This unassuming Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy card has enjoyed a significant price spike thanks to its ability to help aggressive players get the early-game mana they need.
The valuation for Starting Town, a rare from MTG’s Final Fantasy set, has risen by 109%, according to MTGGoldfish. The card is now valued at $34 (£25.60), more than twice its value at the start of the week.
Resource management is a key element of Magic: The Gathering, as anyone who’s ever had too few (or too many) lands in hand will tell you. Starting Town boasts the rare ability to provide mana of any colour for players, at the cost of a single point of life. This means that aggressive decks with more than one colour can steeply benefit from lands like Starting Town, which will allow them to make powerful plays at the start of the game, no matter the colour of the card they’re casting.
Starting Town is a common staple on decklists across Standard (one of MTG’s most played and competitive formats), highlighting the strength of aggro decks in the current metagame. For instance, both of the leading red and blue aggro decks on MTGGoldfish make ample use of the land. However, due to the card’s consistent performance, slower decks across the meta are also making ample use of Starting Town. Despite the card coming into play tapped after the third turn of the game, the sheer amount of versatility it offers more than makes up for this drawback.
Though classic so-called ‘pain lands’ like City of Brass lack this drawback, the utility on offer with Starting Town is more than enough to make any deckbuilder turn their head. Unfortunately, this price hike will also play a role in raising the bar of accessibility to the Standard format – a bar which was already prohibitively high to begin with.
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