The Magic: The Gathering card Ripples of Undeath has spiked in price over the last month, going from $4 this time in March to $14 today. Meanwhile, extended versions and extended foils have risen from a similar price point to a whopping $30-40 – though they do seem to be coming down from these ludicrous highs now.
Released in the Modern Horizons 3 MTG set last year, Ripples of Undeath is a two mana enchantment that’s a super cool card advantage spell for graveyard decks. It mills you for three at the start of your second main phase, then you can pay one mana and three life to place one of the milled cards into your hand.
That’s some really nice card selection, albeit at a cost, and tons of Commander decks that want to be dumping many cards into their graveyard anyway run this card, from Muldrotha to the Master of Keys.
But – though it was already a popular EDH option – Tarkir Dragonstorm seems to have created a particularly high demand for Ripples of Undeath, with three popular new MTG commanders that are running it.
Though the least played of the three overall, Teval, Arbiter of Virtue has the most obvious synergy with the enchantment. This commander gives all your spells delve, so the graveyard becomes a resource that ramps you – filling it is paramount. The drawback is pretty huge too though – you have to pay a bunch of life for each spell you cast.
What this means, however, is that Teval, Arbiter of Virtue decks are already designed around tanking a load of life loss. Lifelink creatures or even spells like Platinum Emperion that prevent life loss altogether will make the cost of Ripples of Undeath pretty insignificant.
However, this version of Teval pales in comparison to the other: Teval, the Balanced Scale. This variant of the Sultai spirit dragon wants you to be taking cards out of your graveyard all the time and rewards you with zombie tokens for doing so. Though it doesn’t have much bearing on the deck’s landfall subtheme, Ripples of Undeath is an efficient enabler that fuels what the deck is doing, and can make you a token each and every turn.
And since this is the most popular Tarkir Dragonstorm commander from the set’s Commander precon decks, it’s obviously pulled a ton of copies of Ripples of Undeath out of circulation as people look for upgrades.
But the third most popular Tarkir Dragonstorm commander, Betor, Ancestor’s Voice, also wants Ripples of Undeath. Betor has an ability that pulls cards out of your graveyard, so keeping it well-stocked is important. But even better, that ability is directly tied to the amount of life you lost each turn, turning the enchantment’s biggest drawback into a net positive.
Between just these three commander cards, there are now 6,643 new decks logged on EDHREC that run Ripples of Undeath. So it’s pretty easy to see why the card is spiking, even though it only came out last year in a very popular set. The demand is just that huge!
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Source: Wargamer
