The Magic: The Gathering card Collector’s Cage has spiked in price, going from $3.40 on January 4, 2025 to $10 at time of writing. That’s a pretty speedy rise of 194% in just six days, and though it seems to have leveled out for now, more expensive variants of the card continue to gain value.
If you’ve never heard of this card before, that’ll probably be because it was part of The Big Score: that strange collection of cards tacked onto Outlaws of Thunder Junction after Wizards of the Coast discovered what a disaster Epilogue Booster packs truly were, and excised them from all future MTG sets.
If you pay one mana, this white artifact card can be tapped to put a +1/+1 counter on a creature. Even better, it has the Hideaway ability, letting you dig five cards deep into your deck and tuck away a spell, ready to cast it for free later when you meet a particular criteria: in this case, having three creatures with different powers after you tap Collector’s Cage.
The reason this card is spiking is it’s part of a new Standard deck that wasn’t on our radar at all. Known as Selesnya Tokens or Selesnya Aggro, this is a classic green/white go-wide archetype, which runs lots of cards that create and buff tokens Sandstorm Salvager, and Sanguine Evangelist.
Piloted by Charles Eiler, Selesnya Tokens won the SCG standard 10k on January 5, which explains the sudden surge of interest. Right now we’re seeing other cards from the decklist, such as Pawpatch Recruit, also rising quickly in price, as players buy up copies.
As for Collector’s Cage, its main role in the deck is to cheat in Overlord of the Mistmoors. This card would otherwise be too costly to play in the deck, since you’re very vulnerable to board wipes, and need to have an opponent on the ropes before they can build up the mana to cast a Sunfall.
But with Collector’s Cage to cheat it out several turns early, it’s an amazing win con. It demands an immediate answer, and even if it gets shot down with spot removal, still leaves you with two flying tokens to help close out the game.
Playing online, we’ve yet to run into this deck on the Standard queue, but you should probably give it a spin: it could turn out to be one of the best MTG Arena decks of January.
Collector’s Cage might be pricier than it was a month ago, but its still below the heights it rose to shortly after Thunder Junction came out. Back then, it was played in all kinds of decks, from Midrange strategies, to janky builds looking to cheat out Emrakul!
For more Magic price stories, check out our list of the most expensive MTG cards ever sold.
Source: Wargamer
