The Magic: The Gathering card Iron Man, Modern Marvel is rising in price, with copies jumping from about $30 last week to $60 in the first week of July. Since the card was only valued at $12 when pre-release for the Marvel Superheroes set rolled around, that’s a significant glow-up for Mr Stark.
It’s interesting that this has become the costliest version of Iron Man, since it is also one of the worst of the eight (yes, eight!) versions of the character that can be found in the Marvel MTG set. The ability to buff other artifact creatures, and draw you a card upon attacking as long as you’ve got one, is at least very versatile – Iron Man, Modern Marvel fits into a bunch of different decks – but it’s not all that powerful.
As a result, Iron Man, Modern Marvel is only found in 1,700 decks on EDHREC (mainly decks led by other versions of Iron Man) and almost no one is running him as their commander. Just take a look at other versions of the same hero…
- Master of Machines: played in 3,450 decks
- Bleeding Edge: played in 4,500 decks
- Armored Avenger: played in 7,200 decks
- Tony Stark: leads 3500 decks, played in another 2000
… And you’ll see that in terms of playability, he doesn’t measure up.
So why is this version of Iron Man becoming so costly? Well my assumption is that it’s got something to do with the delays affecting Marvel products. After all, Iron Man, Modern Marvel comes from the welcome decks, and these were delayed in both Europe and the US. While there are a few eBay listings for these decks right now, it seems like they’re pretty hard to get hold of online. They’re not up on big stores like TCGPlayer, for instance.
If few copies are being pulled from welcome decks, the only other place this card can be found is collector boosters, where exclusively foil copies show up in 1.9% of packs. If I’m doing my math right, since there are five welcome deck mythics available (one for each color), that means a foil Iron Man, Modern Marvel should show up in 1 out of every 250 Collector packs.
Surprisingly, foil and non-foil copies of Iron Man, Modern Marvel are valued about the same right now. But as more welcome decks hit the market, we should see non-foil prices fall somewhat, while foil copies are likely to remain expensive.
You might be wondering why the other mythics heading up the welcome decks aren’t also spiking in price. For most of them, it’s simply because they’re not very playable. Iron Man, Modern Marvel is relatively unimpressive compared to the rest of the iron men, but the card does at least work nicely in casual commander. Black Widow, Daring Operative for instance, just isn’t worth her mana cost.
However, another of these welcome deck mono-color mythics, Hulk, Brutal Brawler, is in fact getting costly. Just like Iron Man, Modern Marvel, this card is broadly usable in a wide range of decks; he’s strong in any green build using +1/+1 counters. Copies are now selling for $48 and continuing to rise.
Source: Wargamer
