I admit it: I adored the first Mystery Booster experience at conventions. I went to GP Reno, in late February of 2020, just before Covid shut everything down. It was glorious, a set of packs that could hold just about anything, including a lot of pricey reprints. I’d gone to the GP, towing a big light-up sign that advertised CUBE DRAFT in big letters, because I love cubing. When I was there, though, I found that people didn’t want to Cube: they wanted to draft MYB over and over again. 

Looking back through my messages, I believe I did eleven drafts over the three days, and I probably could have squeezed in a little more. The reprints in the set, such as Mana Crypt, Ancient Tomb, Rhystic Study and Vampiric Tutor, offered a chance to spend $20 on a draft, open a chase rare and resell it, then do the whole thing over again. 

On top of that, I knew that the packs were hot sellers, to the point that judges were pre-opening packs. Sealed MYB1 packs were going for something silly like $25 if I remember correctly, and the playtest cards were at wild prices, including several hundred for things like Slivdrazi Monstrosity.

All this to say that the new Mystery Booster product is formulated much the same way, offering a unique experience that we can get at home via Secret Lair offering us Festival in a Box.

So let’s dig into what’s in the packs, what’s in the sale, and if it’s getting our money.

Mystery Booster’s core concept is simple: Each slot of the pack is pulling from a sheet of 121 cards. There are 1,815 cards possible in a pack, so your experience is going to go wild. I remember getting an easy 3-0 with a mono-black Mystery deck in Reno, and such things will be possible again. 

The distribution isn’t as perfect as ‘one slot is foil, you have a 1/121 chance of getting a certain foil card’ but it’s more like the Time Spiral Remastered OBF, where you had a slot that could be foil.

Officially, you’re going to get a Future Sight Frame foil in less than 5% of packs, and in less than 1%, it’ll be an Alchemy foil, one of seven special acorn-stamped foils.

Let’s take a beat and look at what it takes to get a foil card here: If you’re 5% to get a foil, that’s 1/20, times the 121 options for foils (according to the Card Image Gallery, there’s 9 white, 26 blue, 14 black, 18 red, 17 green, 5 multicolor, 25 artifacts, 7 lands) and that means to get a specific card, it’s one in 2,420 packs to get the specific foil you want. And that’s with rounding up to 5%!

There’s 24 packs in a box, so you’re going to need just under 101 boxes to get that Foil Oracle of the Alpha your cube is craving.

The other guaranteed slots are the white border (lol) and the playtest card. Each has 121 options, and that’s your odds, just over 5 boxes to get the white border Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath that you really want. 

As a result, the highs on this set are going to be stratospheric. The foils should all be at a premium price, considering the amount of product needed to get it and that there’s only two ways we know of to get them: Attend a MagicCon (This may or may not include other big Magic events, we’ll see) or buy the Festival in a Box, which goes on sale this coming Monday, August 19, at 9 am PST/12 noon EST/4 pm GMT.

This is available on the Secret Lair website and includes a MYB2 box, 3 Collector Boosters (Wilds of Eldraine, Commander Masters, and Lost Caverns of Ixalan), a pack of nonfoil convention promos, and a Secret Lair Drop: Li’l Legends. This has foil chibi versions of Reya Dawnbringer, Orvar, the All-Form, Drana, the Last Bloodchief, Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, and Omnath, Locus of Creation. The first three have no special versions, Lavinia is in retro and is a new white border in MYB2, and Omnath has a textless promo to spar with. Not an exciting Lair if it were by itself. 

(Keep in mind this is before the D&D 50th Anniversary Secret Lair Drop coming August 29!)

I think the quantity printed of the Li’l Legends Lair is what’s going to define the availability of this Festival in a Box. I imagine it’ll be available in similar amounts as other Lairs which didn’t sell out recently, and those numbers we can only guess at. The important detail, though, is that we know it takes roughly 100 boxes to get one specific foil and that means even if they sold 100,000 of these (more popular than any SL ever) that’s only 1,000 copies of each foil–for now. 

There will be more Festivals in a Box, and more MagicCon events to go to and open packs. It’s not confirmed that SCGCon will have MYB2 events, but you can be sure that every convention is pushing hard to get this product in order to get attendance up.

My inclination is to think that the hype right now will make this FIAB sell out, probably within the first 12 hours. We’ve been put in Secret Lair fever, and it’s been immensely profitable to grab the best drops early for reselling. Even at $249 for the kit, you’ve got a solid $50 in boosters, plus a foil Lair and nonfoil promos that will offset costs by $30-$40 or so.

We don’t have specific price data on the foils you can open (TCG has these cards as Presale until October, which severely limits who can sell on that platform.) but again, these are some very chase cards and we have the example of Time Spiral Remastered to see what can happen with a low drop rate. Remember what those early OBFs were going for? That’s what we’re dealing with. 

To be clear, I think that this first FIAB is very likely to lead to a profitable resale of the MYB2 box right away, but I’m not sure about every FIAB that will be offered. Every event that has this product increases the amount out there, and the ease of picking up singles. Vendors at these events will be ravenous to get the foils and resell, too. 

I’ll be interested to see what the prices are like for these cards after Vegas’s hype has died down, say Thanksgiving or so, and that’ll tell me if I’m going after the FIAB for other events too. For now, I think I’m likely to get two of these on Monday, with the intent to flip the boxes ASAP.

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) 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.