The market price for ‘Gilt-Leaf Archdruid’, a curious green MTG card from the Lorwyn set Morningtide, has risen steadily from less than two dollars to a neat $6 since February 21, according to price tracking website MTG Goldfish. That coincides neatly with when ‘Teval, the Balanced Scale’ was revealed, a new dragon commander that can easily activate the Archdruid’s hard to use but incredibly powerful ability to steal another player’s entire land base.
The Gilt-Leaf Archdruid is not an MTG card you play for its stats, as it’s a green 3/3 elf druid creature that costs two green and three generic mana. It has a triggered ability that allows you to draw a card whenever you play a druid spell, and an activated ability which requires you to tap seven druids but grants you control of all of another player’s lands.
That’s the kind of incredibly powerful, hard to set up ability that commander players just love brewing decks around, and many players have tried to make it work with druid typal decks or simply throwing Archdruid into a shapeshifter deck. Then along comes Teval, the face commander for the upcoming Sultai Arisen MTG commander precon, and it suddenly seems all too easy.
Teval is a 4/4 flying spirit dragon that costs one generic, one black, one green, and one blue mana. Whenever it attacks, you mill three cards, and may return a land from your graveyard to the battlefield tapped. Whenever one or more land cards leaves your graveyard, you create a 2/2 black zombie druid creature token.
The Sultai slice of the MTG color pie is well placed to create loads of zombie druids, with mill cards, ways to return lands from the bin to the field, and ways to exile lands to pay alternate costs via MTG keyword abilities like Delve and Gather Evidence. There are also quite a few good druid cards in the three colors, particularly green. Far from a pipe dream, activating the Archdruid’s land-stealing ability in a Teval deck is perfectly possible.
Gilt-Leaf Archdruid was only printed in two MTG sets, as a rare in 2008’s Morningtide and then again in The List in 2022, so the supply is very limited. Fans pre-emptively buying copies to upgrade their precons in advance of the Tarkir Dragonstorm release date, and probably a few speculators buying cards to sell later, have pushed the price steadily up.
It doesn’t hurt that quite a lot of YouTubers have created videos about Teval, and Gilt-Leaf Archdruid is always in the 99. Here’s InkedNinja’s take on it:
It’s such an odd card we can’t see it appearing on the main MTG release schedule any time soon – but who knows, perhaps it’s one of the unrevealed cards coming in Tarkir Dragonstorm? It would be a peculiar pull in limited.
We’re keen to see the rest of the Dragonstorm reveals so we know what our options will be to upgrade our paper and MTG Arena decks. If any freebies are revealed, you’ll be able to find them on our guide to the MTG Arena codes.
Source: Wargamer
