The Magic: The Gathering card Stronghold Gambit has seen a frankly extraordinary price spike, jumping from less than a dollar about a week ago to a whopping $40 on July 1. That’s a huge price spike! But something here seems too good to be true…
The card, from the 2000 MTG set Nemesis, is a red sorcery that’s actually pretty decent for its age. It lets you play a little minigame with your opponent: you each pick a creature card from your respective hands to reveal, and whoever chose the card with the lowest mana value gets to play it for free.
While that’s a cool way to cheat on the casting cost of a creature, it’s also very risky. If your opponent wins the gambit, you’re not going to be happy, encouraging you to pick the cheapest critter possible – at which point why are you even bothering? However, if you’re up against a deck that’s running hardly any creatures, and if you can sculpt your opponents’ hand with targeted discard, you might be able to cheat something massive into play.
This has allowed the card to be a sideboard staple in Rakdos Reanimator Legacy decks. They have the perfect combination: a series of ginormous, powerful creatures that you’re already trying to cheat onto the battlefield, and four copies of Thoughtseize.
The thing is, this isn’t news to anyone. When a major price rise occurs, we’re usually looking for a new card or deck that’s boosted its power level, or at least a popular content creator that’s highlighted the card. Stronghold Gambit doesn’t seem to have any of that.
Reporting on the same price spike, MTGRocks has attributed the card’s momentous rise to stock simply having run out, the number of cards in circulation slowly being chipped away at by eternal players, until now there are none left. They point to the absence of listings for the card on TCGPlayer as evidence for this hypothesis.
I don’t buy it though, for two reasons. Firstly, there seem to be plenty of copies of the card available on other storefronts, like Cardmarket, where there’s no evidence any price spike has even occurred. And secondly, and this is pretty weird, there are still copies of Stronghold Gambit selling cheap on TCGPlayer, mixed in alongside the expensive sales.
On the day I’m writing this (July 1), a Lightly Played version of the card has sold for 68 cents, and four Near Mint copies have sold for $39.99. But another Near Mint copy has gone for just $2.25!
Rather than a genuine price spike, this smacks of market manipulation to me. Perhaps some naughty individual has paid over the odds in an attempt to drive up this card’s price and sell their own copies for more cash.
Or perhaps there’s a perfectly innocent explanation. It seems to have become a trend lately for TCGPlayer sellers to not delist a card they don’t actually want to sell, but instead set its cost to something ridiculous. This played havoc with price trackers like MTG Goldfish and Stocks for a while. And that means it’s possible some poor sod has accidentally paid way too much money for a card that wasn’t actually worth more than a dollar.
At any rate, I don’t think it’s possible for a genuine price spike to be fully contained to a single online store, so I’m saying this potential price spike has been myth-busted!
Source: Wargamer
