The Magic: The Gathering card Omnibian has seen a significant increase in price, jumping from $2.50 to $9.48 in the past two weeks. Going by MTG Goldfish’s price tracker, the spike began a week after Bloomburrow released, and it shows no signs of slowing down just yet.
Hailing from the 2006 Ravnica MTG set Dissension, Omnibian has an awesome design and a cool flavorful effect. It’s a 3/3 frog that can turn other creatures into 3/3 frogs using ‘reverse camouflage’.
So obviously, this price spike is frog-related. Just as Bloomburrow has caused the price of rats and squirrels to rise, so has it now boosted this amphibian.
But while it’s no great mystery that powerful MTG commanders like Ashcoat have gotten more expensive, Omnibian is objectively an underwhelming, overrated card. It’s a hill giant that can tap to make one other creature a 3/3 frog for a turn. They don’t even lose their abilities!
There’s no way this card is seeing play in any MTG format but EDH, so let’s take a look there. Examining the recent frog commanders on EDHREC, we can see that some Glarb, Calamity’s Augur and Clement, the Worry-Wart players are running this card, presumably because they want to play frog tribal and there just aren’t enough frogs.
With Clement, at least there’s some frog-synergy to speak of, though you’re not able to use Omnibian’s ability if you tap him for mana.
Despite the new contenders, it seems like Grolnok, the Omnivore remains by far the best fit for Omnibian. With this commander, there might even be situations where you can actually make use of its lackluster ability, perhaps giving a strong or unblockable creature the frog creature type so it can mill extra cards while slipping past or over blockers.
We think it’s likely that more players are making Grolnok decks right now than at any time since the card was released, what with all the new frog support to try out. Sure enough, on EDHREC, Grolnok is the 265th most popular commander overall, but he’s ranked 192nd in the past month, with 418 new decks to his name.
These three commanders combined seem to be the main reason Omnibian is spiking. A niche old card, never reprinted before, it makes sense that this creature’s price would be easily boosted by a little bit of froggy hype.
This is by no means the only Dissension card to see a price bump in the past few weeks, either. We recently saw Psychic Possession soaring in price, and before that a very narrow counterspell spiked surprisingly hard.
For more Magic: The Gathering content, check out our guide to the best MTG Arena decks, and our MTG release schedule.
Source: Wargamer
