Time to shake out your bulk box! The Magic: The Gathering card This Town Ain’t Big Enough has suddenly become a premium uncommon. According to MTG Goldfish’s tracker, it was priced at just 40 cents in late December, but the card has shot up over the last week.
It now sits at $4.10 at time of writing, after a price rise of 925%. While one copy probably won’t break the bank, for a mere uncommon it’s now very expensive, up there with the best removal uncommon removal cards of recent years.
Released in last year’s cowboy MTG set Outlaws of Thunder Junction, This Town Ain’t Big Enough is a bounce spell that’s most useful property is its ability to pop two of your permanents back to your own hand for just two mana.
In November last year, it formed part of the Temur Floodcaller combo deck, a Standard strategy that – while it now only forms a small part of the meta – was briefly very popular, likely in part because it had the potential to pull off an infinite combo in the low-powered Standard environment.
While that deck will certainly have pulled many copies of This Town Ain’t Big Enough out of circulation, by itself it isn’t the main reason for this spike. Instead, it’s a new deck, known as Esper Self-bounce, which has driven the surge of interest in this card.
As the name suggests, this Esper deck is all about taking advantage of ‘enter the battlefield’ triggers. It uses cards like This Town Ain’t Big Enough and Fear of Isolation to return permanents to your hand, enabling you to play them again to reuse their effects.
Unlike many blink strategies, in Esper Self-bounce it’s not creatures you want to be bouncing. In this deck, your creatures stay on the battlefield while your enchantments are repeatedly recycled. You’ll bounce and recast cheap enchantments like Nowhere to Run, Hopeless Nightmare, and Stormchaser’s Talent, getting second and third bites of the apple.
Meanwhile, all these enchantments entering and reentering the battlefield net you extra benefits from the ‘Eerie’ triggers on creatures like Optimistic Scavenger and Entity Tracker. You’ll have all the card draw you could need, and be able to pump up a flier with +1/+1 counters to make a potent, evasive threat.
It’s worth noting that this deck has cropped up in the past month without gaining an advantage from any new set release or change to the Standard MTG banlist. It’s nice to see that, even though the pace at which MTG Arena decks can be tested has accelerated the rate at which new archetypes arise and formats become ‘solved’, we can still get exciting new Standard decks in a period of relative inactivity.
This Town Ain’t Big Enough has now been a promising part of two intriguing new decks in three months, so while the card could come down in value once the shine wears off Esper Self-bounce, it seems likely the spell will continue to find spots in new archetypes.
It’s also worth shouting out Stormchaser’s Talent, which has been an important part of both Temur Floodcaller and Esper Self-Bounce. It’s risen to surprising heights for a card that cost just $2.50 when the last Standard set came out: now it’s close to ten times that value.
For Magic card prices you can truly gawk at, check out our list of the most expensive MTG cards ever sold. And don’t miss our rundown of the 2025 MTG release schedule – we’ll keep it updated with all you need to know about the next year of new sets.
Source: Wargamer
