This week in Magic finance, the biggest gainer was The Gaffer, with the Lord of the Rings Commander card shooting up 268% to over $12 thanks to a bunch of popular new lifegain commanders including Hope Estheim, Ragost, Deft Gastronaut and [[Haliya, Guided by Light]. With the price spike, The Gaffer is now the most expensive new card from the Lord of the Rings commander set, although I wouldn't be surprised to see other cards from the release spike in coming months. Typically a couple of years post-release is when supply of cards starts to dry up to the point where increases of demand brought about by newly printed cards can send only cards shooting up in price, and as weird as it sounds, compared to a set like Final Fantasy, the supply of Lord of the Rings is comparatively low. 

Speaking of Final Fantasy, this week Wizards had to report their second quarter financials, and we got a truly staggering statistic. Lord of the Rings, the previous best selling set in Magic history, generates $200 million in revenue in 6 months. Final Fantasy, the current best selling set, did $200 million in revenue in a single day! This means a couple of things. For one, there's no use in fighting the tide of Universes Beyond sets. There's no argument that anyone can make that is going to convince Hasbro to not try to make sets like Final Fantasy again and again and again, it's simply too profitable not to. Second, the supply of Final Fantasy is incredibly high. While it is fair to wonder how much of this supply will ever hit the markets and how much of it will be locked into closets and binders of Final Fantasy fans who will never sell their cards, it seems like it should be hard for lesser cards to gain much in price simply because so many copies exist. It's also possibly that if these new Final Fantasy players stick around, it could be easier for cards from older sets to spike, since supply may be low compared to the current size of the player base. Regardless, at this point its safe to say that we've never seen anything like Final Fantasy in this history of Magic. 

Finally, at San Diego Comic Con this week Wizards previewed some cards from the Spider-man set, but what caught my eye the most was a product display at the con that showed Magic cards packaged into Marvel figurines. It seems that we've reached the point where Magic is so popular that Wizards is now attempting to use it to jump-start the lagging toy sales (despite Magic showing massive growth in Q2, Hasbro actually lose hundreds of millions of dollars overall). Whether this will work or not remains to be seen, but expect Magic to continue to show up in more and more strange places and Hasbro leans harder and harder on the game to help keep their outdated toy business afloat.