Top Trades: June 30 - July 7

Mind into Matter | Illustrated by Joe Slucher

Howdy, folks, and welcome back to Top Trades, the weekly series where we check in with the most popular cards from the previous week of trading here at Cardsphere. This week’s list has a little bit of everything, so let's get into it!

Honorable Mention - Loki, God of Mischief

Number of Trades: 6 --- Number of Cards Traded: 10

Leading things off this week is Loki, God of Mischief, one of the newer cards from Marvel Super Heroes that has got plenty of players excited.

For , Loki is a 2/1 legendary God Sorcerer Villain that says whenever a player or permanent becomes the target of an ability you control, you draw a card. This ability triggers only once each turn.

That’s a pretty specific build-around, but it doesn’t take much for Commander players to start poking at text like this. Equipment, repeatable activated abilities, oddball utility creatures; there are a lot of ways to squeeze value out of a once-per-turn draw trigger, especially when the commander itself is cheap.

#5 - Urza's Tower

Number of Trades: 4 --- Number of Cards Traded: 4

Kicking off our main list is a land that really doesn’t need much introduction: Urza's Tower.

On its own, it taps for . If you control an Urza’s Mine and an Urza’s Power-Plant, though, it taps for instead, setting up Magic's infamous Tron deck, capable of outputting seven as quickly as turn three. That's the makings of a playable deck in Pauper, Modern, and Legacy; no wonder folks keep coming back to trade for more.

#4 - Mind into Matter

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

Next up is Mind into Matter, a splashy Simic value spell out of Secrets of Strixhaven. For , this sorcery lets you draw X cards, then put a permanent card with mana value X or less from your hand onto the battlefield tapped.

That’s exactly the kind of text Commander players tend to notice pretty quickly. It scales with the game, it turns big mana into a fresh grip of cards, and it can cheat something meaningful onto the battlefield along the way. Plus, it essentially replaced the already popular Braingeyser.

#3 - Hidden Lair

Number of Trades: 5 --- Number of Cards Traded: 6

Coming in at number three is Hidden Lair, one of the new dual lands (two of which are on our list) from Marvel Super Heroes.

At its worst, Hidden Lair taps for . If you control a basic land or if Hidden Lair entered this turn, it can tap for or . Taken together, that's a dual land that is never tapped and has a pretty reasonable condition insofar as colored mana output is concerned, exactly the qualities low-to-mid bracket Commander is looking for.

#2 - Gixian Infiltrator

Number of Trades: 5 --- Number of Cards Traded: 8

Just missing the top spot this week is Gixian Infiltrator, a sacrifice payoff from The Brothers’ War.

For , Gixian Infiltrator is a 2/1 Phyrexian Human that gets a +1/+1 counter whenever you sacrifice another permanent. That’s a very straightforward reward for doing something black decks were already planning to do anyway. Aristocrats shells, anything playing Treasures, Food, Clues, or Magic's myriad artifact tokens, etc... this slots into all of them pretty easily, particularly Pauper, where it's seeing a lot of play in Jund.

#1 - Dark Fortress

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

Last but not least, it's our most traded card of the week, Dark Fortress.

Just like Hidden Lair before it, Dark Fortress is a dual land out of Marvel Super Heroes that can only add colored mana; in this case, or if it either entered this turn or if you control a basic land. Otherwise, it can only add .

At the end of the day, everything I said before about Hidden Lair applies here: low-to-mid bracket Commander is stuffed full of basic lands, meaning that Dark Fortress can pretty reliably add colored mana. Add in that it always enters untapped, the ultimate draw for any land, and you've got yourself a playable dual land.

Wrap Up

That does it for this week’s Top Trades. Between the Marvel Super Heroes cards continuing to circulate and a few older picks popping back up, this was a pretty interesting mix, especially as far as lands were concerned. We’ll be back next week to see what else starts moving; thanks for reading!