Highlights
- Strip Mine and Triskelion offer powerful gameplay options, while Mishra’s Factory offers a unique seasonal map experience.
- The rarity is reflected in the price: Tawnos’ Coffin and Argivian Archaeologist achieve higher values due to their usefulness in the game.
- Candelabra of Tawnos and Mishra’s Workshop stand out as high-quality cards and offer players strong mana generation capabilities for artifacts.
Back when Magic: The Gathering was still young, Wizards of the Coast produced the first of several artifact-based sets and introduced us to the War of the Brothers, a planetary and eventually planar conflict between Mishra and Urza. This brought powerful artifacts to Magic and even more powerful cards to use those artifacts for good or evil.
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This set is now over thirty years old, having been released on March 4, 1994. With sets this old, you know there are going to be some valuable cards to collect. If you’re looking through your old cards and want to know how valuable some of them might be, stay tuned to see what Antiquities has to offer.
These prices are all based on TCGplayer’s market value and are subject to change.
10 Opencast mine (tower)
Unusual – $34.32
Strip Mine is a fairly straightforward land designed as a countermeasure against a particular land that proved to be a bit too powerful in Magic. This land has only one ability besides producing mana: you can tap it and sacrifice it to destroy any target land.
Strip Mine was originally designed to thwart strategies based on the exceptionally powerful Library of Alexandria. Each of the four designs on this card are by Daniel Gelon, with the version with a tower in the illustration being the most valuable of these.
9 Tawnos’ Coffin
Rare – $88.00
Tawnos’ Coffin is a pretty complicated card, but it’s a perfect way to protect a creature under your control while ensuring your Auras stick to it. You can pay three mana and tap Tawnos’ Coffin to banish a creature and all Auras attached to it.
When Tawnos’ Coffin is untapped or would leave the battlefield, the exiled creature returns with everything attached to it. One of the more interesting aspects of this artifact is that the counters remain on the card, which is something that normally goes away when a card changes zones.
8 Triskele
Rare – $92.62
This silly metal behemoth is a classic Magic: The Gathering card that has sparked all sorts of combos and nostalgia among players. Triskelion costs a whopping six mana for a 1/1 creature, but it also gets three +1/+1 counters.
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You can remove one of these counters to deal one damage to any target. With the numerous ways to add +1/+1 counters to Treskelion, you can easily keep the pain going indefinitely until your opponent is out of the game.
7 Mishra’s Factory (Summer)
Rare – $79.08
Antiquities did something different with this release: several Magic cards had different illustrations, sometimes showing a change of seasons, while other designs could show a structure from different perspectives.
Mishra’s Factory features the same building built into a giant tree, lasting through different seasons. This card is for the summer version of the card, with the dense green of the canopy filling almost the entire card. Mishra’s Factory is also one of the first manlands in Magic, turning into a 2/2 Assembler creature for just one mana.
6 Argive archaeologist
Rare – $79.99
As a powerful artifact recursion card, especially in a set full of artifacts, Argivian Archaeologist is a great way to keep your best artifacts in play, or at least in your hand, without requiring a huge commitment.
For two mana, you can tap Archaeologist to return an artifact from the graveyard to your hand. Argivian Archaeologist was the first Archaeologist creature type to enter the battlefield, but in later updates its creature type became Artificer.
5 Power Artifact
Unusual – $152.43
An intriguing enchantment, Power Artifact reduces the cost to activate this artifact’s activated abilities by two generic mana. You can’t reduce the cost of something to zero, so you’ll probably always pay at least one mana.
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Power Artifact can be used as a cost-effective way to swap out equipment cheaply or to turn Basalt Monolith into an infinite two-card combo. There are many ways to turn Basalt Monolith into infinite mana, but Power Artifact is one of the easiest.
4 Mishra’s Factory (Winter)
Unusual – $199.79
A beautiful depiction of Mishra’s factory. In this wintery version, the huge tree that has been converted into a factory is covered in snow, while all the leaves have fallen off and only the moon is visible in the night sky.
A nice little addition by illustrators Kaja and Phil Foglio are the many lights that decorate the houses, factories and trees in Misrha’s factory. There is even a giant red and green star above one of the buildings, symbolizing that it is time to celebrate family and togetherness.
3 Transmute artifact
Unusual – $351.48
We had a Power Artifact, so now it’s time for a Transmuted Artifact. This blue spell lets you sacrifice an artifact to search your library for an artifact card and put it onto the battlefield. If the new artifact’s mana value is equal or lower, you don’t have to do anything. If it’s higher, you have to pay the difference.
Transmute Artifact lets you effectively trade any artifact (even a token) for virtually anything else in your deck, making it a coveted card for any artifact deck looking to splurge.
2 Candelabra of Tawnos
Rare – $574.01
Candelabra of Tawnos is a dangerously powerful card, an infinite mana-generating machine capable of producing absurd amounts of mana as soon as it enters the battlefield. For a measly bit of mana, you can play the Candelabra.
As long as you have a land that produces more than one mana at a time, you can instantly generate infinite mana, but you’ll need something to put it into, like a Fireball. Candelabra quickly became part of early competitive decks because of its easy combo.
1 Mishra’s workshop
Rare – $1,650.00
Speaking of bonus mana, Mishra’s Workshop is the first card in Magic to restrict the use of the mana it generates. You can tap Mishra’s Workshop to add three generic mana to your mana pool, but you can only use that mana on artifact spells.
This isn’t too much of a problem though, as there are plenty of artifact spells you’d like to cast a few turns earlier. The workshop is so good that it’s banned in Legacy and will probably never be repealed, but that doesn’t hurt the price.
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