It’s the new year, and while I haven’t written down resolutions in the same way every single year, I’ve certainly gained a lot of insights this year into what is and isn’t a good strategy for profiting on Magic cards. 

Some lessons have taken me longer than others to grasp, but I would like to think I’m always capable of learning. It’s the only way to grow, to get better, to make more money. So allow me to present my lessons as resolutions, as the things I want to make sure I’m doing in 2026.

Resolution #1: Sell Things Faster

I have been awful at selling into hype in 2025, and I need to get better at it. Magic, more than ever, is a game driven by the new commanders, the discovered interactions, the unearthed gems. When I have those gems, I have a terrible habit of thinking, “oh, that’ll keep its price, I’ll sell it soon,” only to discover that I waited too long. Magic finance is littered with examples of this, but I can guarantee that 2025 was a record year for ‘damnit Cliff why did you wait so long?’ sort of thinking.

I also want to be more aggressive about lowering my prices when I’m still in a profitable range. Case in point was when Simulacrum Synthesizer was pushing $60 for regular copies and over $100 for the special ones:

I did sell one FEA version at over $100, but instead of being on top of prices and watching them fall, I stood pat and waited…and I’m still waiting on my other two copies. If I had kept track of the market, seen that prices were going lower, I still could have moved my last copies with a healthy margin, instead of holding and hoping. 

Resolution #2: Open More Secret Lairs

My track record with opening special cards has been very mixed. I hit a bunch of Chaos Emeralds (waited too long to sell those, see above) in the Sonic lairs but I hit zero elementals with Final Fantasy. I don’t know the exact drop rates, and while I’d love to know, it’s not really relevant what the rate is. People aren’t paying extra for these Lairs for the chance at those bonuses, or else we’d see a much bigger gap between the prices of sealed Lairs when compared to the aggregate cost of the singles.

The main reason I want to do this is so that if I hit big on one of the special inclusions, the prices for that are generally higher early on. Again, see the Chaos Emeralds as examples of this. Final Fantasy is the outlier here, but really, that set is the outlier in every damn way. Secondary goal is that selling these early means that some of my costs are covered, bringing down my average prices and allowing me to sell that much earlier when I’m ready to take profits. 

Resolution #3: Presell More Secret Lairs

This has easily been one of the most profitable part of my year, when a Lair sells out in two hours there are going to be people on Facebook and eBay who are desperate to make sure they get one of their own. I dabbled in this some before, but at the end of the year I made a more concerted effort to get that going and it paid off quite well. 

Doubling your money is pretty easy to do at that point, and the best part is, that’s money you can immediately flip into the next SL spend. Some Lairs keep rising, like the recent Eddie Unchained, but there’s plenty of Lairs that have sold out yet stagnated (Spongebob comes to mind, or Sonic) and if you can consistently make $40-$50 per Lair, with a near-zero holding time, well, that’s the sort of thing dreams are made of. 

Resolution #4: Get Rid Of Old Specs

Like many of us, I’m wrong about things. Sometimes I’m amazingly wrong. And when I’m wrong, rather than take the loss, I tend to just…store the cards that missed. It’s a fun adage that bad specs just turn into long term specs. Over time, though, as I sell the cards that got there, my spec boxes are turning into a gallery of horrors, with some of these 100-card bricks haunting my space for five years or more!

My resolution this year is to just move on. Sell them for what I can. Even if it’s bulk prices, I don’t want the reminders and I don’t want the dead space. 

Resolution #5: Keep Targets In Mind

Over the last couple of years, I’ve adapted my model of buying specs. No longer do I just buy ‘good card got cheap’ but I need to have a reason to buy that card. Parallel Lives is a great example of this. Yes, the Marvel version is cheap, but it’ll also be a fantastic card to add to the token-based TMNT decks that will be built in a couple of months. Reprints are happening at breakneck speed, and I want to minimize my risk. 

And related to #4, if it doesn’t hit, I want to resell and move on. If I buy a card, with a certain reason or a timeframe, then that reason or time passes by without the spike, then yeah, I want to move on from it. 

Resolution #6: Make Sure On The Big Stuff

In 2025, two of my most unprofitable decisions involved higher-dollar amounts than I usually spend. One was the Dragonscale fetches, where I got in at the top of the market and now I’ve lost $75-$100 in value on the extra four I have, and the other was Final Fantasy Collector Decks, which I bought a couple extras in the $250 range and are now gettable for $175. I feel okay about the decks, as Final Fantasy is doing nicely in basically every arena and the collectors are still going wild, but the Dragonscales sting. 

I had good reasons for those purchases, but the main takeaway for me as I look back was the FOMO. I didn’t want to miss out on something when it was on the cusp, when the energy was high. I don’t want to flinch on spending then it’s the right call, but I do want to pump the brakes a little and re-examine my ideas for those purchases. 

So that’s my plan for 2026, documented for the world to see. I’ll be keeping these ideas in mind as we go through one of the busiest years in Magic’s history, so this should make the pace a little more manageable. Happy New Year!

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.

I do plenty of speculating on Magic. Mostly I stick to cards, and I do well on figuring out themes ahead of time too. But today, I want to get more and more out there with some things that could happen with Magic, and I’ll rank them in order from least likely to most likely. 

Please feel free to chime in with your takes, in the comments, on social media, or in the ProTrader Discord server.

For each of these scorchingly hot takes, I’ll add a percent that’s pure guesswork. Note that if they announce these things during 2025, I’m gonna call that a win. 

