Wizards’ Game Changers list, priced: 53 cards, $14,301.60, and two lands are half of it

All 53 Commander Game Changers, priced card by card on November 2, 2026. The list costs $14,301.60, half of it two lands, yet 21 cards sell under $20. And what prices did when the list changed.

Aymeric Lamontagne

Nov 6, 2026

Wizards’ Commander Game Changers list is usually argued about as a power list, and now and then complained about as a rich player’s list. Priced card by card from our archive on November 2, 2026, all 53 cards come to $14,301.60, which sounds like the complaint winning. It is not. Two lands are 51.2% of that bill and ten Reserved List cards are 89.1% of it. Meanwhile 21 of the 53 sell for under $20, Narset, Parter of Veils sells for $0.91, and 44 of the 53 most expensive Commander-legal cards are not on the list at all.

Here is the honest headline: the list is not about expensive cards, but it is not a cheap list either. Its median card costs $32.03, about 21 times the $1.55 median of the 53 most-played cards it leaves off. And being added did not dent a price. In the two big additions of 2025, listed cards pulled ahead of similar unlisted cards by a median 8% to 10% after 30 days and 13% to 15% after 90, slowly, over weeks rather than days. Removals show no clean signal in either direction.

This piece covers five things: whether our 53 match Wizards’ 53, how the list counts toward brackets, what every card costs, whether price explains who is on it, and what prices did when the list changed.

Cards on the list

53 — Checked against Wizards on November 4, 2026

The whole list

$14,301.60 — One copy of each

Median card

$32.03 — The mean is $269.84

Under $20

21 of 53 — 10 of them are under $10

Cheapest non-foil paper printing of each card, excluding memorabilia. TCGplayer market prices in our archive, November 2, 2026.

Are our 53 the same as Wizards’ 53?

Yes. Wizards’ Commander format page, read on November 4, 2026, prints 53 names in seven colour groups. Our card index, last refreshed on November 3, flags 53 through the Game Changer field in Scryfall’s data, and Scryfall’s own search returned 53 on November 4. A name-by-name comparison of Wizards’ list against the index leaves nothing over on either side. The only difference is spelling: Wizards prints Tergrid, God of Fright, and the index stores the whole double-faced name. A mismatch section with nothing in it is the kind to hope for.

The list has had four versions, and each date below comes from Wizards’ own announcement:

We found no Wizards announcement changing the list after February 9, 2026, searching up to November 4. If one lands, the table further down goes stale with it.

How Game Changers count toward brackets

The list’s formal job is a cap, and Wizards’ format page states it in three sentences. Decks in Bracket 1 (Exhibition) and Bracket 2 (Core) run none. “Bracket 3 allows for up to three Game Changers,” which is Upgraded. Bracket 4 (Optimized) and Bracket 5 (cEDH) have no limit.

Wizards’ stated test is about what a card does to a game: letting a player run away with resources, swinging games in ways many players dislike, locking people out, searching too efficiently for the strongest cards, or, for some commanders, pulling a game away from casual play. Price does not appear in it.

Two things follow. First, the count is one input, not the bracket. Wizards’ brackets also speak to two-card combos, extra turns and mass land denial, and they are still labelled a beta, so a deck with no Game Changers is not automatically Bracket 2. The bracket our deck stats estimate is built from the same kinds of signals and is a way to start that conversation; the guide to reading deck stats says what it can and cannot detect.

Second, the cap counts cards, not dollars. On November 2, 2026, three slots cost $3.69 at the cheap end (Narset, Parter of Veils, Braids, Cabal Minion, Notion Thief) and $8,950.26 at the other (Mishra's Workshop, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, Gaea's Cradle). Both trios use the same three slots.

Every card, cheapest first

Each price is the cheapest non-foil paper printing in our archive on November 2, 2026, from the TCGplayer market price, which reflects completed sales rather than the lowest listing. The last column marks the Reserved List. Identity is the card’s colour identity, with C for colourless. The printing is the set code and collector number, so you can find the exact object.

Three choices in that table move its numbers, so here they are.

First, memorabilia is out. Eleven of these cards have a cheaper copy in a set Scryfall files as memorabilia, mostly gold-bordered World Championship decks. Leaving those in would read $11,936.03 for the list, $2,365.57 less. Wizards’ tournament rules do not count gold-bordered cards as authorized game cards (section 3.3 of the November 10, 2025 edition). A $303.59 gold-bordered Gaea's Cradle is a lovely object. It is not a cheaper Gaea’s Cradle.

Second, foils are out. Two foils currently sell below the non-foil floor: Bolas's Citadel at $7.94 against $9.36, and The One Ring at $97.93 against $105.34. Counting them would barely move the total.

Third, The List counts. Demonic Tutor, Aura Shards and Coalition Victory reach their floors through printings from The List, which are real, playable copies. Skip The List and those three floors become $62.89, $23.93 and $5.46.

