I bought a Ravnica: Clue Edition box in 2024 because I thought it was funny. It was on clearance at a Target, a murder mystery board game with Magic cards jammed inside it, and my playgroup ran the mystery exactly once before quietly agreeing we’d rather just play Commander. The cards went into a 400-count box in my closet with “misc supplemental” written on the side in Sharpie. I haven’t opened it since. Which turns out to matter, because one of the cards in there just went up 395% in four days.
The card is Mastermind Plum, and the reason is Smaug. The Hobbit previews wrapped up last week and the set is stuffed with Treasure payoffs, which is thematically obvious in a way I appreciate. Three separate Smaug cards, all of them pointing at Treasure tokens. Smaug the Magnificent is currently the most-brewed commander from the set on EDHREC. So speculators went digging for Treasure support that hadn’t been reprinted into oblivion yet, and Plum was sitting there at about $1.51.
What the Hobbit treasure price spike actually hit
Four cards made the weekly winners lists. They spiked for three completely different reasons, and only one of those reasons is the kind that survives a set release.
Mastermind Plum and Plunge into Darkness are the thin-supply cards. Plum exists in exactly one printing, that weird Clue box, and there were sixteen listings left on TCGplayer by the time the finance sites picked it up. Over 400 copies moved in four days. Plunge into Darkness is worse, or better depending on which side of it you’re on: one printing, Fifth Dawn, June 2004, never reprinted in twenty-two years. When a Modern Cosmogoyf deck started showing up in MTGO challenges running it as a four-of, and AspiringSpike put a video on it, there was simply nothing to buy.
Rain of Riches is the odd one out. It’s been printed seven times. New Capenna Commander, Outlaws of Thunder Junction Commander, Bloomburrow Commander, plus promos and an extended-art version. It sits in over 96,000 decks on EDHREC already, which makes it a genuine Treasure staple rather than a spec target. And it still went up something like 355% from its cheapest printing, which was sitting at about $1.06 in early July.
Then there’s Shimmer.
The number in the headline is not the number
Here’s the part I actually care about. MTGStocks ran Plunge into Darkness at the top of its weekly winners at $39.99. MTGGoldfish’s finance segment called it $42. Draftsim said copies were listed north of $40.
Scryfall’s market price for Fifth Dawn Plunge into Darkness right now is $21.03.
That isn’t anyone being wrong. It’s two different measurements. During a buyout the cheap listings evaporate in hours and what’s left is whatever the last few sellers decided to ask, so the “price” becomes a handful of optimistic listings on a card nobody is currently buying at that number. Market price is a trailing average of completed sales, so it lags on the way up and then catches whatever the card settles at. Saffron Olive said as much in the Goldfish writeup, that he wouldn’t believe the current price and expected it to fall once vendors relisted, though also nowhere near the $3 it was a year ago. That looks about right so far.
Same gap on the others, just smaller. Plum headlined at $9.00 and Scryfall has it at $8.04. Shimmer got reported as tripling to $10 and sits at $4.07. Rain of Riches depends entirely on which of the seven printings you own, and they’re currently spread between $6.66 for the Bloomburrow Commander copy and $8.33 for one of the New Capenna versions.
If you own these cards, the practical consequence is that you should not price your collection off a spike article. You’ll talk yourself into a number your buylist will never honor. I went through this with repricing habits a while back and the conclusion I keep landing on is that the only price worth writing down is one someone actually paid.
Which of these has legs
Rain of Riches, probably. It was already a staple in Vihaan and Jolene decks before any of this, the Smaug decks want it for obvious reasons, and demand that already existed doesn’t evaporate when the hype cycle moves on. The catch is the same thing that makes it safe: seven printings means Wizards clearly has no problem putting it in precons, and the next Treasure-themed Commander deck is going to reprint it. That’s the reprint trap in its purest form. Real card, real demand, and a supply valve Wizards can open whenever they feel like it.
Mastermind Plum I keep going back and forth on. The card is genuinely good in a Treasure deck. Repeatable card draw off Treasure sacrifice is exactly the effect those decks are short on, and it’s in 20,900 decks already with no real marketing behind it. So the “underplayed card finally gets noticed” story is plausible.
Except the EDHREC data doesn’t support it yet. Only about 99 Smaug the Impenetrable lists and 40 Smaug, Wicked Worm lists have picked it up so far, which is under 10% inclusion on the commander that supposedly caused the spike. That’s not a card getting adopted. That’s a card getting bought. And a single-printing product from a discontinued Target board game is exactly the kind of scarcity that looks permanent right up until Wizards drops it in a Commander precon. Though I’ll walk that back slightly, because Clue Edition cards are weird IP-adjacent designs and I genuinely don’t know if the Cluedo licensing lets them reprint Plum at all. Nobody I’ve read has addressed that.
Plunge into Darkness is the one I’d trust least and it’s also the one with the strongest supply story, which is annoying. Twenty-two years of no reprints is real. Actual tournament results are real. But Modern tech cards fall out of favor faster than Commander staples do, and if Cosmogoyf stops winning, you’re holding a $21 card from Fifth Dawn that four people want.
And then Shimmer
So yeah, Shimmer. Mirage rare, 1996, Reserved List, four mana blue enchantment that gives a land type phasing. Tripled in a week. Nobody can explain it. Goldfish couldn’t. Their best guess was something to do with The City on the Edge of Forever from the Star Trek spoilers, since you can phase out lands and keep them phased out, but they admitted you could already do that with Disciple of Caelus Nin and nobody cared then. No content video anyone can find. No deck. It’s just up.
I love these. Every few months a card moves for no discoverable reason and the entire finance internet shrugs. It’s usually one person with a spreadsheet and too much money, or a foreign-language buyer, or somebody’s cEDH brew that hasn’t gone public yet. At $4.07 it’s not worth doing anything about either way, but if you’ve got Mirage rares in a box somewhere it costs you nothing to look.
Which is the actual takeaway from all of this, and it’s the same one as the Dwarf cards that spiked a couple of weeks back. Every one of these four cards is something a long-time player plausibly already owns. Supplemental Commander precon cards, a Target board game exclusive, a Fifth Dawn rare, a Mirage rare. None of them are cards you’d have registered as valuable, which is exactly why they’re in a box labeled “misc supplemental” instead of a binder.
I finally dug my Clue Edition box out while writing this, and scanning the whole thing took about ten minutes because there aren’t many cards in it. One Mastermind Plum, near mint, still in the same sleeve I put it in two years ago. I’m not selling it. I’ll almost certainly build a bad Smaug deck in September and then feel very clever about having it.
The prerelease is Friday, the set lands August 14, and preorder numbers on the actual Hobbit cards are doing their usual thing. Smaug the Magnificent is at $57.94 and I’d expect that to look different by October. But the old cards are the ones worth checking now, before somebody’s video sends a second wave through them.