The second-hand market for Trading Card Games (TCGs) has always been a fickle place.
You’d always have cards blazing a path through the market trends like Vanquish Soul Hollie Sue, due to the pivotal role they will play because of incoming additions to the Yu-Gi-Oh! card roster.
Then you have cards like Super Quantum Green Layer, which have not seen a reprint since 2016, that have surged in price without rhyme or reason.
A Sudden Uptick Below the Radar
A Super Rare from the Wing Raider set, Super Quantum Green Layer was sitting at a pretty modest $1.50 average last month. Over the past couple of weeks, copies have been steadily ticking upwards.
At the end of the first week of July, copies of this card were then being sold at a $2.74 average. This wasn’t bad, and a very healthy trend for such an innocuous card.
Over the last week, copies of this card have been selling for around $6 - $7, and you even have the odd buyer or two getting them at about $14.
The price spike appears to be due to the new cards in Duelist’s Advance. These new cards support the Super Quantum archetype, giving it increased consistency.
One of these cards, Super Quantum Black Layer, pairs up nicely with Green Layer.
The former can send the latter into the graveyard for quick access to Super Quantal Mech Beast Aeroboros, which is essentially a Book of Moon attached to a Super Quantal Mech Beast for your other lines of play.
On its own, Green Layer is a piece of board interaction that the opponent has to carefully weigh. If used as a board piece, that’s two bodies for the price of one.
If a handtrap staple Droll & Lock Bird comes out, you can use Yu-Gi-Oh’s bountiful ways of making graveyard play lines with Super Quantum Green Layer plus another card of choice (e.g. Fiendsmith engine); and you still get to draw a card out of it.
Despite being a relatively obscure archetype, the new support has breathed new life into these cards. With that, it appears the second-hand market is reflecting this change.
Some deck builders have also found synergy between the Super Quantum archetype and the new K9 archetype coming in Justice Hunters, thanks to Super Quantum Red Layer and its Rank 5 counterpart, Super Quantal Mech Beast Magnaliger.
The Payoff
With all these movements in the second-hand market, players who like to dabble in the waters of rogue decks might want to take advantage of the current market prices to grab a full playset of Super Quantum main deck monsters.
For such a rogue archetype, the Super Quantum cards hold probably one of the best extra deck monsters in the Yui-Gi-Oh! TCG, and it’s because of Super Quantal Mech King Great Magnus.
This behemoth of an XYZ monster has some of the best effects of the game, if you can get all of them to activate. It has:
- Non-targeted, non-destructive, and non-banishing board removal by spinning a card back into the deck,
- It can’t be affected by card effects except by ‘Super Quant’ cards, and;
- The opponent can’t add cards to their hand except by drawing them.
This first effect already bypasses a lot of general card protection and makes sure cards like Maliss don’t get to piggyback off banishment either.
The second effect may as well not even have an except clause, because how improbable it would be to run into a mirror match. That third effect shuts down about 95% of modern decks if they can’t dislodge Great Magnus.
Seeing as how Super Quantal Mech King Great Magnus has a whopping 3,600 attack strength, beating over this Super Sentai (Power Rangers for the west) inspired card is gonna be a tall order in of itself.