The Magic: The Gathering creature card Sandstorm Salvager from the miniature set that never was, The Big Score, has seen a huge price increase over the past month. According to the price tracker on MTG Goldfish, the card was priced at $3.20 on January 4, but in the last 12 days it's gone all the way up to $8.20 and still seems to be rising.
Meanwhile, the Showcase variant of the card is riding an even bigger wave, blasting from just under $9 to $25.
If you’ve been paying attention to the best Standard and MTG Arena decks, then it won’t be a mystery to you why Sandstorm Salvager is spiking. She’s part of the new crop of Selesnya decks that have appeared on the scene over the past month.
Selesnya Cage, as the archetype seems to have been coined, is a go-wide tokens deck. It has a sting in its tale, though, in the form of Collector’s Cage, which the deck uses to cheat Overlord of the Mistmoors into play for a swift victory.
Last week we saw the Cage itself spiking in value, but Sandstorm Salvager is a no less important part of the gameplan. For starters she provides two bodies to help you get the hideaway ability off ASAP, but she can also become your best bet if the game goes long and you need a mana sink.
Selesnya Cage drew mainstream attention when it won a tournament on January 5. Since then… well it's not exactly taken the Standard meta by storm. On MTG Online it's had medium results in some Standard Challenges, but as new decks go, this is no Esper Self-Bounce. Indeed, it seems like Mono-White remains the best tokens deck, thanks to the lasting power of Caretaker's Talent.
But a brand new deck is still a brand new deck, and Selesnya Cage is having a noticeable impact on secondary market prices as people rush to go try out the latest flavor – a deck sparked purely by innovative brewers, not by any new card releases.
Selesnya Cage is full of rare cards that are hard to get hold of and haven't had a home before; now the likes of Sandstorm Salvager, Collector's Cage, and Pawpatch Recruit are all trending upwards.
That’s all for this one – a nice, non-mysterious spike. If you want more great reads, we recommend this list of the most expensive MTG cards to ever go on sale, and our full guide to the year’s MTG release schedule.
