The Magic: The Gathering card Rat Colony has crept up in price, and now creating a rat deck is super expensive! This card was already at a premium for a common, with each copy costing about $4, but in the run up to the latest set release it has more than doubled in value, and now you have to spend $9.70 if you want just one.
Given that most Rat Colony decks feature 20+ copies of this card, that makes any mono black rat decks a nightmare to purchase.
Rat Colony is one of those cards that breaks the fundamental deckbuilding rules of Magic: The Gathering, allowing you to include any number of them in your deck. You have to include a bunch of them if you’re going to use any, because they all buff each other up. One Rat Colony is just an understatted 2/1, but if you get five onto the field, they’ll all be boosted up to six power.
As it was only ever printed in Dominaria and a Myster Booster product, Rat Colony is pretty vulnerable to a price rise each time a new rat commander gets printed. And sure enough, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set had one: Rat King, Verminister.
There have been quite a few good legendary rats in recent years, thanks mostly to Bloomburrow, but Rat King, Verminister is specifically designed to work with Rat Colony or its older form, Relentless Rats.
His ability lets you sacrifice three rats to return a creature and all other creatures with the same name from your graveyard to the battlefield. That’s pretty useless in commander, unless you’re leaning heavily into the Rat Colony gimmick. If you have some self-mill available or just enough dead rats in the grave, Rat King’s ability can be terrifying and very hard to handle without graveyard hate.
Surprisingly, while the strategy would work just as well with Relentless Rats, that card doesn’t seem to be moving up in price to the same degree. That’s partly because it’s had more reprints, and partly because Rat Colony is seen as a net upgrade to Relentless Rats. Though remaining at one toughness is a big downside, costing one mana less more than makes up for it.
While Relentless Rats doesn’t seem to be moving, there is one other rat card that seems to be ticking up in price and that’s Marrow-Gnawer. This is a great card for any rats deck seeking to go wide. It gives all your rats fear to help them get through for damage, and can make a ton of tokens if you’ve got a full board.
Source: Wargamer
