The Magic: The Gathering card Blade of the Bloodchief has shot up in price, boosted by synergy with the new Jumpstart reveals and a Modern combo deck that’s filled with Eldrazi. Two weeks ago, on October 21, the card cost just $4.80, but now it’s risen by 208% to $14.83, according to MTG Goldfish’s price tracker.
This equipment card, first released in the 2009 MTG set Zendikar, is an efficient way to buff your creatures in certain Commander decks – specifically those with a lot of tokens and methods for sacrificing your own creatures. Whoever is wielding the Blade of the Bloodchief gets a +1/+1 counter whenever anything else dies, and that effect is doubled if they’re a vampire.
Not coincidentally, one of the MTG commanders revealed last week ticks all the boxes. Evereth, Viceroy of Plunder is an MTG vampire who hails from Ixalan, and also a free sacrifice outlet who wants to gobble up as many creatures or treasure artifacts as possible to grow big and strong.
Evereth already gets more powerful when you sacrifice creatures to her, but with Blade of the Bloodchief you can make that happen three times as quickly. Then you can swing in the skies or sacrifice her to some other effect to deal enormous damage to everyone at the table (save yourself, of course).
Evereth is one of the best MTG Foundations commanders coming out in the new set, certainly in the top 10 out of the whopping 39 new legends. Fans snapping up the card to build this spicy new EDH deck is largely the cause of this recent price spike.
But it’s not the only cause. There’s also a Modern deck floating around that uses Blade of the Bloodchief for an infinite combo. The key card here is Basking Broodscale. This Eldrazi Lizard has great potential to go thermonuclear and is already a part of various combo decks in the Pauper format. It creates an Eldrazi Spawn token that can be sacrificed for mana whenever a +1/+1 counter is placed on it.
So with Blade of the Bloodchief equipped, all you need to do is get that first counter onto Broodscale and away you go, making an infinitely large creature, and generating infinite mana. That mana could be spent winning the game with a Walking Ballista (you can scry your entire deck and draw it with Kozilek’s Command). A far simpler way to win, however, is to just drain your foe with a Glaring Fleshraker.
While this deck still seems rather niche, and there are other better established Eldrazi archetypes like Tron still around, the Broodscale Blade deck has seen some success – for instance taking fourth place in a recent Modern Challenge. With Belcher still the hot new thing, could this be the age of Modern combo?
For more Magic: The Gathering content, check out our MTG release schedule guide and our list of the best MTG Arena decks.
Source: Wargamer
