The MTG card Primeval Titan has spiked in price by as much as 522%. This jolly green giant has seen tons of variants and reprints over the years, and pretty much all of them have doubled or tripled in price.
For instance, the cheapest iteration right now is the one from Modern Masters 2015, and this has jumped from $4.60 to $15.30 in the past week and a half. The most expensive is the one from the Chris Rahn Secret Lair, and that’s gone up from $5.80 to $36.10.
Still a very relevant card, thanks to its place in the popular Modern deck Amulet Titan, Primeval Titan is one of the strongest MTG mana ramp cards Wizards of the Coast has ever printed. It fetches up two non-basic lands the turn you play it, and then collects two more every time it attacks.
As we touched upon earlier in the week, a load of banned Commander cards have leaped up in price, as fans appear to have got it into their heads that Wizards is about to overturn the Commander banlist, or at least strike select cards from it.
Primeval Titan is a banned EDH card that players have semi-regularly questioned on social media. In part, that’s just because it’s been banned for such a long time. It was axed all the way back in 2012, just two years after it was printed, and the format has changed a lot since then.
The reason Primeval Titan is banned is partly that it accelerates so fast, requiring an immediate answer to prevent its caster pulling into an unstoppable lead. The Commander RC site explains that “the result is that it decides, but not ends, the game frequently”.
As well as the sheer number of lands it can fetch up, it’s also problematic that Primeval Titan is not restricted to basic lands. That means it can pull out lands like Cabal Coffers, Gaea’s Cradle, and Field of the Dead on the turn that you play it. These cards are very hard to interact with, given how unfashionable land destruction has become, and the ability only gets stronger the more busted MTG lands Wizards creates.
According to the wise elders who remember such things, when Primeval Titan was legal, it was played in every green Commander deck, and entire games would be warped around trying to clone, steal, or remove it.
Champion of the Commander format and late leading member of the RC Sheldon Menery once suggested that Primeval Titan would only be unbanned if the whole rules committee lost its mind. Instead, we’ve lost the RC, but while Wizards has said it’s going to be examining the MTG banlist for Commander, we’re not about to put money on Primeval Titan getting unbanned.
We’ve got plenty more Magic: The Gathering content worth reading, from our list of the very best MTG commanders to our MTG release schedule guide.
Source: Wargamer
