There’s a lot of cool stuff in the set. 

Some of the new cards do new things in a new color, and that can set off a whole set of spikes. Let’s look at what has been previewed so far, and some potential specs. Many of the legends that were previewed early, like Doctor Doom, King of Latveria, I’ve already written about and we’ll see if any of those specs get there. (Come on, Mesmeric Trance!)

I’ve chosen four of the new legends, cards that do a neat thing in a way not really done before. No promises that these are the only legends people want to build around, just my first pass. 

Squirrel Girl is an early favorite, and that’s because there hasn’t been a Commander who collects Squirrels this way. Chatterfang isn’t a Squirrel-based creature, and the BG legends from Bloomburrow never took off. Squirrel Girl goes infinite with a couple of different cards, and those are the first targets.

Earthcraft – The ProTrader Discord picked up on this early, and bought out many of the copies available on TCGPlayer, and it’s a one-card, four-Squirrel, infinite-rodent machine. Earthcraft has long been a combo card, and this is the newest card to make use of it. 

Cryptolith Rite/Enduring Vitality/Springleaf Parade – Green needs some way to give haste plus a way to make tokens tap for mana.

Supportive Parents – It’s a version of Earthcraft, but you need to start with eight Squirrels. This is an uncommon, and there’s a boatload of them on TCGPlayer, so it might be tough to make money on this. 

Chitterspitter – Lots of random cards that are Squirrels or refer to Squirrels will spike. This should be among them.

Nut Collector – There’s a foil borderless Dominaria Remastered version that should especially go up.

Krosan Beast – Magic players love a good joke, and it won’t take many purchases to make this go up, considering the small quantities out there.

Shuri, the Black Panther is an artifact commander based in GW, which doesn’t get a lot of love. That said, this color combo can do more than just destroy artifacts! Please keep in mind that there is still a decklist to be released for this one, and some of these specs might be reprinted.

Merry, Warden of Isengard – This being from the LTC set means it’s already under pressure from The Hobbit set that’s incoming, and it’ll be popular for adding a swarm component to Shuri’s ability.

Argivian Archaeologist – Being on the Reserved List means it’s already pricey, but if Shuri gets popular, a handful of sales will make this take off.

Brilliant Restoration – One thing UR artifact decks don’t have is mass reanimate like this. 

Hanna’s Custody – Or mass protection like this. Much depends on if you want to target your own stuff.

Illustrious Wanderglyph – Already near $20, I strongly think this will be in the deck.

Machinist’s Arsenal – This should avoid a reprint, since it is from Final Fantasy.

Oswald Fiddlebender – I don’t know if there’s restrictions on Wizards reprinting D&D-themed cards, but this is another strong candidate for the deck.

Scourglass – Notably, this will destroy Shuri but leave most of your deck intact.

Thousand-Moon Smithy – A great card in artifact decks!

The Prydwen, Steel Flagship – Just an amazing set of synergies for the deck. More fodder, and fodder that grows when you do the thing you want to do!

MODOK is very good at what he does, which is entering play and immediately going to work as a connive effect. This allows you to do two things: Draw cards and Discard cards. I wonder what we can abuse here…

Maha, Its Feathers Night – A combo indeed, making it so your opponents’ creatures all just die and stay dead and die as soon as they enter play. Indestructible doesn’t mean what it used to!

Sheoldred, the Apocalypse – Already a great commander card, this turbocharges MODOK in a wonderful way. 

Syr Konrad, the Grim – Make those discards count!

Bone Miser – Turn your discards into profit!

Starving Revenant – A great way to put the engine into overdrive!

Cryptcaller Chariot – Since this makes Zombies, you can add a third combo piece and really go to town. 

Feast of Sanity – Slow your life loss and increase someone else’s pain all at once!

Starscream, Power Hungry – This takes some doing, but if you’re the monarch and Starscream is in the proper mode, MODOK becomes a killing machine.

Photon rewards you for having lots of creatures, and casting noncreature spells. Sounds like a recipe for everything that makes token creatures and isn’t a creature! (Warning: in early testing, this deck turned into a calculus problem. Lots of dice and InfiniTokens required.)

Monastery Monk/Young Pyromancer/Prismari Pianist/Anim Pakal – Pakal wants stuff to attack, but the rest of these want you to just cast spells and make more things. Easy enough!

