Countdown to Christmas 2019: Creatures

All entries into our Christmas contest have been submitted. Now it's time to take a look at the most popular cards on Cardmarket in 2019, starting with creatures. Recently, we saw oh so many Gilded Geese alongside Paradise Druids and Hydroid Krases, but those didn't top the charts …

#4 – Deputy of Detention

The deputy that got introduced in Ravnica Allegiance at the beginning of the year made big waves over the course of 2019—all while retaining a relatively small price tag. Not only did Deputy of Detention prove a flexible removal spell in Collected Company decks. Soon the Vedalken caught on as a weapon of choice in Modern's Humans deck.

As the year progressed, we witnessed the rise—and eventual fall—of Field of the Dead and Deputy helped decide many mirrors when it took out all of the opposing Zombies in one go. A deserving #4 on our list.

#3 – Dreadhorde Arcanist

Initially dismissed as another bulk-rare red creature, few saw the potential in Dreadhorde Arcanist. Recasting 1-mana spells is like drawing and casting an additional card. If you do so every turn, that's sure to take over the game quickly. First we saw this fellow included in Legacy—the place where 1-mana cantrips rule the day— but soon after, Modern players caught on with spells such as Faithless Looting, Thoughtseize, Fatal Push, and the likes. What's more, the Standard Feather, the Redeemed archetype made great use of the Arcanist as well.

Our Zombie Wizard never jumped to a high price though, a trend that we will see repeated across all of our best-selling cards of the year. The other powerful cards in War of the Spark pushed supply to fairly high levels, and this is one of the reasons why the Arcanist got traded so often. When demand is high and supply is too—and thus the price is low—plenty of purchases will happen.

#2 – Persistent Petitioners

Well, well, well … If this isn't Rat Colony all over again. As with any of the cards that let you play more than four of them, Persistent Petitioners broke the parameters of our marketplace. Usually, if a single person wants to play a deck including card X, they will buy at most four copies of that card. With Persistent Petitioners, if someone wants to build that deck, they'll buy up to 40! That's ten times as many as any other card. This makes for an absurd demand—once again paired with a very high supply—and an impressive number two spot on our list.

But which card had the power to outperform even the mighty petitioners? Let's find out!

The #1 Creature Is …

Click here!

Our most sold creature of the year is a 1/1 flying creature for 1 mana. Basically Flying Men.

Well, that's not all it has going for it. It also turns into a 5/5 monstrosity at a cost as low as a single blue mana later in the game. Pteramander experienced a lot of hype early on, with players either calling it the next Delver or absolute trash. What ended up happening was something in between: it did see play in some Legacy Delver variants, but only in the especially aggressive versions, and it did not end up as the new premier threat to beat down with.

In Standard however, the Salamander Drake delivered the beats: coupled with Curious Obsession, Monoblue took down Mythic Championship I. This is what drove the demand early on. Together with Modern and Legacy players trying to use the newest efficient flier, it was enough to overcome even the most persistent of all petitioners.

This was the first category for our Christmas countdown. How did you do? How many of your guesses for this category were correct? Let us know in the comments and don't forget to check back tomorrow for our most traded planeswalkers of 2019.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily Cardmarket.