This week in Magic finance, the biggest news - by far - was Monday's ban list update. Four cards were unbanned in Modern, and all of them have seen huge price increases. Faithless Looting is the least impactful financially since it's a common that has been reprinted a million times, but some special versions like the Japanese Strixhaven Mystical Archive (up from $9 to $48) and The Brothers' War Commander retro border printing (up from $1 to $15) jumped. Meanwhile, Splinter Twin shot up between 250% and 300% to nearly $30, Green Sun's Zenith about 250% to about $40, while Mox Opal doubled up to between $160 and $180 depending on the printing. If you held these cards through their banning you are certainly doing quite well at the moment. The long term future of these cards is uncertain both because some could prove so broken they need to be rebanned and because at these prices, the newly unbanned cards look like juicy reprint targets. 

The impact of the unbans isn't just limited to the unbanned cards themselves. The rest of the biggest gainers in Modern list are cards that synergize with the unbanned cards like Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student, which more than doubled up to $46. Flip Tamiyo benefits from two unbans. First it has found a home in Splinter Twin decks built around Flare of Denial where Tamiyo offers a cheap blue creature that can be sacrificed to free cast Flare of Denial in a pinch. Second, Tamiyo works really well with Faithless Looting, which is now the cheapest and easiest way to flip it on turn two. We've seen Modern Horizons cards peak at even higher prices in the past, so if Tamiyo really is everywhere in our new post ban meta, its price could continue to climb.

Finally, we have the most expensive of the banned cards in The One Ring (bundle). I mentioned back on Monday that I didn't expect the price of The One Ring (bundle) to fall much more and that the possibility of a Modern banning was mostly already priced in, considering that the price of the cheapest The One Ring (bundle) (the bundle promo) had been slowly but steadily dropping for months from a peak of $110 back in September to $55 at the beginning of December. If the price fell too much, Commander players would start snapping up copies. Well, it turns out that the price of The One Ring (bundle) actually increased this week, from $55 to $67. At this point another The One Ring (bundle) banning in any format seems unlikely, which means we'll probably see the price slowly climb until it's eventually reprinted. Feel free to sell your The One Ring (bundle)s if you don't need them, but I wouldn't feel a huge amount of pressure to dump your copies because of the banning. The time to do that was back in September before the artifact lost half of its value leading into the ban list update.