MTG Finance - Stock Watch - Swamp #238 from Shards of Alara

by ElspethFTW, Old School Duelist

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.