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.
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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.
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.
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.
It’s really, really easy to get caught up in ‘the next thing’ because of Wizards of the Coast’s obsession with keeping excitement high. Granted, there’s a vested interest in keeping up with what’s coming out and what’s happening, because there’s profit opportunities such as the recent spike in Commander’s banned list. There’s no end of new events, streams, articles, and ways for Wizards to drum up interest in upcoming sets.
However, we can’t lose sight of the here and now, which means Aetherdrift! The set only came out a week ago, and there’s a lot of movement on prices. Not all of it is downwards, either, so let’s get into it and see what opportunities exist right now, and which hint at future ones.
All data is as of Thursday night, 2/20, for the regular frame nonfoil.
Ketramose, the New Dawn (Lowest sale was $15, Highest $75, currently $48) – Ketramose is getting all of the attention from the set, especially for its strength in Modern, where there’s a wide assortment of ways to exile things for benefit. Some of those are aggressive (Phelia) and some are reactive (Force of Negation) but all of them now come with a cantrip once Ketramose is in play. What’s additionally wild is how Path to Exile now comes with a card to draw as well!
Ketramose will start showing up in some lists in the next couple of weeks, and there’s a good chance that we see the card pop back up above $60. People aren’t dipping a toe in with this card, they are going full-on with the complete playset in a deck, and for a mythic, buying four at a time can really impact the supply.
Monument to Endurance (L: $4, H: $15, C: $11) – This is one of the top inclusions from EDHREC, not least because there are two Zombie commanders who want to discard cards, and Varina has also been newly popular. I have a hard time thinking that this price stays high, as it’s just a rare and people are getting one at a time. It takes tremendous demand to keep an in-print rare above $10, and I’m doubtful about this card in the short term.
Radiant Lotus (L: $13, H: $70, C: $16) – We all know that this is a Lotus, and making three mana at a time, but the six mana and the need for sacrifice is a real cost. I’m not surprised that it’s fallen this far, but clearly it’s got farther to fall until the combos are found. I don’t doubt that this card can be broken, but we’ve got to keep in mind that this isn’t fast mana, it’s a boatload of mana after you’ve found a way to get a six-mana rock into play. I don’t think it’ll go below $10, but the premium copies with truly gorgeous art might stay expensive just for the aesthetics.
Oildeep Gearhulk (L: $3, H: $11, C: $5) – What a lot of people are overlooking about this card is that it shares the Vendilion Clique ability of looking at the hand, and then you get to decide if you need to get rid of a card from your opponent’s hand. It’s a tough mana cost, and it’s very dangerous to add this card to Standard when there’s already a Dimir self-bounce deck running around. It’s a mythic, and that helps its price, but this will never be a four-of card and so I expect the price to stabilize between $5 and $10.
The Aetherspark (L: $25, H: $110, C: $34) – It’s a crazy card with an impressive type line, but that novelty was responsible for lots of hype and a too-high price. This really needs to come down under $20, and likely to the $15 range. A regular planeswalker with these abilities (+1: add a counter to a critter, -5: Draw two, -10: Add ten mana) would be pretty middling for what Commander decks what to do. There’s a lot less work that can go into a win condition, and once people realize that, the price will trickle downwards. It might pop up if something turns out to be a fun combo, but if the point of the combo is adding mana, it might not do too much.
Loot, the Pathfinder (L: $1.50, H: $30, C: $3) – I’ve seen people building decks around Loot and Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, a combo that makes my heart sing. ASC is already super pricey because of the Modern combos that it helps to reinforce, but Loot is an accessory, not a focus. Does great things, powerful things, and there’s combos in Standard with Sleep-Cursed Faerie, but we’re going to need to see results before we start buying.
Riptide Gearhulk (L: $5, H: $10, C: $10) – It’s pretty evil that this is legal in Standard alongside Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines. If someone double-triggers this on you, then your third and fourth turns from now are locked in. It’s also a really quick clock, smashing for six or 8 depending on the cantrips in your hand when you attack. Additionally, everything that cares about having two power, like Enduring Innocence, will gladly welcome the card. Ten bucks feels about right, but the rest of the set and the speed of undercutting might lower the price slowly over time.
The Verges (range in prices, mostly $4-$7 now from $10 heights) – I like these to travel back upwards into the $10 or even $15 range before they rotate out of Standard. It’s really, REALLY powerful to have dual lands that come into play untapped, and considering that these are best friends with the Surveil lands from MKM, we’re going to see a lot of Surveil/Verge manabases for all of 2025 and 2026.
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.
Aetherdrift is on sale today, and let’s be honest, Ketramose is lighting up all sorts of cards. BW Blink is a big deck in Modern right now, and it’s about to get a powerful draw engine. Psychic Frog plus Darkblast and Ketramose is a deadly combo that we’re going to see a lot of as well. It’s $50, and we’re going to see that price go higher this weekend and hopefully it comes down to something reasonable.
It’s not going to be soon, though, because people are buying the card four at a time…and it’s worthwhile to do that. It might come down if the meta shifts, but I expect Ketramose to hit $75 in the next week, and after that, supply should bring that back down. Heaven help us if there’s a Standard deck as well as the Modern implications.
