Artificer’s Intuition, a blue MTG card that was printed just once, twenty years ago, has suddenly jumped up in price, rising from $4.10 on Friday to $11.30 today, according to the market tracker at MTG Goldfish. The card has a home in the 99 for the upcoming Esper commander ‘Noctis, Prince of Lucis’, who will be part of the main Final Fantasy set.
Artificer’s Intuition has one one and only one printing, in the 2004 MTG set ‘Fifth Dawn’. It’s a blue MTG enchantment that costs one generic and one blue mana to cast. It has an activated ability which, for one blue mana, lets you discard an artifact card, and then search up an artifact with mana value one or less.
That might not sound like much, but remember that some of the best MTG cards ever cost one or less mana. Admittedly, most of them are on the Commander banlist, but there’s still great stuff that you can tutor with Artificer’s Intuition, from utility equipment like Shadowspear, to combo pieces like Lion’s Eye Diamond or Walking Ballista.
Artificer’s Intuition has great utility in decks that trade artifacts in play with artifacts in the bin: it lets you dump a Blightsteel Colossus or Portal to Phyrexia into your graveyard, while tutoring up a cheap artefact to play out. Then a Daretti, Scrap Savant or Goblin Welder can perform the switcheroo, sacrificing the cheap artifact and cheating the big one out of the bin. It also plays nicely with decks that want to set up recursion loops involving cheap artifacts, such as Lion’s Eye Diamond combos.
Artificer’s Intuition will be a great roleplayer for Noctis, Prince of Lucis, a new rare from the forthcoming MTG Final Fantasy set. Noctis is a Legendary creature human noble who costs one generic, one white, one blue, and one black mana, and has four power, three toughness, and lifelink.
Noctis also has a static ability that allows you to cast artifact spells in your graveyard by paying three life in addition to their other mana costs. There is a limitation – the artifact enters with a Finality counter, which will exile the artifact if it’s ever sent to the graveyard, shutting down infinite recursion loops.
Or it would do, except that fans in the r/CompetitiveEDH subreddit found a way around this drawback as soon as Noctis was revealed. The one mana artifact Hex Parasite has an activated ability that can remove a Finality counter at the cost of one generic mana and two life. Handily, this is another card that Artificer’s Intuition can find.
If you want to use this to repeatedly recast Lion’s Eye Diamond, you’ll still need a way to mitigate the five you pay for each loop, and you’ll need a win condition. There are artifacts that do both – Aetherflux Reservoir, and the upcoming Black Mage’s Staff – but Artificer’s Intuition can’t find either of them. Even so, being able to tutor for two parts of the combo is great.
Noctis was revealed almost three weeks ago, and the price of Artificer’s Intuition didn’t twitch, even though it is a known quantity among CEDH players. It only started climbing on Sunday, the same day that redditor Cautious_Handle2547 posted a spec piece to the r/mtgfinance subreddit suggesting it was likely to go up in price and would be a good buy.
That doesn’t mean that the demand is coming purely from speculators. Cautious_Handle2547’s post may have raised the card’s profile among casual Magic players looking for good inclusions in a new Noctis deck. It has only been printed once, making supply extremely limited, so it’s natural that its price increases steeply based on rising demand.
We’re looking forward to Final Fantasy actually hitting the MTG release schedule so we can play it (assuming we can actually get any cards) – and we’ll be intrigued to see where prices settle down once it’s out in the wild. Are you going to build a deck based around your favorite Final Fantasy character? Come and share it with us in the official Wargamer Discord community!
Wargamer has a whole separate guide to the best MTG commander precon decks if you just want to get involved with the game without any fuss or worries about the secondary market. At least, not until you get onto upgrades…
Source: Wargamer
