The Magic: The Gathering card Polymorph has seen a significant price spike, with good quality copies rising from about $1.30 to nine or ten bucks over the past week. This card has seen a number of reprints over the years and while different versions have jumped up at different speeds, all of them now seem to go for about the same on TCGPlayer, at least if you want a near mint copy.
Polymorph is a very old pseudo-removal spell in blue which destroys a creature and replaces it with a random one pulled from the top of the library. It’s like a less versatile Chaos Warp – a card that nowadays slots into most casual red EDH decks. Funnily enough, it’s Commander that’s behind this price spike, specifically the new precon deck from Reality Fracture.
The most likely reason to play a copy of Polymorph in your deck is that you’re hoping to turn tiny tokens into gigantic creatures. This is the strategy the Multiverse Reforged precon is going for, and Jace, Reality Architect’s main ability is more or less a straightforward copy of Polymorph.
However, while this deck contains loads of great token makers and lots of big beefy creatures (though arguably many don’t belong in the deck) what it really lacks is Polymorph-type effects. Relying on Jace’s Planeswalker power alone isn’t going to cut it – you can only use it every four turns, unless your commander gets removed and you spend your whole turn recasting him.
So Polymorph, Transmogrify, Mass Polymorph and other cards that have this effect are really useful for the precon, and some of the most popular upgrades. While this was obvious as soon as the decklist was revealed, it took nearly a month for supplies of Polymorph to start to run low, which is why the card has only just begun to spike in value.
While Polymorph has had three reprints (and one appearance on The List) since it first showed up in the 1996 MTG set Mirage, it hasn’t had a proper reprint since 2007. Since it’s never benefitted from the larger print runs of more modern sets, that explains why it was able to shoot up in value despite having several versions.
Source: Wargamer
