Somewhere in America right now, a grown adult is refreshing a shopping cart at 2 a.m., watching the price of a single playing card climb past their car payment.
This is the reality of the *Multiverse Reforged* Commander decklist craze — a format that was supposed to be about creativity and house rules, now devolving into a ruthless race to own the most expensive stack of cardboard at the table.
Commander was never meant to be a financial arms race.
The whole point was casual chaos — weird synergies, underplayed cards, a goblin deck that somehow wins.
But *Multiverse Reforged* leaned into power creep, and the decklists followed.
Now players aren't brewing decks; they're copying spreadsheets.
The fun got optimized out, and the invoice got optimized in.
Walk into any local game store on a Friday night and you'll see it.
Two players shuffle up, and before a single land hits the table, one of them is already sighing because they know their $80 build is about to get steamrolled by a $700 one.
The secondary market is the real winner here.
Vendors watch which cards spike after a new *Multiverse Reforged* list drops, and prices move like crypto.
A card that cost four dollars on Monday is forty by Friday because some streamer called it "the new staple." Families budgeting for groceries aren't the ones buying these singles — and that's exactly the point.
The barrier to entry keeps climbing while the community keeps telling itself this is still a game for everyone.
Commander night used to be the great equalizer — the format where a teenager with a precon could sit next to a collector with a binder worth more than a used sedan, and everyone had a shot. *Multiverse Reforged* broke that.
When every decklist is a mirror of the same fifteen optimized staples, you're not playing against a person.
You're playing against their credit limit.
And let's be honest about the psychology.
FOMO is the most powerful card ever printed, and it costs nothing to print.
Every time a new must-have enters the meta, it quietly tells players that their current deck — the one they love, the one they built by hand — isn't good enough anymore.
That's a community telling its own members to spend or step aside.
The fix isn't complicated, even if it's uncomfortable: stop chasing the list.
Build the deck you actually want to play.
Set a budget and treat it like a hard rule, not a suggestion.
The most memorable games I've ever seen didn't involve a single card worth more than a nice dinner.
They involved someone pulling off a ridiculous combo nobody saw coming and the whole table laughing about it for a week.
The real magic was never in the cardboard.
It was in the people sitting across from you, and no price spike can take that away unless we let it.
Our take: a hobby that prices out its own new players is a hobby quietly digging its own grave.
Final Thoughts
The question is whether the community will keep letting the market decide who gets to sit at the table.