The Magic: The Gathering artifact card Surveyor’s Scope has blown up in value, jumping up from just $0.80 to $5 in the last 20 days, according to MTG Goldfish’s price tracker. And weirdly enough, this huge 525% price spike may actually have been caused by MTG Goldfish itself.
Released over a decade ago, in Commander 2013, Surveyor’s Scope is an MTG mana ramp card that can be handy for helping you catch up with other players. It’s a two mana artifact which you can sacrifice to fetch up lands. However, it only works when you’ve missed land drops – you get as many basic lands as there are players who are at least two lands ahead of you.
This artifact was a pretty decent card at the time – especially in red or white decks which were otherwise easily left in the dust. However, Wizards of the Coast has printed plenty of catch-up cards since – there are even lots of good white mana ramp cards now – so you mainly see it played alongside MTG commanders who sacrifice or bounce their own lands.
So why has Surveyor’s Scope spiked this week? To be perfectly honest, this one gave me some trouble. At first glance I thought it was our first Duskmourn price spike – since Zimone, Mystery Unraveler does reward you for pulling off multiple land drops in a turn.
But the more I looked into it, the more nonsensical this seemed. When it comes to ways to ramp, Simic is an embarrassment of riches – there’s no reason you would be behind any of the other players at the table, let alone multiple of them, and I’m highly unconvinced players will be building in land-saccing strategies just to make Surveyor’s Scope work.
Besides, the dates don’t line up. We were shown the MTG precon deck commanders for Duskmourn on August 31, and this card started to rise a week before, on August 21.
Finally, I stumbled upon the answer. On August 20, the MTG Goldfish Commander channel uploaded a Shark Tank spoof, where the crew pitched their EDH ideas to each other (and also to an audience of 50,000 viewers). The very first card in the video was Surveyor’s Scope.
MTG Goldfish owner Richard makes a convincing case, with the aid of a powerpoint filled with tables and percentages, for why Surveyor’s Scope is better than you think. If you take into account the possibility of bounce lands, and Lotus Field, and ignore some of the fine print, Surveyor’s Scope is a broken card. The sharks were convinced, and it seems like some viewers were too, because this artifact started spiking directly after the video came out.
Surveyor’s Scope was only printed in Commander 2013, and the Commander Anthology released four years later, which makes it a fairly scarce card that’s more susceptible to spikes. Also, Richard says in the video that he bought “like 8,000” copies, so that’ll have depleted the supply quite a bit.
For more Magic: The Gathering content, check out our list of every single MTG set ever released – and see some sets that haven’t come out yet in our MTG release schedule guide.
Source: Wargamer
