Multiple MTG sphinx cards are spiking in price right now, after Reality Fracture’s spoiler season has drawn to a close. The most impressive spike is for Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign, which – according to the tracking tools on MTGGoldfish – has seen a meteoric rise from just $1.20 to $15.20 in just one week. That’s a jump of 1100%, so hats off to anybody who picked up a ton of these a month ago. Lunch is on you.
The reason there’s so much hype around Magic: The Gathering’s sphinxes right now is because the creature type gets special treatment in Reality Fracture. There are six strong sphinx cards at rare or mythic rare in the main set, but more importantly the Ur-Sphinx brings back the busted eminence ability, encouraging thousands of Commander fans to try out this tribe for the first time.
The Ur-Sphinx has an Esper color identity, allowing you to include all the best sphinx cards in your deck. And it has an equivalent to the Ur-Dragon’s eminence power, making all sphinxes cheaper just for being in the command zone. You don’t even have to ever play the Ur-Sphinx (though it also has a powerful card stealing ability that looks mighty fun) to make it a viable leader for a sphinx typal deck.
While dragons are a much more supported tribe than sphinxes, the novelty factor is huge here. Suddenly there’s a reason to go out and buy all the best sphinx cards, when there never was before, and the creature type as a whole has become much more valuable off the back of all the hype.
Unsurprisingly, the biggest mover Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign is probably the most valuable card you can put in an Ur-Sphinx deck – not for its useful card draw ability, but for the fact that it reduces the cost of your other sphinxes by two mana. See, there aren’t a lot of low-cost sphinxes in Magic. We’re looking at five, six, seven mana for many of the best cards in this faction.
If you can reduce that by three instead of one, you’re suddenly at a point where you can plop down multiple very powerful creatures in a single turn. And that’s a pretty good place to be.
As well as Unesh, another great sphinx that’s seen a spike is Sphinx Ambassador, up from $20 to $50. This is a really fun card with just a single printing (in Magic 2010). When you deal combat damage with it, it triggers a fun mini-game. You search for and select a (creature) card from your opponent’s deck, and if they can’t guess what it is, you get to play it for free. That’s really cool and has some neat synergy with the Ur-Sphinx’s card-stealing ability. More importantly, it’s a pretty strong, and old sphinx card that has only ever been printed once.
Source: Wargamer
