MTG’s Hottest Weekly Price Spikes: 9/19 – 9/25

Last updated on September 25, 2026

Jace, Cunning Castaway | Illustration by Kieran Yanner

Reality Fracture, which releases next week, keeps rocking the Magic card market before the set has even properly hit shelves. Last week was all about sphinxes and planeswalkers; this week, a fairly famous Sphinx and a forgotten Jace have joined the party, while a 24-year-old enchantment has found a rather disgusting new combo partner.

And because apparently Smaug hasn't accumulated enough wealth yet, The Hobbit is still moving Treasure cards too. Let's check this week's biggest movers!

Ganax, Astral Hunter

Ganax, Astral Hunter was already an extremely popular casual Commander card, showing up in nearly 100,000 decks according to EDHREC, and it's even fringe-playable in cEDH. But it saw a massive increase in price in the last couple of weeks, jumping from about $1 to over $4: 

Source: MTGStocks

One culprit appears to be Smaug the Magnificent, which makes perfect sense: Ganax creates a Treasure whenever a dragon enters under your control. Smaug, meanwhile, creates a Treasure at the beginning of every upkeep and then, whenever he attacks, deals damage equal to the number of Treasures you control. By now, more than half of current Smaug the Magnificent decks include Ganax, Astral Hunter.

There's also the even newer Draconic Visitor, which forms an easy infinite with Ganax. Play a dragon, make a treasure, just kidding treasure is actually another dragon, rinse and repeat.

Words of Worship

This week's Weird Old Card award goes to Words of Worship. This Onslaught rare was printed back in 2002, has never received another proper printing, and it sees quite a bit of competitive play in Premodern. That kept its price in the $2-3 range.

But now it's gone up way past $10, thanks to the new Niv-Mizzet from Reality Fracture, Niv-Mizzet, Ghost Counsel: 

Source: MTGStocks

Words of Worship has an odd little replacement effect: For , the next time you would draw a card that turn, you gain 5 life instead. Normally that's a pretty bad deal: Cards are usually much better than life points.

But Niv-Mizzet, Ghost Counsel changes the math quite a bit. Whenever you gain life, this new Niv lets you pay that much life to draw that many cards. So activate Words of Worship before your normal draw, replace that draw with 5 life, and Niv triggers. You can then pay those same 5 life to draw five cards!

Raffine, Scheming Seer

Raffine, Scheming Seer was once one of the best cards in Standard, and has managed to stay relevant in competitive Pioneer, while also becoming fairly competitive in Duel Commander, and very popular as a casual Esper commander. That allowed this sphinx demon to stay out of the bulk bin, although far from its $10 high.

Yet Reality Fracture, and in particular The Ur-Sphinx, has given Raffine a big boost upward. Regular copies have jumped from roughly $2.20 to around $5.70 over the last week, an increase of about 160%. 

Source: MTGStocks

As we covered last week, spinxes are coming in hot thanks to their new commander:

And, at the time of writing, Raffine is now in roughly three out of four Ur-Sphinx decks! 

Part of the appeal is simply efficiency. Raffine costs only 3 mana, but it goes further than that: Both the Ur-Sphinx and Raffine reward you for attacking, so the two sphinxes are already asking you to do the same thing.

Jace, Cunning Castaway

First it was Kasmina, Enigma Sage. Then Ichormoon Gauntlet. Now Jace, Cunning Castaway has gone from forgotten Ixalan mythic to one of the week's biggest movers thanks to FRA's empower Jace mechanic. Regular Jace copies cost around $1 at the beginning of September. They're now trading around $9-10.

Source: MTGStocks

The interaction with empower Jace has a bit of a subtlety, so just in case: The empower Jace mechanic only puts loyalty counters on a Jace token. You can't put those loyalty counters onto the original Jace, Cunning Castaway.

Thing is, Jace's ultimate creates two token copies of himself (except those copies aren't legendary). And those are Jace planeswalker tokens.

That's where things can get really silly. Cards like Jace's Machinations, Overwrite the Multiverse, and the rest of the empower package can pile loyalty onto those copies. Since they copy Jace, Cunning Castaway‘s abilities, they can eventually use −5 themselves and make still more nonlegendary Jaces.