The Coldsnap Magic: The Gathering card Sunscour has started to rise in price, jumping from $1.50 on September 21 to $5.50 today. This seven mana board wipe has one main benefit – you can play it for free if you exile two white cards from your hand. It’s therefore started to see play as a sideboard card in Modern, a format whose fans just cannot get enough of free spells.
Released in the MTG set Cold Snap in 2006, Sunscour has never had a reprint in 18 years, which makes it much more susceptible to sudden fluctuations in price, like this 266% spike. Right now, though, it’s only seeing play in one place – as a sideboard card for a new but still niche Modern deck, Bant Ritual.
Mostly playing the MTG colors White and Green, with just a splash of Blue, Bant Ritual is an interesting deck which revolves around the Modern Horizons 3 card Birthing Ritual. The idea is you play a bunch of creatures with powerful ETB effects, using Ritual to move from one to the next in order to counter whatever your opponent is playing.
The deck also has a bunch of recursion effects on creatures like Renegade Rallier, Recruiter of the Guard, and even Luminous Broodmoth, to help keep your engine going.
Since the strategy is based heavily around creatures, we’re not too sure why this deck in particular is the one that wants Sunscour. I suppose when you have so many ways to get creatures back, blowing up a board is going to be good for you in some matchups.
One notable thing about this card is that it’s in a cycle with Soul Spike, a black removal/burn spell whose price went through the roof in 2023. It then saw an even bigger spike again earlier this year, coming to rest at $50 which, while below the prices it commanded in the summer, is not bad for a piece of cardboard that cost less than a dollar before March of the Machine came out.
We don’t expect to see Sunscour follow the same path, but it’s notable how good ‘free’ spells, which require you to pitch a card to get their effect, have become in recent years. Once upon a time, that was a pretty prohibitive cost that kept them out of competitive decks, but card draw has become so good now that they’re popping up all over Magic’s high power formats.
For more Magic content, check out our MTG release schedule, and our guide to the top MTG Arena decks.
Source: Wargamer
