Since the inception of the Old School MTG format among long-time Magic the Gathering players, many older cards have become highly sought after. The Old School format only uses cards from Fallen Empires and before, cards from early sets such as Legends and Arabian Nights have seen a lot of interesting price fluctuations. Being a casual format, cards you would never have thought of playing suddenly look quite interesting in that format.

Since most of these cards are on the Reserved List, which are cards that Wizards of the Coast promised to never reprint, these old rare cards can make some very good investments.

Of particular interest is an 8 mana white enchantment (6WW) called Divine Intervention. What's particularly interesting about this card is its rather unique effect. There are several cards in Magic that serve as alternate win conditions. But Divine Intervention, after it has two intervention counters removed from it, actually ends the game in a draw.

From a competitive standpoint, this doesn't seem like a very fun card. It has seen some fringe play in Phelddagrif "group hug" EDH decks as a way to simply let no one win. It's not really a fun card, but it has its uses.

It doesn't seem like you'll be seeing Divine Intervention becoming a format staple anytime soon. But, seeing what a mediocre enchantment like Field of Dreams has done in price in the past, it can't hurt to find a good condition copy or two of this as an investment. All you need is for the supply to dry up all of a sudden which with these very old cards can happen quite easily.

If anything, this is just a cool gem from early Magic. It's a cool one to have. In EDH, it's a great way to end a Commander game no one really wants to play anymore.

Field of Dreams is an enchantment from Legends saw a crazy price increase back in 2015. Its price jumped from $6 to $20 to $80 in a very short time. What tempted players to buy out this reserved list Enchantment?

It costs a single blue mana to cast. What does it do? It has all players play with the top card of their decks revealed. This doesn't sound all that exciting.

However, as an artifact with a similar effect has shown, knowing what the next draw would be can provide plenty of useful information. The difference between this and the Modern-playable Lantern of Insight, however, is that you can sacrifice the Lantern to shuffle a target library. Field of Dreams has no such extra ability.

Having such a similar effect, though, it would seem a few players thought it may have some potential and bought copies. Suddenly having such a low supply card see sudden interest, there was a buyout. It's actually a great card to sell if you happen to have any laying around and don't plan on using it.

The only format in which this could ever actually be good is the Old School Magic format. It's a format that only allows cards printed from Fallen Empires and before. Because of this, it's often called 93/94. Could there be a sort of Lantern control deck possible in that format using Field of Dreams as an alternate version? Who knows. Someone out there must be trying it.

We've already run through and reviewed all of the Ally cards in all five colors, so now it's down to the final few, the multi-colored cards! Plus, we'll have a bonus card to look at! Without further ado, let's take this thing home and reach a final verdict!

Final Verdict on Battle for Zendikar Allies: B

So rather than just taking individual grades and doing the math, it felt right to just give the entire Battle for Zendikar Ally tribe a solid B. Grading the cards on an individual basis, I feel like the set’s offerings provide us with a B-minus or C-plus, but with the amount of synergies among the Allies, I had to bump them up a few points. Also, having the Rally mechanic benefit all creatures you control and not simply Allies is a minor but non-negligible upgrade for these newer Allies. Many of the new Allies are slightly more functional counterparts of those from Zendikar and Worldwake. A few are slightly worse perhaps, but make up for being slightly worse with benefitting all of your creatures.

The Ally Encampment is probably the best thing that Allies got in the entire set. The Black allies and Drana’s Emissary form a pretty sweet draft/sealed deck archetype. There are also enough decent two and three mana Allies (as well as the 2/1 one-mana Envoy) that playing a Collected Company Allies deck seems legitimate. There is hope in Standard for Allies.

We also got a couple cool Commanders in Noyan Dar and Zada, and the latter could actually work his way into a decent Standard deck, too.

Beyond Standard, though, the only real thing that I feel Allies picked up is the Encampment. Collected Company Allies have won here and there in Modern, especially having Aether Vial to cheat in creatures. The Encampment makes the mana base more consistent. Also, Zulaport Cutthroat is essentially another Blood Artist, and there are sweet things some Modern decks could do with Blood Artists #5-8, as those combos revolve around creatures you control anyway, so the functional downgrade doesn’t matter in those cases.

