Last updated on August 29, 2025
Winged Hive Tyrant | by Antonio José Manzanedo
Turns out not only Edge of Eternities spacecraft are going through the sky in the Magic card market. This week, a card from another space-faring MTG set – although in this case an Universes Beyond crossover – is going up like crazy, and has roughly quintupled in price since a month ago.
And it even has wings, which makes all the more sense for why it’s flying!
Printed three years ago as part of the Warhammer 40K crossover, Winged Hive Tyrant has been a casual-playable Izzet card for years, but nothing out of the ordinary. But now a new, extremely famous Jeskai Commander is pushing Winged Hive Tyrant‘s price way up.
Tyranids Are Coming!
Marneus Calgar | Illustration by Slawomir Maniak
With a single printing in the Warhammer 40K Universes Beyond crossover, Winged Hive Tyrant gives creatures with counters on them flying and haste. It started slowly moving up in late July, picked up the pace by mid-August, and has kept rising by about 67% since last week, for a huge 400% increase in the last 30 days: You would have paid about $1 a month ago, and now near-mint copies are being listed at close to $5 in US markets:
Source: MTGStocks
Demand has been steady all through the month, and while there are still many available copies (about 130 at the time of writing), that’s a bit of a low inventory when considering that’s just about two weeks’ worth of demand:
Source: TCGplayer – Winged Hive Tyrant (40K), near mint
Gotta Go Fast
Winged Hive Tyrant sees nearly no competitive play, neither in cEDH nor in 60-card formats, but it’s quite popular in casual Commander, above all with two other Warhammer 40K commanders.
Magus Lucea Kane – itself one of the top #100 most popular commanders overall in the last couple of years – plays a copy of Winged Hive Tyrant in more than two thirds of its decks, and the tyranid is a near auto-include with The Swarmlord in the command zone.
Looking at the price curve, you’d be tempted to think the current price spike may be related to another space-faring set, Edge of Eternities… but as it turns out, the most likely culprit is another extremely famous Universes Beyond character involving Izzet colors.
No, not Vivi Ornitier! It’s true that, whenever he’s not terrorizing the Standard format, the Final Fantasy wizard is pushing prices of other Magic cards sky-high, and the +1/+1 counters synergy with Winged Hive Tyrant does seem enticing, but Vivi’s mostly innocent in this case.
The Tyrant’s spike seems to be related to a much more famous UB character: Sonic the Hedgehog.
Sonic and his friends dropped into Magic on July 14th as part of a Secret Lair, and that’s when Winged Hive Tyrant started moving up. And by now, close to a third of all Sonic the Hedgehog decks pack a copy of the tyranid, reinforcing the “Gotta Go Fast” synergy between +1/+1 counters and haste: Sonic hands out +1/+1 counters to hasty/flash creatures; Hive Tyrant in turn gives flying + haste to any of your creatures with counters, closing the loop for aggressive counter decks.
Could Winged Hive Tyrant Be Reprinted?
There’s another subtle factor that explains price spikes for UB cards. If a UB card is generic enough to exist in a Magic plane with just a name change, then it’s easy to reprint – but if its creature type is tied to a specific IP, it’s very unlikely WotC can reprint it.
Take for example Company Commander, Exalted Flamer of Tzeentch, and Winged Hive Tyrant.
Magic’s Head Designer Mark Rosewater has been very clear what WotC can easily reprint: “If a Warhammer 40,000 card has a name we could use in a normal Magic set”, Mark wrote in his blog back when WH40K was released, “it could get new art, set in the Magic multiverse, and be reprinted as is.” In other words, when a UB card’s name isn’t IP-locked, they can reprint it “as is” with Magic-world art. Company Commander, for example, has a very generic name that could exist in a ton of different settings, and creates soldier tokens, which is commonplace in MTG, so it just needs new art to be reprinted somewhere.
Exalted Flame of Tzeentch
Exalted Flamer of Tzeentch is a bit different in that the name is very clearly tied to the WH40K IP – but it’s a demon, so with a different name it could exist as an in-universe card, much like Godzilla, Primeval Champion and Titanoth Rex are, for deckbuilding and gameplay purposes, exactly the same card.
But Winged Hive Tyrant has a creature type tied to a specific IP. IP-specific creature types (like “Tyranid” from 40k or “Time Lord” from Doctor Who) present a unique challenge: Those terms are often trademarked or too setting-specific to appear in regular Magic sets. According to Mark Rosewater, they could still reprint it but using a different (and unique) creature type… but it would be a bit of a headache with general typal cards, like Vanquisher’s Banner, if you had two different creature types that were meant to be mechanically equivalent.
Which, in short, makes it very unlikely that WotC will go through the pain of reprinting cards like Winged Hive Tyrant, which in turn could put this subset of UB cards in a “UB Reserved List” of sorts, and protected from reprinting.
What’ll Happen With Winged Hive Tyrant’s Price?
Sonic the Hedgehog
As always, this is not investment advice (always be sure to double-check all the facts, folks!). Regardless, Winged Hive Tyrant‘s increased demand looks organic, and clearly tied to Sonic the Hedgehog, who’s looking like a very solid Jeskai commander, one that’s only been around for a month. And Winged Hive Tyrant was already a very playable card in casual Commander, often seen with one of the top #100 most popular commanders in the game.
On top of that, it has a “hard-to-reprint” creature type, since tyranids are tied to Warhammer 40K – as far as we know, WotC could still jump through a bunch of hoops and have it reprinted if they ever wanted to, but it seems unlikely they’ll want to go through so much hassle.
At any rate, the Sonic syergy seems real: Price’s gotta go (up) fast!
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