The Magic: The Gathering card Varina, Lich Queen has seen a huge price spike of over 2000%. Worth only 50 cents in late January, the cheapest copy of this card now costs as much as $10.80. However, it is worth saying that it seems like, after an initial mammoth bump, that price could now be on the way back down.
Originally hailing from Commander 2018, Varina, The Lich Queen has never been printed in a mainline MTG set. This zombie tribal card lets you draw and discard cards based on how many zombies you attack with, and can also exile cards from your graveyard to create 2/2 zombie tokens.
Varina began to spike on January 25, which funnily enough is just one day after the new Commander precon deck, Eternal Might was revealed. And obviously it’s not a coincidence: both Varina and that deck’s commander, Temmet, are zombies in the esper MTG color combination. They even both hail from the plane of Amonkhet!
For some reason she wasn’t included in the decklist, but Varina is quite clearly a perfect fit for the Eternal Might deck, simply because she packs so much synergy with its main commander.
Temmet gives all your zombies a major power boost whenever you draw a card, and Varina gives you one draw for each attacking zombie. So if you attacked with five zombies with both Varina and Temmet on the field, you’d draw five cards and each creature would get +5/+5. That’s an instant overrun effect, with some excellent card draw to boot. Since Varina can even make zombies for you, you wouldn’t technically even need any other creature cards to win the game.
Varina’s also fairly decent alongside Eternal Might’s more popular MTG commander, Hashaton, Scarab’s Fist. This creature wants you to be discarding powerful creatures and creating zombie copies of them, which Varina can certainly help you with. But it’s primarily the combo with Temmet that’s set this card a’spiking.
Whereas Living Energy seems to have had basically zero impact on card prices – at least as far as we’ve noticed – Eternal Might has been setting off spike after spike. In particular, it’s had a strong impact on retro cards, with this Reserved List rare getting expensive, and this Stronghold card also jumping up in value.
For more Magic price stories, you might enjoy our list of the most expensive MTG cards ever to be sold. Or you can take a look at our list of the best MTG Arena decks and the MTG release schedule.
Source: Wargamer
