The Magic: The Gathering card Rain of Riches is spiking hard right now. This card has appeared in a number of Commander decks, but the cheapest version from Bloomburrow has risen from $1.30 to $10.75 in the past two weeks – a rise of 726%. The reason for this particular spike is no secret. It’s all to do with The Hobbit cards, every last one of which was recently revealed.
Rain of Riches is a five-mana card for treasure decks that makes you a couple of treasures, then gives the first spell you cast with treasure each turn the cascade keyword. That can mean a ton of free spells for devoted treasure decks, especially if you’re running plenty of instant speed cards and can activate this ability on your opponents’ turns.
The Hobbit set has a bit of a treasures theme, with close to 20 cards that mention the token type in their rules text, including some really powerful ones like Gleaming Splendor. In particular, there are some powerful treasure synergies based around Smaug and the dwarves – arguably the two most attractive elements of this entire MTG set.
On the dwarf side, the card most relevant to this spike is Thorin, King of Durin’s Folk, who makes treasure whenever a dwarf enters and buffs them all up in the process. Assuming you have a lot of dwarves in your Thorin deck (if you don’t, maybe go back and build it again) you’ll often end up making replacement treasures with the creatures you cascade into, which is a tasty bit of synergy.
The deluge of dwarves has also increased interest in Magda, a cEDH level commander that makes treasure whenever you tap a dwarf. It probably isn’t the best place for it, but I could easily see Rain of Riches being bundled into a more casual version of this deck.
Then there’s the Smaug cards, and all three of them (the Impenetrable, the Magnificent, and Wicked Worm) work with treasure – they also synergize pretty well with each other. While the other two contribute, Smaug the Magnificent is the most popular and most relevant here, as it wants to build up a critical mass of treasure to blast opponents for lethal damage.
Though Rain of Riches doesn’t do that much treasure-making on its own, if your entire deck is singlehandedly designed around making as treasure as possible then it will play a great role in speeding up your gameplan, fetching you Reaver Cleavers and Xorns that can generate more cash money.
With spoiler season for The Hobbit now at a close, I’m expecting more price spikes created by these cards over the next few weeks. We’ll keep our eyes open, and let you know what we find.
Source: Wargamer
