With just about every card from MTG Reality Fracture now revealed, pre-order listings on online marketplaces like TCG Player are giving us a pretty clear picture of the cards from the upcoming set that the fandom is most excited for – or at least, the cards fans are willing to pay through the nose for. These are the five Reality Fracture cards that have attracted the most hype – and the highest prices – in the lead-up to the set’s launch, and the decks they’re going to see play in.
These prices are based on the market average on MTG Goldfish at time of writing; sellers charge a premium for presales of cards that they don’t actually own yet, and once the set is in the wild, it’s likely that all of these prices will fall. We’re only looking at the price for the most common version of each card. Like all contemporary MTG sets, Reality Fracture is packed with alternate card treatments, which are sure to reach higher price points, but aren’t a concern for players who just want to build a deck.
5. Emrakul, the Exigent Doom – $39.99
The newest version of the iconic Eldrazi, Emrakul, Exigent Doom is a game ending threat with a mind-bending mana cost of 10 mana. Emrakul is a 12/12 flyer with vigilance and Ward – Sacrifice three permanents. You can pay three generic mana and exile her from your hand to give one of your lands the ability to tap for two colorless mana, and then cast her later from exile; and when she enters play, you untap all lands.
That’s funky, but she’s by far the weakest Emrakul. Eldrazi EDH decks are already set up to get creatures that cost 10 mana or more into play without reanimation, usually with mana rocks or sacrificial Eldrazi scions. As a mana rock, Exigent Emrakul is expensive, and casting her won’t untap your Sol Ring or Thran Dynamo. With that said, Adventure cards have shown us well enough the value of cards that can do something in the early game and something completely different later on, and Exigent Emrakul might fit that bill.
4. Tarmogoyf – $45.00
Tarmogoyf is a reprint of a once game-defining card, a green creature that costs one green and one generic mana, with stats that grow based on the number of different card types in all graveyards. A decade ago this was the defining aggro threat in the Modern format, and the fact that every deck running green with a remotely aggressive strategy needed four copies drove the price up around $150.
In contemporary Magic, it’s just a cheap vanilla creature. Standard already has plenty of those that don’t have any impact on the format. Perhaps there is an archetype for it in, but at the moment, this demand looks like the result of nostalgia.
3. Ingris Stingerquill – $47.00
Each one of the five elder sphinxes in the new cycle of Hexhaven founders is going for a high price, but Ingris Stingerquill is soaring the highest. She’s the cheapest at just one black and two red mana, always a good start for a commander, and has a static ability that means whenever one of your creatures attack, they deal one damage to each opponent. She’s obviously encouraging an aggressive, go-wide strategy, similar to what we saw with Mishra, Claimed by Gix in The Brother’s War.
But she’s got some scope for shenanigans that Mishra lacks – I’ll thank YouTuber Space Coconut MTG for pointing this out. Ingris doesn’t deal the damage, her creatures do. There are a lot of red and black creatures that can do funny things when they zap an opponent, like forcing them to discard cards or shutting down their lands. Rakdos aggro stax, anyone?
2. The Echoverse Fulcrum – $59.48
The Echoverse Fulcrum is a two mana colorless artifact lets you draw and then discard a card when it enters, and then sits there looking threatening. It has a five mana and tap, sorcery speed activated ability that exiles the Fulcrum, and destroys all creatures. It’s an expensive wrath of god effect, but it’s also colorless, and there are very few of those for Eldrazi decks to run – they also tend to be a lot more restrictive than this one.
1. Hexhaven Invigorator – $ 79.99
Hexhaven Invigorator is a cheeky reference to the classic Phyrexian Obliterator, with a similar monocolored cost, this time four green mana. It’s a 6/6 with vigilance and, like the Obliterator, it punishes your opponent for dealing damage to it: whenever it takes damage, you can search your library for that many land cards and put them into play tapped.
The demand for this guy makes sense to me – which isn’t to say I’d pay the price or that it will necessarily stay this expensive, just that I understand why there’s hype. The Invigorator’s ability to tutor up any and all lands looks a little bit like a Primeval Titan. It’s not – being tied to a damage trigger instead of when he enters makes him so much less reliable than Prime Time, and I don’t expect him to function in any of the same decks as Prime Time. But it’s a completely different story in Commander, because Prime Time is banned in EDH.
If you want to replicate Prime Time with the Invigorator, you’ll want to have a Marauding raptor in play before you him, so he takes 2 damage as he enters – why not treat yourself by immediately searching up both parts of the Thespian Stage / Dark Depths combo? Or get him on the board at the same time as an Akoum Hellkite, play a land, and set off a cycle of Hellkite landfall triggers pinging the Invigorator for one damage, triggering him to go grab another land until you stop or he dies.
Monogreen is also a potent force in Standard, even after the banning of Badgermole Cub, thanks to powerful landfall cards. This guy has the same cost as Icetill Explorer, and while he’s a less reliable tool to get lands into play, he’s also an aggressive threat in his own right. He might not pan out as a replacement, but he’s definitely worth experimenting wiht.
Which cards from the new set do you think are being overlooked? Which ones are overhyped? Come and talk about them in the Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
