGplayer so your inventory can do more for your business.
Download the Magic Price Trends Report
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