God of War, God of Value: Which card prices could Kratos goad into rising?
- Jace
- Oct 27
- 3 min read
Kratos, God of War is coming to Commander, fresh from the new PlayStation Secret Lair Superdrop! We’ve applied our data science algorithms (particularly an AI one we built) to identify a few cards Kratos might cause price rises in.
So, first up: what does Kratos, God of War, do?
He gives EVERYONE’S creatures haste (including your opponents)! Then he punishes people for not attacking with their hastey creatures by doing tons of damage to them. It feels a bit like you can either goad all your opponents into attacking each other, OR lean into limiting attacks and punishing your opponents for not attacking. But maybe its hard to synergistically do both?
This might become a fan favourite commander for the political chaos it causes, but there’s not yet a lot of support for what it does (just not a lot cards that punish players for not attacking). I could have done a top 8 or 16 for this, but from an mtgfinance perspective the numbers just didn’t look good outside the top 4, so a top 4 is what we have:
4. Bothersome Quasit: so this card just has the one printing and there’s really not a lot of copies left. It does something that’s fairly unique in magic and also causes some utter commander chaos: Not only does it force attacks against opponents, but it also prevents blocking letting you really manipulate all your opponents attacks against each.
3. Silent Arbiter: ensures that very few creatures do ever attack and so Kratos will be throwing around maximum damage every turn. It’s hugging the ~$10 mark with some fairly limited reprints since its first release 20 years ago.
2. Total War: is weirdly cheap for an ancient card with such little supply. Ok, it’s not perfect here, but if you’re locking them out of combat or just trying to encourage your opponents to attack each other then Total War fits in there somewhere by forcing all your opponents to lose all their (non-hastey) creatures if they don’t attack.
1. Crawlspace (or Caverns of Despair if you can find one anywhere at all): The price charts look promising and a dwindling supply for this artifact that stops players attacking you with their newly hasted critters.
That's it! Pretty trim list for Kratos, God of War. But we have a few honorable mentions:
Why didn't Kazuul make the cut? There's just a lot of copies of him available from a lot of precons, so its hard to see Kratos being the catalyst for him to sell out in a big enough way to justify the postage costs. But maybe?
Conversely, Smoke is already pretty pricey for what it does (although the link above takes you to the last cheap 5th ed one - so maybe someone will snaffle that up (I'm based in the UK, so I can't). Smoke will ping all your opponents with those creatures that can't attack each turn. As will...
And, of course, the crawlspace of every burn player's dreams:
So, there we go! What our bespoke built AI suggests as the cards you might want to think about as price-changers due to Kratos, God of War (interpreted by the AI's wilful human assistant). The AI kept making strong b-lines for Stax decks and card combos so its probably important to read the results through that lens, but I tried to force it to amble around a fair bit of the other parameter space. Let us know what you think.
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Jace & Garruk
