All you need to know about how Commander influences foil prices is to look at Expedition Map. The low common goes for over $10 to the right player because when you become a Commander, you want foils all around you. All of those spells should be holographic! While we knew Map would be a good staple in Commander, I don't think people called that it would be this much for a common, this early. Today, I'm going to share my forecasts for the next hot Commander cards - ones I think will double or triple in price in a year or two. Let's start!

Exsanguinate

Which means to remove the blood from something.

In this case, it's each enemy that you can look at.

Exsanguinate is part of nefarious monoblack decks but it's also a potent blade in other long-game, spell-focused decks. In a four-player game, hitting this thing for X=8 makes for 24 life in your favor. Heck, this thing is a variable Kokusho that doesn't get exiled all the damn time. Exsanguinate is popular and when a casual player looks at it, they immediately make the connection that this card scales really, really well with multiplayer games.

What I can't believe is that this card goes for under a dollar in foil online. The general rule for retailers seems to be "every foil is worth $2 if it's playable at all!" Thus, I think this card is a real steal at what it goes for right now. This is a great long-term scoop. It's also a good candidate for a card to get if you want to juice up a trade binder. I know that foils can be hard to move, but this is the kind of card that someone who wants Commander foils will jump at - and maybe overvalue emotionally.

Staff of Nin

You've got to know that if you play a non-blue deck in Commander, it's easy to be crushed under card advantage. The reason is simple - for every card you draw, your "opponent" draws three. It doesn't matter that your opponent has three or four heads in this instance. In nonblue decks, it's really challenging to see a card here or there. I play a Karn, Silver Golem deck (39 nonbasics!) and I have to resort to things like paying echo on Urza's Blueprints to stay in the game. I'm looking forward to the Staff and it's going to be high on the list of non-blue draw tools that are worth playing. Seriously, this has an effect similar to Honden of Seeing Winds and it pings things. It only asks you for mana once, instead of things like Jayemdae Tome or Temporal Aperture.

It's hard to get a real price on this card in foil right now since it's brand new and a promo, but the non-foil goes for $0.50 right now so the foil will probably settle for a dollar or two. This is another one to nab early.

Mwonvuli Beast Tracker

Just about all of the good monsters in Commander have one of these abilities and it fits a very convenient color scheme. Green is the color of "bounce me for utility ETB effects" and this is a fine effect. It would be much better if it were like Fierce Empath and put it in your hand, but it's still a good monster. I don't expect phenomenal foil prices on this, but it's good to keep an eye on.

Trading Post

So the closest thing I can think of with this is Staff of Domination, another artifact with a crazy list of abilities and a home on the Banned list in Commander. Trading Post doesn't do anything blatantly broken with mana generators and it cannot untap itself, which is a challenging drawback. However, this card also has a lot of utility wrapped up in it that card. Consider this: there's a lot of destruction that happens in Commander. You've got a creature checking out already? Cash it in for an artifact that you lost earlier. You can even step things further if all you recovered was a now-useless Signet, since Trading Post can slowly cycle it away. I get it, the tapping blows, but this really does do a great job of converting resources that you have too much of into something that you might want. A Goat token can play Forcefield to keep a bigger monster away. This, like Druidic Satchel, will find its way into a lot of decks that aren't sure of their last spots. It's going to be a fan favorite for a lot of players who will write forum posts about everything that they did with their Trading Post in that game. I'm looking forward to telling Mana Crypt to GTFO when I'm done with it, for one.

Reliquary Tower

Now mind you, these are already kind of a hot ticket. Their reprint is going to do a funny thing to the market. There will be a lot more of these, so the non-foil price will even out a bit. The foil price might dip a bit too, but you're really going to clean up on these with toss-in trades from Standard players. Foils of this card are about $8 or so from Alara and you wouldn't know it if you didn't play Commander. Heck, you can pillage this from draft pickings and still walk away with $1 uncommons in non-foil. This is the card to keep an eye out for. It's like the people with foil Mana Leaks when it was reprinted in 8th Edition who were happy to trade them away, even when you told them that they were $5 cards. The price on these will pick up again, but I predict a dip even in online prices as the new foils crush the demand for older foils.

So there's the short list for now. Not every card is as obvious as "get foil Gilded Lotuses for later" but I have confidence that we'll see some action in these. If you've got your eye on Commander foils that seem underpriced or you're wondering about something in M13 (or older sets) that I left off, post it up here! In time, $2 Cultivates become $7 Kodama's Reaches.

Until next week,

Doug Linn