COVID-19 is a contagious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In January 2020, the disease spread worldwide, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The symptoms of COVID‑19 can vary but often include fever,[7] fatigue, cough, breathing difficulties, loss of smell, and loss of taste.[8][9][10] Symptoms may begin one to fourteen days after exposure to the virus. At least a third of people who are infected do not develop noticeable symptoms.[11][12] Of those who develop symptoms noticeable enough to be classified as patients, most (81%) develop mild to moderate symptoms (up to mild pneumonia), while 14% develop severe symptoms (dyspnea, hypoxia, or more than 50% lung involvement on imaging), and 5% develop critical symptoms (respiratory failure, shock, or multiorgan dysfunction).[13] Older people have a higher risk of developing severe symptoms. Some complications result in death. Some people continue to experience a range of effects (long COVID) for months or years after infection, and damage to organs has been observed.[14] Multi-year studies on the long-term effects are ongoing.[15]
COVID‑19 transmission occurs when infectious particles are breathed in or come into contact with the eyes, nose, or mouth. The risk is highest when people are in close proximity, but small airborne particles containing the virus can remain suspended in the air and travel over longer distances, particularly indoors. Transmission can also occur when people touch their eyes, nose, or mouth after touching surfaces or objects that have been contaminated by the virus. People remain contagious for up to 20 days and can spread the virus even if they do not develop symptoms.[16]
Testing methods for COVID-19 to detect the virus’s nucleic acid include real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT‑PCR),[17][18] transcription-mediated amplification,[17][18][19] and reverse transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT‑LAMP)[17][18] from a nasopharyngeal swab.[20]
Several COVID-19 vaccines have been approved and distributed in various countries, many of which have initiated mass vaccination campaigns. Other preventive measures include physical or social distancing, quarantining, ventilation of indoor spaces, use of face masks or coverings in public, covering coughs and sneezes, hand washing, and keeping unwashed hands away from the face. While drugs have been developed to inhibit the virus, the primary treatment is still symptomatic, managing the disease through supportive care, isolation, and experimental measures.
We had a preview this week of Star Trek, which is out in November. There’s two sets between then and now: The Hobbit (getting its own stream today, Friday, July 17) and Reality Fracture. Wizards likes to do this, to give teasers, to get people fired up, to make the attention machine go brrrrrrr but this is really knocking it out of the park.
So let’s go over the highlights of the stream and the set, and see what sorts of speculation we can get into.
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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 co-host of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
There’s a case to be made that in Magic finance, you should never sell. We are entering a new level of collectability, where Lord of the Rings Collector Booster boxes are reaching heights never before thought of, leaving us to wonder ‘why did we sell out and take 200% profits?’ After all, if you bought Bitcoin at a dollar each and sold at $100, you made a ton, but then you feel like an idiot when it hit $100,000 per. Magic isn’t there yet, but with some recent growth, the analogy is apt.
I sympathize with you on feeling like we must hoard everything, a dragon sitting atop a mountain of gold, reluctant to let go of even a coin, for it is ours and it is precious. However, down that path leads not just madness, but missing out on value, and then you get to feel bad in a whole new way.
So today, I want to go over how we differentiate between a spike we sell into and when we resist, how to plan, and a method that both takes your profits and saves some for future value.
The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.
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 an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
In case you haven’t heard, Magic is moving into a new era of prices and collectibility. We’ve got Collector Booster boxes going for $14,000 and more, we’ve got major IP crossovers left and right, we’ve got serialized and non-serialized confirmed to be less than 150 or 500, depending on the set and the card.
Chase cards are just that, cards that people really want because they are rare, good in the game, pretty, or some combo of those things. They are not immune to market forces, such as highs or lows in supply and demand, so let’s go over what some cards have recently done, and what looks good in the future.
One of the problems is small sample sizes, not a lot of sales on xxx/500 serialized and damn near impossible to track xxx/100. You can just forget it with stuff like the Cosmic Stones, they just aren’t sold on platforms like eBay very often. For these cards, the very first one is often among the most expensive, but while the conventional wisdom is that the ones after that get a little cheaper, the margin is razor-thin before it trends upwards again.
