We’ve got quite the gauntlet of Secret Lair drops coming, one after the other for the next four Mondays. All of them appear to be worth buying so far, so we’re going to start with the first two.

Stardew Valley’s drop is this coming Monday, and that has three separate Lairs making up the superdrop, and after that, on the 3rd, it’s the end of the order time for Their Magic is Limitless, Wizards’ annual charity drop that is print-to-demand. Yes, it’s been a month already and there’s a real effect going on. 

So let’s get into these drops, the cards and the outlook, and decide what to do this week and next, before Miku and Hobbits terrorize our wallets.

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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.

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. 

I want to lead off by saying that like many men of my age group, I watched a lot of The Next Generation (affectionately TNG) and much less of the other series. It’s just timing for what was on TV at the time. I didn’t give nearly the attention to this world as I did to Final Fantasy, but that’s okay, as I’m still pretty stoked for this set. 

The headliners for this set are something very unique, a set of seven cards that feature autographs from Star Trek actors.

First of all, we know there are seven of the signature cards, and roughly 250 of each. Most notably, they are hand-signed by the actor, not a printed signature but they gave Shatner and Mulgrew (and five more actors) a stack of 250, asked them to sign each one, and then distributed those into Collector Boosters. Super neat, excellent collectible, and gives the whales a set to chase instead of individual cards. 

We don’t know who the other five are, but Wizards said that they aren’t all captains. My betting is on the four major captains (Shatner, Stewart, Mulgrew, and Brooks) plus some combo of Takei, Ryan, Spiner, Dorn, and Frakes. No inside info, just a sampling of the four big series. I know this leaves off Discovery and Enterprise, as well as the movies, but you can’t have it all. 

These promise to be some pricey cards, though they won’t be on the Cosmic Stone level of pricey, since there are 1500 in all. I wouldn’t take less than five figures if I opened one. 

We also get the Shocklands being reprinted into Standard yet again. I’d thought that we’d lose this, but frankly we are spoiled for manabases already.

I adore full-art lands, and giving this the LCARS (Library Computer Access and Retrieval System) treatment is awesome. No, this doesn’t look like an overgrown tomb, but this is cool. Expensive? We’ll have to see what the drop rates are, but while Play Boosters can get you foil or nonfoil, Collector Boosters offer you nonfoil, foil, and Surge foil. Lots of premium shocks already out there, including Edge of Eternities’s versions, but this should hold a good price.  

There is a Beam Me Up bundle to be had, and that bundle will have two Schematic cards out of a possible eight, and frankly, these are wonderfully designed. 

I’m not expecting these to be Chocobo-bundle good, but these ought to be big gainers over time. It’s very cool and futuristic and unique, all things I want in my chase cards. I’ve pre-ordered the bundles on Amazon, a practice that works well this far out. I can cancel if it looks like it won’t be worth the money, and I can do that up until the week it ships. Plenty of time!

We got some individual cards, some showing a mechanic, others on a theme. I’m only going over a few that scream out ‘Build around me!!’ as they do something new or consistent. I also need to note that there are four Commander decks with this set, and that’s a lot of potential for reprints. Watch out, and spec carefully. 

Facing a dilemma is basically every time you make a choice, as in ‘choose one’ or ‘choose one or more’ and while we used to call those modal spells, now we’re calling it facing a dilemma. This does not include the choice of paying for Rhystic Study and the like.

Important to note that villainous choices do not trigger Seven’s ability, so you’re stuck with the 253 modal spells that could fit in a Seven of Nine deck. There is a Commander deck set coming in Esper colors, so some might get hit, but here’s some great choices to tack ‘draw a card’ onto: Rankle, Master of Pranks, Mystic Confluence, Dread Presence, Umezawa’s Jitte, The Vision, Dreamshackle Geist, Energy Chamber, Retreat to Coralhelm, Retreat to Hagra, and my favorite, Black Market Connections. Strong chance of reprint there, but it was just in MSH so let’s hope not. 

I focused on dilemmas you can face over and over again, but the list of modal instants and sorceries is truly out there. No wrong answers. 

Dr. Crusher tells you exactly what to do and then rewards you for it, which is my favorite thing in a new commander. She could have doubled the life you gain, but anything can do that, like Boon Reflection, The Wind Crystal, or Rhox Faithmender. She could have gained you bonus life, as in Cleric Class, Angel of Vitality, Heron of Hope, Leyline of Hope, or Knight of Dawn’s Light. There’s a ton of cards which gain life to get counters, but there are two big-potential cards I want to highlight and one deep cut.

Heliod, Sun-Crowned is always amazing in a deck like this, and it won’t be hard to set up a lot of lifegain triggers. Archangel of Thune, freshly reprinted in Marvel Super Heroes is timely and underpriced but the card I’m calling out as the greatest potential is Qala, Ajani’s Pridemate, a Jumpstart Uncommon from Foundations. There’s a lot of copies up on TCGPlayer but it does everything you want all at once.

Federation is an interesting mechanic, in that it wants lots of types but that non-Borg clause means you can’t just stuff Changelings into such a deck. I’m not sure how to break this card yet, but I’m working on it. 

Janeway, I’m certain, has some kind of combo with Elvish Warmaster, or maybe Ashaya, Soul of the Wild, or perhaps both, but there’s a lot of fun to be had here and someone will break the card in half, just you watch.

Assimilate might be the greatest flavor + mechanic combo ever. To add their distinctiveness to your own, you take it, you make it bigger, you make it into a Borg and it loses every type. Hell yes.

We’ve gotten a whole lot of amazing artifact goodness lately, and much of what I might mention has spiked already due to Ultron, Artificial Malevolence. I’m expecting this to be a tough ability to use, since stealing someone else’s creature is pretty unbalanced in Limited settings. The Queen is super-powerful, and note that you keep the thing even if she leaves play or is flickered. 

Calling the reprint sheet Stardates is a wonderful callout even if it makes no sense. This is the third Benedict Cumberbatch card we’ve gotten in less than a year (Dr. Strange, Smaug, and now Khan) but Sheoldred has desperately needed reprinting. Even if you don’t like human faces on your Praetor cards, this is a reprint you’ll want to buy cheap.

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.