Every so often, Wizards of the Coast has something happen and some or all of an upcoming set gets leaked/spoiled/revealed.

Sometimes these are technical glitches, like the Dominaria leaks from yesterday. One Chinese website accidentally put up the release FAQ, then the world had it, and Wizards decided to make the document official.

Sometimes this is pure humans being greedy, as has happened where a worker at the printing plant removed a sheet of mythics and rares, then posted pictures.

Sometimes this is a combination of both, as when the MTGO Beta team got all of Judgment a few weeks early.

Spoilers will be discussed after you’ve logged in and scrolled down. I’m going to trust that you know what to do about reprints, and instead I want to look at one mechanic and see what we can see.

Also, because I don’t want the leaks to rain on my parade, there’s a couple of Masters 25 prices that we REALLY need to talk about.

My favorite story about leaks involves the Godbook from New Phyrexia. Guillaume Matignon, a writer for an honest-to-God paper French magazine about Magic (called Lotus Noir, and is only coming out a few times a year) had a PDF file with the complete visual spoiler of New Phyrexia a month before the set went into previews. It’s called a Godbook, and in an era (2011) when magazines needed that much lead time, it made sense.

It’s bad enough that a pro-level player had early info, but he shared it with a couple of other high-level players for testing purposes, and one of them inexplicably went into an open IRC room and bragged about it. I’ll let Caleb Durward tell the tale, but you should read it just for the pure idiocy.

We’ve had cards from the next expansion show up in the current prerelease, but with the rapid-fire pace of sets coming out, one leak inevitably will overshadow the newest set.

It’s a real pain, because we ought to be focused on Masters 25, but here we are, figuring out how to take counters off so that our Saga enchantments can keep doing good things.

The Saga cards tick up a couple of times and then get sacrificed. You put a lore counter on, then it has an effect, and at the third counter, you get a bigger effect and are forced to bin the enchantment.

We will likely not be able to break this effect in Standard, but in Commander, all things are possible. I used to play around a lot with Decree of Silence, a card that also cared about counters, and there’s a few cards that can favorably interact here.

Power Conduit (50 cents nonfoil/$2.50 foil) – I think this is the easiest card to use with the Saga enchantments, because it’s colorless and an artifact. If your playgroup allows for Giant Fan, By Gnome Means, or Hungry Hungry Heifer, great, but if you want to keep the Saga at one level turn after turn, this is your winner.

Chisei, Heart of Oceans (30 cents/$1.00 foil) – This will also get the job done for no cost, but as a creature, and a colored one, it’s going to be more difficult to utilize.

Hex Parasite ($1/$4) – This is the only way to get ahead on the counters. You can reset the Saga to zero if you wished, and do so for more than one enchantment. The downside is, you have to be able to play black cards. That’s restrictive, on top of this being easy to kill in so many ways. Ferropede needing to attack makes it pretty weak too.

As for Masters 25, and the events going on, starting next week, I have to side with the many folks who are leery of this at $10 a pack. There are reports that stores did not get their full amount, so Wizards either can’t meet the demand of hungry fans or they are artificially trying to create scarcity. I’m not sure which is worse, frankly.

Boxes are still selling in the $170 range on eBay, and that’s dangerously close to what your LGS is paying (likely in the $120 range) and to be honest, the boxes look like a Jace hunt to me. It’ll bum me out if it’s a fun limited set, because I don’t want to pay $35 to draft a set that doesn’t have a lot of payback.

There’s a couple of cards I want to discuss, on top of Blood Moon as I mentioned last week.

Thalia, Guardian of Thraben ($13 now, $17 original/$40 pack foil) – She’s likely to take a hit, and a significant one. Her price is a great confluence of strong demand and low supply, and the jump to $17 was from being a four-of in the Humans decks running rampant in Modern lately. While the new version will go under $10, it won’t go lower than $8. I’ll be watching to see how much product gets opened, because I think a buy-in at something like $25/playset on eBay is a great entry. She will rebound in time, count on it.

Eidolon of the Great Revel ($5, $10/$30) – Just ouch. This is going to be brutal if you still have excess copies around. Journey into Nyx wasn’t opened much at all, relatively speaking, and even though this is a four-of in both Modern and Legacy Burn, that’s the only place you find demand. The price of Eidolon was a financial barrier to burn, depending on if you wanted to play shocks/fetches/duals. This will help that deck stay a budget option.

Ensnaring Bridge ($34, other printings from $40 to $130) – The Invention printing means that this card will have a price ceiling, but this is a four-of in more than Lantern Control.

It’s also a mythic in this set, so we are going to see a small drop, and then prices will start to climb back up. This version will be $50 by Christmas, so if you want your copies, get them now.