Wizards overhauls the Standard format – With seven sets coming in 2026, even with not all of them being Standard-legal, the amount of cards in the pool has never been higher, and Wizards will have to do another round of bans to address a Vivi-like takeover of the format. (Should be a 100% chance of a Standard ban in 2026!)  It’s a damn near impossible balance that they have to strike, and because Hasbro needs every bit of profit, and the stock market is set to pursue *only* growth, they cannot hire the testing staff needed to maintain that balance. If Wizards was its own company they could reinvest into themselves (more on this later) but all of the Magic profit goes into propping up niche Monopoly sets and whatever else Hasbro messes about with. 

So I think in 2026, there’s a tiny chance that Wizards does something extreme to Standard. Could be killing it outright, or saying ‘last three sets only’ or some such change. Something has to give. You cannot do all three of these things: underfund your testing staff, design cards powerful enough to move the needle for Constructed and Commander, and avoid ban-level mistakes. The cheapest thing to do is change the context, and I think they might just give that a try. Just a 10% chance though.

Secret Lair Masters – A favorite topic of James on MTG Fast Finance, he’s right that Wizards won’t be able to resist the lure of Secret Lair reprints. There’s currently more than 2300 cards, including all the basics, and that’s enough cards for a Mystery Booster level of set that uses some ungodly number of cards and keeps everything relatively rare. It would sell like mad, and could be priced super high. I didn’t think they would ever actually do this, but I’ve come around. It’s too easy and too profitable not to get done eventually, and I’d put this at around 20% to occur. 

Commander Unbannings – I think that they put two big things into an announcement in 2026: First, Commander Masters 3 will be put on the schedule for 2027. And to goose the prices of the packs, they announce that some cards will be unbanned in Commander and put into that set. Jeweled Lotus is the prime contender here, as it was the headliner for the first two CMM sets, but it could be several of the currently banned cards. (I own four borderless foils, just for the record, and I might be talking myself into more as we speak.) It’s been a while since our last Commander-focused set, so I put this announcement at 40% for 2026.

We will get less Secret Lairs in 2026 than we did in 2025, and they will cost more. – Our wallets took a beating this year, as 2025 had a record number of individual Lairs: 81 offered up by my count. (If I’m wrong, do let me know.) I count 60 or less for every other year we’ve been doing this, and I think the only reason they do less lairs in 2026 is they goose the price up to $40/$50 and also offer more of the raised/confetti/surge foiling that they have given us. Seven main sets is just incredible, but SLs are pure money for Wizards, even if it doesn’t sell out immediately. They might not slow down the spigot, but this would be a profitable thing for them to do. I put this at 60% chance of happening.

No set pulls a Final Fantasy on us – Now I’m not saying that UB sets don’t get expensive. I’m saying that no set takes off like a rocketship within weeks of its release. Final Fantasy is a triumph of a set on just about every axis. It also pulled in collectors from across the globe and offers nostalgia and crossover appeal. Unfortunately, it also brought in people who were just looking to buy at MSRP and resell immediately for triple the price, something no other Magic set has ever done. Plenty of sets will get you a big return, but you have to be willing to hold for a while, and know which things are worth holding. We saw what the market and what the public did when Spider-Man was instantly overpriced and then cheapened as time went on. Even the presence of two hyper-rare variant Soul Stones can’t keep the Collector Booster boxes high in price (yet). Avatar is behaving like most Magic sets, with the price being steady while it’s being opened and ought to start rising in price once we’re into Lorwyn 2. My estimate is that this is 75% likely to happen.

Modern gets all the attention, Pioneer stays unloved – Wizards doesn’t have enough big paper events. They need to fund it themselves, or at least give some real support in the form of expensive promos. The reinvestment should be happening, Secret Lairs ought to be funding a new GP series, and we know Wizards is capable of producing high-end streaming content for the Pro Tours. Imagine that, but done once a month, or every two weeks! We could have all sorts of new decks and new attention, but the profit has to go to shareholders, not expansion. As a result, Wizards is going to go with the events that already attract a lot of attention, and that’s been Modern for them lately. The lack of high-level Pioneer means people don’t play it as prep for big events, and that continues the circle. 90% chance this continues.

Wizards continues to underfund judges and the paper infrastructure – They know what they could do, but don’t do it. Wizards, almost from the beginning, recognized that they didn’t want to pay judges and that if they did pay judges, then Wizards was responsible for rulings (and potential lawsuits) as well as every right that an employee has. It’s expensive. So Wizards did the cheap thing, and made judge foils, allowing judges to sell those cards and at least pay for the travel expenses. Mostly. Then came a couple years of nebulousness, followed by the Judge Academy, and now the Judge Foundry. Big Magic events require personnel that are grown over time, that need oversight and careful training in the rules, logistics, and pitfalls that can come from large-scale or high-level events. 

Why on earth is a billion-dollar brand relying on an outside, community-driven organization to provide the key personnel needed for in-person play? Money. Wizards doesn’t want to spend it, or Hasbro won’t let them, and it doesn’t matter. There is so much profit that could be used to grow the game even further, but it is 100% that Wizards will keep relying on people who love the game to be the linchpin of in-person play. It is a travesty that Wizards cheaps out on this. They will keep hoping that Star City, NRG, Laughing Dragon and other outside companies will do just enough to let people play in person, when we know what Wizards could be doing.

I hope your holidays are all you want them to be, and thanks for reading in 2025!

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.