Rotation happened a week ago, but the prices have been on the downturn. We know that the dip in prices for cards that are rotating starts about six months before the actual date, and the data bears that out.
So with rotation in the rearview mirror, let’s talk about a few cards with Commander appeal that are at their lowest point in a while, and if they are going to go lower or if we should be buying 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 a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
Aang was a clue, Katara confirms it: Allies are back!
We’re already getting some huge spikes, and the set isn’t released until mid-November! I think there will be some space for the spike prices to settle down, inventories to reload, and then once the set is in hand, the Ally specs will go wild.
So today, I want to talk about not just the Allies, but the accessories and the timing, so that we can be ready when a new wave of players are building these decks.
Before we get to the cards, let’s review a couple of concepts. First, no spec is risk-free. We have lots of ways that these cards might get reprinted, but old Allies seem tricky to reprint in the main set. While there won’t be Commander decks for this set, there’s plenty of risk in a bonus sheet, Secret Lairs, or Special Guest inclusions. There’s no way to know for sure.
Second, I usually list prices on all the cards but all the Allies are deep in flux and we’re trying to think a level beyond that. So some of these will have prices and others not.
Let’s talk cards!
Turntimber Ranger, Hagra Diabolist, Sea Gate Loremaster, Agadeem Occultist, General Tazri: All of these are experiencing some level of buyout, and could have more of that happen soon. If you find copies for pre-spike prices, great! I got in for two playsets of LP foil Rangers, but that’s as much as I was able to get.
If there is an ‘Ally Deck’ I fully expect it’ll be a combination of old and new Allies, which will mean that some old ZEN foils will spike hard. I always recommend selling into hype, and so if you have them, feel free to list at the new plateau and see if someone bites. The other option will be to wait for the spike when everyone knows about the cards, not just the folks who are rabid for new news and are invested in being on top of the newest information. That will probably be a bigger spike, but if you can take your profits, take your profits and move on. It’s entirely possible that everything with the type Ally will go wild, especially because there’s no Commander deck to reprint a bunch of Allies in.
Zulaport Cutthroat (Rainbow Foil $16) – I picked this on the MTG Fast Finance cast a week or two ago, but the Frank Frazetta version of this card is by far the prettiest version available, and supply is close to maximum. I always forget that this one is an Ally, so we’re really at a great confluence of specs here.
Ally accessories: Again, no Commander deck means that one of the main reprint risks isn’t around, so we’ve got good chances on all of these.
Roaming Throne (borderless foil $33) – The regular nonfoil is $30, so why not spend a couple bucks extra? Katara is doing the same thing, but the Throne copies everything you want to copy as well. I’m always surprised when I see that this hasn’t been reprinted since LCI, considering its popularity.
Realmwalker (pack foil $4) – I think these have the most room to grow, considering that the SL version in rainbow foil is $16. Every Kindred (focused on a creature type) deck should think about running this, and especially ones where you want to run a critical mass, plus they have low casting costs.
Patriarch’s Bidding (MH2 etched foil $5) – I run this in more than one Kindred deck, and frankly, it’s busted good in those decks. It’s a way to get ALL of your triggers at once, and it’s wonderful insurance against everything short of Farewell. MH2 was printed and then some, but there’s only three shiny versions of this card: this etched, the pack foil from MH2, and the foil from Onslaught, which is at $70+ for the NM copies.
Elesh Norn, Mother Of Machines (concept foil $48) – I like this version best, as it’s easy to read, rare, and there’s no other versions with the same art. If you wanted to buy regular nonfoils in the $20 range, that’s totally valid, as this card might not be an Ally, but Allies trigger abilities left and right, which you want more of. Denying it to your opponents is also amazing, and some decks just fold to this card.
Yarok, the Desecrated (Halo Foil $25) – We want to double up on triggers, and Yarok is another way to do that. Halo foils, especially mythics are in short supply, so this has a chance to show big gains.
Brago, King Eternal (Rainbow Foil $8) – The best version, up $3 since May, there’s only an etched foil to compete with, and flickering Allies is a great way to get the table to concede to your greatness.
Virtue of Knowledge (showcase foil $5) – Double the triggers, on an enchantment!
Titan of Littjara (FEA $7) – Why not draw some cards for playing Allies?
