Looking back at MTG x Final Fantasy for Future Value

November 28, 2025 Cliff Daigle Leave a comment

So much is going on, from cancelled Secret Lairs to Arena Direct and an overflow of turkey, but I think the time is right to take a step back and look at Final Fantasy cards, now that we’re a safe five months from its release. This set is a landmark, a turning point in terms of finance and attention, so let’s look at some cards and see where the value can be gained by buying in now.

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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.

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Are We Buying The Monster Hunter x Magic: the Gathering Superdrop?

November 21, 2025 Cliff Daigle Leave a comment

Good grief, there’s yet another superdrop? And this one is an international sensation of IP, with giant fantasy monsters and the humans who stand up to them?

Why did it take so long?

Let’s talk about the Monster Hunter superdrop, the individual cards, and what’s worth braving the queue for.

All of the drops are at the $29.99 nonfoil/$39.99 rainbow foil, and there is some bundle pricing I’ll review in a moment, but it’s worth noting that the bundle prices have zero discount this time around. It’s been a while since they did that to us, but at least we get a sweet promo.

For each card in the drops, I’m listing the EDHREC number and the price ranges for the cheapest and most expensive versions.

Secret Lair x Monster Hunter: The Hunt

Blind Obedience ($1-$30, 215k)

Snap ($2-$115, 272k)

Village Rites (25¢-$2, 320k)

Mizzium Mortars (50¢-$3, 48k)

Tooth and Nail ($1-$40, 46k)

There’s useful cards and not-useful cards, and we’ve had premium versions of most of these already. Solid choices, but nothing screaming at me in terms of the card choice. The art is another matter, as I’ll get to in a moment.

Secret Lair x Monster Hunter: The Hunters

Grand Abolisher ($9-$30, 314k decks)

Archeomancer (50¢-$30, 119k)

Grim Haruspex ($1-$14, 114k)

Imperial Recruiter ($11-$120, 176k)

Champion of Lambholt ($2-$12, 200k)

Very good selection, and the first premium printing for several of these cards. Recruiter’s borderless foil from MH2 is a $20 card, in case you’re thinking that you’re about to get a three-figure version. Hate to disappoint, but that’s the Portal: Three Kingdoms version, and you’re out of luck. This is an excellent drop, between the cards, inclusion rate, and sweet versions already available.

Secret Lair x Monster Hunter: The Monsters

Nezahal, Primal Tide ($7-$30, 116k decks)

Drakuseth, Maw of Flames (50¢-$20, 110k)

Ziatora, the Incinerator (50¢-$30, 45k)

Vaevictus Asmati, the Dire ($1-$15, 13k)

Sarulf, Realm Eater (25¢-$1, 6k)

The Dinosaur already has a Secret Lair version, but it’s the ‘relief coin’ version. This set of monsters is mostly under-used and lacking in special versions, so this has potential to go very well. Drakuseth in particular looks like a banger of a card, but with all the Dragon options, we tend to look for value in enters triggers, not attack triggers, and we often take Drakuseth out of decks.

Secret Lair x Monster Hunter: The Monsters II

Razaketh, the Foulblooded ($8-$54, 70k decks)

Kalamax, the Stormsire (50¢-$5, 5k)

Wasitora, Nekoru Queen (50¢-$4, 9k)

Amareth, the Lustrous (50¢-$3, 7k)

I’m pretty low on this set of cards. Three of these are already cheap and used very little, and while this is a really cool version of Razaketh, the value isn’t really there for me. I don’t want to get this drop, except for the ways I’m about to describe.

This drop has some additional wrinkles worth addressing. First of all, there are English and Japanese versions of each card and bundle. English is likely to be the more expensive version, and given how TCG handles the languages in their searches, Japanese copies will take longer to reach the value you want them to get to.

Also, bundles come with an awesome Sol Ring promo, always a rainbow foil, and in the language of the bundle you order. If you order the biggest bundle, you’ll get two of the Sol Rings.

