Price Versus Power: Commander’s Most Expensive Cards
One of the best things about Commander is how you can play almost every card in Magic’s history. This gives players a ton of deck-building freedom and affords many opportunities to play classic cards and nostalgic favorites. It also means that players can play using some of the most expensive cards ever printed. In this article, I’m going to discuss the 10 most expensive cards that are legal in Commander (at the time of writing) and share my opinions on how they hold up these days.
Forcing your opponent to learn what banding does while drawing a card at instant speed is the type of power that we’ve come to expect from the Reserved List.
It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that every card in this article is on the Reserved List. This means that it’s not likely that we’ll see them reprinted outside of collector sets that aren’t designed for regular play such as the controversial 30th Anniversary Edition. Of course, this doesn’t mean that these cards will all be powerful. After all, there are probably a dozen cards like Formation for every Gaea’s Cradle. Early Magic certainly was a bounty when it comes to variety in card design and power level.
Author’s note: Commander should be about fun, rather than about whether you have expensive cards. If you’re just playing with friends, hopefully you feel like you can use playtest cards in order to round out your deck. That said, almost all of these cards have very similar cards that are much more affordable, so I’ll try to recommend them when possible.
One more thing: Due to the volatile nature of the Reserved List market, the rankings in this article may not always be as perfectly accurate as they were when it was first written.
10. Drop of Honey
This is an example of a card that’s actually fairly good at evoking its source material. That aside, it creates an interesting mini-game where creatures are gradually killed off from weakest to strongest. This can actually have some pretty interesting gameplay applications, particularly in green where you might have the biggest creatures and this will clear out small utility creatures or other weaklings that might get in their way.
Porphyry is actually a term used to describe a specific type of igneous rock. It’s usually purple.
I’ve seen Drop of Honey only once in Commander. It was cast by someone playing Grismold, the Dreadsower. It actually did a pretty good job of making sure that more of the tokens died and there was never any danger that Grismold would fall victim to it. Does that mean that it’s as powerful as its price might lead you to believe? That seems unlikely, given that the much cheaper Porphyry Nodes sees very little play.
09. The Abyss
This art actually depicts Exxaxl and I after we looked at the price for the cards on this list.
From the crazy artwork to the Ernest Renan flavor text, everything about this card screams old Magic. If you’re not playing many creatures—or maybe if you even want your creatures to die too—this card can certainly help keep the board a little bit cleaner. You just have to hope that nobody else casts a world enchantment of their own to get rid of it. Hey, it might happen.
Since it can only target nonartifact creatures, you might be able to pair it with Biotransference if you’re playing a deck that cares about making things into artifacts. This is cool, but it does feel a bit unwieldly. If a card like The Abyss is out of your price range, you can also pick up at a much cheaper cost on Magus of the Abyss. This one is even a creature so you can just destroy it when you’re done with the effect.
08. Candelabra of Tawnos
“Simplicity” is not quite how I would describe a candelabra that has the inexplicable ability to refresh the mana of lands.
If you’re not sure what a mono artifact is, it’s the early card type for an artifact that needs to tap in order to use its ability. This means that Candelabra of Tawnos is probably a little bit less broken than the rules text on the actual card might look to people who are unfamiliar with the bizarre templating of older artifacts. In a format with powerful lands, it still seems likely that you can generate tons of extra mana using this card.
In the rare cases that I’ve seen this card in Commander, it’s usually been played with something like Nyxbloom Ancient to create a ridiculous amount of mana that almost invariably wins the game on the spot. If you’re not feeling that price tag, Magus of the Candelabra is more affordable and often easier to untap. Either of these cards should let you produce enough mana to do almost anything.
07. Chains of Mephistopheles
By now, most of us have seen the flowchart version of this card. Early Magic rules text was wild.
Basically, if you’re drawing a card that isn’t the first card that you draw during your draw step, you'll need to discard a card. If you can’t do this, you’ll instead mill the top card of your library. This card can be used to punish decks that want to draw a ton of cards or as a way to stock the graveyard for decks that have uses for the cards that they and their opponents mill or discard.
I usually see this card in decks built around Tergrid, God of Fright because of how effective it is at removing resources from opponents and potentially stealing them with her ability. You might also have seen it played with The Gitrog Monster, where it’s used to both tax opponents who want to draw cards and put cards into the graveyard to enable the deck’s convoluted combo lines.
06. Moat
I’ve always found it strange that a moat would be an enchantment and not a land or an artifact.
This card is infamous for being the subject of buyouts designed to drive up the price when it was seeing play in Legacy. The quaint artwork and no-nonsense symmetrical pillow fort effect make this one of my favorite cards in early Magic, but it definitely commands a higher price than a lot of other cards while offering a fairly specific effect that likely isn’t going to make or break your deck.