As seems to be the case with Battle for Zendikar in general, it feels like the power level of Battle for Zendikar was scaled back a bit too much. A lot of these cards are functional reprints of older cards, and as I said, some of them are actually better and some are only slightly worse. Casual players will jam plenty of these into their existing Ally decks. Only time will tell, but it seems Wizards developed the Allies into more of a Limited archetype than a Standard-playable upper-tier strategy.

However, although many people seem disappointed with what the set has offered, there are plenty of optimists, too. Battle for Zendikar went to the extreme with the tribal flavor of Allies vs Eldrazi. I think they succeeded from a design standpoint, but did development perhaps scale back these guys to be balanced for Limited play and cost them Constructed playability? We shall see.

Today, we'll be taking a look at a commonly played land from Shards of Alara: Swamp #238... Wait, what?

One of the most important things about Magic: the Gathering is having lands to play your spells. This is why full art basics from Zendikar, Unglued, Unhinged, and now Battle for Zendikar are such good investments. It's why foils are even more so. It's why fetchlands fetch such a premium. Shock lands retain good value because they're the best nonbasic mana-producing lands in Modern. But remember that some decks are mono-color and therefore need a crap-ton of basic lands.

Enter Swamp #238 from Shards of Alara.

Kudos to MTG Goldfish tracking the trending price winners and catching this one. Turns out this has been a fairly "expensive" basic swamp for a bit, though. It was about $1 before a couple of recent price jumps.

How about the foil?

Admittedly Chippy does some awesome artwork on basic land arts, and it's not unusual to see some players buy up basic lands of particular arts. Turns out this already gorgeous art is already popular in foil, and has been for quite some time. It hasn't dropped below a TCG Player mid of $4.31 since Goldfish started tracking cards!

If you think this is interesting, check out this Swamp from New Phyrexia:

The non-foil doesn't nearly approach the foil here, but notice that this has been over $3.50 for some time, too. Because foil basics apparently are bought in bunches to fill up mono-colored decks, you tend to see some interesting price fluctuations.

There are a handful more over $2, and this is just looking at Swamps! I'll say one thing: I can never look at basic lands the same again! Some players really, really like particular arts on their basic lands. While I don't necessarily suggest raiding your local game store for the non-foil basics over $1, it's just a good idea to watch what basic lands are actually worth some money. Most buylists don't consider them, but you can always EBay them, Heck, you can even try to trade them off on PucaTrade!

So remember, if a particular land art looks super sweet in foil, look up the pric.e. It may be worth more than you'd ever expect.

Ugin's Insight is being called the "fixed" Dig Through Time. It's not at instant speed and doesn't have the advantage of being able to Delve away your graveyard to cast it for cheap. But 5 mana to draw 3 cards was fine on Jace's Ingenuity. Ugin's Insight lets you scry X, as well, where X is the highest converted mana cost among permanents you control. On turn 5, that number could easily be 3 or 4, so Scry 3, draw 3 seems pretty decent.

Where this card really becomes powerful is when you have much larger permanents on board, such as Ugin the Spirit Dragon himself (with a CMC of 8) or any of the bigger Eldrazi cards. You can dig pretty deep for this card and send away anything you're not going to want to draw to the bottom. Dig is probably going to be strictly better during its time in Standard, but this is a pretty decent card to help you dig for combo pieces or otherwise set up your draws in the late game. Perhaps this could help set up See the Unwritten plays, but you need to have a decently sized creature on board already to get the full power out of this card.

The best applications for this sorcery, like many cards in Battle for Zendikar, are in Commander. Braids, Conjurer Adept and Narset, Enlightened Master are two that have come up a lot already. With Braids, you'll get to at least Scry 4 and make sure you're drawing better artifacts, lands, and creatures than your opponents. Narset is a bit better, as she's a 6-drop, getting you Scry 6. You can try to draw 3 cards that you don't really want to hit with Narset. Then, you get to maximize her ability to cast any of the top four cards for free as long as they're non-creature spells. It's powerful card filtering that can simply win you the game. There are tons of other commanders that will love this ability, of course, but those are the most obvious two.

What do you think of Ugin's Insight? Do you think it's Standard playable? How would you go about using it?