My sister-in-law bought me a Commander Legends Collector Booster the Christmas it came out. I opened it at the dinner table with six people watching, which is a strange amount of pressure to put on a pack of cardboard, and the foil rare was an Emberwilde Captain. It’s worth $1.74 today. I said “oh, nice!” in the voice people use for socks, and everyone at the table could tell. It’s still in a binder page with the other cards I feel vaguely guilty about.
For most Commander players I know, the best MTG gift ideas come down to one card: a specific single that fills an empty slot in a deck they already play. It can’t whiff the way a pack can, it doesn’t have to cost much, and the only reason most gift guides skip it is that you have to do about twenty minutes of homework first.
Finding out which card without asking them
Asking them straight out ruins the surprise, and it also doesn’t work as well as you’d expect. Ask a Commander player what cards they want and you’ll get “oh, nothing, don’t worry about it,” or you’ll get forty minutes on a deck they haven’t built yet.
A lot of players keep their decks on Moxfield or Archidekt, and a lot of them leave those lists public. Their username is often the same as their Discord handle, and if it isn’t, someone in their playgroup knows it. Open the deck they talk about most and scroll down to the maybeboard, the section where people park cards they’re considering. That’s a list of cards they’ve already decided they want and haven’t bought yet. They wrote you a wishlist without knowing it.
The other tell is proxies. If you’ve sat in on a kitchen-table game and seen a printed-out card slipped into a sleeve in front of a real card, that’s a gift idea. They’ve already told the whole table they want the real one.
Their pod is the other good source. The people they play with every week know which card they keep grumbling about, and they’ll usually keep quiet about it for you.
There’s one trap, and it’s the one that burns people. A deck list tells you what’s in the deck. It doesn’t tell you what they own. Commander players move cards between decks constantly, so the card missing from one list might be sleeved up in another. If they’ve scanned their collection (mine lives in Eldwyn), a peek at their phone settles it in ten seconds. Otherwise, ask their playgroup. I wrote more about running a want list against a collection if you want the longer version of this problem.
So yeah. I did this for a friend last year. Found her Moxfield, found the maybeboard, eleven cards in it, and about half were Secret Lair versions of cards that were already in the deck. Which, okay. That tells you something. I just sort of sat there looking at it for a while.
The printing is part of the gift
To someone who doesn’t play, a card name looks like a product. It isn’t. Smothering Tithe has more than a dozen printings on Scryfall. The Ravnica Allegiance original is $55.35 right now. The Commander Masters reprint is $57.75. The alternate-art version from Enchanting Tales is $205.63, and one foil version from that same set is $1,717.21. The card text is identical on every one of them. They all play the same.
For most people, the answer is to buy the cheapest printing in near-mint condition and stop there. Go near mint, not lightly played, because a gift with white wear on the corners feels secondhand even when the price was fair. The condition guide covers what those grades actually mean if you’re buying online and can’t see the card.
Except. Remember that maybeboard full of Secret Lair versions? When someone already owns the card and is asking for one particular printing, the printing is the gift. The cheapest copy is worth nothing to them, because they already have one sleeved up. I went back and forth on whether to even bring this up, since it muddies simple advice. The simple advice still holds for most people, though: if the list names a card without naming a printing, buy the cheapest near-mint copy. If it names the printing, buy that exact one, or pick a different card.
Rhystic Study runs from $67.53 for the Secret Lair printing up to $164.99 for the Enchanting Tales version below. The original from Prophecy, printed in 2000, is $68.04, basically the same as the reprints. I find that funny and I’m not totally sure why. Prophecy is a set most people only remember for this card.
MTG gift ideas by price, when the deck list is no help
Not everyone has public lists, and not everyone has a pod you can quietly ask. These are cards that nearly every Commander deck in their color wants and that people often don’t own yet. All prices are for the cheapest regular printing as of this week.
Under $10:
- Toxic Deluge (black) is $4.45 for the Marvel Super Heroes Commander printing. It’s cheap because it’s been in at least five Commander precons, which also means your person might already have one. Check first.
- Three Visits (green) is $5.65 for the Final Fantasy Commander copy. It’s the same situation: it’s everywhere, so it’s cheap.
Around $10 to $15:
- Heroic Intervention (green) is $9.02 for one of the Marvel Universe printings. The older ones mostly sit around $16.
- Guardian Project (green again, sorry) is $13.43 for the Fallout version.
Around $30:
- Deadly Rollick (black) is $27.67, and the cheapest printing here is actually a Secret Lair. That breaks the idea that Secret Lair always means the expensive one. The Commander Masters copy is $28.62.
$40 to $70:
- Jeska’s Will (red) is $40.30 for the Commander Legends original.
- Smothering Tithe (white) is $55.35.
- Rhystic Study (blue) is $67.53.
The top tier is where proxies show up most at the casual tables I play at. These are the cards people want and keep putting off buying, since $60 on one card for a deck that’s only for fun is hard to justify. Somebody else paying for it is the whole appeal.
I don’t know whether these prices hold through December. Earlier this year I tried to call when singles bottom out and got it embarrassingly wrong, so I’m not making a prediction. What I actually do is put the card on a wishlist with a price alert set a few dollars under today’s price. If it dips, I buy it. If it hasn’t dipped by early December, I buy it anyway, because a card that ships on December 20th is its own kind of gamble.
Wrapping a single card
A card in a penny sleeve inside a toploader, tucked into a greeting card, looks like a present. A bare card in an envelope looks like it fell out of a deck box. The toploader costs about a quarter, and there’s more on when a card needs one if the card is on the pricier end.
And if you get it wrong and they already own it? Anyone with a trade binder can turn a spare Smothering Tithe into whatever they actually wanted by next Friday night.