Movers and Shakers - Stronghold Gambit

Stronghold Gambit | Art by Greg Hildebrandt & Tim Hildebrandt

Would you like to play a game?

No, not a game of Magic, I'm talking about something that'll take much less time: let's play the Stronghold Gambit game!

If you're like me, you probably hadn't heard of this card until this week. Its price has been moving around wildly recently, so it caught my attention. It's jumped up enough that we've dedicated a whole edition of Movers and Shakers to this 26-year-old card!

What Does Stronghold Gambit do, Anyways?

For , Stronghold Gambit is a sorcery that introduces a neat little sub-game to the battlefield: each player chooses a card in their hand, and then all players reveal the chosen cards simultaneously. The player who chose a creature card with the lowest mana value among revealed cards gets to place their creature directly onto the battlefield (without paying its mana cost or any additional casting costs).

This spell can benefit the caster or their opponents, forcing everyone to think very carefully about their choices once this spell hits the stack.

How Can We Optimize Stronghold Gambit?

Like all good mini-game cards, there's an interesting push-and-pull dynamic introduced here. Players want to choose a creature with a high-mana-value creature so they can put something powerful onto the battlefield, but they're also incentivized to choose a cheaper creature so they have a higher chance to actually place one onto the battlefield.

To get technical with it, there's 1,214 one-mana creatures in Magic, 3,540 two-mana creatures, 4,461 three-mana creatures, 3,875 four-mana creatures, 2,531 five-mana creatures, and 2,272 creatures with a mana value of six or higher. Based on these numbers, it's most often correct to choose a two- or three-mana creature. That'll maximize the value you're getting from the creature you choose, should it actually land on the battlefield, while also giving you the best chance to win the gambit in the first place!

Of course, these numbers don't account for which creatures actually see play in typical Magic games. Just because over 1,000 one-drop creatures exist doesn't mean they're all good! I'm not likely to play Abu Ja'far in any current decklist...

But Where is Stronghold Gambit Actually Useful?

In Commander, Stronghold Gambit sees the most play in decks that are already inherently chaotic. It's in 0.5% of Yusri, Fortune's Flame decks and 0.5% of Ian Malcolm, Chaotician decks, likely seeing the most play in Bracket 1 decks that are themed around taking as many chances as they can during the course of a single match!

But this spell's real power comes in 60-card formats, where it can act as a weird sort of Show and Tell. If we've filled our deck with impactful, low-cost creatures while our opponent has filled theirs with high-cost beaters, we can sometimes cheat out a powerful creature ahead of schedule!

Imagine playing against a reanimator deck, or even a hardcore control deck whose top-end game-ender costs five or six mana to cast. In that scenario, we can use Stronghold Gambit to cheat out a neat three- or four-drop, like Mossborn Hydra or Enduring Curiosity.

Stronghold Gambit also works very well in decks focused on hand disruption and information gathering. If we're able to fire off a Pilfer or Gitaxian Probe before casting this spell, we'll know if the coast is clear for us to land a threat on the board at a discount.

Hand disruption, forcing an opponent to discard their best cards, can actually turn Stronghold Gambit into a pretty potent sorcery. If we're able to clear an opponent's hand of all creatures using effects like Dreams of Steel and Oil or Thoughtseize before we fire off a Stronghold Gambit, we can put any creature we want onto the board without worrying about an opponent undercutting us! We could even slam an Archon of Cruelty on the board to cut our opponent's life total while stripping even more cards from their hand.

Of course, this is pretty difficult to pull off. Even in formats where we can play four of each discard spell, it's unlikely that we'll draw enough discard spells to remove threats from our opponent's hand while also keeping a Gambit and an Archon in our hand. We can dream, though!

What's Going on with This Card's Price?

At the end of the day, though, Cardsphere is a card trading site, not a deckbuilding site, so let's see how this sorcery's price has fluctuated recently!

From January until the middle of May, Stronghold Gambit was trading solidly below $1. Prices held steady between $0.12 and $0.84, with copies selling for $0.42 on average. There were only nine trades involving Stronghold Gambit from January to mid May, interestingly, showing a general lack of interest in the card.

This is to be expected. The Gambit saw just one printing, all the way back in 2000's Nemesis, and isn't considered strong enough to have a real foothold in any major format. NEM didn't have many standout cards either, as the whole 143 card set can be had for just $266.02 (according to Scryfall's data at the time of writing).

Starting in June, though, Stronghold Gambit's price began to rise! Although trade volume remained low overall, all five of the trades that occurred from June 5th to present day were significantly above the average we saw in the first few months of the year.

The average trade price from June 5th to July 3rd sat at a whopping $4.38, representing a massive 943% jump! This was, admittedly, buoyed by an individually high trade whose price locked at $13.07, but all five of the trades that were sent out between June and July had prices that represented at least an 81% increase from the earlier average.

What Might be Next for Stronghold Gambit?

After the excitement around this card dies down, my educated guess is that its price will fall back below $1. It has very few redeeming qualities beyond Bracket 1 Commander, and that's not a recipe for maintaining a high price in the long-term.

What do you think? Where will this sorcery's price settle? Let me know in the comments below, and I'll be back soon with another Movers and Shakers!