Are We Buying The ‘Our Boss Is On Vacation’ Superdrop?

March 22, 2025 Cliff Daigle Leave a comment

We’ve gone from this being a Spongebob-only drop to a whole six-pack of extra drops coming along for the ride. Some of these are glorious, others thoroughly mid, and we need to look at the use cases and competition for these cards.

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Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

Casual Fridays

Who Lives In A Pineapple Under The Sea?

March 14, 2025 Cliff Daigle Leave a comment

The SpongBob SquarePants Secret Lair is upon us, faster than anyone was anticipating. It goes on sale March 24 at 9 am PST, 12pm EST, or 4 pm Greenwich Mean Time, if that’s your zone. Three drops, and the bonus cards are as yet unknown., but the speculation is rampant and hilarious.

This is a big deal. SpongeBob has more than 300 episodes, has been on since 2010, and that’s not taking into account movies, specials, and the incredible amount of merchandise available under this brand.

So let’s dive to the deck, flop like a fish, and decide if we’re buying.

I want to start with an overview of the specific cards. Sometimes, the cards don’t matter at all, but it’s easier when the cards are at least good. (See: Miku’s first drop, Sakura Superstar) For each drop, I want to list the EDHREC numbers, the number and type of special printings, and the current price of the foil specials (if any). Those are the comparisons most helpful for something like this, although the IP goes a long way. It’s also notable that these three drops are $30 nonfoil and $40 foil, where others have been $40/$50.

SpongeBob SquarePants: Legends of Bikini Bottom

SpongeBob SquarePants as Jodah the Unifier

EDHREC: 18k as commander (#19 last two years), 16k decks

Special Printings: Showcase foil ($4) and Showcase Textured foil ($10)

This is glorious in so many ways. Spongebob is a friendly dude, happy-go-lucky, and loves to gather his friends together. Jodah does exactly that! The Showcase version is interesting, with the stained glass look of the card, but this rainbow, big eyed, giant smile is pretty hilarious when compared with the wrecking ball that Jodah represents on the board. Win.

Patrick Star as Barktooth Warbeard

EDHREC: <500 total

Special Printings: none, only reprint since Legends

This having the ‘I nailed a board to my head somehow’ meme as the art is a great choice. Are there starfish in Magic that have more abilities? Absolutely. But Patrick is dependable, he is what he is and he’s not super complex. Having the flavor text as “I don’t get it” is extra trolly and I am here for it.

Gary, the Snail as Toxrill, the Corrosive

EDHREC: 6k as commander, 38k decks

Special Printings: Silver Screen foil ($70), Showcase foil ($20)

Toxrill is a powerhouse of a commander, and while the Gary art is very nonthreatening, the irony is hilarious. The Showcase and DBF foils are good, but they won’t stand out in the same way this will, and I expect this to fit between the current special version prices.

Sandy Cheeks, Martial Astronaut as Toski, Bearer of Secrets

EDHREC: 2k as commander, 178k decks

Special Printings: Showcase foil ($6), SPG foil ($25)

By far the most popular card in this drop, I am expecting big things from Sandy. The SPG version is good, but they took a great character and put her in a great pose and I want this version in all my decks. Toski and Sandy just fit well, and she wants to be in the action, doing things, kicking butt and taking names!

Squidward, Sarcastic Snob as Grazilaxx, Illithid Scholar

EDHREC: 500 as commander, 57k decks

Special Printings: FEA ($1.50), Ampersand ($10)

Squidward is a semi-popular card to include in decks that want to bounce things in and out of play. Ninjas see a lot of value here, as does most flavors of blink decks. There were other choices here for the card but the annoying factor is perfect flavor.

Mr. Krabs, Penny Pincher as Charix, the Raging Isle

EDHREC: 2500 as commander, 26k decks

Special Printings: FEA ($2)

Not a lot of iconic crabs in Magic, but I am glad they skipped making this a Ruin/Hedron mill crab. Only really good in heavy blue decks, but this does see play in toughness matters, either for milling or for toughness-as-power reasons.

Plankton, Tiny Tyrant as Skrelv, Defector Mite

EDHREC: 1500 as commander, 86k decks

Special Printings: Showcase ($3) and Step-and-Compleat ($8)

This is the most tournament-played card in the drop, and might help the nonfoil version of the drop sell better/hold a price better. It’s also worthy for any Commander deck that needs to keep the commander safe.

SpongeBob SquarePants: Internet Sensation

Counterspell

EDHREC: 1.14 million decks

Special Printings: Several, with a very wide range of prices.

