MTG Weekly Price Spikes: 8/1 – 8/7

Last updated on August 7, 2026

Battle of Wits | Illustration by Mark Brill

Three years after the massive success of The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, Magic is heading back to the Shire next week with The Hobbit. But while Smaug is still setting a few price charts on fire, another MTG product unexpectedly stole the spotlight this week.

Mystery Booster Commander Edition (MBC) made its debut at Gen Con, bringing with it a pile of deliberately weird new commanders — including some that bend Commander‘s deck-building rules. And whenever Wizards prints a commander that suddenly gives an old, forgotten card a reason to exist, well… you can probably guess what happens next.

Let's find out what went up this week in the MTG card market!

Battle of Wits

Battle of Wits is one of Magic’s most famous deckbuilding challenges. The win condition itself is pretty simple: If you have at least 200 cards left in your library at the beginning of your upkeep, and while this blue enchantment is in play, you win the game.

Building a (good) 200+ deck is difficult in most MTG formats… and essentially impossible in Commander. For all the freedom Commander gives you when choosing cards, it's pretty rigid about deck size: your deck needs to have exactly 100 cards, including your commander.

Or, well, it used to be that way, until Mystery Booster Commander Edition‘s Whtz, the Bibliophile showed up this week!

One of the new commanders revealed in Mystery Booster Commander Edition, Whtz has a Rulebreaker ability that throws the normal restriction out the window: a deck with Whtz, the Bibliophile as its commander has no maximum deck size. So, yeah, basically Reliquary Tower, but for your library and in your command zone.

Among the gazillion shenanigans that Whtz will definitely allow, it now makes Battle of Wits a legit commander wincon…

Source: MTGStocks

… and has sent its price up roughly 600% (and climbing fast!), given that Battle of Wits is a fairly old card: originally from Odyssey, and with just a couple of reprints, near-mint copies are relatively hard to come by. More than 800 near-mint copies were traded on TCGplayer this week. Remaining stock is well below 200; wouldn't be surprising if it's even more expensive next week.

Let the Battles of Whtz begin!!

Nephilim Typal

Mystery Booster Commander Edition has also answered another very old Commander complaint… sort of.

The original five Nephilim debuted all the way back in 2006’s Guildpact. They were bizarre four-color creatures with appropriately bizarre abilities, and they looked exactly like the sort of cards that would make fun commanders.

There was just one problem: none of them are legendary!

MBC has patched that hole, and now there's a Nephilim that can also be your commander…

… and, as was to be expected, Nephilim Epochal‘s a five-color commander so it can fit all the other nephilim in the 99.

The original nephilim spiked almost immediately after Nephilim Epochal was revealed, with Ink-Treader Nephilim, Dune-Brood Nephilim, and Witch-Maw Nephilim all showing clear upward price action.

Source: MTGStocks

Of the three, Ink-Treader Nephilim may be the most interesting. Whenever someone casts an instant or sorcery that targets only Ink-Treader Nephilim, the spell gets copied for every other creature it could target. And Ink-Treader Nephilim has never been reprinted since Guildpact (all other nephilim have at least be reprinted in The List) so renewed Commander interest is hitting a card whose available supply comes from booster packs opened roughly 20 years ago. 

Source: MTGStocks

Source: MTGStocks

Last Laugh

Last Laugh is getting pushed from two different directions at once: Mystery Booster Commander Edition and The Hobbit. 

For starters, we have Last Laugh's synergy with The Hobbit's big bad. Smaug the Impenetrable is indestructible, and whenever he takes noncombat damage, you create that many Treasure tokens. If you then sacrifice a Treasure, Last Laugh triggers and deals one damage to everything, Smaug gets pinged, and Smaug replaces the Treasure you just sacrificed with another one.

And then there's the synergy with MBC‘s Sahir, Visitor in Darkness:

Sahir, Visitor in Darkness cares about damage done to you; any self-ping will do, but Last Laugh does that while pinging everything else. 

Players have been theorycrafting Last Laugh with both Smaug and Sahir this week, pushing this black enchantment's price up by nearly 200%.

Source: MTGStocks

Rain of Riches

Looks like Rain of Riches is still running hot!

We covered this red enchantment in last week's price spikes, after The Hobbit previews sent prices up roughly 200%-300%, depending on the printing. And unlike plenty of cards that get bought out during preview season and immediately give some of that gain back, Rain of Riches has kept going.

Source: MTGStocks

There isn't much mystery behind this one. It's Smaug. More specifically, Smaug the Magnificent.

Rain of Riches creates two Treasure tokens when it enters the battlefield, and the first spell you cast each turn using mana from a Treasure gets cascade. That's already an attractive package in any Treasure-heavy Commander deck, and Smaug the Magnificent is very much a Treasure-heavy commander.

The early numbers have only gotten stronger since last week. EDHREC currently shows Rain of Riches in roughly 78% of Smaug the Magnificent decks, making it one of the commander’s highest-synergy cards.

The caveat here is that, unlike Last Laugh or Battle of Wits, Rain of Riches has been reprinted repeatedly, and fairly recently. After debuting in Streets of New Capenna Commander, it showed up again in Commander: Bloomburrow, Commander: Outlaws of Thunder Junction, and promo products, so there's a lot more supply here.

Still, one week after the first spike, Smaug's favorite rainstorm hasn't stopped!