Forth Eorllingas! – There’s no shortage of good X spells for this deck, but this is among the best, giving you a hasty army and likely the monarchy. 

Rise of the Hobgoblins – Another great X spell for the deck, it also can make your stuff a lot less profitable to block.

Warleader’s Call – Purphoros dealing 2 is also a card to think about, but the Call is just climbing up and up.

Champions from Beyond – So many plans in one, this gives you tokens, and bonuses for attacking with the whole mess of them!

Angelic Aberration – A ‘win more’ card, but a great way to upgrade your tokens from 1/1 on the ground to 4/4 in the air.

Divine Visitation – Or you could skip the middle step!

Wildfire Awakener – One of my favorite ‘win more’ cards ever, this turns your batch of tokens into twice that many tokens, which tap for damage!

This list is by no means exhaustive, and there are likely to be other legends that pop off and form a whole new alliance. When they go off, keep track of everything via our ProTrader Discord, and the profits will follow.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the co-host of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

Today, I want to go over a feeling that many of us have gone through. 

You had a plan for a spec, you bought in at the right time, and then just as predicted, it went up. You posted at the perfect price at the most opportune moment, and locked in a significant profit, and did that process over and over, netting yourself the funds needed to move on to the next target.

And the card kept going up.

How do you deal with that? Why did it happen? Are there ways to mitigate it? Should we mitigate it? Today is less about the picks and more about the mentality, so come with me and let’s review what success means. 

This topic is timely for me, as just a month ago at MagicCon Vegas, I sold off a stack of my leftover English-language Hatsune Miku cards. I’d already made significant profits by repackaging the four individual lairs and selling them as a group on Ebay. (I was in at $160 per foil set, and selling at $600+, a most delightful margin!) I had a dozen or so assorted Lairs that I’d cracked, looking for a Snapcaster, and I sold off the individual foils and nonfoils from every set other than the original Sakura Superstar.

Again, all of this was profit on top of profit, and I got $23 for each of six Rainbow Foil Miku, Divine Diva, a card that was selling for around $45 as of a month ago.

In case you didn’t hear, someone’s Goblinstorm deck was shipped with what appears to be a Hatsune Miku Commander deck, with a reskinned Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice as the only card visible through the sealed plastic. As a result, everything that is Miku and is in green or white has gone up like mad, and the cheapest copy of that same Elspeth is now just under $100 on TCGPlayer.

This is only the most recent (and therefore most painful) example of a phenomenon that absolutely will happen to you the longer you’re buying and selling something. It happens with stocks, it happens with real estate, it happens in crypto. There’s no single name for the phenomenon, which is interesting, as I thought folks in the stock market had a cute phrase for just about everything, like a ‘dead cat bounce’ or ‘economic moat’ or ‘diamond hands.’ In the ProTrader Discord, I’m open to coining a phrase, if you’ve got a fun idea get it in there and let’s make it work.

Let’s start with the feelings that follow a post-sale spike.

First of all:  You won! You had a plan, you did it, and you made money. Hell yes! High Five! Buy yourself that sweet foil with the profits. Recognize that you did it. Other people might make more, and as time passes, you might feel bad about what you made and when, but wallowing in regret will only lead to you making bad decisions, like not selling when you could make a profit. 

Magic finance is littered with examples of holding too long, and most spikes represent opportunities for you to sell and make your profits. Let’s take a recent example of a Commander who made an enormous amount of cards spike: Hashaton, Scarab’s Fist. This was a card that premiered in Aetherdrift’s Commander decks in January 2025, and immediately made a big splash. One of the cards that went wild was Tortured Existence, a Stronghold common that went from $3 to a top price of $14. 

The reason you sell into a spike is because there’s no guarantee that the prices stay high. Attention moves on. Tortured Existence has gotten a Secret Lair printing since its spike and can now be had around $5 a copy. If you have a $3 card go up to $14, you set your prices at just over $10, make your 3x profit, and move on. You’re gaining cash that you can use on your next spec, or roll it into value for a Commander deck, or remodel your kitchen. 