SpongeBob’s face doing this, put onto Counterspell, might be the most iconic combination of art, intent, and card use possible. I can see this as Rhystic Study “DiD yOu PaY tHe OnE” sort of thing but this is glorious in every way possible. Is there a non-Vintage Cube that wouldn’t love to have this art?

Daze

EDHREC: 20k decks

Special Printings: Invocation ($200)

I thought there had been something else over the years, a SPG or anything, but no, this is the only other special printing of Daze and that alone might be worth the price of admission. Even better is that you’ll get a certain number of Legacy players who need not just one copy, but four matching ones.

Inevitable Betrayal

EDHREC: 36k decks

Special Printings: MH2 Retro and FEA (Both $1)

I had straight-up forgotten that this card exists, but the art makes me want to play it in every blue deck! Sure, Bribery is better, but it doesn’t make the whole table nervous for a couple turn cycles. Again, iconic combination of art and card, someone at WotC deserves a bonus for this.

Force of Despair

EDHREC: 31k

Special Printings: Secret Lair Prize ($15 foil)

There are a lot of Magic cards that refer to sadness, depression, and feelings of being alone, and Force of Despair is a worthy inclusion. Sacrificing, and especially taking fun away from others, is a great way to use this art.

Night’s Whisper

EDHREC: 245k decks

Special Printings: Retro Foil WPN ($1), Dracula SL ($7 foil)

Creepy, accurate, and hilarious. Everything you want a SL to be. This should easily become the most expensive version, and I hope I have the chance to buy in cheap.

SpongeBob SquarePants: Lands Under the Sea

No point listing all the sweet cards here. Great choices from the show, and Gary features in all of them as a happy little snail taking a tour. This will be more popular than you think.

There’s a lot of discussion on how the bonus card is very likely to be SpongeBob’s house as Command Tower, and there’s a lot of folks who would love for that to be true. Including me.

Overview

One of the things I’m expecting here is a massive print run for this set. We know that the Miku lairs were cranked up between the first and the last in terms of print run, and despite all the tech glitches and problems, the Marvel Lair took several hours to sell out. I don’t think this will sell out in less than a few hours, but the supply will be pretty significant at the outset.

SpongeBob collectibles aren’t a huge market the way they are for Hatsune Miku, but the nostalgia/gifts for kids factor is through the roof here. People will want this just for a physical copy of the memes.

Additionally, I expect the lands to sell out first. It’s reasonable to assume that they printed less of the lands, since lands are usually the worst-selling part of a Lair. From a psychology perspective, it also gooses interest to have something sell out early, and push hype towards getting the rest of it sold. I imagine there will be some minor bundle discount, and I will be maxing out the bundles as best I can.

If I were ranking these, it would go memes-legends-lands, but I’m a big believer in this drop and I will be investing in both foils and nonfoils. A full set of both would be about $210, and based on past pricing, the bundle price will be something like $180. That price point is just under 15% off and I plan to max out there, getting additional single foil drops as well.

I think this drop has all the hallmarks of a success, and the only question for me is how many hours it will take to sell out. I plan on buying a lot, and I would encourage you to do the same.

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Preparing for Rotation in Fall 2025

March 7, 2025 Cliff Daigle Leave a comment

With everything going on, with all the different previews happening, it’s really easy to lose track of the calendar. One of the things happening this year is that when Edge of Eternities comes out in August, Standard is rotating, and we’re losing several sets: Dominaria United, The Brothers’ War, Phyrexia: All Will Be One, and March of the Machine. Plus Aftermath, too, but that set barely counts most days.

Standard rotation is a tricky thing, as most card prices are driven by Eternal formats, like Modern or Commander, but there’s still quite a few cards whose prices are propped up by Standard and now is the time you want to sell off everything you aren’t using, before the big dumping starts in June or so. Let’s talk about the cards to sell, and the ones to keep.

Let’s take a moment and examine the phenomenon historically, so you can be sure that this is the right play, selling five months early. I’ll use a couple of examples from last year’s rotation, which was SNC, NEO, MID, and VOW. Let’s start with the graph for Ledger Shredder:

Shredder was everywhere, and while it’s still seeing play in Arclight Phoenix builds for both Modern and Pioneer, that’s not enough to sustain the price with so many copies. The price has dropped by half, and that means you could have sold out, waited, and re-bought the cards after rotation. You’d have the same cards plus $24 on a playset!

The Wandering Emperor makes for another good example:

In March of last year, it was selling briskly at $30 a copy, but that’s when the slide started. In August, when it rotated, it was down to $10 and now it’s $5. That’s a lot of value you’re leaving behind if you move too late, and that’s what I want to help you avoid. Even cards that are popular in other formats take a hit too. Boseiju, Who Endures, since it’s used very widely in Modern and Commander, had its price go from $40 down to $30 at rotation, and hit a low of $25 in December, but it’s crept back up to $30 since.

