5-Color Game-Winning Sorcery Sees 500% Price Increase Amid Unban Speculation

Last updated on December 26, 2024

Coalition Victory | Illustration by Eric Peterson

Carried by speculation on its potential unbanning in Magic's Commander format, illegal 5-color sorcery Coalition Victory‘s price has soared by more than 500% in the last couple of weeks, according to MTGStocks.

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Coalition Victory Invasion‘s print shot from around $1.3 two weeks ago – a price it has maintained for more than a decade – to over $8 now and is currently out of stock on TCGPlayer direct. Foil versions were listed for almost $28 at the time of writing.

Betting on Unbans

Coalition Victory is what MTG players call “unplayable” in Magic formats like Modern, Legacy, or Vintage: you can technically put it in your deck if you want… but good luck casting an 8-mana, 5-color sorcery before you're very, very dead.

And the card is literally unplayable in Commander, Magic's most popular format: it has been banned since in 2007. But as it turns out, it's that unplayability that's pushing the price upwards.

Two weeks ago, Wizards of the Coast suddenly announced that they were taking over management of the Commander format. This news came a week after the now-defunct Commander Rules Committee banned three high-profile cards from the format, causing uproar in the MTG community.

Since that day, Magic speculators have been hoarding several cards from the Commander ban list, in hopes that WotC will eventually unban them and their price will rise. Onslaught‘s Biorhythm, for example, shows a similar trend as Coalition Victory, Reserved List‘s Tolarian Academy more than doubled its price from around $100 to more than $200, and even the recently banned Mana Crypt has regained steam in the last few weeks:

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In Coalition Victory‘s case, Redditors were joking about buying foil copies of Coalition Victory in the same Reddit thread that announced WotC taking over Commander, although few seem to have actually done so back then. There was even a specific discussion about the card, but the most-voted reply dismissed it with an “Ignore it mostly.”

Fast forward to today, though, and it's clear many speculators have decided to ignore Coalition Victory no longer.

Could Coalition Victory Be Unbanned in Commander?

Sol Ring | Illustration by Mark Tedin

With the caveat that the following is not investment advice: Yes, it very much could.

Coalition Victory was banned more than 15 years ago when Commander was a very different format, and cEDH was not a thing. Redditors routinely reminded the RC, and now WotC, that the Commander banlist is outdated, and Coalition Victory is often the poster child of those reminders.

Back in 2007, the reasoning for the ban was that you shouldn't “unexpectedly” lose if you tap out versus a 5-color deck with their commander in play – but while some play groups will never be happy with alternate win conditions, in this day and age of Thoracles and two-card infinite combos it's hardly a surprise that things may go downhill if the pod lets a 5-color commander cast an 8-mana spell.

As noted last year by MTG content creator Jacob Lackner, better known as Nizzahon Magic on YouTube, in an article for Card Kingdom, Coalition Victory “isn’t something other Commander players are going to sit around and allow. If one of the players at the table can respond to Coalition Victory by removing one of the permanents that is helping you meet the conditions, Coalition Victory doesn’t do anything when it resolves.”

Will WotC unban this 5-color sorcery, though?

There's no way to tell for sure, and if they do it very likely won't happen until well after WotC hashes out their power bracket system for Commander.

But as far as longshot bets go, the MTG market seems to be all in on “Yes.”