The dual-faced Magic: The Gathering card Norman Osborn / Green Goblin is rising in price. This time last month, the MTG Spider-Man legend was worth just $3.50, but even then it was slowly creeping up in value. About ten days ago is when the card began ramping up in earnest, shooting from $4.30 to $9.40, with no signs of stopping just yet.
The trigger for this price spike was the reveal of the Doom Prevails precon deck, led by Doctor Doom, King of Latveria. While the face commander had already been shown off for this deck months earlier, the full reveal really showed us how important the connive mechanic is to this deck, and what a good fit Norman Osborn therefore is.
If you’ve read our Doom Prevails precon upgrade guide, you’ll know that Doom Prevails is pretty messy – with lots of villain designs that are interesting, but don’t fit a particular theme. But as far as the deck has an underlying strategy, it’s conniving, with many of the precon’s best cards featuring this draw-and-discard mechanic.
This dual-faced Spider-Man villain is great for the deck, valuable whichever side you choose to cast. As Norman Osborn, you have an easy way to keep conniving, with an unblockable creature who triggers the keyword on combat damage. As the Green Goblin, meanwhile, you give all your spells mayhem, letting you cast them from the grave for cheap on the turn you discard them.
The supervillain side is more flashy, effectively providing a ton of extra cards and letting you cheat on their costs, but if you have other cards out that gel well with connive like Iron Monger, it’s possible you might choose to play Norman first, anyhow. In which case, having the ability to transform the card later on and switch to the more powerful mode is super useful.
The Green Goblin is one of the most memorable cards from the Marvel Spider-Man set – for one thing this was Fleem! But also, he’s the most popular commander from this release, with an impressive 15,000 decks logged on EDHREC. It’s easy to assume that many copies have been taken out of circulation – making this spike more likely.
If you’ve seen any big price movements, you can share them over on the Wargamer Discord group.
Source: Wargamer