I have two metrics in mind here, the combination of ‘lots of current Standard play’ and ‘over $5 in price. Under that price, there isn’t a lot to be gained, because after rotation, it’ll still be close to that price, though maybe $2.50 instead of $4. Cards which aren’t in favor in Standard currently have already taken a big hit price-wise, and so while I’ll be mentioning several cards which are still expensive enough to warrant selling, we really want to focus on the cards we can make the most from.

Additionally, I’m focused on the basic nonfoils, because premium versions are more insulated from rotation. Those copies are in Commander decks, or foiled-out Modern ones, and therefore aren’t getting taken out of decks and resold. The Standard players, though, they got the most basic ones and they are gonna resell them.

Dominaria United

Sheoldred, the Apocalypse – Currently just over $70 for a nonfoil, basic frame version, this is the flagship card for what I want you to do. There are already 450 copies on TCGPlayer, and that’s before people start listing theirs. Yes, this is a great card for and against Ketramose, but there are a boatload of Standard decks playing with 2-4 copies of the Praetor and we can expect her price to drop by at least half. I think that between Commander (where this card is brutally good) and the occasional Modern deck it won’t go much below $35, but I would definitely not be holding any basic copies longer than I needed to.

Zur, Eternal Schemer – Zur is big big big in the Domain and Overlord type builds that make up a large section of the current metagame. Currently at $14, he’s headed for being sub-$5, since Commander is the only spot where he sees notable amounts of use. Modern and Pioneer just aren’t his territory, except for the loyal few who play Enigmatic Incarnation in Pioneer.

Liliana of the Veil – Easy to forget she’s Standard-legal again, but she’s already at $12 from the times she’s been reprinted. I’m expecting her copies to slide under $10, but probably not as far as $5.

Temporary Lockdown – It’s just over $5 now, but it’ll end up being a dollar. This card has seen some wild fluctuations in its time, and if you’ve got spares, let them go now.

The Brothers’ War

Amazingly, from this set, there’s nothing that fits my criteria. Stuff is either already very cheap or it’s a card popular in other formats like Commander or Modern.

Phyrexia: All WIll Be One

Atraxa, Grand Unifier – At $18, you might be thinking she gets enough Modern and Legacy and Commander love to keep that price. You’d be wrong. By the end of August, she’ll be under $10, but the premium copies in those reanimator decks will all be sitting pretty. There’s just going to be too many sellers and not enough buyers.

Jace, the Perfected Mind – This is an interesting case, because the Phyrexian copies are cheaper than the regular copies. He can be had for $6 right now, and that’s going to be more like $3 in six months. Get what you can, while you can. He’s being used as a finisher for Standard control decks, and that’s it. Please don’t hang on too long.

March of the Machine (and Aftermath)

Faerie Mastermind – While this is a great card in Commander, present in 150k decks, we’re up against the numbers problem. Everyone who’s on Dimir Bounce as a deck has four of these, and that’s a whole lot of copies that will end up on the market in the next few months. A slide is inevitable, a reprint is also quite likely. We know there’s a return to Lorwyn coming, and Faeries are indeed a thing on that plane. Seeing the $16 copies slide down to $6 seems very, very likely. This might well bounce back, especially if there’s new Faeries and this avoid a Commander precon reprint, but the slide is our immediate concern.

Sunfall – There’s only 35k decks that have this registered on EDHREC, which feels low for what this does. Its biggest issue is that Farewell is now the default board wipe, and everything else lives in its shadow. Sunfall is just over $5 now, and that’s with Standard demand propping it up. At rotation, it might well be $2 or less.

Tranquil Frillback – Another $6 card, the set it was in represents its greatest strength. Aftermath was one of the least-opened products of Magic’s history, and a model that Wizards has said they want to steer away from. Rotation will steal a couple dollars from this, but there’s a minimum level of interest from Commander players and Dinosaur enthusiasts that I might get some cheap.

I hope this helps you plan your selling for the coming months!

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What Miku and Marvel Mean for Final Fantasy and Spider-Man

February 28, 2025 Cliff Daigle Leave a comment

There’s a whole lot going on in the Magic world. We’ve got Final Fantasy previews, we know there’s an Avatar:The Last Airbender Secret Lair in November, and there’s a whole lot of Spider-Man product on the horizon for this summer. That’s before you get to all the fun of Aetherdrift being live and Tarkir: Dragonstorm on deck for April.