Kindred Discovery (Anime Foil $25) – There’s not a lot of these left and just a few purchases will have this over $40. It’s good in any Kindred deck, so it’s a good spec even if you aren’t sold on Allies.
And They Shall Know No Fear (Surge foil $23) – The nonfoil is close to $10 and there’s a lot more copies of it out there. Teferi’s Protection is three mana, though, and this does a lot to save your stuff for a mere two mana.
Maskwood Nexus/Birthing Boughs ($5/$2 foil) – There’s no special versions of either card as yet, and nothing makes Ally tokens, so you have to settle for Changeling tokens. The Boughs is down to less than fifty vendors, and only one of those is at more than six copies. All told, it’s a card that is close to popping off.
Urza’s Incubator (borderless foil $30) – There are several lesser versions available, all near the same price, but only a handful of the special foils. That would be the best target for a deck filled with cards that want a reduction like this.
Herald’s Horn (Buy-a-Box FIC $7) – The perfect storm of a great Kindred card and max supply with the promo versions, a wonderful time to stock up on a card.
Blade of Selves (Rainbow Foil $10) – All the Final Fantasy lairs got cracked looking for elementals, and there’s a lot of this on the market right now. Get your copies!
Molten Echoes ($6) – There is no special version, no foil at all, just the two nonfoil Commander printings. That said, it’s a remarkably powerful card in a Kindred deck, and I would expect this to have a jump when Allies are a big thing again.
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 a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
The new set is fully released as of today, though the prerelease isn’t for another week yet. Still, we’ve got all the information we need to look at the breakdown Wizards gives us and figure out how hard it is to open certain cards.
There’s nothing serialized in this set, though there’s a mega-rare textless Sothera, the Supervoid that is in less than 1% of packs.
So let’s look at the numbers, make some tables, and have some idea of how far someone will need to go to get the copies of the card they really, really want!
All of this information comes from the Collecting Edge of Eternities article, which tells us both how many of each card there are for each category, and what percentage of packs can open a card from that category. From there, it’s straightforward math.
The last three slots in a Collector Booster are where we want to focus, as that’s likely to have all the value, but first, let’s address what Play Boosters add to the quantities in circulation for the more chase cards. We can’t open Galaxy foils in Play Boosters, but there is a tiny chance of opening special frame foils.
Play Boosters have a dedicated foil slot, which can have:
A common (58%), uncommon (32%), rare (6.4%), or mythic rare (1.1%) from Edge of Eternities‘s main set
A rare (1%) or mythic rare (less than 1%) Stellar Sights land
A rare (less than 1%) or mythic rare (less than 1%) borderless viewport, triumphant, or surreal space card
That first bullet point adds up to 98.5%. That means the mythic stellar sights, rare or mythic rare borderless viewport, triumphant, or surreal space cards add up to 1.5%.
Traditionally, mythic is twice as rare as regular rare. 58 non-main-set rares, and 27 mythics. So there’s two tiny numbers to multiply: first, you’ve got a 1.5% chance of drawing from this group, and then you’re rolling for a card from a pool of 143 cards (2 sets of rares, one of mythics). All told, that means to get a specific foil mythic rare from this group it is going to take you approximately 9,524 Play Boosters, and 4,767 packs to get a specific rare from this group of cards.
All told, it is substantially harder to get a rare foil of those types from a Play Booster than it is to get anything from Collector Boosters. This does add some extra copies into circulation, but it’s such a small number that I’m not going to stress it when thinking about the numbers of cards getting printed.
The first slot we care about in a EOE Collector Booster is the special frame nonfoil, which can have:
A rare (47%) or mythic rare (5%) extended-art card from the Edge of Eternities main set
A rare (7%) or mythic rare (4%) borderless viewport land
A rare (17%) or mythic rare (3%) borderless triumphant card
A rare (15%) or mythic rare (2%) borderless surreal space card
It’ll be tough to get those four nonfoil mythics in the Triumphant style, and that includes the new three-mana Tezzeret. Otherwise, this isn’t too bad, though a bit rarer than past sets with a nonfoil slot like this. We’ve had a couple sets in a row where nonfoil got two slots like this, which doubles your chances, but in EOE we’re using that for the Stellar Sights sheet.
