Weekly Price Spikes: 7/25 – 7/31

Last updated on July 31, 2026

Smaug the Magnificent | Illustration by Francisco Miyara

Hype from Magic's upcoming The Hobbit crossover is doing most of the heavy lifting in the Magic card market this week, with some Treasure and Elf cards jumping higher.

But not everything is Middle-earth, though: a very old card is spiking hard thanks to a sudden Modern breakout.

Let's check what's up this week!

Rain of Riches

Rain of Riches indeed, if you happen to have a few unused copies lying around! Since last Friday, this red enchantment has gone up by around 200%-300% depending on the printing:

Source: MTGStocks

And the culprit here is clear as day: The Hobbit‘s big bad dragon, Smaug, who true to the book is very much all about treasure.

Looking at early theorycrafted decks it looks like it's Smaug the Magnificent who's taking the lion's dragon's share when it comes to Rain of Riches: For starters, it's right now the most popular commander from The Hobbit. And nearly fourout of five of Smaug the Magnificent‘s include a copy of Rain of Riches.

If the trend holds, this is one card that could become quite pricey; the caveat is that it has been reprinted fairly recently (both in Bloomburrow and Outlaws of Thunder Junction) so there's probably quite a bit of supply.

Elves of Deep Shadow

While Smaug is The Hobbit‘s big bad, Thranduil is a fairly minor character… but is thus far breathing down the dragon's neck when it comes to who's HOB's most popular commander. Which in turn is pushing up prices of other elves, like Elves of Deep Shadow: about half of the Thranduil decks that players are brewing pack a copy of this green mana dork that produces black mana.

Source: MTGStocks

Elves of Deep Shadow is already one very popular elf among casual Commander decks, while also being a competitive card in two different MTG formats: It's a maindeck card in Balustrade Spy decks in Pauper, and it sees high-level cEDH play (often with Thrasios, Triton Hero in the command zone).

With the current increased demand and depending on the printing, Elves of Deep Shadow has gone up by as much as close to 100% in the few days, as seen by the Ravnica version.

Plunge into Darkness

Not everything is The Hobbit hype, though!

Cosmogoyf decks have been showing up a lot on MTGO Modern Challenges this week, which is one of the the reason why Plunge into Darkness (which is a four-of in the main deck) is trading today for more than double of what it was seven days ago.

Source: MTGStocks

The other two reasons are scarcity… and sudden fame!

Plunge into Darkness has only been printed once, and very long ago, in Fifth Dawn, which makes it a sort of “rare rare”: Near-mint copies are pretty hard to come by, and at the time of writing are listed at over $40 on TCGPlayer (nearly quadrupling last week's price).

And Plunge into Darkness got featured in a Cosmogoyf deck by MTG content creator aspiringspike (who has been trying to make a Cosmogoyf deck competitive in Modern for quite some time!).

Mastermind Plum

Speaking of “rare rare” cards, Mastermind Plum has almost doubled since last week. This human wizard is nowhere near as old as Plunge into Darkness, but comes from a very niche set: Ravnica Clue Edition. 

Source: MTGStocks

This spike seems a bit on the speculative side, though, as noted by the MTG financial subreddit. Like Rain of Riches, Mastermind Plum shares Smaug's interest for treasures, and two of Smaug's versions lean black…

… but the inclusion rate suggests Mastermind Plum will be very far from an auto-include in Smaug decks: it's less than 10% in Smaug the Impenetrable‘s case, and there doesn't seem to be too much interest in Smaug, Wicked Worm as a commander.