Please keep in mind that when a vendor/company purchases a Cosmic The Mind Stone for a publicized price of $20,000, they do so because they have a buyer lined up at $25,000 or $30,000. The buyer doesn’t have the social media reach, or doesn’t want the attention, and the company is happy to provide. A similar bounty was given for the acquisition of the 1/1 The One Ring two years ago, which we think is still in Post Malone’s hands but that’s a pretty wild collectible to let go if you don’t have to.
We are in a strange era, a transition from prices based on gameplay to collectible pricing, as I covered on May 22. There’s no logical reason to buy a LOTR SE box for $14,000 and open it on a stream, you’re not making that much in EV and you aren’t making it back based on viewers. Whatnot and sites like it allow for a ‘raffle’ model with ridiculous margins, so maybe that’s what people are going for. The rarity isn’t enough, though. It’s got to be notable. We’ve had things with crazy-rare drop rates, and that’s been insufficient for cards to maintain a high price. As an example, look at DFT Fracture Foils vs. DSK Fractures, which was 1515 to pull a specific card vs. 1428. These Fracture Foils are very close in terms of how hard it is to open one, but because DSK’s are generally much more playable, those are a lot more expensive.
Another factor with Magic, related to value as a game piece, is that rarity/difficulty is not as important as playability, even with Magic moving into collectibles and not just game pieces. Slabbing is everything in Pokemon/sports, much less relevant for Magic. The Vintage players, the Cube drafters, the Commander players will all tell you, they want to have that super-rare card in their decks just for the moment when someone asks if a card is real in a hushed tone of voice.
So if we want these sorts of cards, these hard-to-pull, good-in-decks, often-very-expensive cards, when should we acquire them? Well, let’s look at some recent examples.
Dragonscale fetchlands were released in April of 2025, and took more than a year to get expensive, but the trough is obvious:
We’re looking at lows in August/September/October, roughly 4-6 months after it was printed. There’s no spike in demand, no one event that made these expensive. If the matching allied fetches get announced, watch out, because these will all end up at a grand each. (I have a spare playset set aside for just this occasion, I must admit!)
I’ve written before about the lows of a set being around two sets later, but I’m going with 4-6 months now as sets are coming out at a breakneck pace. Most chase cards you can think of exhibit this timeline.
Here is Thanos utilizing The Soul Stone, before Marvel interest heated the card by several hundred dollars:
You could get this at its cheapest in the February-April window, around $1200, before it started its new climb to $1900.
The data tells us that there is a case to be made to be patient, to avoid the ‘gotta have it’ mentality. We’re going to be in for an interesting time with The Mind Stone, as those are selling around $1400 right now, but where will these two Stones be in 4-6 months? Will both of them trail downwards?
If you want the set, are you willing to be patient? We know Soul has jumped up several hundred when Mind came along, so what will both of them do when the next one comes along? Are we going to ride this rollercoaster for four years? I’ve no idea.
So if we’re looking for pricey cards that hit their lows, what are examples of things we should look at now?
The best example, I think, is Bloom Tender:
We’re looking for a set from 4-6 months ago, high EDHREC usage, great art, and hard to pull. Here we are. (Also paying the waifu tax, a real thing in Magic collecting.) All the cheaper copies got bought out in TCGPlayer’s last sale, the card is up $20 in the past couple of weeks, and by the end of this calendar year, this will have broken through $400 and be staring at $500.
Other current examples such as MSH comic cards (not Cosmic foil) need more time. The right timeframe is Lorwyn Eclipsed (six months) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (four months) for cards to be at their likely bottoms. I’m going to stare at the copy of Krang, Utrom Warlord in fracture foil real hard for a bit, but there’s a lot I’m going to spend on other things too.
So keep in mind that 4-6 month window, get in at the lows, and be ready when cards start to climb.
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 an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
