Following the bans back in November, Legacy has been in a much better spot. Without Nadu plaguing the format and Reanimator having its wings clipped, new decks have been able to rise up. While Dimir Tempo is still the best deck in the format, things have undoubtedly gotten more competitive.
Recently, in fact, it appears that a new, or rather old, has been putting up strong results in Legacy. Empowered by a rarely used enchantment from Tempest, the aptly named Aluren deck has been putting up consistent results. Thanks to this impressive winning streak, the price of the namesake card has spiked dramatically, hitting $90!
MTG Aluren
First released almost three decades ago, it’s very easy to see why Aluren is a powerful MTG card. If you build your deck around it, you can cast every creature in your deck for free with this enchantment. Unsurprisingly, this is an incredibly powerful effect, but it is naturally very risky, since it’s symmetrical.
Thankfully, by building your deck around Aluren, in any format, you should have the edge over your opponents. Even then, however, you need a lot of fuel to keep this strategy going so you can make the most out of its effect. Either that your you’ll want to spiral into even bigger and better threats while using cheap creatures as tutors.
This is exactly what the Legacy Aluren deck aims to do. Utilizing the new Formidable Speaker from Lorwyn Eclipsed, Aluren basically lets you tutor up creatures for free. With your powerful free tutor, you’ll always be searching up Acererak, the Archlich when your namesake enchantment is online. Since Acererak bounces itself back to your hand, you’ll be able to Venture into Lost Mine of Phandelver infinitely, draining your opponent for infinite life.
Even without Aluren in play, Formidable Speaker can still search up Legacy’s signature haymakers. This combo deck can use Legacy’s classic Show and Tell to power them out, which is equally capable of hitting Omniscience. Using this line, you can play either Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or Atraxa, Grand Unifier to close out games incredibly quickly. Of course, Acererak also just wins the game with Omniscience in play.
While this is pretty par for the course for a Show and Tell strategy, the Aluren and Formidable Speaker upgrades help a lot. Recently, this deck has been consistently putting up strong results in Legacy, driving significant demand.
Notably, outside of Legacy, Aluren does see some play in MTG Commander, too. Typically appearing in Chulane, Teller of Tales decks, and Group Hug strategies, Aluren definitely has multiformat potential. With this in mind, it’s no wonder that demand and prices for Aluren are so high right now.
The Spike
Thanks to being a decades-old enchantment, that’s notably on the Reserved List, Aluren has never been particularly cheap. Near-mint copies, in particular, have long been selling for around $30. Back in early January, following the release of Lorwyn Eclipsed, however, there was a sudden surge in sales, and prices started to climb.
Technically, in the past three months, only 94 near-mint copies of Aluren have been sold on TCGplayer. Despite this low sales volume, the card’s scarcity has still pushed prices up dramatically. Now, copies of Aluren have been selling for $91, and new near-mint listings begin at $97.99.
Thankfully, if you’re still in the market for a copy of Aluren, there are a few worse-condition copies available. Sadly, even these have experienced a pretty significant spike, as heavily played examples are now $75. Unfortunately, no matter what variant you’re after, supply is low across the board, so prices may continue to climb.
The Future
While we can’t predict the future of MTG with any degree of certainty, the future for Aluren does admittedly look pretty bright. Thanks to this MTG card being on the Reserved List, there’s no chance Wizards will ever print more supply. With this in mind, any further demand will continue to push prices higher, potentially to obscene levels.
Arguably, Aluren is even deserving of an even higher price point thanks to its potency. Coupled with draw spells and effects like Guardian Project, you can churn through a well-constructed Commander deck remarkably easily. That being said, as powerful and popular as Aluren is right now, this isn’t the first time it has spiked.
Back in 2021, Aluren jumped from $60 to $120 almost overnight. While this price point fluctuated somewhat, Aluren seemed like a sure thing… until it wasn’t. Over time, this card fell out of the limelight and the metagame, and slowly tumbled in price as a result. While it did take over four years to happen, Aluren’s price crashed from $120 to just $30.
With this in mind, even with the Reserved List potential of Aluren, it’s hard to call it a sure thing. Should the Legacy metagame shift for whatever reason, this card could easily end up being pushed out. If this happens, Commander demand evidently can’t sustain it forever. Potentially Premodern might be able to pick up some of the slack, but this is hardly guaranteed.
Ultimately, thanks to its history, it’s hard to tell where exactly Aluren will end up in the long run. As always, we’ll just have to watch this card closely over the coming months to see what the future holds.
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