The Magic: The Gathering card Seton, Krosan Protector has seen a huge price spike. At the beginning of March this card cost just $1.50. Now copies are selling for $12, after a rapid increase over the past six or seven days.
Seton, Krosan Protector is a pretty old Magic card, hailing from the 2001 MTG set Odyssey. It’s a centaur druid who can tap any other druid you control to create one green mana. Unfortunately, ‘druid tribal’ has never really been a thing, so Seton’s never really had a firm place in any deck. Until now, that is.
The main cause of this price spike is the new Sultai Commander precon deck in Tarkir: Dragonstorm. This deck’s MTG commander, Teval, the Balanced Scale, creates zombie druid tokens whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard, allowing for all sorts of shenanigans with Seton. This is the same reason, incidentally, that another druid card, Gilt-Leaf Archdruid, has risen in price.
There are lots of ways to get value out of your druid tokens in a Teval deck, but Seton, Krosan Protector is a step above cards like Cryptolith Rites or Insidious Roots, for the simple fact that you don’t have to wait a turn for summoning sickness to wear off.
Seton is obviously a great ramp card for the deck in any scenario, but there’s extra combo potential with cards like Withered Wretch, or better yet Gravecrawler and a sac outlet, allowing you to create a mammoth army of tokens to win the game with.
Druid fans are eating well in Tarkir Dragonstorm. Other interesting zombie druid cards in the new set include The Sibsig Ceremony, Teval’s Judgement, and Welcome the Dead.
What’s interesting is that if this set had been remade a few years ago, these druids would almost certainly have been shaman. Original Khans of Tarkir had zero druids, but a fair few shaman split across Temur and Sultai.
But it seems like Wizards of the Coast had deemed shaman a problematic term. A conversation came up months ago about problems with using both druids and shaman, due to their connections with real life religions, and Magic’s lead designer Mark Rosewater wrote on his blog that “Druid is far less of an issue than Shaman”.
It’s clear from the complete absence of shaman in this set that Wizards has decided to double down on druids, and perhaps cut shaman all together.
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Source: Wargamer