Speaking of the Stellar Sights, that’s the next slot, with foils, nonfoils, and Galaxy Foils mixed together:
A non-foil rare (36%) or mythic rare (9%) Stellar Sights land
A non-foil rare (18%) or mythic rare (4%) poster Stellar Sights land
A traditional foil rare (12%) or mythic rare (3%) Stellar Sights land
A traditional foil rare (6%) or mythic rare (1.5%) poster Stellar Sights land
A galaxy foil rare (6%) or mythic rare (1.5%) Stellar Sights land
A galaxy foil rare (3%) or mythic rare (less than 1%) poster Stellar Sights land
To no one’s surprise, the Galaxy Foils are the hardest pulls, requiring an enormous number of packs to land on the mythics. This slot adds up to 80% rares, making for some mostly unimpressive pulls and some extremely pricey ones. Galaxy Foil versions of these creaturelands are going to lead to some feelsbad moments, but that’s the price we pay for these right now.
Finally, let’s look at the slot with all the other chase foils and frames. This last slot can have:
A traditional foil rare (38%) or mythic rare (4%) extended-art card from the Edge of Eternities main set
A traditional foil rare (6%) or mythic rare (3%) borderless viewport land
A traditional foil rare (13%) or mythic rare (2%) borderless triumphant card
A traditional foil rare (12%) or mythic rare (2%) borderless surreal space card
A traditional foil Special Guests card (6%)
A traditional foil (9%) or fracture foil (1%) Japan Showcase card
All Japan Showcase cards will always appear in Japanese in Japanese Collector Boosters. For all other Collector Boosters, these cards appear in English two thirds of the time and Japanese one third of the time.
A galaxy foil rare (2%) or mythic rare (1%) borderless viewport land
A textless singularity foil Sothera, the Supervoid appears in less than 1% of Collector Boosters
These add up to 99%, so there’s some rounding errors going on for that textless Sothera. My guess is it lands at about the same rate as the galaxy foil Stellar mythics, around 2000 packs, but they gave us percentages that add up to exactly 100%, so we have no way of knowing for sure.
The Japan Showcase cards are subdivided further in non-Japanese-language CBs, where you have a 2/3 chance of opening one in the booster’s language and a 1/3 chance of Japanese. So in an English pack, it’ll take roughly 1515 packs to get a specific Showcase in Fracture Foil, or 3000 packs to get a Japanese-language version in Fracture Foil.
This slot is also very heavily pushed towards rares. In Collector Boosters, 71% of packs will open a rare in this slot, including the 2% that have Galaxy Foils. There’s an additional 16% for the Japan Showcases and the Special Guests, leaving just 13% of packs for mythics from any grouping. In a box of 12 packs, you’re looking at 1.5 mythics total, on average, coming from this slot. Packs are swingy by nature, but this is a very pronounced example of such wide potential values.
I hope this helps you make clear decisions about what to buy and what to open. If you want to talk about my math or methods, please reach out on social media or stop by the ProTrader Discord. Good luck in your pack cracking!
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 a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
Let me tell you a quick story about my June 1995 experience, as a sophomore/junior who’d been playing for a few months. My local store (Last Grenadier in Burbank, forever next to the mall, RIP) had a box that they put five-cent uncommons into, and when Ice Age came out, I didn’t know it was going to come out.
I just knew that one day, that box had a label added: Ice Age in here! So I eagerly riffled through the cards, exclaiming, and then I saw it. Counterspell. An $8 rare from Revised, was sitting in the nickel bin! And there was another behind it!
I didn’t look at the rest of the cards, I just went to the register and gave over a buck for the 18 other cards and my $16 pair of counterspells, feeling like I was committing a felony. Then I went to my friend and said, “Look what was in the nickel box!”
He looked at me and said, “Yup, that’s a common now.” I felt the world shift, and then I looked at my stack of commons with new and disgusted eyes.
That’s the feeling I think a lot of people are going to get as this game deals with the aftereffects of Final Fantasy.
There’s been a lot of markers for transitions regarding this game over the years: damage on the stack, the new frame, Arena, COVID, etc. We’ve adapted to these changes, and learned new ways to manage the ways we can make money off of these changes.
Final Fantasy is one of those changes. Never before have we activated so many people or added such a rabid set of collectors as we did for this set. As a result, the money involved is through the roof, and we’ve attracted more attention than ever.