What the whole list costs, and why two cards are half of it

The mean is $269.84 and the median is $32.03, and most of the story lives in the distance between them. Mishra's Workshop and The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale together cost $7,319.49, which is 51.2% of the total. The ten Reserved List cards cost $12,746.53, or 89.1%. The other 43 cards cost $1,555.07, with a median of $23.99.

The mechanism is supply. Under Wizards’ reprint policy, Reserved List cards do not get functionally identical reprints, so no new copies arrive to meet demand. Everything else on the list can be reprinted, and much of it has been: five of the 21 cards under $20 find their floor in Mystery Booster 2. Narset, Parter of Veils at $0.91 has been around in quantity since its uncommon printing in War of the Spark. Mox Diamond at $1,119.82, with a single non-foil printing from 1998, shows the other end.

Two caveats on the total before anyone quotes it to the cent. First, the top of the list trades thinly. The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale read $3,239 on October 13, $1,866.50 on October 16 and 18, $3,239 again on October 20 and $3,619.50 from October 29. Mishra's Workshop has sat at exactly $3,699.99 since September 12, and showed only 12 distinct values across 322 snapshots in the year to November 2. More than half the total rests on those two numbers. Second, nobody needs the total. It measures the list, not a deck: no bracket asks for all 53, and Bracket 3 stops at three.

By colour identity

Groups match Wizards’ own seven, card for card. The right-hand column takes the Reserved List out, because otherwise the table mostly reports where those ten cards happen to live.

Colourless is 71.8% of the bill: twelve cards that fit any deck, five of them on the Reserved List. Green’s second place is an illusion of two cards, since Gaea's Cradle and Survival of the Fittest are $2,067.27 of its $2,162.61. Take the Reserved List out and the order changes to colourless, black, blue. Black has no Reserved List cards at all, so its $393.54 is simply ten reprintable cards, led by Imperial Seal at $156.02. Red has only three cards and multicolour four, so read their medians as descriptions of those few cards, not of a colour.

Is the list mainly about expensive cards?

No, and the test runs in both directions.

Start from price. Of the 32,030 Commander-legal cards with a real-printing price on November 2, 2026, the 53 most expensive all cost $214.34 or more. Nine of them are Game Changers; 44 are not. Widen to the 100 most expensive and only 12 are listed. A price list would hold most of them. Fifty of those 53 are Reserved List cards, which tells you what actually sets the top of that ranking. Chrome Mox is listed at $153.13 and Mox Opal is not, at $221.60.

Expensive, legal, and not Game Changers (November 2, 2026)

• Timetwister — $6,400.00. The most expensive Commander-legal card by this measure, and on no list but the Reserved one.
• Candelabra of Tawnos — $2,749.99, above every Game Changer except the top two.
• Bazaar of Baghdad — $1,984.60.
• Underground Sea — $1,099.49, and far more played than the list’s two dearest cards: EDHREC rank 296.
• Volcanic Island — $1,007.98, EDHREC rank 335.
• Moat — $935.94. Costs more than all but the four dearest Game Changers.

Start from the list. Ten of the 53 cost under $10 and 21 cost under $20 on November 2, 2026. Wizards’ stated reasons for the cheap ones have nothing to do with money.

On the list, and under $5 (November 2, 2026)

• Narset, Parter of Veils — $0.91. Added April 2025 for punishing extra card draw and combining with wheel effects.
• Braids, Cabal Minion — $0.97. Moved to the list when it was unbanned in April 2025.
• Notion Thief — $1.81. Added April 2025 for the same reason as Narset.
• Crop Rotation — $3.33. Added April 2025 as an efficient one-mana tutor.
• Farewell — $3.65. Added February 2026 as a large reset, so tables opt in at Bracket 3 and up.
• Gifts Ungiven — $4.87. Moved to the list when it was unbanned in April 2025.

But compare it with popular cards, and it is expensive. The 53 most-played cards that are not on the list, by the EDHREC rank in our index on November 3, 2026, have a median price of $1.55 and cost $334.96 in total: Sol Ring is $1.16 and Command Tower is $0.21. Even across the 1,000 most-played unlisted cards the median is $2.04, and 82 of them cost $25 or more. On the list, 31 of 53 do. Popularity alone does not explain the gap, either, because inside the list it barely sorts the prices: Cyclonic Rift is rank 58 at $30.34, and The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale is rank 8,824 at $3,619.50. The rank correlation between price and play across the 53 is only about 0.14.

The verdict, then: price does not put a card on the list, but many of the cards Wizards picks are the tutors, fast mana and free disruption its format page expects in Bracket 4 decks, and wanted cards that have not been heavily reprinted cost money. The list is expensive as a side effect of what it is selecting for. That is a different thing from being about price, and Narset, Parter of Veils at 91 cents is the counterexample.

