The Magic: The Gathering card Aphelia, Viper Whisper is spiking in price, up to $25 now from its previous price point of $8 in just the last week – a rise of almost 180%. This card is part of the Foundations set, which theoretically means new copies will always be available. However (and the anime art style might have tipped you off to this) it’s also a mythic Jumpstart card – notoriously much harder to get hold of.
The reason for Aphelia’s rapid spike appears to be a new legendary creature from the Marvel Superheroes MTG set: The Serpent Society.
The Serpent Society has a really fun ward ability that gives opponents five poison counters – meaning each player can only ever target them once. But more relevant here is the other ability, which forces all your enemies to sacrifice a nontoken creature whenever one of your deathtouch creatures is killed.
Deathtouch tribal is still a fairly underutilized design space, and Aphelia is one of the best options going. And there’s a lot of synergy between these two cards. The Serpent Society wants you to have as many deathtouch creatures as possible, and Aphelia can make tokens with deathtouch. Aphelia wants you to be attacking with snakes, and The Serpent Society is a snake that plays well with other snakes like Hooded Blightfang, Ohren Frostfang, and Ophiomancer.
With The Serpent Society making everyone sacrifice their creatures, it shouldn’t be too hard to land a hit with a snake, at which point Aphelia can halve your victim’s life total.
Perhaps because deathtouch strats are so rare (or maybe it’s that super sweet ward cost), The Serpent Society is shaping up to be the fifth or sixth most popular MTG commander in the entire Marvel set. And given that this set may have the highest density of legendary creatures we’ve ever seen, that’s pretty impressive.
I’m sure the synergy goes the other way too – I expect some fans were looking for a place to include The Serpent Society and are now working on an Aphelia list. Together, the added interested has added $17 to her price tag.
If you’re planning on building some Marvel EDH decks, let us know on the Wargamer Discord – especially if you’ve got a commander no one is talking about.
Source: Wargamer