Finally, there’s a Surge Foil version of each of the cards, but you can’t order those Lairs individually. Instead, you have to buy the bundle at $240 for English or Japanese. That’s $60 per lair, which is in line with a bonus foiling version. I expect the Sol Ring to be a popular card, much like the Final Fantasy Gilded Lotus was.

While the cards aren’t big choices in terms of how many decks they are in, this set of art might be some of the best ever in terms of the characters depicted. It’s big fantasy monster art, in a borderless frame, and reflecting an incredibly popular game series. I’ve never played the series, and that’s okay.

Monster Hunter has a great comparison with another profitable IP that you might or might not have known about: Hatsune Miku. The cards could be notably mid, and because of the art and IP, the demand should be good. We’re here to make money off of the game, not fixate on the things we know about. We know that there’s an enormous amount of players who have bought the game, or more than one game, and combined with some kickass art, I feel like this entire drop should do well.

However, I also have to acknowledge that this is the fifth big drop in a seven-week period, and that’s on top of Avatar being released as a main set. From my article two weeks ago: “Secret Scare was on 10/13, Playstation was on 10/27, then the Encyclopedia boxes dropped on 11/3, and now Avatar has five drops coming on 11/17.” Add in Monster Hunter on 12/1 and we’ve got quite the raid on our wallets happening.

We also have a very recent example of what happens when you give us special foils in a Drop: The Furby Confetti foils sold out after some of the other drops on 10/13, but they sold out way before the regular foils.

My plan is to do what I can to get the surge foil drops. I’m going to skip the regular foil and nonfoil drops, but if I can get in the random queue and snag a couple of those bundles, that should resell nicely and quickly. Everything else can wait for Dump Week.

Casual Fridays

The Mana Math of Magic: the Gathering X Avatar: the Last Airbender

November 14, 2025 Cliff Daigle Leave a comment

Hello and welcome to the next installment of Mana Math! We’re dealing with Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is a full-size set, not a mini like Spider-Man was, so there’s a lot more to do in the draft format. We’re also focusing on the Collector Boosters, since the Play Boosters are absolute garbage if you want to pull anything that isn’t a regular-frame rare or mythic.

Let’s do some math!

Why am I skipping Play Boosters? Mainly because your odds are much worse than terrible. The wildcard slot in a play booster is 97.6% to give you a main-set nonfoil common, uncommon, rare, or mythic, making everything in a special frame less than 1%. In the actual rare/mythic slot, you’re 92.6% to get a nonfoil rare/mythic from the main set, leaving every variant crammed into that leftover 7.4%. And then the foil slot is more than half commons, with 98.5% of pulls being C/U/R/M from the main set, leaving a mere 1.5% of foils to be anything Booster Fun. That means in 200 packs, you’ll get three Booster Fun foils! Ugh. You might open one, and I hope you understand what incredible odds you beat to do so.

For each of these charts, I’m using Wizards’ MSRP of $38 for a single Collector Booster pack. I’m aware that the prices on boxes are varied, depending on where you get them, so if you have a different number, feel free to use that in your own calculations. Right now the lowest price on Avatar Collector Display Boxes is about $550 on TCG, but those are on presale mode till 11/21.

We’re going to go through the last three slots for a Collector Booster. In order, that’s nonfoil Booster Fun, the Source Material cards, and then the foils for Booster Fun.

To start with, the nonfoils:

The rarest drops here are the battle poses and the mythic elemental frames, and compared to other nonfoils in the past, they will be surprisingly difficult to open. If any of them turn out to be strong in Commander or Constructed, the nonfoils could end up being pricier than expected. As a point of comparison, the hardest nonfoil to pull in Edge of Eternities was the nonfoil poster mythics, at about 1 in 375 and that’s a bit easier than the 460 or the 454 that represent the least common pulls for the nonfoils for TLA.

Next up, let’s look at the Source Material, 61 reprints using stills from the actual show:

I both love and hate that they use actual frames from the cartoon, but I adore that the artist is given as the season and episode.

