An old Magic: The Gathering card has seen an enormous 1,100% price spike. Since that card is Battle of Wits, and a Magic 2013 copy was a 15 cent card, that means it’s still only sitting at $1.80. But there are far pricier variants available, with a Secret Lair card themed around the battle of wits in Princess Bride now selling for anything from $10 to $50 (a ridiculous range), up from just $4.
There’s a simple reason why this card’s value has become a bit wobbly and wacky. Battle of Wits has gone from being completely useless in almost every conceivable situation, to an instant win condition in the most popular Magic: The Gathering format, Commander.
That’s because Battle of Wits is a very strange card, a five mana enchantment that wins you the game on your upkeep, as long as you have 200 or more cards left in your library. While it did actually see some sporadic play many years ago, while it was Standard-legal, it was never a key player. Having a large enough deck to make Battle of Wits work creates way too much variance for most constructed formats, and Commander has strict deckbuilding requirements: it’s 100 cards only.
However, one of the new rulebreaker cards, Whtz, the Bibliophile (the name is not a coincidence) lets you break those requirements. While most of these rulebreakers care about color identity, if you pick Whtz as your commander, your deck simply has no maximum size. This book-stealing homunculus even has a card drawing ability which is free if you have a deck of 200 cards or more.
With Whtz as your commander, all you need to do is play Battle of Wits, and if your opponents can’t deal with it in one turn cycle, it’s curtains for them. Of course, there is the little problem of actually finding Battle of Wits in a 200-and-something card deck. You do have access to white for enchantment tutors, though there are actually fewer of these available than you might think.
Honestly, the whole thing is a gimmick I’d rather steer clear of. Actually searching through your massive deck for this card seems kind of annoying – not to mention the shuffling you have to do afterwards – and what you get for your trouble is an instant win-the-game enchantment. Obviously, this is subjective, but that doesn’t seem like a particularly fun way to seize victory.
Still, this is a good meme, and while I think a lot of people are going to have a lot less fun with this combo than they expect to, it’s cool that a useless card got granted a new lease on life.
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Source: Wargamer