Please remember a tough lesson to learn personally: Your cards have a ‘worth’ only when you go to sell them. The moment you do sell them, that’s when the profit is locked in. Owning a card that is spiking feels great, but if you don’t move to liquidate the card, you run the risk of it settling back down at the post-spike price.

The right time to sell is tricky. Let’s stick with the Miku example and focus on foil Elvish Mystic, the bonus inclusion for the first Miku drop. It was at $30 or so, and here’s the current set of prices for the evening of 5/28:

If you have one copy in a Commander deck, you should be tempted to sell. This is a huge jump and not one I’d expect to stay high. I would respect your desire to sell at $50, and I would understand your desire to list at $96.69 and wait a bit. We don’t even know when the Miku deck will come out, and as we’re seeing in the midst of Goblinstorm sales, selling into the original preview hype can mean less profit than selling when people get cards in hand. The correct play with the Mystic could be to wait until people get the Miku deck and then more folks are in on the buying.

We can’t know for sure what the right play is, and that feels brutal. We are conditioned to avoid the situations that make us feel bad, including the feeling of selling too early.  However, there are two concrete plans you can implement to help prevent this set of negative feelings, neither of which works after the fact.

System #1: Make the plan and trust the plan.

It’s remarkably easy to have your emotions in a moment derail what is usually an orderly set of feelings. Buy the card, sell the card. When we start adding regret, though, and the potential of regret, things can really go off the rails. In poker, this is often referred to as being on tilt, where your emotions cloud your judgment like you’re Anakin about to slaughter some younglings. 

When you make a plan ahead of time, you free yourself from that doubt and regret. Doesn’t matter if the card goes up or goes down, you got the profit you wanted and you had a plan for that profit! You are a success and doing better every time! Having a system, a set of preplanned sell points, allows you to worry less about what could be.

And if it looks like a card might keep going up, well, that leads to the other systematic approach.

System #2: Cover your entrance costs, and everything after that is free money. 

This is how I approached the Miku cards. I’d already sold a ton of the cards, and I was way ahead on all of it. Whatever I got from these leftovers was just super bonus money, and should be viewed as a nice addition to the systematic profit I’ve already made happen. 

The common variation on this is to buy a card, and when it spikes, immediately sell just enough to cover what you paid. After that, hold forever or sell immediately, and you’ll always be winning when it comes to your sales. This is a systematic approach, but allowing you to flex as the situation changes. 

Whichever plan you have, I also want to tell you that the social aspect is big. It helps a lot to hear from other people that you did the thing and you did it well, even if there was more profit to be had. Some people like to buy cards and then never sell them, and down that path lies madness and storage units and lots of cobwebs covering mildewed boxes. Magic is turning into a game of churn, and if we want to maximize profits, we need to execute our plans and keep up with it all. 

Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the co-host of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

We don’t have a lot of specifics about The Hobbit set yet, and that’s fine, since there’s still all of Marvel Super Heroes to get through. What we do know is enough to do some early preparations, and sometimes, forethought is all that’s needed to make some wonderful profits. 

Let’s go through the categories, then some specific cards. 

Borderless Classic Artist Cards

This set is already off to a great start, with reprints of original LOTR cards coming. We’re told of Tom Bombadil, Sauron, the Dark Lord, and of course, The One Ring. There will be 40 of these cards, and there’s nonfoil plus surge foil in the collector boosters, with traditional foils being in a special one-card Box Topper pack. 

It’s important to note that these are not exclusive to the Box Toppers, as has been the case in the past. The Toppers are merely a bonus, something you get with Play Booster and Collector Booster boxes alike. If the special packs were the only way to get shiny cards, then we’d have some difficulties, but two foil versions means we can be reasonable about this. 

We should expect most of the popular LOTR cards here: Bowmasters, Delighted Halfling, Mithril Coat, etc. I’ll be interested to see if there’s nine more Nazgul for us to collect, but mainly, I want to buy all of these when supply maxes out. Will it take another three years for us to get The Silmarillion and a third printing of these cards? Perhaps, but I surely bought enough Halflings at under $10 to resell at $25 to make me interested in maxing out known staples.

The One Ring having cribbed art, and admitted to it, is not going to affect the price all that much of this new version. It’ll be the cheapest. I expect older versions to go up in price some, since they are, by far, better looking. Even without Frazier having copy-flip-pasted the Ring itself, the background is dull and everything else is better. I’ll absolutely be buying these for later resell, but I’m under no illusions regarding the tiers of demand here. 