Cliff is an avid Cuber and Commander player, and has a deep love for weird ways to play this amazing game, as well as being guest host on MTGFF when needed. His current project is a light-up sign for attracting Cubers at GPs, so get his attention @wordofcommander on Twitter if you’ve got ideas or designs.

Here’s the scenario:

You hear about a run of boxes where every 8th pack, there’s a $50 mythic. You travel to where those boxes have been sent, and you head to the counter, and start counting. Every time someone buys packs, you keep track, you monitor when the money shows up and now you count packs, buying a pack after seven others have been purchased.

You’ll make a lot of money that way but every other person is gonna be pissed. That’s called a fixed-ratio schedule. Every X trials, a desired outcome happens.

Humans figure that out really quickly, and it’s not a formula for success. What we would get is the box mapping scenario, or the peeking at packs: Some people figure out where the money is and then sell the loose boosters at slightly less. In the case of Masters 25, if you opened six good rares/mythics and were about even on value, you could put the rest of the loose packs on eBay or Amazon for $5 or $7 each and clean up.

Gambling (and I’m including opening Magic: the Gathering packs here) works on a variable-ratio schedule. With every trial, there’s a chance of the desired outcome. Because it’s random, you might get two really good packs in a row, you might have 30 bad packs in a row.

Weirdly, the longer the run of negative outcomes, the more likely humans are to keep trying. WE ARE DUE. This works on video games, slot machines, booster packs, etc.

I bring this up because Masters 25 is shaping up to be a really frustrating set to open.
It’s a truism that you should never buy loose boosters. Box mapping, peeking, weighing, there’s a lot of margins that people can exploit. Don’t do it for those reasons, but also don’t do it because it’s just bad value.

For instance, Rest in Peace was just previewed for the set yesterday. Right now, it’s a $10 card. At MSRP, you need to hit that card to break even. You have about a 1 in 3 chance (at current prices/spoilers) to open a pack with a card that has retail value of $10 or more. That’s better than a lot of other sets. Some data:

These are only the cards that retail for the cost of the pack, so if we are talking about Eternal Masters, something worth exactly $10 (Maze of Ith) is as much as a win something going for $140 (Jace, the Mind Sculptor) and that brings us to how many we need to open.

You’ll have to open about five packs to get one worth $10, on average. You’ll spend $50 to hit one $10 card. At that rate, your numbers get much much worse. There’s only three cards in EMA worth $50, and that rate is so much worse.

Is there the potential for a three-Jace box? Absolutely. You might hit a Jace and a foil Force of Will, and you’ll feel like you hit the lottery, and it’s a great great feeling.

You’ll also open boxes with Balance, Worldgorger Dragon, and Sphinx of the Steel Wind, and which have foils of Nevinyrral’s Disk, Eight-and-a-half Tails, and Malicious Affliction.

That level of variance is a bad investment. It’s bad value. It’s not worth it, and Masters 25 is going to be worse, it seems. You will hear about amazing boxes, but people won’t be trumpeting their godawful mythic pulls the same way.

If there’s cards you want from Masters 25, just go buy them, about three weeks after the release. We haven’t seen the whole spoiler yet, but the early signs are that this set is going to smash a lot of prices.

Masters 25 appears to have a pair of card types getting a reprint: Multi-format staples whose prices will drop and slowly rebound, or cards which had a high price due to low supply, and those prices are going to fall off a cliff.

Sticky: Blood Moon

Blood Moon is a card that has had a lot of printings, including two Modern Masters printings, and it’s managed to remain a $20 card. That level of price retention is testament to its popularity, mainly in Modern as a backbreaking sideboard card in a lot of matchups.

Among the decks that get counted, this is the 12th most popular card in Modern, even though blessed few decks are playing it in the main. A full 1 in 5 decks has at least one copy in their 75, the average is between 2 and 3. That’s some amazing numbers, considering the popularity of Modern.

I wouldn’t be shocked if this trickled down into the $15 range, but it’ll get back to $20 within a few months. It won’t go higher and it won’t go lower.

Slider: Rishadan Port

Let’s be clear: Port is a powerful card in denial strategies. In the right deck, and god forbid in multiples, it can severly limit what a deck can do in Legacy matches.

Unfortunately, Legacy and Cubes are the only formats where this gets played. Yes, you can use this in Commander, but the benefit is pretty low, and a colorless only land has to be pretty awesome to be worth the addition.

Port is a 4-of in Legacy Death and Taxes builds, but not being Modern legal is a big knock. The only supply has been the original Mercadian Masques printing, and a recent judge promo. At a presale point of $50 it’s already lost nearly half the value. I don’t think the original will move much, but the new version will struggle to stay above $40, because not that many people need it.

Cliff is an avid Cuber and Commander player, and has a deep love for weird ways to play this game. His current project is a light-up sign for attracting Cubers at GPs, so get his attention @wordofcommander on Twitter if you’ve got ideas or designs.