The Magic: The Gathering card Lotus Bloom has seen a 113% price spike, moving up from $3.10 when Duskmourn came out at the start of the month, to $6.60 today. That’s the cheapest version of the card currently available, but rarer variants have seen greater movement, with foils jumping from $3.50 to $10, while the promo prerelease version with unique artwork has jumped from $4.80 to $26.50. Interestingly, original Time Spiral copies have not changed price at all.
Lotus Bloom is essentially a much weaker Black Lotus. Like that artifact, one of the best MTG cards ever created, it can be sacrificed to create three mana. However, Lotus Bloom isn’t as busted, simply because it has Suspend. You can’t cast it normally, you have to either wait for it to run out of time counters and come into play, or reanimate it directly onto the battlefield.
The reason this card is spiking is that it’s seeing play in Mono Blue Charbelcher decks. Modern decks revolving around Goblin Charbelcher as a central combo piece have darted in and out of play over the years.
This unusual artifact reveals cards from the top of your library until you hit a land card, then deals damage equal to the number of cards revealed this way. So the way to turn this from a quirky card into a wincon is to stack your deck so you never hit a land.
In the past, you would have to do this by removing your lands with cards like Mana Severance, but now thanks to DFC lands in Zendikar Rising, it’s possible to make a viable Modern deck with zero cards that Charbelcher will ‘see’ as lands. It’s gotten even easier with Modern Horizons 3, which added a bunch more double-faced cards with lands on their backs.
Lotus Bloom would see play in Belcher lists even before the latest iteration of the deck. It was always useful as a free ramp spell which cones online and makes a bunch of mana on the crucial turns when you need to play and then activate Goblin Charbelcher. But the new version really makes it sing.
The ingenious latest iteration of Blue Charbelcher combines Lotus Bloom with the Kamigawa creature Tameshi, Reality Architect to create a large amount of mana very quickly. You spend one mana and bounce your own land to reanimate Lotus Bloom from your grave, then immediately sacrifice it for three white mana. Rinse and repeat.
This combo means you only need four lands (one of them white) to make enough mana to cast and then activate Goblin Charbelcher in a single turn, speeding up the deck dramatically.
This powerful interaction is the main reason Lotus Bloom is jumping in price. It’s also quite likely that a fair few copies were pulled from supply thanks to the Timey-Wimey MTG commander precon decks, which may have reduced supply.
Zero land decks caused another card to jump up in value recently. Selective Memory would usually be useless, but because you can make decks with no lands, it became the main card in a Thassa’s Oracle strategy that can easily exile your entire deck and win the game.
For more Magic: The Gathering content, check out our list of all the MTG sets in order, or take a look at the MTG release schedule.
Source: Wargamer
