Last updated on September 4, 2025
Shelob, Child of Ungoliant (The Lord of the Rings- Tales of Middle-earth) – art by Lorenzo Mastroianni
Your friendly neighborhood spider, along with a ton of his friends and foes, will swing into Magic in just two weeks! We're right now in the middle of the reveals for the upcoming Spider-Man MTG crossover and we've already seen more than forty new spiders, including Ghost-Spider, Gwen Stacy, Ultimate Spider-Man, and the one and only Sensational Spider-Man.
And it looks like they have a welcome committee from Magic's existing arachnids, presided over by a legendary spider from a different Universes Beyond set: Shelob, Child of Ungoliant
Shelob, Child of Ungoliant's Price Spike
Web-Warriors (Marvel's Spider-Man) – art by Thanh Tuan
Shelob, Child of Ungoliant is the poster child of casual Commander. It's so clearly the best spider commander that it's one of the Top 100 most popular commanders overall in the last two years, according to EDHREC.
“Shelob can’t turn your opponents’ creatures around and beat them with them,” wrote Jeff in our ranking of best spider commanders, where Shelob is the undisputed #1. “But it secures whatever activated and passive abilities those creatures had. Force a block from your opponent’s Blood Artist with a Hunt Down and now you’re the aristocrats player.”
There are quite a few Spider-Man cards we have yet to see, but early theorycrafted decks seem to lean towards Spider-Ham, Peter Porker, Radioactive Spider, Spider-Man, Brooklyn Visionary, and Spider-Man, Miles Morales when Shelob, Child of Ungoliant is in the command zone.
And the whole spider gang even got a Swarmyard reprint in the Stellar Sights bonus sheet from Edge of Eternities!
In this scenario, it is not a big surprise to see Shelob, Child of Ungoliant more than doubling in price since last week, going from less than $0.80 to over $1.60 in the US markets, for near-mint copies of the regular version.
Source: MTGStocks
This upward pressure is seen across other versions. The extended art version started climbing in price in July, and has steadily increased in price since. And the Showcase Scrolls version shows a similar pattern, trading nowadays for more than $12 when it was priced at about $5 two months ago.
Interestingly, the regular copy also had a spike around that time – but then fell to well below $1 during most of August, to shoot back up again now.
What Will Happen With Shelob, Child of Ungoliant‘s Price?
Spider-Gwen, Free Spirit (Marvel's Spider-Man) – art by Lie Setiawan
Shelob, Child of Ungoliant remains one of the most popular commanders from The Lord of the Rings, which is itself the second best-selling set in all of Magic's history. There's plenty of copies available, and the market seems to be reacting to Shelob, Child of Ungoliant‘s spike: There were regular copies traded above $5 last week (and the average price peaked at around $4.5 on August 20th), but at the time of writing there are lots of copies listed at less than $2 on TCGplayer.
With our usual caveat that this is not investment advice (doing your own research is priceless!), the main factor right now is that we still haven't seen the full Spider-Man set – if there happens to be more powerful (or just fun!) spiders that could fit with this Golgari commander, its price could see another rebound.
Follow Draftsim for awesome articles and set updates:
Add Comment