This means some changes, some *big* changes, and since we’re in uncharted territory here, we need to talk about what could be happening next.
The one-month graph for the Omega packs, starting at $65 and getting to the current $110!
We’ve never had people stalking Target for restocks on Magic cards, but here we are. If you can buy the single Collector Boosters (often referred to as an ‘Omega’ pack) for the MSRP of $40, you can resell it for $100+ on eBay or TCGPlayer. That’s uncharted territory for sealed Magic product, unheard of for the current set. There’s a few sets where saving sealed product pays off well, Lord of the Rings’ Holiday Edition is the biggest one in recent memory, but never before has the buy/sell been so dramatic and so immediate.
People are stalking the restock at Target or Best Buy like they do for Pokemon. We’re getting called scalpers and such, but keep in mind this is all hype around Collector Boosters. The base version of the game is still going at a reasonable price, the hype and big money is chasing the premium versions.
What we need to keep in mind is that these are folks who don’t know Magic trends, and they might cause Edge of Eternities to have some weird pricing. If you don’t know, then you might think that all the sets are this way. We’ll see what happens to the price of sealed product for EOE, and then, heaven help us, we’re hitting another enormous IP with the release of Spider-Man.
Spider-Man will be the second product in five months which capitalizes on a very well-known property. We don’t have details yet, but we know it’ll include the Spider-verse, the most recent animated movies, and I would be surprised if the Marvel live-action movies didn’t play a part. This is going to be recognizably Spider-Man, and that means we need to buckle up for a whole different group of whales to enter the game and chase singles.
There won’t be a Pro Tour: Spider-Man though, not like there was for Final Fantasy. The Pro Tour in September will be Pro Tour: Edge of Eternities even though the PT date is literally that Friday, September 26. I don’t know what sort of scheduling is happening, but it’s clearly something Wizards fumbled. The fact that Arena cards/art will not be the same as the physical cards is a huge miss, very confusing, but I doubt that will affect the prices or play patterns much.
We’re going to see some extremely disappointed people, as the Pro Tour Cloud, Midgar Mercenary is going for $4,000+ as a nonfoil, the participation in the Pro Tour. The top 32 got foil versions that have sold for as much as $25,000! The Pro Tour before that, which was Pro Tour Aetherdrift in late February of this year, participants got a nonfoil Karn Liberated:
Top 32 got a foil version, but the price gap here is breathtaking. To make it worse, let me quote from Wizards’ website: “Karn Liberated is 2025’s Pro Tour and World Championship Secret Lair prize card, so expect to see more of our favorite sun-tanning silver golem throughout the year at the Magic Pro Tour.” Right now, on eBay, I can find nonfoils under $300 and foils for $1200. That is a huge gap in price and attention.
Heck, even the RC participation card is a sweet Aerith variant, and that’s a card I will be keeping an eye on too.
What I want to keep in mind here is that the influx of new people to the game means that if they start with Final Fantasy…they are going to expect every set to behave this way. And while EOE is shaping up to be a fun set, it’s not going to be in the same league financially. You can’t get a month’s bills out of whatever nonfoil is being handed out, or an MP Beta Black Lotus from the foil version.
If they act the same way (I hope they don’t, but humans are humans) then we’ll see people buying in a frenzy, and trying to sell cards that no one is heavily motivated to buy. That’s a nice Karn, but buddy, you’re no Cloud Strife.
That will lead to people becoming motivated and confused sellers. Again, if your business model is ‘stalk the restockers, instantly sell for 2.5x’ for Edge of Eternities, then you are in for some very bad times.
I think EOE will have some brutal undercutting going on, but I can’t say for sure what the price levels will end up at. What I’m really not sure about is what this will mean when Spider-Man shows up. Will we see people stalking the unsuspecting floor workers again? If there’s a ‘bad’ set to this group of people, will they write off Magic entirely, or wait for others to tell them that it’s worth going after again?
There will undoubtedly be an effect on EOE prices, as sealed becomes a harder thing to find. I am doubtful that the singles will hold up, though, because so far, this looks like a sweet Magic set but nothing that captures a brand new group of collectors the way FIN did. Brace yourselves, because we’re in for a wild ride.
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 a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
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