Lately, The Hobbit has been the driving force behind many recent MTG price spikes, following the usual trend of new cards causing lots of demand. Occasionally, however, real-world events affect MTG finance, especially after the game’s foray into Universes Beyond. Optimus Prime, Hero, for example, appears to be experiencing a buyout following the sad passing of his voice actor, Peter Cullen.
With this character being a major part of many players’ childhoods, myself included, many MTG content creators are now highlighting Optimus Prime, Hero as a tribute to the incredible voice behind the character.
MTG Optimus Prime, Hero
Frankly, it’s somewhat surprising that Optimus Prime, Hero hasn’t spiked in price before this. His Bolster ability, alone, is far better than it looks at first glance, triggering on each and every endstep. Thanks to this, cards that care about their stats like Esper Sentinel, or synergistic +1/+1 counter cards like Arcee, Sharpshooter, can do incredible things with Optimus Prime.
That said, even without extreme synergies, just making your board incrementally bigger with Optimus Prime can be worthwhile, especially considering his survivability. So long as you’ve Bolstered your creatures enough, Optimus Prime, Autobot Leader should have no issues Converting repetitively. If that weren’t enough, Living Metal prevents Optimus from being hit by creature removal on your opponent’s turns, dodging board wipes.
While this makes Optimus extremely difficult to get rid of, you can even go infinite with this Commander. Luminous Broodmoth alongside a sacrifice outlet like Altar of Dementia
Altar of DementiaSacrifice a creature: Target player mills cards equal to the sacrificed creature's power., for example, can mill out opponents infinitely, taking advantage of Optimus Prime’s second ability.
On top of Optimus being a surprisingly powerful Commander, the sad passing of Peter Cullen has drawn a ton of attention to this MTG card. Multiple well-known MTG content creators have recently highlighted the iconic character or made tributes to Cullen himself. As a result, Optimus Prime seems to have experienced a buyout.
The Spike
After Cullen’s passing was announced on August 28th, Optimus Prime, Hero saw a massive demand spike, with about 315 nonfoil near-mint copies of the card selling in just three days. That’s more than all the near-mint Optimus Primes sold in the past three months combined.
Prior to this demand spike, players could pick up a near-mint copy of Optimus Prime Hero for just $2.90. Sadly, those prices are long gone, with near-mint copies now commanding $9 at the absolute cheapest. This represents a 210% price spike for the nonfoil variant of the card, but foils are far worse. Jumping from $5.61, the cheapest foil copy of Optimus available is for a whopping $86.20, representing a 1436% increase!
If Optimus Prime’s foils weren’t expensive enough, Optimus Prime’s chase variants are even more. For the card’s chase Shattered Glass variant, nonfoils start at $90 in lightly played condition, while foils cost an eye-watering $780! On the plus side, if you aren’t picky about card condition, you can find lightly played copies of Optimus Prime’s base variant for $6, but who knows how long this price will last.
Buyer Beware
With how extreme Optimus Prime’s demand spike is, it’s quite difficult to truly figure out if this price increase is player-driven or not. While many content creators highlighting Optimus, or players wanting to honor Cullen on their own, could have driven demand, it’s equally likely that investors are pushing the card’s price up. This is especially true given how explosive Optimus’s demand was, with interest already starting to taper off.
Given the risk of Optimus’s price plummeting in the future, grabbing expensive copies is certainly a risky proposition, but it’s impossible to truly predict the future. After all, this is an incredible Commander to build around, meaning that this sudden surge of attention might be all the card needs to stay expensive. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
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