We’re six months past the release of Aetherdrift, and that set is commonly given the side-eye as being one of the weakest sets in recent memory, both in terms of impact and finances.

So that means there’s a lot of potential value, as folks don’t bother to open or use the cards. 

Today, I want to look at the set, its chase treatments, evaluate use-cases, and see what I want to pick up in anticipation of future gains.

Fracture Foils are a treatment that has proven to be very popular, depending on the card and art. They’ve shown up in three sets so far: Foundations, Aetherdrift, and Duskmourn: House of Horror. Outlaws of Thunder Junction went for raised foils as part of the OTP bonus sheet, and we’ll come back to that. Each of the Fracture Foil sets have had cards show up in English and in Japanese-language, even if you’re opening English packs. In order to get a specific English Fracture Foil in DSK, you’d need roughly 1,428 Collector Booster packs. That number is 1,515 for Foundations, and the same 1,515 packs for Aetherdrift. These are tough to open on their own. 

However, the rarity is not the only factor at play here. The card needs demand, either from being amazing art, amazing card, mega-staple, or some combination thereof. Here’s the prices for all the Fracture Foils, TCG Low as of this weekend:

Foundations		Duskmourn: House of Horrors		Aetherdrift
Kaito, Cunning Infiltrator	$76.71	Overlord of the Boilerbilges	$56.94	Explosive Getaway	$19.89
Day of Judgment	$89.82	Overlord of the Floodpits	$67.53	Salvation Engine	$32.71
Think Twice	$99.92	Overlord of the Mistmoors	$83.55	Spectacular Pileup	$36.29
Progenitus	$144.89	Enduring Innocence	$94.17	Mimeoplasm, Revered One	$51.29
Herald of Eternal Dawn	$172.28	Enduring Courage	$95.25	March of the World Ooze	$58.79
Muldrotha, the Gravetide	$259.06	Enduring Tenacity	$100.22	Mu Yanling, Wind Rider	$67.95
Bloodthirsty Conqueror	$312.83	Enduring Curiosity	$154.83	Cursecloth Wrappings	$70.60
Twinflame Tyrant	$498.45	Overlord of the Hauntwoods	$172.31	Chandra, Spark Hunter	$116.77
Doubling Season	$515.09	Overlord of the Balemurk	$173.04	Loot, the Pathfinder	$163.07
Llanowar Elves	$663.78	Enduring Vitality	$240.79	Radiant Lotus	$170.73

Foundations is the only one of these three that has reprints, but this isn’t just about the reprints. Twinflame Tyrant is in about 73k decks on EDHREC, but it’s a Dragon and we know how much people love our scaly overlords. (I run the meetings on Wednesdays!) Enduring Vitality is in 50k more decks and it is about half the price. All five of the Enduring creatures, being value engines, are in at least 68,000 decks each, but four of the five have lower prices than Progenitus, a card who sees play with Cubes and only 15,000 Commander decks total. 

I’m looking at these price lists and I’m thinking that we are seeing opportunity. Nothing on the agenda right now is making these cards spike, but there’s a whole lot that could go off. Cursecloth is waiting for a Zombie deck, as an example. These cards are underpriced considering how difficult it is to pull one. These Aetherdrift Fracture Foils are not even falling victim to the yellow problem, this is just reflective of a belief that nothing in the set is worth money…so nothing in the set is worth money.

There’s another subset of hard-to-get cards in Aetherdrift: The first-place foils and the borderless first-place foils. These were only found in the Box Topper packs, and you get exactly one per Play Booster Box, Collector Booster Box, and the Finish Line Bundle. Let’s go over how tough those are to pull from Box Topper packs:

Category (# of cards)	Percent chance to get any card of that type	Percent chance to get a specific card of that type	Number of Box Topper packs needed (approx.)
DFT First-Place Foil Main Set Rare (60)	69.40%	1.16%	86.46
DFT First-Place Foil Main Set Mythic Rare (20)	11.60%	0.58%	172.41
DFT First-Place Foil Borderless Rude Rider Rare(13)	7.50%	0.58%	173.33
DFT First-Place Foil Borderless Revved Up Rider Rare(11)	6.40%	0.58%	171.88
DFT First-Place Foil Borderless Graffiti Giants Mythic Rare (8)	2.30%	0.29%	347.83
DFT First-Place Foil Borderless Revved Up Rider Mythic Rare (4)	1.10%	0.28%	363.64
DFT First-Place Foil Borderless Rude Rider Mythic Rare (1)	0.30%	0.30%	333.33
DFT First-Place Foil Special Guest (10)	1.40%	0.14%	714.29

We don’t know the ratio of bundles sold vs. CB boxes and Play boxes, so we can’t estimate the relative costs for each copy of a card, but it’s surely not cheap. The Special Guests especially are incredibly difficult to snag, but only Chrome Mox at $450 is above a price tag of $100 for any of these rarities or treatments. That’s way out there, and not the prices I would have expected. We’re in an era where Final Fantasy has brought in a ton of new collectors, with lots of Collector Booster boxes rising in price but Aetherdrift staying stubbornly cheap. 

The big issue here is the same thing haunting the textured foils from the OTP set: The cards don’t look terribly appealing. 

To be clear, the pictures on Gatherer and TCGPlayer are mustard-yellow, and being borderless, that makes for a LOT of the yellow color:

This is a difficult thing to want to spend money on, if it looks this much like a hot dog topping. If they’d gone for some other color, they might have had better luck, but making everything yellow also makes the color identity of the card much more difficult, something that is hard to grasp until you play with these cards and see how they look in person:

There’s no other word for it: These cards are ugly. Doesn’t mean they can’t get expensive, just means that they aren’t right now. 

With that in mind, though, there’s a couple of cards from DFT’s rarest pulls that are worth considering:

Bloodghast ($9, 84k on EDHREC) – The Secret Lair version of this card, from one of the very first Lairs six years ago and only in nonfoil, is at $11, or you can get this for $9. It’s a card that has an infinite combo with Perilous Forays and if you’re willing to go to three-card combos there’s plenty of those around. It’s in plenty of decks, and is incredibly a Vampire if you want those synergies. 

Lord of the Undead (34k decks) – The only thing that does this justice is a comparison of the regular SPG and the First-Place SPG:

The yellow one is $55. The regular foil is $9. Both are worth it for the next time Zombies get popular, as this is just cool art. 

Salvation Engine is the most popular Fracture Foil from DFT on EDHREC, and I think it’s worth picking up. It’s a plus-two anthem for artifact creatures, and if you have six power of creatures (a 4/4 or two 1/1 artifacts can do it) then you can get an attack and return something to play. That’s a pretty great set of abilities in a single card.

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 co-host 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.