The MTG card Soul Spike has risen in price by a whopping 1857% in the past two weeks, according to MTG Goldfish’s price tracker. The card just hit its highest ever price for the 17 years it’s been around.
Soul Spike is a rare MTG card printed in the set Cold Snap in 2006. It’s never had a reprint, yet was valued at less than a dollar at the start of March, giving you some idea of how unimportant this card was until very recently. It’s now shot up to a very respectable $13.70.
The card is a black damage-dealing instant that can hit a creature or player for four damage and gain its owner four life. It can also be cast for free. Well, no mana. You do have to pay the rather questionable cost of exiling two other cards from your hand, however – a steep cost that has likely kept this card down in obscurity… until now.
In 2023, Soul Spike has suddenly become a key card in a new Mono Black burn strategy that’s a popular new Modern deck of the past month. The deck, which uses a number of other life-loss cards like Soul Spike, can reload quickly thanks to creatures like Sygg, River Cutthroat, so can sometimes pay the alternative card discard cost for a surprise killing blow.
While it hasn’t had its mettle tested in any competitive MTG events yet, plenty of variants of the deck exist. A Rakdos burn deck using the card showed up in January, before the sleek Black version arrived in March. Now a new Rakdos variant is doing the rounds as well.
Burn is an aggressive MTG strategy that seeks to reduce an opponent to zero life as quickly as possible, using instants and sorceries for the most part, as well as a few creatures. It’s typically a strategy found associated with Mono Red decks, so it’s pretty unusual to see a variant like this using a completely different MTG colour. Perhaps that novelty is why the deck has found such favour with Modern fans.
If you wanted to play this Modern deck, hopefully you bought Soul Spike before its price shot up! If you’d rather stick to Standard, then check out our list of the best MTG Arena decks.
Source: Wargamer