After all, there are plenty of other pillow fort cards that make it harder for opponents to attack you. Teferi’s Moat is one such example where the reference is quite clear, although it puts a different spin on things by caring about the color of creatures that want to attack you. As with many iconic early Reserved List cards, you’ll find something even closer with Magus of the Moat being an almost identical card.
05. Juzám Djinn
In the early days of Magic, this was considered one of the very best creature threats in the game with above-rate stats with a minor downside and the ability to evade early black removal spells that weren’t able to target black creatures. While it hasn’t aged as gracefully as some of the other cards on this list, Juzám Djinn is still one of the hallmark cards of Magic’s early years and also features some of its most iconic artwork.
Back in my day, we played Phyrexian Negator and liked it.
One look at a card like Sheoldred, the Apocalypse should tell you everything that you need to know about the evolution of black creature threats over the years. While black still sometimes features above-rate creatures with downsides in its wheelhouse, this card is all upside. Nowadays, you’re a lot more likely to see a creature such as the not-so-subtle reference of Ravenous Giant in the Uncommon slot.
04. The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
A creepy church shrouded in mist? Let’s check it out. What could possibly go wrong?
This is one of the weirdest lands ever printed. It doesn’t produce any mana and it instead gives an ability to every creature on the board that causes them to be destroyed unless the person controlling them keeps paying mana to prevent this from happening. This barely even feels like a land at all, so it’s easy to see why we haven’t seen any other similar land cards over the years.
You’ll find direct references to The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale on another Reserved List card—the much more affordable Pendrell Mists—and also on Magus of the Tabernacle. The key difference is that these cards cause creatures to be sacrificed rather than destroyed if the mana is not spent to protect them. This actually often makes the effect on these cards stronger than the original, but they also cost mana.
03. Mishra’s Workshop
In order for a land to tap for three colorless mana, there has to be some type of downside. In this case, it’s because that mana can only be spent to cast artifact. This can feel really restrictive because artifact decks often want to use colorless mana to pay for activated abilities as well. Even so, this land feels incredibly powerful in decks that are able to properly capitalize on the extra mana that it produces.
The lack of a Mishra’s land type was one of the main catalysts for The Brothers’ War.
I play this card in my Heliod, Sun-Crowned cEDH deck, where it can be used to make powerful plays such as dropping an early Trinisphere to stop opponents in their tracks. The high number of artifacts in the deck provide me with a lot of ways to spend that mana. While it’s not quite the same thing, the recent Urza’s Workshop offers a unique spin on the design of his brother’s card.
02. Bazaar of Baghdad
As the second land in this list that doesn’t tap for mana, this card allows you to tap it to draw two cards and discard three. This can be a powerful effect if you need to filter cards and have a use for the discard, but it can also wind up leaving you down on cards in circumstances where you’re unable to capitalize on this type of effect. As such, it can be difficult to use a card like this in some decks.
Rielle is that friendly grandmother who wants to go to the bazaar to pick up a few new cards.
Commanders such as Rielle, the Everwise—and the aforementioned The Gitrog Monster—love cards like Bazaar of Baghdad. It’s extremely easy for these commanders to come out ahead on this exchange and there are plenty of ways for them to use the cards that get discarded too. Almost predictably, there exists a more budget-friendly version of this card in the form of Magus of the Bazaar.
01. Timetwister
Thirty years on, I still want to see the character with those crazy hands. Show us another angle!
As the only member of the Power Nine to be legal in Commander, this card holds the distinction of being the most expensive card in the format. Casting multiple cheap cards early and then making everyone shuffle their hands and graveyards into their libraries and draw a fresh grip can be very disruptive to anyone whose early turns were relying on specific cards in their opening hand.
We’ve seen a few similar cards over the years, with Echo of Eons being the most recent example. While the allure of Timetwister is very strong due to its status among the Power Nine, it can actually wind up being a difficult sell for decks that want to use cards in the graveyard. In many situations, a card like Windfall can actually be a more reliable—and more affordable—way to make this type of effect work for those decks.
Conclusion
Thank you for sticking with me while I looked at some classic cards from Magic’s past. I wouldn’t play all of these cards in my own Commander decks, but I’m certain that most of them will appeal to a lot of different players. Are they worth the price of admission? That’s for you to decide, but I encourage you to talk to your playgroup about playtest cards or consider the budget options available. After all, Commander is all about fun.
I’m lucky enough to own two of the cards on this list. I always suggest that you prioritize fun over worrying about buying expensive cards like these.
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