Two MTG cards that synergise brilliantly with saga enchantments – Tom Bombadil and Falco Spara, Pactweaver – have more than doubled in price in the last week, thanks to excitement for the upcoming Final Fantasy set. Final Fantasy’s famously powerful ‘summons’ are being represented in the set as enchantment creatures with the saga subtype, and interest from commander players preparing to build saga decks with these new cards is driving prices up.
The cost for Tom Bombadil has risen from $2.10 to $4.80 since last Monday, while Falco Spara has gone from a dollar to $2.20, according to MTG price tracking website MTG Goldfish. The pair were printed in the Lord of the Rings and Streets of New Capenna MTG sets respectively, and see very little constructed play outside of Commander.
Tom Bombadil is the definitive five color saga commander. Whenever you resolve the final chapter ability of a saga while Bombadil is in play, you get to exile cards from the top of your library until you hit another saga, put it into play, and then tuck the exiled cards in a random order. While there are four or more lore counters on sagas you control, he has hexproof and indestructible, making him very hard for opponents to remove with anything less than a mass exile effect or an edict.
Falco Spara has wider applications, but is a good Bant saga commander and a great inclusion in the 99 for Tom Bombadil. Spara allows you to look at the top card of your library and play cards from there, at the cost of removing one counter from a permanent you control.
This is a downside if you’re removing +1/+1 counters or similar, but removing a lore counter from a saga is all upside, keeping it in play for another turn and rebuying your earlier saga abilities. That’s particularly true when the saga is also a creature.
Sagas are a fascinating card type: although they’re a permanent like other enchantments, they have a fixed lifespan, and they have different effects from turn to turn. It’s hard to predict their exact value, particularly in multiplayer. And when the MTG Final Fantasy set releases, the new creature sagas will introduce a new layer of tantalising complexity.
The creature sagas are a slam dunk lore win for Final Fantasy fans, and a juicy deck-building challenge for deck brewers, so we’re not surprised that people are buying up support pieces for them before the new set has even arrived on the MTG release schedule.
Are you building a new Bombadil deck? Retuning your Spara build? We’d love to hear from you in the official Wargamer Discord community!
Tom Bombadil decks are likely to mash up many more Universes Beyond sets than just Final Fantasy and Lord of the Rings. The MTG design studio loves using sagas to communicate stories, and so they appear in a lot of Universes Beyond products, like the fifteen original sagas themed around TV episodes in the Dr Who Commander precons. The Warhammer 40k decks have powerful sagas too, some of which already see substantial play with Tom Bombadil. It’s going to be an eclectic deck to play against!
Source: Wargamer