With all that in mind, though, I want to take a beat and think about what’s happening with some recent Secret Lairs, because there’s an emerging pattern that has me wondering if I should re-examine the buying I’ve been doing, and will be doing. So let’s look at some of the biggest recent sales and see what changes Wizards has made.

It would be lovely if we knew precisely how many of each Secret Lair drop were sold. With that data, we’d know how rare each of them were compared to each other, and be able to figure out likely pricing on those sets after they sell out. However, we don’t have access to that data, more’s the pity.

What we do have is a case study in Wizards adjusting to meet market demands, and that’s via the four Hatsune Miku drops. In May of 2024, the first drop happened, the Sakura Superstar. That drop, featuring six cards that are quite mid except for the Azusa, Lost but Seeking, sold out in something like three hours. The drop was goosed by the presence of a sweet Rainbow Foil Seedborn Muse, giving you a great bonus card for every $200 spent. Miku was the big draw, though, and the fast sellout was accompanied by high prices. That rapid sellout started the price increasing on the sealed boxes, putting them up over $150 now.

The second one, Digital Sensation, is a much more popular set of individual cards, as I went over back then, with more than one getting their first special printing. Since that was just about a month later in late June, it’s unlikely that Wizards was able to order a greater quantity of the lairs and this one sold out in around two hours. Makes a lot of sense, really. The hype was wild, the first set of Lairs were already selling for double, and everyone wanted their copies.

Where the change can really be seen is in the third drop, Electric Entourage. This was in late September, which is enough time for Wizards to have made changes based on the first drop. The result was that the drop took a lot longer to sell out, with the ENG foil going first, the ENG nonfoil second, and eventually, the JPN nonfoil sold out. There are still JPN foil copies to be found on the Secret Lair website, though it’s got the low stock alert. The additional issues here is that these are all planeswalkers, and only two of them feature Miku herself.

That pattern, of ENG foil-ENG nonfoil-JPN foil-JPN nonfoil, that’s the same order of how expensive the sealed ones are on TCGPlayer.

The most recent and the final drop, Winter Diva, has been up for seventeen days and only the ENG nonfoil has sold out. There’s low stock alerts, but the lack of speed or urgency here is impressive. I fully expect that there’s a lot more copies of this drop than the first, though the exact amount greater is pure speculation. The card selection here is top-notch, as I said, and I have confidence in this lair in the long term. However, I have to revise the timeline of when they’d get profitable, because the drops are already landing and the glut is real. In a few months, we might see these settle out some, but given the hype cycle coming this summer, I’m not sure when it’ll get back.

We have another recent example of the surge of interest: The Marvel X Secret Lair collaboration in late October sold out in five hours or so, with the bonus Signets selling out just before all the Lairs went out too. The process of buying appeared to have lots of technical glitches and bypasses which seemed to have been fixed now but between the Final Fantasy drops and the Spider-Man drops that are inevitably coming, this first Marvel drop is a signpost.

So the saga of the Miku drops directly informs my expectations for the Marvel and Final Fantasy drops. However much got sold in October, Wizards took that data and talked to their printer, very likely increasing the quantity being printed by a significant amount. I don’t think we’ll get to ‘not sold out seventeen days later’ level of quantity, but we should expect that it’s probably not going to sell out in five hours, more like twelve hours or maybe a whole day.

It feels sacreligious to type those words out, that a Secret Lair drop with this sort of IP (dare I hope for some 8-bit Final Fantasy 4 or 6, or polygon-blocky FF7!) would not sell out near-immediately, but Wizards has the data. They know how fast things sold out, and importantly, they want to maximize their profits. They don’t make anything from the secondary market, so their goal is to find the number of lairs where everyone gets all they want. That number was too low for the first Marvel drop, and I expect they’ve learned and adjusted.

I will 100% still be trying to buy as quickly as possible when those are available, but the evidence points me towards thinking that I don’t need to panic. I was feeling that way with Marvel’s first round, but I will be a bit less anxious this summer. They want to sell all the Lairs, to make every dime they can, so I’m expecting a lot more product. That doesn’t mean it won’t sell out, either.

We’ll also have to see what the greater print run means for singles. Marvel had a lot of great things, and some great buying opportunities. For example, Rhythm of the Wild, the Wolverine version, is up a dollar since I picked it in late December. Most of the great singles have started to rise up from their lows, and if you didn’t get something, now is the time.

If the print run is maximized, we’ll see some much lower prices when most of the cards land, and a slower growth in price. Everything depends on the mentality, though, and if the perception is of rarity, it’ll be priced that way.

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