The cheapest printing of the zombie MTG card Bone Miser has tripled in price in the last week, hitting $30, while its rarer printing from the List has risen to an eye-watering $80. The demand seems to come from fans pre-emptively upgrading the upcoming Eternal Might precon deck, thanks to the incredible value Bone Miser adds to the deck’s card discard strategy.
Bone Miser has never been printed in conventional MTG sets; it made its debut in the 2019 Commander precon ‘Merciless Rage’, before being reprinted in limited numbers via the List. According to MTG market tracker MTG Goldfish, the List printing has risen from $16 to $80 in the last week, while the Commander 2019 version has gone from $10 to $29.90.
There’s no noticeable movement in the MTGO online prices, a good sign that demand is being driven by Commander rather than constructed formats.
Bone Miser is a 4/4 black zombie wizard creature for four generic and one black mana. It has three triggered abilities, each triggered when you discard a different kind of card:
- Whenever you discard a creature card, you create a 2/2 black zombie creature token.
- Whenever you discard a land card, you add two black mana.
- Whenever you discard a nonland, noncreature card, you draw a card.
This bony lad is a perfect upgrade to ‘Eternal Might’, one of the upcoming Aetherdrift Commander precons. It’s a zombie typal deck with a primary theme of getting value from discarding cards.
The face Commander, ‘Temmet, Naktamun’s Will’, has a triggered ability that allows you to draw a card and then discard a card whenever you attack, and a triggered ability that grants all your zombies +1/+1 each time you draw a card.
With Temmet and the Bone Miser in play, you can reliably create more zombie tokens for your army by discarding creature cards, or draw an extra card and pump your board even more by discarding a non-creature non-land card.
Hashaton, Scarab’s Fist is arguably the best MTG Commander in the precon, with an even more powerful triggered ability. Whenever you discard a creature card, you can pay one blue and two generic mana, to create a tapped token copy of the card that’s a 4/4 black zombie.
Provided you have a way to discard cards, this lets you cheat massive creatures with powerful abilities into play, even cards with clauses that cause them to be shuffled back into your deck when they hit the graveyard (like the MTG Eldrazi titans). If that’s your strategy, Bone Miser offers incidental value, and isn’t a bad creature itself to cheat into play.
Aetherdrift and the Aetherdrift commander decks aren’t even out on the MTG release schedule yet, and they’re already causing old cards to spike in price. We reported on Varina, Lich Queen shooting up an incredible 2,000% earlier this week.
We’re eager to see what impact Aetherdrift has on standard, and we’re keen to incorporate a lot of the cards into our MTG Arena decks. Make sure you check out our guide to MTG Arena codes: if WotC adds anything special for Aetherdrift, we’ll be sure to include them in the guide.
Source: Wargamer