All the cards are listed as mythic rarity, but all of them are mythic, so the actual rarity doesn’t matter. Compared to Spider-Man, this will be a little more difficult, since the comic book cover SPM cards dropped every 53/160 packs. There are some great hits in this list too, I can’t wait to get some more nonfoil The Great Henge for cheap.

This list also has Force of Negation and Teferi’s Protection as big hits, but there’s a whole lot of good hits too, but the supply on nonfoils should be pretty significant and you’ll have a chance to buy some very good deals. Contributing to this is the art, which can be polarizing, especially on something like Cruel Tutor or Bloodchief Ascension, focused on drawn animation that doesn’t feel as high-resolution as the things we’re used to.

Finally, the foils:

Regrettably, I had to a bit of estimation here: adding up all the known percentages gives us 99% exactly, with the mythic rare EA, the Neon Ink, and the Raised Foil Aang listed at less than 1% each.

So I used 0.45% for the EA, as that’s very close to the other mythics in this set. That leaves 0.55%, and I split that evenly among the Neon Ink and the Raised Foil, but I suspect that’s wrong, going by the prices The Soul Stone is fetching in premium printings. I suspect that it’ll be a split where the Raised Foil is in the 2000-3000 pack range, but in the absence of data, all I can do is speculate. If we get better data, I’ll update this post.

Overall, we’re looking at pretty reasonable drop rates for everything but those Neon Ink and the Raised Foil. I can’t predict if this raised foil will have the same rarity as the raised foil textless Soul Stone, but all things are possible when there’s five cards and just 1% of slots left. I’d also be very surprised if it got similar prices, but if Avatar unlocks new collectors the same way Final Fantasy did, the sky is the limit here.

It also needs to be said that about 85% of Collector Booster packs will have a rare in this slot, so the average CB box will only have about two mythics. That’s almost the same as Spider-Man’s rate in Collector Boosters, but Edge of Eternities was about 70% rare in this slot. We’ll have to see if this greatly impacts the prices as well.

I hope this information helps you make good decisions about cracking packs, and that you feel sufficiently lucky when you open something amazing! As always, if you’d like to discuss methods or numbers, please feel free to hit me up on social media, or come to the ProTrader Discord!

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Are We Buying the Avatar: the Last Airbender X MTG Superdrop?

November 7, 2025 Cliff Daigle Leave a comment

It’s a time of madness, people, as Wizards assaults our wallets for the fourth big drop in a five-week span. Secret Scare was on 10/13, Playstation was on 10/27, then the Encyclopedia boxes dropped on 11/3, and now Avatar has five drops coming on 11/17. Between the problems people encounter on the website, and the powerful drain all this has on our wallets, you can be forgiven for thinking, “I don’t know if I want to buy this right now.”

I’m here to help, with a breakdown of the cards, their usage rates, and what’s worth it at MSRP and what’s worth waiting for Dump Week.

First of all, remember that these five Lairs are all at the $29.99 nonfoil/$39.99 rainbow foiling prices. I do think that eventually, all Lairs will be at that price point, but as long as we’re getting these, I hope it stays on the cheaper side, mostly.

Please, as always, remember that EDHREC is useful but it’s not perfect. There’s an awful lot of people who never get around to posting a deck there, and it’s weighted towards cards that have been in precons. Useful data, but not the only information and definitely not without flaws.

Secret Lair x Avatar: The Last Airbender | My Cabbages!

Chain of Vapor (128k, MYB2 foil $100)

Meltdown (12k, MH2 foil $1)

Nature’s Claim (248k, FCA foil $1.50)

Anguished Unmaking (400k, raised foil $20, SLD foil $5)

Putrefy (238k, MPR nonfoil $6, STA foil $3)

These are hilarious art, and we know that memes have their own value with Commander players. The big unknown here is Chain of Vapor, as the only two foils are the hard-to-pull MYB version and the ‘never-any-around’ original pack foil. The other cards will be lucky to hit $5 here. I like the art, and the setup, but we have data to show that these four cards don’t have high-priced versions.