However, from a MTG Finance perspective, the biggest news of the week was Commander-related. We got an explanation of the Commander Brackets system, a list of Game Changer cards, but most importantly, Gavin Verhey saying that sometime in April, there will be some cards unbanned in Commander.
Frankly, there’s already been a lot of buying around this potential news, and all sorts of speculation online about which cards he’s referring to. I’m here to give you the definitive list of what is and isn’t getting unbanned, now that Wizards runs the banned list.
We’re going to put this in tiers, from the zero-chance (F tier) to the ‘absolutely going to happen sometime’ (S tier). For each, I’m going to put down the current cheapest price, and what that price could go to. More premium versions will of course go wild too. I’m presuming that the cards will not get a reprint to go with the unbanning, and if that happens, watch out.
S-Tier: Will Get Unbanned
Jeweled Lotus ($76, but was $40 before the announcement)
Dockside Extortionist ($37, was $12)
Mana Crypt ($80, was $45)
Coalition Victory ($3)
These are the easy picks. The three bannings that triggered the end of the Commander Rules Committee era are all cards that were fine until the RC decided this specific set of fast mana was a problem. Wizards is happy to reprint these cards, mark them as Game Changers, and move on. I don’t think they will all get reprinted immediately, or even at the same time, but eventually yes, they are going to be legal again. Eventually.
I bought four borderless foil Jeweled Lotus when I heard about the announcement, but I should have moved on Dockside. Legit spec targets, but I’ve no idea when it will happen.
A-Tier: I Have Slight Doubts, But Likely Eventually
Biorhythm ($6)
Golos, Tireless Pilgrim ($2)
Iona, Shield of Emeria ($4)
Sylvan Primordial ($2)
Flash ($1.50)
These five cards are powerful and potentially really annoying, but there’s a lot to be said for each of these being totally fine. Golos could become the default ‘five color good stuff’ deck and with the land find it’s possible to recast it almost every turn. Is that more or less annoying than other cards? Iona hoses one color (you should name blue) but the other colors make for a fun political subgame. Primordial is capable of killing three permanents, and finding you forests, but it’s not problematic until you flicker/reanimate/etc and isn’t that every damn card in Commander? Same thing with Flash–puts a card into play, instantly sacrifices it. We’ve got a range of such effects already, and while this is cheaper, it’s got a good chance to see an unbanning and try it at high power levels.
I could defend you buying these, especially at these low prices, but I wouldn’t be in super deep.
B-Tier: Make Your Case, But I Lean No
Braids, Cabal Minion (bulk)
Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ($20)
Hullbreacher ($3)
Trade Secrets ($1)
I think that these all represent cards that are unfun in most settings, and should stay banned. They are also ridiculously powerful, and since we’re legislating in the high power brackets of Commander, I think people will make a case. I definitely would not spec on any of these cards.
C-Tier: Reserved List Conspiracy Brain
Fastbond ($30)
Library of Alexandria ($1,300)
Recurring Nightmare ($60)
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary ($42)
Yawgmoth’s Bargain ($22)
Hot take: I don’t think these are so much more game-breaking that they can’t be considered for unbanning, but they won’t be unbanned because they are on the Reserved List and therefore Wizards cannot make any money off of the unbanning. It is super easy to imagine Gavin calling up someone at WotC and saying, ‘when’s a good time for us print <name of card> so we can unban it at the same time?’ These are enormously powerful cards, worthy of being banned, but less powerful than some other unbanned cards.
D-Tier: Enormously, Incredibly, Boringly Unfun and 95% Never Unbanned
Erayo, Soratami Ascendant ($6)
Gifts Ungiven (50¢)
Griselbrand ($3)
Leovold, Emissary of Trest ($2)
Limited Resources ($3)
Lutri, the Spellchaser (bulk)
Nadu, Winged Wisdom (50¢)
Panoptic Mirror ($8)
Paradox Engine ($7)
Primeval Titan ($8)
Prophet of Kruphix ($1)
Sundering Titan (bulk)
Sway of the Stars ($3)
Tinker ($1)
Tolarian Academy ($200)
Upheaval (bulk)
A lot of these cards are just repetitive play patterns, over and over again. Are there plenty of Commander decks built the same way? You betcha, it’s the main format for people who love to spin their wheels over and over and yet accomplish nothing. With these cards, it isn’t always about the instant win, no, you should be so lucky as someone demonstrating their Gifts Ungiven for a combo, or the Paradox Engine loop twice and then table is scooping. It’s the non-deterministic Nadu combo for ten minutes, it’s a flipped Erayo from someone who also has four counters in hand, just in case. It’s Prophet basically taking four turns every cycle while you do one. Good riddance to all of these.
F-Tier: Why Are You Even Asking?
Ancestral Recall
Balance
Black Lotus
Chaos Orb
Channel
Falling Star
Karakas
Mox Emerald
Mox Jet
Mox Pearl
Mox Ruby
Mox Sapphire
Shahrazad
Time Vault
Time Walk
Name your reason, these are staying banned. I love the idea of the ‘dexterity’ cards like Orb and Star, but having seen people argue about Orb in Cube drafts, heaven help us at regular Commander games. These aren’t getting unbanned ever, no need to go over prices here.
If you disagree with these tiers, please, let me know in the comments, on social media, or preferably, in the ProTrader Discord! I’m happy to talk about the reasons I ranked them this way.
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.
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