The Magic: The Gathering card Prime Speaker Vannifar is spiking in price. This ooze elf wizard from Ravnica Allegiance was priced at just $2 at the start of August, but now collectors are selling it on TCGPlayer for up to $20. That’s a pretty meteoric 900% price rise, no doubt aided by the fact this mythic rare has only ever had one printing.
Vannifar is in high demand because she synergizes nicely with two very recent commanders. The most popular is Thranduil, The Elvenking from The Hobbit. Thranduil gains all activated abilities of elves in your graveyard, and has a discard/draw ability that helps him fill it.
With the number of elves that tap for mana, it’s easy to turn Thranduil into a glorified mana dork, but this deck can also build a number of creature-based combos by having the right pieces in the bin. Devoted Druid is really the lynchpin here, as the deck’s dedicated untapped. With your devotee in the graveyard you can create infinite mana by giving Thranduil the abilities of Incubation Druid or make your elf army infinitely powerful using Immaculate Magistrate.
Vannifar is useful for this gameplan case as a repeatable means of tutoring up your combo pieces, sacrificing more disposable elves to grab the exact creatures that you need, then sacrificing those creatures to give their abilities to Thranduil.
That might seem a bit slow and clunky, but it works pretty well in this deck. If you fetch up Devoted Druid it can put itself into the graveyard from the battlefield, and then that gives you a way to untap Thranduil to keep using Vannifar’s ability (assuming she’s in the graveyard), until your combo is all set up. It’s actually much easier to catch your opponents by surprise with this than you might think.
While just under half of Thranduil decks logged on EDHREC are running Vannifar, that would be more than enough to trigger this price spike all on its own. Elves are obviously an extremely popular tribe and Thranduil’s coveted Sultai color identity has been enough to make him the most popular MTG commander in the Hobbit.
But there’s another card contributing to Vannifar’s spike at the same time and that’s Uugguu, the Omniplasm. Uugguu (wow, that’s annoying to type out!) makes token copies of oozes that die, so in this deck Vannifar becomes a really useful way to sacrifice oozes for value.
Uugguu creates two non-legendary copies of each offed ooze. Which means you can easily get two Prime Speaker Vannifars out on the battlefield. You can really go off from there, especially given how many oozes already make tokens when they die. It’s not hard to create an army of oozes that replicate and grow and sacrifice themselves, until you can drown your enemies in a tidal wave of jello.
Though Vannifar is a more obvious inclusion in Uugguu, the slimy guy from Mystery Booster: Commander Edition is a lot more niche than Thranduil. It’s the elves players that really this caused this, while the ooze aficionados contributed a little as well.