Top Trades: June 3-June 10

Starting Town | Illustrated by Hristo D. Chukov

Howdy folks, and welcome back to Top Trades! It's Thursday, and that means another weak has just about come and gone, so what are the hottest cards that players are itching to pick up? Let's take a look.

Honorable Mention - Red Elemental Blast

Number of Trades: 5 --- Number of Cards Traded: 14

Kicking things off for the week is a classic card you'll find at just about any cEDH table, as well as hanging around plenty of other lower-bracket Commander lists with red in their color identity, it's Red Elemental Blast!

For , this versatile instant has two modes: either counter a blue spell, or destroy a blue permanent. In competitive circles, Red Elemental Blast effectively serves as a counterspell-for-counterspells, providing red with an opportunity to defend itself without having to rely on the likes of Force of Will or Swan Song. Sure, it might not be able to stop too many of your opponents' win attempts (save for stopping a Thassa's Oracle, perhaps), but in true red fashion it does do a wonderful job of propelling your own victories through to resolution.

#5 - The Darkness Crystal

Number of Trades: 5 --- Number of Cards Traded: 5

Alrighty, with our classic Magic honorable mention out of the way, it's time to get into the good stuff, and spoilers, but this is going to be a week of nothing but Final Fantasy. So, where to begin? Well, how about with our first of three Crystals?

Coming in at number five is The Darkness Crystal, a legendary artifact for that causes all of your black spells to cost less to cast. Additionally, if a nontoken creature an opponent controls would die, instead it gets exiled and you gain 2 life. Last but not least, you can pay and tap The Darkness Crystal in order to put target creature card exiled with The Darkness Crystal onto the battlefield under your control, with an additional two +1/+1 counters on it just for good measure.

The Darkness Crystal does a whole lot of stuff, so let's break it down step by step. Immediately, The Darkness Crystal begins to exert gradual support for your gameplan with its static ability and replacement effect. Cost reduction is always nice, and shutting off creature deaths can be a huge benefit against the right decks. Remember, The Darkness Crystal doesn't just change which zone creatures end up in, it also prevents death triggers from ever being put onto the stack since creatures aren't dying in the first place.

As for that last ability, six mana for something not entirely backbreaking for your opponents is a tall order, but it's not so exorbitant as to be prohibitively expensive in long games. Casual Commander is going to love this, so it's no surprise that The Darkness Crystal has made it to this week's list.

#4 - Jumbo Cactuar

Number of Trades: 6 --- Number of Cards Traded: 6

Here it is, the card that broke the internet for a solid 24 hours as the collective Magic community gasped at seeing "+9999/+0" in the rules text of a card for the first time: Jumbo Cactuar.

For , this 1/7 Plant brings with it one triggered ability which more than makes up for its otherwise lackluster stat-line: "Whenever this creature attacks, it gets +9999/+0 until end of turn."

Two things come immediately come to mind when I read this card, the first being trample and the second being Fling. Move to combat with either of these effects at the ready and Jumbo Cactuar becomes a two-card combo that easily removes all but the healthiest of players from the game. Sure, it costs seven mana, plus whatever your other combo piece is (plus one for Rancor, if we're keeping it mono-green), but that's pretty easy for green.

Pack your removal, folks, because I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot more of this card over the years.

#3  - The Earth Crystal

Number of Trades: 6 --- Number of Cards Traded: 8

Speaking of green, it's time to move on to our second Crystal of the week: The Earth Crystal.

Like The Darkness Crystal before it, The Earth Crystal costs four mana (), reduces the cost of on-color (green) spells by , and has two other impactful abilities, a replacement effect and a six-mana activation.

Starting with the replacement effect, The Earth Crystal doubles the number of +1/+1 counters placed on creatures you control. A classic of go-big Commander strategies and every Hydra's best-friend, this effect doesn't do much on its own but can be a massive boon to properly synergistic piles.

Moving to the six-mana activated ability, The Earth Crystal has ", : Distribute two +1/+1 counters among one or two target creatures you control." Keep in mind the replacement effect, however, as this ability effectively reads as "Choose one - put two +1/+1 counters on each of two target creatures you control, or put four +1/+1 counters on target creature you control." Unlike The Darkness Crystal, this ability doesn't depend on your opponents doing anything, so it is a bit more readily controllable... provided you have creatures worth investing in.

#2 - Starting Town

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

Coming in untapped as this week's second place is Starting Town, another pick that's seeing plenty of play in cEDH tables and beyond.

Starting Town is a land that, provided it's your first, second, or third turn of the game, enters the battlefield untapped. As far as mana is concerned, it can either add , or you can pay one life (in addition to tapping it) in order to add one mana of any color.

Starting Town's early game flexibility is exactly the kind of tolerable tap condition that allows for multicolor lands to breakout as all-stars. In the early turns, when you've seen a comparatively minuscule amount of cards, your options for lands to play are necessarily constrained. Drawing nothing but tapped lands in the early turns can be a real tempo swing, exactly the kind that causes close games to become losses rather than victories. Having a land in your deck that enters untapped early and tapped later, however, is far less of a problem, since you'll probably have drawn a proper untapped land to play in place of Starting Town later on.

At the end of the day, Starting Town is still worse than Mana Confluence and City of Brass, but redundancy in the world of 100-card singleton, even with incrementally worse duplicates, is key.

#1 - The Water Crystal

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

Here we are, folks, the end of the line. Drum roll, please, as we check in with this week's most traded card, our last Crystal of the week: The Water Crystal!

The Water Crystal is blue's installment in the Crystal cycle. So, beyond the copy-paste of costing and making blue spells cost less, what's unique here? First off, arguably the singularly most important replacement effect from the whole cycle.

"If an opponent would mill one or more cards, they mill that many cards plus four instead."

Mill has traditionally been a pretty weak strategy, outside of some particularly potent synergies in Commander (Bruvac the Grandiloquent and Maddening Cacophony) or two-card combos in Legacy (Painter's Servant and Grindstone). In Commander, it suffers from a problem of parasitic strategy without the inherently broken cards necessary to compliment it, meaning that the mill player doesn't get to benefit off of the incidental damage done between their opponents in the same way that a traditional life-loss oriented deck would. Poison, meanwhile, makes up for this by simply having absurdly broken card quality, and no additional padding in for a multiplayer format (players lose at ten poison counters regardless of format, while players have to lose 40 life in Commander instead of the 20 in traditional constructed). So, how does The Water Crystal help to fix this? Simply put, it suddenly breaks a plethora of cards mill players were already running.

Mesmeric Orb? Mill five per untap. Grindstone? Now only two from six total cards need to share a color for the cycle to repeat. Persistent Petitioners now has ", : Target player mills five cards." The list goes on and on. On top of all this, we finally get to The Water Crystal's own activation; ", : Each opponent mills cards equal to the number of cards in your hand." Well, that many plus four, that is.

All in all, The Water Crystal doesn't quite fix mill's problem entirely, but it does an excellent job at making every other card already in a mill deck significantly better. Good enough to push mill into the competitive 60-card arena? Probably not, but definitely enough to welcome a cohort of mill decks to Commander's upper (casual) brackets.

Wrap Up

Final Fantasy may not have hit its full release yet, but already the set is making waves across formats. Check back in next week to see how much more Final Fantasy continues to rock the boat (and to see if the other Crystals make an appearance). Thanks for reading!