Top Trades: May 13-May 20

Howdy, folks! Another Thursday has arrived, and with it another installment of Top Trades, the weekly series where we check in with the hottest cards here at Cardsphere. So, what trades are moving around the site? Let's take a look.

Honorable Mention - Moonmist

Number of Trades: 9 --- Number of Cards Traded: 17

Kicking off this week's Top Trades as our honorable mention is none other than last week's most traded card, Moonmist.

For , Moonmist is a Wolf-and-Werewolf-kindred Fog, preventing all combat damage that would be dealt this turn by non-Wolf, non-Werewolf creatures, but that's not why it's on our list.

Beyond just fogging most creature types, Moonmist also causes you to transform all of your Humans. Why does this matter now? Magic's next set - the Final Fantasy crossover - is full of impactful Human creatures that transform into potent game-enders, although these creatures often have prohibitively high barriers to jump over before you can flip them. Moonmist bypasses all of that en masse, allowing for quick finishes when deployed properly.

#5 - Harmonic Prodigy

Number of Trades: 5 --- Number of Cards Traded: 5

Speaking of cards seeing new life due to Final Fantasy, it's time to start off our main list for the week, now with every Wizard and Shaman's favorite doubler: Harmonic Prodigy.

For , this 1/3 Human Wizard with prowess brings with it a simple and powerful replacement effect: "If an ability of a Shaman or another Wizard you control triggers, that ability triggers an additional time." Succinct but potent, ask anyone who puts Krark, the Thumbless in the command zone and they'll tell you just how out of hand this little creature can get. So, what from Final Fantasy is driving the hype? Vivi Ornitier, of course!

For , this 0/3 Wizard has - among other things - a triggered ability which deals one damage to each opponent and puts a +1/+1 counter on Vivi whenever you cast a noncreature spell. Couple this with a once-per-turn mana ability that allows you to make an amount of and/or equal to Vivi's power, and you can see how doubling both damage and counters quickly amounts to a game-ending threat. Vivi isn't even legal yet and the theorycrafters of the internet have already broken this commander across message boards, and core to those broken decks is Harmonic Prodigy.

#4 - Mirror Box

Number of Trades: 5 --- Number of Cards Traded: 6

On to the next pick of the week, a mid-bracket Commander favorite from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. It's Mirror Box!

For , this artifact looks at everything that makes legendary creatures more restrictive to play than normal creatures and throws it out the window, providing boon after boon for players that like making an army of copies out of their commanders.

First of all, Mirror Box stops the "legend rule" from applying to permanents you control, meaning you don't have to sacrifice legendary permanents that share a name. Second, it provides a static buff to all your legendary creatures, granting them +1/+1. Third, it gives each creature you control an additional +1/+1 for each other creature you control that shares a name with it. So, what does this look like in practice? It means your clones are going to get big, and get big fast. Spark Double, Vesuvan Doppelganger, the original Clone, all of these get a buff just by the very nature that they share a name with something else. All that Mirror Box asks in return is that the card you start cloning is worth the investment in the first place.

#3 - Into the Flood Maw

Number of Trades: 6 --- Number of Cards Traded: 9

Coming in at number three on our list is a card that's seeing much more play in the competitive halls of Magic, from cEDH tables to Modern and more.

Into the Flood Maw is one of the most efficient bounce effects Magic has printed in a long time. For , this instant allows you to return target creature you don't control to its owner's hand. However, it also allows you to promise a gift; in this case, that means granting an opponent a 1/1 tapped blue Fish creature token. In exchange, the horizons on Into the Flood Maw widen, and you can return any nonland permanent an opponent controls instead, rather than just a creature.

This flexibility can be pretty critical in competitive Magic, as there is a wide range of noncreature threats that often get stuck on boards with little opportunity for future interaction. Need to bounce a Rhystic Study so you can combo off without drawing your opponent a billion cards? Into the Flood Maw has you covered? Simply need to get rid of some combat-trick buffed Mouse? Into the Flood Maw has you there, too.

#2 - Night Market

Number of Trades: 6 --- Number of Cards Traded: 11

Next up for this week's Top Trades is a common from Aetherdrift that's starting to make the rounds across lower-bracket Commander decks as a cheap and fair version of fixing while also slowly infiltrating the fringes of Pauper Tron decks, and that card is Night Market.

Night Market is a land which enters the battlefield tapped, and as it does prompts you to choose a color. It has the ability to tap for one mana of the chosen color. Additionally, should you not need it, you can also cycle it for .

The color flexibility on Night Market is great, making it relevant across all range of multicolor decks regardless of the number of colors (well, beyond one, that is), while the cycling option here means that Night Market is never a dead draw. Sure, sometimes you'll really wish your land entered untapped that one turn you needed it to, but I bet you that there will be plenty of times when you wish you had drawn anything but a land, too. Especially for a common, Night Market makes that trade pretty cleanly.

#1 - Dragonfire Blade

Number of Trades: 7 --- Number of Cards Traded: 7

Here we are folks, the last card on our list, Dragonfire Blade.

For the low, low price of just , Dragonfire Blade is an Equipment artifact that grants the equipped creature +2/+2 and hexproof from monocolored. At base, Dragonfire Blade has an equip cost of , but this costs less to activate for each color of the creature which the ability targets.

Magic is plenty full of monocolored creatures, so that might as well have been a , but where this really shines is in along side any of the numerous three-color creatures output by Tarkir: Dragonstorm. It's simple math, granted, but an equip cost of is a whole lot better than an equip cost of , let alone , but it's also really surprisingly easy to make work.

Beyond being a deceptively cost-efficient Equipment, Dragonfire Blade's hexproof-from-monocolor boon is also particularly relevant, as the majority of Magic's best removal is mono-color. Swords to Plowshares. Fatal Push. Into the Floomaw. All of these are the pinnacle of efficiency, and none of them work on a creature holding a Dragonfire Blade

Wrap Up

Alrighty, folks, that does it for this week! We may not have had a card with more than 200 copies traded like we did last week, but Moonmist did make a reappearance, as did some other support for the forthcoming Final Fantasy crossover. Check back in next week for some more Top Trades, and thanks for reading!