The Magic: The Gathering card Deathrite Shaman is spiking in price, going from $4.50 to $10.33 in the last two weeks. If you’re lucky enough to own a retro copy of the card from the recent Ravnica Remastered set, this spike is much larger, as copies of these cards have gone from $4.40 to almost $40 in the same period.
This Golgari creature card, released in the MTG set Return to Ravnica in 2012, is a one-drop mana dork that has a ton of utility. It can exile a land from a graveyard to create mana, exile a creature to gain life, or exile instants or sorceries to make opponents lose life. Obviously, you need cards in the graveyard to make use of this effect, but in any deck that can pull that off, it’s hugely powerful.
Deathrite Shaman is banned in Modern and Legacy, so it seems we have to look at other MTG formats like Pioneer and Commander to explain the price rise.
There is a new graveyard deck coming out – Sultai Arisen – whose commander, Teval the Balanced Scale, creates zombie tokens whenever a card leaves your graveyard. We’ve seen this MTG commander create several price spikes in the past week, and the synergy with Deathrite Shaman is clear, so this definitely could be driving the spike.
An even bigger possible reason for this price spike, however, is the upcoming MTG banlist update on March 31. It seems like some fans are predicting a Deathrite Shaman unban, perhaps as an answer to dominant graveyard dependent decks in both formats like Grinding Breach and Dimir Reanimator.
Deathrite Shaman has been banned in both formats because it’s too effective as graveyard hate, too efficient at enabling multicolor decks, and provides too much utility for too little cost. Personally I think it has a snowball’s chance in hell of being struck from the banlist. Wizards of the Coast took bold steps unbanning a bunch of cards in the last update and while some of these changes were just fine, Mox Opal was hugely format-warping. I’m expecting a little more caution this time.
Whether I’m right or wrong, we’ll have to see what happens to the card’s price next week. Until then, you can check out the most expensive MTG cards for more Magic: The Gathering price stories, or take a look at our MTG release schedule guide.
Source: Wargamer
