Top Trades: August 5-August 12

Harvey McGuinness • August 15, 2024

Top Trades 8.15.24

Welcome back to Top Trades, everyone! I hope the week has treated everyone well. It's Thursday, and that means it's time to check in with the movers and shakers here at Cardsphere. So, what does everyone have their eyes on? Let's take a look!

Honorable Mention - Innkeeper's Talent

Number of Trades: 9 --- Number of Cards Traded: 9

First up is our honorable mention, a card that made its debut on Top Trades as our number four pick last week: Innkeeper's Talent.

For two mana, Innkeeper's Talent provides a lot of value. At the minimum, you'll be walking away with an enchantment that grants one of your creatures a +1/+1 counter each turn. Not bad, especially in a Standard environment where valiant exists. But the buck doesn't stop there.

Invest one more mana and now you've reached Level 2, which grants all of your permanents with counters on them ward . Not a huge ward cost, but definitely not nothing. Level 3 costs a bit more (), but is a huge step up. Now, whenever you put counters on a permanent or player, you'll be putting twice as many instead. That's a lot of value.

Innkeeper's Talent is a card that's going to be worth watching for a long time. A valuable asset in any counters-matters Commander decks as well as a significant player in the current Standard format, this card will be making waves for years to come.

#5 - Springheart Nantuko

Number of Trades: 7 --- Number of Cards Traded: 7

Starting us off on our main list for the week is Springheart Nantuko, Nadu, Winged Wisdom

's best friend and our only Modern Horizons 3 pick for the week. So, what does this Insect do, and why is it terrorizing Modern?

For , Springheart Nantuko is a 1/1 Insect Monk enchantment creature with bestow , "enchanted creature gets +1/+1," and "Landfall - Whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control, you may pay if Springheart Nantuko is attached to a creature you control. If you do, create a token that's a copy of that creature. If you didn't create a token this way, create a 1/1 green Insect creature token." A little tricky to navigate at first, but basically this boils down to either paying a cost and cloning enchanted creature, or not paying a cost and getting a 1/1 regardless. Pretty wild for a landfall ability. I wonder if there's a green deck in Modern right now that puts an absurd amount of lands into play and wants to have at least as many creatures...

Oh, hi Nadu. 

For those unacquainted with Nadu, Winged Wisdom, first off - congratulations on making it this far. Now comes the terror of learning what this card does. As long as you control Nadu - a creature with a cost of - creatures you control have "Whenever this creature becomes the target of a spell or ability, reveal the top card of your library. If it's a land card, put it onto the battlefield. Otherwise, put it into your hand. This ability triggers only twice each turn." Nadu has come to dominate Modern (and other formats) thanks to its interaction with any card that can target creatures without a mana investment, such as Shuko

or Nomads en-Kor
. Combine this with Springheat Nantuko, and suddenly each Nadu trigger has a chance to give you a token as well, providing you with more creatures to target and thus more opportunities to dig ever deeper into the deck.

#4 - Mockingbird

Number of Trades: 7 --- Number of Cards Traded: 8

Alright, time to shift focus away from Modern Horizons 3 and back to Bloomburrow. So, what's up next? Mockingbird - a (potentially) one mana clone.

Magic has plenty of ways to copy creatures, from 1993's first rendition of the titular Clone

through to modern-era choices like Flesh Duplicate
. All in all, the running theme has been that, the more expensive a clone is, the more things it can enter as a copy of, or the longer it could stick around. Phantasmal Image
 can be anything, but boy oh boy is it fragile, while Vesuvan Doppelganger
 costs three mana more but loses the fragility and can shift what it is on any given turn.

Mockingbird fits into this as a mana value-scaling clone. You'll never copy a Progenitus

at a massive discount the same way Phantasmal Image would've saved you ten mana, but it also means that you can copy a cheap creature without any downsides (such as Flesh Duplicate's vanishing ability) without needing to spend excess mana. Why spend two mana to clone an Esper Sentinel
 when you can spend one? Plus, your clone will have flying as a little extra bonus.

#3 - Iridescent Vinelasher

Number of Trades: 9 --- Number of Cards Traded: 10

Up next on our Top Trades this week is Iridescent Vinelasher, a card that advances attrition strategies with ruthless efficiency and is currently part of the + decks running rampant in Bloomburrow Standard.

For the low low cost of just , Iridescent Vinelasher is a 1/2 Lizard Assassin with offspring and the landfall trigger of "Whenever a land you control enters, this creature deals 1 damage to target opponent." In the early game, this means that you can readily cast Iridescent Vinelasher as easily as turn one to start chipping in for valuable damage immediately, while the relatively affordable offspring cost lets you start doubling up on the landfall damage in the mid to late game without significant worry that you missed out on potential damage for holding off on your cast.

Like I mentioned before, Iridescent Vinelasher's biggest success has been as an attrition piece in Standard's Golgari shells, but this isn't the only list it's seen play in. Since this creature is a Lizard, it gets a pretty healthy bonus from some other Standard synergy pieces, namely Gev, Scaled Scorch

. Putting the two together has proven pretty powerful, enough to give rise to both Jund offshoots of the main Golgari shell as well as a wholly Lizard-focused Rakdos deck.

#2 - Patchwork Banner

Number of Trades: 9 --- Number of Cards Traded: 11

Speaking of creature-typal strategies, let's talk about Patchwork Banner, our penultimate pick of the week.

Patchwork Banner is one of Bloomburrow's blanket creature-type support pieces, meaning that it can go in any creature-type-matters deck with relative ease and do a fine job supporting the overall game plan. What support does it offer, you ask? Well, for , Patchwork Banner provides a +1/+1 bonus to all creatures you control of a chosen type, and can tap to add one mana of any color.

This flexibility is pretty powerful, and definitely very popular, but overall its biggest successes have been in Commander. Three mana for a mana rock and an anthem effect is very good, but not fast enough to keep pace with most of Standard's much more efficient decks. In Commander, however, where games take much longer, this story is flipped on its head. Most Commander-viable mana rocks nowadays cost three mana (think Cursed Mirror

or Midnight Clock
) and make up for their heavier cost with an additional bonus. Well, for Patchwork Banner that bonus is a +1/+1 anthem, something which typal decks can really work to their advantage.

#1 - Lorien Revealed

Number of Trades: 9 --- Number of Cards Traded: 14

Drumroll please as we announce this week's most traded card...and that is Lórien Revealed! A bit of a surprising pick, considering that this has been out and about for over a year now, but this common from Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth is still packing a punch. So let's talk about it.

At face value, Lórien Revealed is not an exciting card. Coming in at five mana - - Lórien Revealed is a sorcery with islandcycling that you can cast to draw three cards. Five mana for three cards is a worse rate than Concentrate

's mana value of four, so why play Lórien Revealed? It all comes down to flexibility.

Lórien Revealed's ability to be cycled away in order to find an Island makes it comparable to MDFCs. You won't have the option to bolt in Lórien Revealed the same way you would a Sink into Stupor

, but if you have mana available on an endstep and need the land next turn then cycling away Lórien Revealed becomes a very attractive option. We've seen how popular landcycling is, with a key comparison being Ash Barrens
, but what if that cycling ability was stapled to potential late-game card advantage? Voilá, you now understand the question that Lórien Revealed so wonderfully answers.

Wrap Up

This week's Top Trades was one of the most varied mixes we've seen in a while, despite the bulk of the picks coming from Bloomburrow. Standard staples, Commander all-stars, and even a throwback most traded card thanks to Lórien Revealed. Come check back next week, when we'll see what's being traded the most here at Cardsphere.