Every set ships a mythic nobody wants. Strixhaven had a few, and for five years Kasmina, Enigma Sage was the one I’d flip straight past without my brain registering that a card was there. Three mana, green and blue, plus two to scry one. She lived in the part of my binder where the mythics are worth less than the sleeves holding them.
Ninety-three cents. That’s roughly where TCGplayer had her sitting for most of this year.
She’s $3.65 as I write this, and the cheapest near-mint listing I can find is over five bucks.
What empower Jace actually does
Reality Fracture releases October 2, and previews have been rolling since the start of September. The set’s headline mechanic is empower Jace. When something tells you to empower Jace, you check whether you control a Jace planeswalker token. If you do, you drop that many loyalty counters on it. If you don’t, you make one first, a blue Jace token with “−1: Surveil 1” and “−3: Draw a card.”
Which is fine. Two abilities, both perfectly reasonable, neither worth building a deck around.
Then Jace’s Machinations showed up. Three-mana instant, lets you fire off loyalty abilities of your Jace planeswalkers at instant speed on anyone’s turn, and it carries empower Jace 8.
Eight loyalty counters. On a token.
Now go back to Kasmina’s top line: each other planeswalker you control has the loyalty abilities of Kasmina. Other. Tokens count.
So you’ve got Kasmina out, you cast Machinations, you get a Jace token with eight loyalty on it, and that token has Kasmina’s −8. Which digs through your library for an instant or sorcery sharing a color with her, exiles it, and casts it for free. Go find Enter the Infinite, draw your deck, win with Thassa’s Oracle. With a turn-one Llanowar Elves you’re doing this on turn three.
People are already brewing it for Pioneer. Whether it’s any good, I honestly don’t know. A three-mana planeswalker that has to survive a full turn cycle in a format where Thoughtseize is a four-of feels like it falls over a lot. But nobody was waiting for the format to answer that question before buying.
Three hundred and sixty sales
The part I can’t stop thinking about isn’t the combo. It’s how little buying it took.
Kasmina has one real paper printing. Strixhaven, April 2021. She’s mythic, so there were fewer of her printed than anything else in the set, and then five years of total irrelevance meant nobody was sitting on a spec pile waiting for this. EDHREC has her in under 8,000 Commander decks, which for a five-year-old planeswalker is close to statistical noise.
Roughly 360 copies changing hands was enough to clear out most of the near-mint supply on TCGplayer. Three hundred and sixty. For a card that actually sees play, that’s a slow afternoon.
I drafted a lot of Strixhaven. More than was sensible, honestly, my shop ran Friday drafts straight through that spring and I went most weeks. Opened Kasmina three separate times and was mildly annoyed on each occasion, because a three-mana planeswalker that scries is not what you want when you’re staring down two Mage Hunters. Two of those copies went into the trade binder and walked out for a Blade Historian that never once made a deck of mine. I remember feeling clever about it.
Which Kasmina, though
Here’s where it gets annoying, in a way that’s specific to owning cards rather than playing them.
The regular Strixhaven Kasmina, collector number 196, is $3.65. The borderless version from the same set, number 279, is $10.45. The prerelease and promo pack versions land around $3.74 non-foil and $9.23 foil. So the spread between the cheapest and most expensive Kasmina you could be holding is nearly 3x, and they all say “Kasmina, Enigma Sage” on the front.
There’s a genuinely weird wrinkle in there too: the borderless non-foil at $10.45 is worth more than the borderless foil at $7.05. I’ve seen that inversion before on Strixhaven cards and I’ve never had a satisfying explanation for it. Something about how many of these got cracked out of Collector Boosters and immediately sleeved into Commander decks, maybe. If you know, tell me, because it bugs me.
If you want to sort out which one you’ve got, the collector number on the bottom line is the fastest tell, and the borderless-versus-extended-versus-showcase question is worth ten minutes of your life if you’ve never nailed it down. My whole Strixhaven binder is in Eldwyn with printings attached, so answering “do I have the 279” took about as long as unlocking my phone.
So yeah. Kasmina. Five years of nothing, then four days. I went and looked at mine, which was quick, and it turns out I have exactly one. One. The regular one, obviously. Not the borderless. Never the borderless.
Whether to do anything about it
I started writing a paragraph here telling you to sell into the spike, because that’s the obvious advice and it’s usually right. A card jumps 446% on a combo that hasn’t played a single sanctioned match, the supply is thin, the buyers are speculators, and you’re holding a copy you’d written off. Sell. Easy.
Except I’m not sure that’s right for this one, and the reason is the thing that normally makes me more bearish. Kasmina has one printing. The reprint trap usually eats cards like this, where a spoiler spikes something and then Wizards prints it into oblivion six months later in a Commander precon. But she’s a green-blue Strixhaven planeswalker with a weird static ability that only matters alongside a mechanic from one specific set. That’s not an easy reprint slot to fill. If the Pioneer deck is real, supply doesn’t get fixed quickly.
If it isn’t real, she goes back to a dollar by November and you’ll wish you’d sold. I’d put the odds somewhere around even, which is a deeply unsatisfying thing to tell you.
What I’d actually watch is the other half of this. Jace’s Machinations is $15.70 on preorder right now, and preorder prices during spoiler season are reliably fiction. That card is a rare in a Standard-legal set that’s about to be opened by the truckload. It will not be sixteen dollars in November. The old card with fixed supply and the new card with a print run still spinning are not the same bet, even though the same combo is driving both.
The boring, correct move if you own Kasminas is to find out how many and which ones before you decide anything. That’s it. Not a hot take, I know. But the number of people who’ll read about this spike, feel a flicker of “wait, do I have that,” and then never actually check is going to be most of them.
Previews run through the end of the month. There’ll be more of these.