The Universes Beyond Magic: The Gathering card Marneus Calgar has spiked in value by 660% in just four days. According to our favorite price tracker on the MTG Goldfish website, this card cost just $1.80 on November 9. By today, November 13, it has rocketed up to $13.70.
As you may already know, Marneus Calgar has only ever been sold in the Warhammer 40k deck Forces of the Imperium. The very first batch of Universes Beyond Commander precons ever made, these Warhammer decks were wildly popular, and likely paved the way for Wizards of the Coast’s current, crossover-heavy strategy.
Marneus Calgar himself is the alternate MTG commander for the deck, but has become an order of magnitude more popular than the Imperium deck’s main commander, Inquisitor Greyfax. That’s because he comes with a vastly more flexible effect, letting you draw when you make tokens, and even creating his own token creatures to power that card draw effect.
In fact, Calgar is so great that he’s one of the few Warhammer cards with cEDH potential. You’ll see from our cEDH tier list that, while he’s not about to dethrone the likes of Sisay or Kinnan, the Space Marine strategist can do great work, winning games on the spot if you can form an infinite mana generator.
But why is the card spiking now, just over two years since the 40k decks started to shoot off the shelves? There doesn’t appear to be any obvious synergy with new MTG Foundations cards, no busted combos or new decks to speak of.
Could it just be the draw of the character? Leader of the Ultramarines (the most mainstream of Space Marine chapters) and the first guy to be upgraded to a Primaris Marine, Calgar is pretty popular. He’s had some great moments too. In one Warhammer 40k book, for instance, Caglar punishes his own troop masters because rebels rising up against the Imperium are doing such a bad job of it.
The explosive launch of Space Marine 2, the best Warhammer 40k game in years, can only have helped matters, and in fact could be the driving force for this spike. This shooter focuses specifically on the Ultramarines, after all, and Marneus Calgar even shows up at one point to save the day. We’ve certainly noticed a surge of interest in Warhammer 40k around the release of the game, so it’s not inconceivable that that’s translated to more players building around one of its characters.
However, it may also just be that supply of these cards is very low, given that so many people want the 40k cards, and Wizards has shown no signs of reprinting the decks. It seems like some fans may be hoarding the more valuable UB cards, too, specifically in the hope that their value will keep, as the ins and outs of license deals may make it harder for Wizards of the Coast to reprint them.
Whatever the case may be, we’ll be keeping an eye out, to see if other Warhammer 40k MTG cards go up in price over the next few weeks.
For more Magic: The Gathering content, check out our MTG release schedule guide, which lists every MTG set coming out next year.
Source: Wargamer