Secret Lair x Avatar: The Last Airbender | Everything Changed

Torment of Hailfire (154k decks, SLD foil $37)

Blood Moon (94k, Borderless foils $15-30)

Lightning Bolt (392k, 12 different SLD plus other promos)

Dramatic Entrance (1k decks, pack foil $4)

One great, one pretty good, one super-common, and one no one cares about. The Torment will likely be in the $20-$25 range during Dump Week, and the others will be gettable for a lot less. We got a great version of Torment in the sAnS mErCy drop, but the trolling might have put some folks off. Blood Moon has lots of $10+ versions, and this should join that crew. This is the 13th Secret Lair printing of Bolt, making it third place behind Sol Ring (21) and Command Tower (17). Worth getting at retail.

Secret Lair x Avatar: The Last Airbender | A Lot to Learn

Serra Ascendant (116k, SLD foil $45)

Ponder (424k, lots from $8 to $18)

Cryptolith Rite (122k, borderless foil $5)

Kodama’s Reach (948k, borderless foil $3)

The big question here is if the Serra Ascendant can hold its price. The Secret Lair version that’s pushing $50 in foil is from 2022 and is a great piece of art. Aang is a great character, but there will absolutely be people who refuse to engage with the UB side of Magic. That’s the minority of people, and I won’t let them hold me back. The other three cards are good and used enough that they should be a few bucks each, but this is all about the Ascendant. It’s an echo of the pre-Commander days, never given errata, and the easiest path to becoming the archenemy as a turn one play.

Secret Lair x Avatar: The Last Airbender | One with the Elements

Silence (211k, SLD foils $25-$70)

Preordain (337k, SLD foils $10-$25)

Painful Truths (78k, pack foil $2)

Past in Flames (85k, Spellbook foil $5)

Force of Vigor (108k, Raised foil $80)

Expressive Iteration (111k, SPG foil $11, Showdown foil $24)

Force of Vigor has the potential to be pricey here, given how the low-supply raised foil did, and this is a lot nicer to look at. The rest of these should be decent to good as well, even though there’s other special versions around. I think this will also be worth buying at retail.

Secret Lair x Avatar: The Last Airbender | The Ember Island Players

Phantasmal Image (98k, SPG foil $27)

Braid of Fire (28k, SLD foil $25)

Cursed Mirror (205k, WHO Surge FEA $10)

Mask of Memory (106k, 40K Surge $4)

Thespian’s Stage (182k, SLD rainbow $8, Stellar foil $24)

Very solid choices, and one of the great episodes of the series. Blessed few Magic cards are funny, but this Phantasmal Image definitely is. We’re about to see a spike of decks that can make use of Braid of Fire, so there’s a lot of potential there as well. This should also prove to be worth getting at retail, as they need to average $8 to break even.

Overall, three of these are likely worth it, and I’d expect either A Lot To Learn or Everything Changed to be the first ones to sell out, if even numbers of all Lairs were printed. The other two Lairs are going to take too long to rise in price, so I will avoid those for now.

I don’t expect good bundle pricing, either, and I also expect that the networks of bots clogging the site early on will lead to most of these selling out relatively quickly. We’ve seen this pattern a few times now, and while we don’t know the relative quantities that were printed for each Lair, we do know what’s left on the site: 24 different lairs from Spider-Man, Secret Scare, and Playstation are still there as of today, 11/7. I can’t guarantee which get targeted and sold out first, but the Serra Ascendant, the Torment, and the Chain of Vapor are likely the cards that will lead to the most interest from people who want to resell immediately.

When these Lairs arrive in hand, I’ll want to go after the following cards at the Dump Week lows: Preordain at less than $5, Cursed Mirror in the same range, and Torment of Hailfire in the $20 range, all three in foil. Dump Week is good for most cards that hit lows, but those three especially catch my eye for art, use pattern, and the number of other versions available.

Join me next week for some math!

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