Dwarven Language Cards

So far we know about Arcane Signet, and there will be four more. Your guess is as good as mine, Signet would not have been on my list as a card that “captures a moment from The Hobbit, such as this Arcane Signet which depicts the mark carved into the door of Bilbo’s home.”

We will get more of these, but I’m not fixated yet unless there’s a Dwarven Rhystic Study lurking.

Book Cover Cards

This is a lot cooler than the other covers we’ve seen, like the D&D module books and the like. These are legible, and it’s obvious what they are. I personally don’t like cards where they are pre-aged to look like the corners are already jacked up, but that’s just me. We’re only getting ten of these cards, with two of them known already. 

Dragon Hoard Frame Cards

The detail of having the red version missing a scale is top-notch, the sort of thing they do very well in a lot of the Universes Beyond products. (Personal favorite: Shadowfax having the meaning of haste!) 

We’re getting 25 of these cards, with three of them previewed, and this should be the sort of thing that performs well. Important to note that there’s both nonfoil and regular foil of these in Play Boosters, with the Collector Boosters getting the Surge Foil versions. 

Glittering Gold Smaug

They didn’t serialize this card, but they announced that there will be ‘approximately’ 500 copies of this card. On one hand, I am deeply suspicious of this methodology. They were allowed to serialize lots of things three years ago, why not slap a number on here? Further than that, why didn’t we get an approximate number for the super-chase Sothera, the Supervoid, or the Headliner Turtles, or The Mind Stone, and so on?

And on the other hand, I feel like Smeagol looking at the Precious for the first time. I wants it, yes I do, and I’m aware that I’ll have to pay an exorbitant amount to get it. The TMNT Headliners are several grand, but with them publicizing the amount of Glittering Gold Smaug out there, the big collectors will be all over this and copies will not last long in the market. I’m doubtful that any will get sold on TCGPlayer, but we’ll see. My expectation is that this is $4k+ out of the gate and rises from there. I wish I was kidding. 

Individual Cards

Smaug is a fantastic card, one that fits well into a wide range of decks but definitely amazing in those that are Treasure-focused. Imagine Smaug into Goldspan? Boom! I appreciate that he’s four power and hasty and low costed. I’m becoming resigned to not owning the Glittering version with each of these words.

Thorin is a perfect inclusion in every Equipment deck, giving a lot of mana for equipping, plus a big smack to a creature. Don’t forget that he can target himself too, so hopefully one of your equipment grants haste. 

The Arkenstone and My Precious are solid cards that have good Adventure spells, but since the Adventures have colors, it restricts where these cards can go. A lot of decks would love the combo, though. 

Bilbo, Thief in the Night is going to form some interesting combos. Mana reduction for the Commander is good, but from the yard, from exile, from foretell or even from Adventures is remarkably flexible. I don’t know what the endgame is for this card, but it’s got a great first ability and a very useful secondary, so there will indeed be some craziness. 

Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the co-host of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

We’re in the first week for Secrets Of Strixhaven, and prices have yet to settle out. There’s still a lot of product to go on the market, so I’m not ready to buy in on the set yet (mostly) but there are a lot of things I have bought already this year, and I wanted to show you where I’ve put my money. 

Some of these I’ve mentioned on MTG Fast Finance, others have been discussed in the Discord, so perhaps some will sound familiar. I talk about a lot of cards; I don’t always buy in. So let’s discuss what I’ve bought and why! 

Mesmeric Trance    ICE    01/2026    48x @  $1.80

Way back when we learned about some of the Marvel Super Heroes commanders/themes, Doctor Doom, King of Latveria was causing all sorts of spikes. People have gone through a LOT of cards that involve discarding land. (Side note, Tectonic Reformation is way low stock on foils, though it might be in the Commander deck. I also think Artist’s Talent is amazing, but who knows. Take your chances!)

One of the cards that catches my eye if you’re doing a lot of drawing and discarding is Mesmeric Trance, an Ice Age rare that is thirty-one years old at this point, and even more importantly, it is on the Reserved List. We’ve gotten many examples of RL cards that get just a whiff of interest and the prices jump up 5x. Yes, this has a cumulative upkeep cost and that’s awful, but with RL cards, the interest will be enough to goose the price, and I’ll take all the $5+ sales I can get on this card. There’s a lot of awesome discard enablers and payoffs, but blessed few with the potential that this has. 

