The MTG card ‘Flagstones of Trokair’ has shot up in price overnight, with the market value listed on MTG Goldfish doubling or tripling depending on printing. The white land card sees play in several powerful Legacy decks, with a single copy appearing in the winning deck of a recent 64-player Legacy Challenge on MTG Online.
Flagstones of was first printed in the 2006 MTG set Time Spiral, and that printing is the most valuable – prices rose from $4.60 on June 10 to $15 on June 11, according to data from MTG Goldfish. The Ultimate Masters printing has seen a similar spike, from $4.30 to $12. The recent Time Spiral Remastered version started climbing a little earlier, ramping up from $2.70 on June 7 to $6.80 on June 11, but the steepest increase is noticeable on June 10.
For once, the MTG Commander format isn’t responsible for this price spike. Nor has the power of Flagstones of Trokair suddenly been unlocked by something new and shiny on the MTG release schedule. No, this is simply a very good MTG card that shows up in some powerful Legacy decks – including a recent tournament winner.
MTG Online player achillies27 won a 64-player Legacy Challenge on June 9 running his ‘Maverick’ deck, a midrange / STAX deck with an MTG land combo element. The deck includes a single copy of Flagstones. To see how the deck performs, you can watch YouTuber ‘DougesOn Twitch’ running it in the video above.
Flagstones also shows up in the popular (and similar) Selesnya Depths deck, which has contributed to gradually rising demand. Given the timing of achillies27’s tournament win, it looks like that’s what pushed the price into a sudden spike. So what does the card do?
Flagstones of Trokair is a white legendary land that enters play untapped and can tap to produce white mana. When it’s put into a graveyard from the battlefield, its controller can search their library for a Plains card and put it into play tapped. This means that destroying or sacrificing Flagstones won’t harm your mana base, and can have other utility if your deck cares about lands in the graveyard.
Legacy has a variety of decks that sacrifice lands to tutor other lands into play. If you’re not familiar with Legacy you might wonder how this can turn into a win in such a powerful format. Among its strategies, Maverick runs the Dark Depths / Thespian’s Stage combo.
Dark Depths is a legendary land that enters play with a stack of 10 ice counters on it. The ice counters can be slowly removed by paying mana – but the combo doesn’t bother with that. Once the tokens are gone the land is sacrificed, and its controller creates a 20/20 black Avatar creature token with flying and indestructible.
Thespian’s Stage has an activated ability that costs two mana, taps it, and transforms it into a copy of another land. Since the stage is already in play, if it becomes a copy of Dark Depths it doesn’t get the stack of ice counters, so it immediately sacrifices itself and produces the lethal Avatar.
Maverick uses the creatures Elvish Reclaimer and Knight of the Reliquary to sacrifice lands and tutor them up. Selesnya Depths is great sacrifice fodder for this, since it replaces itself when removed by enemy land destruction spells, or when sacrificed to tutor a combo piece.
Both the Reclaime and Knight also have the upside of becoming reasonably sized threats the more lands are in the graveyard, so Maverick has a backup plan of beating the opponent to death over the long game.
Flagstones of Trokair hasn’t been implemented on MTG Arena yet, so you can’t include it in your Timeless MTG Arena deck. Check out our guide to MTG Arena codes to unlock some free packs – plenty of older codes are still valid.
Source: Wargamer