What prices did when the list changed

The dates are confirmed at Wizards, the archive has daily rows through every window below, and two groups are large enough to measure, so this part stays in. The method, since the answer depends on it:

• Each card is followed on one fixed printing, the cheapest non-memorabilia copy in the two weeks before the date, so a later reprint cannot swap the object being measured.
• Baseline is the median price over the 14 days before the announcement. “7 days” is the median over days 1 to 7 after it, “30 days” over days 23 to 36, “90 days” over days 83 to 96.
• Each card gets five controls: never-listed, Commander-legal cards with the same Reserved List status, a baseline price within 25% (widened only where fewer than five qualified), no new printing in the window, and the nearest EDHREC rank. The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale and Mishra's Workshop have no comparable cards, so they drop out.
• The gap is each card’s change minus the median of its own controls, and the table reports the median gap with a 95% interval from resampling the cards 10,000 times.

If you expected a list that caps a card out of two brackets to take money off it, the first two groups say the opposite. Nothing about a label removes a card from any deck already playing above Bracket 2, and at both dates the listed cards ended up ahead of their controls.

It was slow, and that is the interesting part. The gap for the first list was still 0.4% two weeks after the announcement, 4.4% at three weeks and 9.1% at five. The April group opened sooner but did not jump either: 2.3% at one week, 6.1% at two, 9.4% at three. That is not a feed that lags, because the same feed caught the unbanned cards within seven days.

The median first-week rise across the five April cards was 451%. None of that belongs to the Game Changers list, because the list and the unban arrived together: Wizards moved those cards onto the list the same day. Those six are excluded from the table above. They are here as a yardstick: an unban changes what is legal overnight, and the price moves in days. A listing changes what a card is called, and whatever it does takes weeks.

Removals are a shrug. The ten cards dropped in October 2025 were mostly high-cost cards and legends that Wizards judged strong mainly as commanders. Their median fell 5.1% in 30 days against 0.8% for controls, but the card-level gap is +2.4%, with an interval from −21.8 to +5.5, because ten cards is not many and they scattered widely: Winota, Joiner of Forces went from $2.45 to $1.40 on one printing while Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow went from $1.33 to $1.84 on another. Sway of the Stars fell from $7.09 to $4.23, but it had already lost about half its price in the weeks before, coming off the spike above. These numbers cannot tell you that removal lowers a price, and they cannot rule it out.

What we did not measure. The two cards removed in April 2025 and Farewell, the one card chosen in February 2026, are samples of two and one. Any percentage from them would be an anecdote wearing a table, so there is none here.

Would the same method find a gap on a quiet day?

It should not, so we checked by running it on the same cards at dates when nothing happened to the list.

The first-list result survives this reasonably well: its quiet-day gaps sit within about 4 points of zero, against 8.2% and 13.2% at the event, though one of them is itself distinguishable from zero. The April result is weaker than it looks. It has the same size and the same sign, but with 17 cards the method swung by about 11 points on a date with no list news at all. The most useful line is the last one. On the day the first list came out, the cards Wizards would add ten weeks later were not yet listed, and they stayed roughly level with their controls for the next 30 days, while the 39 listed cards ran ahead by 8.2%. Its interval is wide enough to include that 8.2%, so this supports the reading without settling it.

Four caveats before anyone trades on a label

First, this is association, on two dates, in one market. The whole pool of about 6,100 candidate controls rose a median 6.1% in the 30 days after February 11, 2025, and 10.0% in 90, so the level of any card’s rise says little. Only the gap carries information, and something other than the list could have favoured tutors and fast mana in spring 2025. Price data cannot say why a card was bought.

Second, the controls match on price and popularity, not on function. A listed tutor is compared with whatever unlisted cards sit at its price and rank, which need not be tutors. EDHREC rank is also today’s rank, not the rank in early 2025, since the index keeps only the current value.

Third, the April group was already moving. In the weeks before April 22, 2025 it rose 6.0% against 2.0% for controls. The median gap of 6.4% has an interval, −3.0 to +10.3, that includes zero, but it fits the possibility that Wizards added cards players were already chasing, making the list a marker rather than a cause. The first-list group shows no such run-up: its pre-announcement gap was −1.1%.

Fourth, the effect is not uniform. At 30 days the six Reserved List cards in the first group with controls were up 2.9% against 0.0%, and the 33 others 15.3% against 5.4%. Reprints do not explain the result either: leaving out cards that got a new printing during the window moves the 30- and 90-day gaps in both addition groups by at most 1.2 points.

That leaves three readings we cannot separate: attention, with an official list working as a checklist for anyone building above Bracket 3; selection, with Wizards naming cards already on the way up; or a tide in that part of the market with no link to the list at all. The data supports “listed cards did not fall.” It does not support “a listing makes a card rise.”

What to do with this

Use the list for what Wizards built it for: a quick signal about what kind of game a deck wants, and something to raise before the first turn. It is not a shopping list and not a price guide. Three slots can cost $3.69 or $8,950.26, and both decks pass the same count. To see the question against your own list, a Commander deck’s stats can show an estimated bracket built on signals that include Game Changers, which is a prompt for that conversation rather than a ruling on it.

See all 53 in the card search — The same Game Changer flag this piece was built on, in our own card search.

May your three slots be the cheap ones, and may the Workshop stay someone else’s problem.