If you want another RL spec for Dr. Doom, may I suggest Mind Over Matter? This hard has jumped to $120+ at times, has an infinite draw/win combo with Temple Bell, and might be better with the King, depending on what you’re tapping/untapping.

Archon of Coronation (FEA)    CMR    01/2026    31x  @  $2.25

Champions of Minas Tirith (Showcase Foil)    LTC    01/2026    14x @ $3.00

Regal Sliver (FEA)    CMR    02/2026    9x @  $5.00

One of the other Marvel Super Heroes previews was for the box art of the Commander decks. Black Panther has two blurbs on the box: “Power up with Artifacts” and “Reign as the Monarch” in a Green-White deck. We were given T’Challa as a card, at least the artifacts version, but we don’t know about the Monarch side of things. 

So I took a swipe at three separate Monarch-themed cards. Archon is the most likely to be in the deck, since it’s generically named, but it’s also the cheapest at the time. It seems like we’ll get regular nonfoil decks and then the special foil versions, so there might be room for the FEA copies to do well. There isn’t much supply left of these anyway, since Commander Legends was 2022. 

The Champions and the Regal Sliver are much safer bets to not be in the deck, because Slivers are reviled and LOTR cards are hard to print if they reference the specific lore of Tolkien. Reprieve is fine; Minas Tirith is safe until The Hobbit lands later this year. 

There’s four ‘Court of’ cards that are in Green/White, and it seems unlikely that they would reprint all four, but who knows. Keep an eye on when the decklists are released, and pounce right away on the ones that got skipped. 

Yuna, Grand Summoner (Wedding Promo Foil)    FIN-Promo    1/2026    12x @  $37.00

At the end of the year, there was a promo given out for people who played in a Commander Box League for exactly one week. This is a traditional foil version of the card, with Yuna in her wedding dress, just a great piece of art. Originally, I got these from a ProTrader in Europe when the card was going for $75 on TCGPlayer. Folks have been steadily listing and selling their copies in the months since, bringing it down to about the same price that I got mine for when shipping was calculated in. 

I’m still a big believer in the card, as it’s selling several copies a day. Everything Final Fantasy looks so good in the long term, so I’m just keeping this dozen until they rebound and surge back up. It’ll just take a little attention or a bit more time. 

Terrasymbiosis (Borderless foil)    EOE    02/2026    4x @  $18.00

James talked me into this live on the cast, and honestly, I didn’t need much convincing. I really wish I’d bought in when the card was sub $10, but this is a card that’s truly bonkers in the counters-based decks and should be an auto-staple on the level of Hardened Scales/Doubling Season. 

We haven’t gotten the right commander for this since EOE came out, but the next one that does will put this in range of a double-up.

Sunset Sarsaparilla Foil     SLD    03/2026    11x @  $15.00

Academy Manufactor Nonfoil   SLD    02/2026    11x @  $7.50

Silver Shroud Costume Foil    SLD    03/2026    10x @  $10.50

These are recent Dump Week specs thanks to the Fallout lairs. The Costume was the bonus for every $150 spent, and I bought ten more to add to the ones I’d already gotten. Manufactor’s only special version came from the Playdoh drop, and while it looks fun, the SL version with a Handy Helper is so on point that it hurts. Sunset Sarsaparilla ought to hit when The Hobbit lands and we’re likely to get some more amazing Food-themed cards. There’s no shortage of them now, but more is always good. 

Bring to Light (Scroll Foil)    SOA    04/2026    4x @  $15.00

Expressive Iteration (Scroll Foil)    SOA    04/2026    4x @  $16.00

Finally, some very recent pickups I got from Card Kingdom with the last bit of store credit I had left. Both of these are rares, and need 350+ Collector Booster packs to be opened to get one copy. I think there’s going to be more opportunities on the Silver Scroll foils, as they are incredibly gorgeous, but these were just too cheap to pass up. Bring to Light doesn’t really have a special version, but it also sees much less play overall, so it evens out.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the co-host of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.