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Daily Stock Watch – Phyrexian Altar

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Hello, everyone and welcome to our crazy Friday edition of the Daily Stock Watch! If you remember last week, I featured Ward of Bones on this segment to let you guys know that there are cards out there that could fool you into spending unwisely. Although I'm not a hundred percent right at all times, (I mean, who is?) I'm quite sure that I could at least intelligently distinguish a good card from a bad one. In the case of today's card, I like how good it is gameplay-wise, but I think that the price has gone a bit overboard on this. In any case, let's talk about the financial future of this artifact.


This is a grown up's version of Ashnod's Altar, in a sense that it hasn't been reprinted ever, but it isn't also included on the Reserved List. Today, this card has been bought out and is sitting at $55.07 which is its all-time high. Quite pricey for an artifact that doesn't actually win you games out of nowhere, and it isn't even Modern legal. I tried looking for a decent deck where it's seeing play in Legacy, and this is what I stumbled upon.

The deck name is cool but it's basically a Zombie deck that aims to punish its opponents with the resilience of cards like Relentless Dead and Gravecrawler. The Phyrexian Altar acts like a conduit for your zombie minions to grind themselves into so you could help in padding a jumbo Diregraf Colossus. It's a pretty neat mini combo to begin with, but not exactly something that I would like to play in a competitive field. If you're up for some casual fun, this could work out just fine for you.

Sac Engines

There are tons of ways to get rid of your creatures and get something out of doing it. From this list above, the Phyrexian Altar looks like the most efficient one if you're after colored mana and a mana-less sacrificial altar at the same time. However, would you be inclined to paying $55 for a card that does just that? Not me. If you could find people who are hovering around with cheap copies of this card though, I'm not going to stop you from doing so. Just be sure that you could dispose them while they're hot.

At the moment, the only place where you could get non-foil copies of Phyrexian Altar is via Card Kingdom where they are up for grabs at $49.99 each. Some foils are available via ChannelFireball for $99.99, while there are more via TCGPlayer for $101. StarCityGames is out of stock but should be following this trend once they have their own supplies and this will be the benchmark price guide for the months (or years to come) until this card gets reprinted. I wouldn't mind grabbing copies that are cheaper than $40 if I have means to move it around, but I wouldn't lose any sleep if I don't get them in this price range. I'd rather invest in high value Modern cards that have quick and slick returns rather than these big buck cards that have the potential to be reprinted at any time that WotC decides to do so. Stay away from the foils as well unless they're going for so low.

And that’s it for this week's edition of the Daily Stock Watch! See you again next time, as I preview new cards that should be on the go, or good enough for speculation purposes. As always, feel free to share your opinion in the comments section below. And if you want to keep up with all the market movement, be sure to check in with the QS Discord Channel for real time market information, and stay ahead of the hottest specs!

4 thoughts on “Daily Stock Watch – Phyrexian Altar

  1. In the list above, Altar is much more of an “I Win” combo piece than you realize. With any other zombie on the battlefield, saccing Gravecrawler to the Altar gives you infinite ETBs. It’s an instant kill with Wayward Servant.

  2. You went through the entire article and never mentioned EDH at all, lol. That’s why Phyrexian Altar is so expensive. It’s an EDH all-star and, credit to Jason Alt, he frequently xcites this card as an example of a card that keeps going up if it continually dodges reprint, which it surprisingly h

    as.

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