Movers and Shakers - Cyberman Patrol

Cyberman Patrol | Art by Anton Solovianchyk

Afflict? Like that card from Bloomburrow? Oh! You meant afflict! Like that spell from Urza's Destiny?

I'm wrong again... I should really get my hearing checked. Let's just get on with it then, shall we?

Welcome back to Movers and Shakers, the series where we examine cards whose prices have seen big changes recently. Today, we're looking at Cyberman Patrol! This artifact creature was printed almost three years ago, but its price has moved significantly in July of this year!

What Does This Card Do?

For , Cyberman Patrol is a 2/2 artifact creature. Additionally, this card gives all of our artifact creatures afflict 3 (a player who blocks a creature with afflict loses three life).

Afflict isn't a very common keyword. It first showed up in Hour of Devastation, also making cameo appearances in Commander Masters and Aetherdrift Commander. Just 14 cards (and one sticker sheet) have this keyword included in their rules text. Cyberman Patrol is the only colorless creature to feature afflict, with Dagger of the Worthy being the only other artifact to mention the keyword at all.

Cyberman Patrol is best in decks that go wide and flood the board with artifact creatures. It disincentivizes our opponents from blocking the creatures that we attack with, operating at maximum effectiveness when our opponents don't really have much of a choice at all. If they don't block our creatures, they'll take significant combat damage, but if they do block our creatures, they'll lose a good chunk of life regardless!

It's also great that this creature costs just . Its colorless identity allows it to find a home in any deck, and its low mana cost lets players cast it quite easily. In 60-card formats, we can even include multiple copies of this card to make blocking really difficult for our opponents.

Afflict can also help small, fragile creatures survive the combat step. Let's look at Acquisition Octopus as an example. When we attack an opponent with this creature, they must choose to either take two damage and let us draw a card or to lose three life. In this case, there admittedly isn't too much of a difference. But, if an opponent is low on life points, we can put them in a no-win situation!

Why Is This Card's Price Rising Now?

Magic's Universes Beyond sets have leaned heavily into science fiction recently. From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Star Trek, we've seen some robot-heavy worlds! This game's designers typically flavor automatons and cyborgs as artifact creatures, using the type line to showcase the flavor of these external IP's characters. That sort of top-down design is actually what gave us Cyberman Patrol in the first place!

With that in mind, let's look at some of the best artifact creatures to release recently. It'll be difficult to point to any one of these as the reason for Cyberman Patrol's price spike, but it'll be an interesting exercise regardless.

Looking first at the TMNT product release, two cards jump out as synergistic with Cyberman Patrol.

First up is Big Mother Mouser, a super powerful Robot that can create dozens of artifact creature tokens upon dying. While Big Mother Mouser is alive, the Cyberman will put in a bit of work. Our opponents will want to chump block this creature frequently, not allowing the Mouser to crash through for combat damage while also not killing it. Then, after this creature dies, each of the 1/1 tokens it creates will also be granted afflict 3 by Cyberman Patrol! These two cards make a great pairing.

There's also a commander to look at: Baxter Stockman. While this Human Scientist isn't an artifact creature, he makes a relevant token and pumps up our robotic friends at the start of each of our combat steps. That buff works well with Cyberman Patrol, as our opponents will want to block the pumped-up creature but risk both losing their blocker and three life as a result!

There's a whole host of cards from Marvel Super Heroes that work well with Cyberman Patrol, too.

The Cyberman is a great fit in the 99 of a Commander deck led by Iron Man, Bleeding Edge or Ultron, Artificial Malevolence. These legendary creatures both create copies of our artifact creatures, in one way or another, and a wide board means more instances of afflict for the Patrol to hand out. Ultron works particularly well with this card, as he makes every artifact that we copy into an artifact creature. Both of these leaders also let us make an extra copy of Cyberman Patrol, giving our creatures a virtual afflict 6! That can end games quite quickly.

We even got a new artifact-creature-centric tutor in the recent Marvel product: Vision Quest. If we invest just into this sorcery, we can nab Cyberman Patrol from our library and put it directly onto the field. This could be useful across formats, acting as a neat way to close out games in or artifact decks!

This combination of cards may be largely destined for Commander, due to the relatively slow nature of the life loss it enables. But, I could see lower power versions of Grixis affinity decks in Modern getting a bit of use from it too!

How Has This Card's Price Changed?

Cardsphere's data shows that Cyberman Patrol's price sat at around $5 until the beginning of July. The average sale of this card was $4.56 from February 1st to July 1st. There wasn't a ton of volume, admittedly, with just six sales appearing on our site during that 151 day period.

But, sale prices have gone up significantly recently. There have only been two trades between July 2nd and the time of writing, but the average price for those transactions leaped up to $11.76.

That's a huge 158% increase, more than doubling the card's initial price. This increase is likely due to Wizards of the Coast's renewed focus on artifact creatures in UB sets, and, as I'll get into in just a moment, this upward trend may continue with some future set releases.

What Might Be Next for Cyberman Patrol?

From our first look at the upcoming Star Trek product, we can see that artifact creatures may feature heavily. From Borg Queen, Perfection Manifest to Crystalline Entity, it seems that machines will play a big role in this set's design.

If that is indeed the case, then Cyberman Patrol's price may go even higher! It's a great card for the 99 of many artifact-centric Commander decks, and it has the potential to break into some 60-card formats, too.

Have you got any non-singleton decks that you've included the Cyberman in? Let me know in the comments below, I'm genuinely curious to know if this card has breached into other formats.