You might be thinking something like ‘We don’t even know all the cards in this set yet, and this guy is calculating odds and how many there are and what to target already?’

And the answer, clearly, is yes. 

Given what we know, we can make more than a few suppositions, and estimate where would be a good place to make some plans. 

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Cliff (@WordOfCommander) 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 official substitute teacher 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.

Welcome to the latest installment of the Mana Math series, this time talking about Innistrad Remastered! This set has reprints of previous showcase frames, it has borderless art, movie poster art, and even a single serialized card in the progenitor himself, Edgar Markov. 

We haven’t gotten all the previews yet, but they told us enough information that I can confidently write out how many packs it will take to get a card with a certain treatment, in foil or nonfoil. So let’s get to the numbers, and see what we can see.

In the Collecting Innistrad Remastered article, the information we need is spread out, regarding how many cards there are in each frame, but if you read carefully, it’s all in there. I’ve assembled it into a handy table for you.

With that laid out, we can now look at the categories and percentages Wizards lays out for us for our nonfoil pulls from a Collector Booster:

• 2 Non-foil Booster Fun rare or mythic rare cards
  • Each slot can drop a non-foil movie poster card 8.7% of the time.
  • Each slot can drop a retro frame rare (41.7%) or mythic rare (14.8%) card.
  • Each slot can drop a different type of Booster Fun rare (29.6%) or mythic rare (5.2%) card.

And with this, we can make a table to tell us the drop rates: 

They lump the Borderless, Fang, and Equinox frames together because they don’t want to make it easy on us, but math cannot be defeated!

None of these nonfoils are particularly difficult to pull, especially with two nonfoil slots, so when this product lands, the special frame nonfoils will be especially deep and might represent a very cheap entry point on some of these cards. The Movie Posters are the ones I’m most interested in, even though they haven’t all been revealed yet.

• 1 Traditional foil Booster Fun rare or mythic rare card
  • There is a 10% chance for a traditional foil movie poster card.
  • In less than 1% of Collector Boosters, this is replaced with a serialized double rainbow foil movie poster Edgar Markov.
  • There is a 41.1% chance for a traditional foil retro frame rare card.
  • There is a 14.6% chance for a traditional foil retro frame mythic rare card.
  • There is a 29.2% chance for a borderless, showcase equinox, or showcase fang rare card.
  • There is a 5.1% chance for a borderless, showcase equinox, or showcase fang mythic rare card.

And with this data, we can calculate our odds of pulling a foil.

Compared to the last couple of sets, these treatments are downright easy to pull from the INR packs, especially compared to the drop rates of Fractured Foils in Foundations, as the most recent example. Those packs’ easiest foil drop were any Foil Extended-Art rare, at 131 packs to get a specific card. 

Innistrad Remastered is a bit more expensive, but to make up for it, nothing besides the serialized Edgar Markov is terribly difficult to get out of these packs. Statistically, you could get one of each of the special foils (aside from the serialized) in a mere ten boxes of Collector Boosters. 

I want to take a beat here and do some comparisons with Ravnica Remastered, a set that wildly underperformed expectations. There, the hardest pull was Traditional Foil Retro Frame Mythic Rares, and those took 245 packs to get a specific card, or a little over twice as many packs needed compared to this new set.

It’s also worth using RVR as a comparison point for trying to figure the relative rarity of the Edgar Markov. For RVR, and the 64 potential serialized cards, it was exactly 1% to get any card, and 6400 packs to get a specific card.

With that ratio of 6400 packs, and 500 Edgars out there, that’s a print run of 3.2 million Collector Boosters, same as RVR. The lower drop rate of the other cards has me thinking it’s likely around half that, if not less. The Holiday Edition of the Lord of the Rings set was 1.5 million. Let’s do a little more math, and see where we can land. Remember, we know it’s less than 1%, but it’s likely a lot less than that.

Our initial estimate for the print run was 1.25 million packs, but after some more checking, we think it’s higher, at around the 2.5 million mark. That would be lower than Ravnica Remastered’s number of 3.2 million, a set that was underwhelming at the drop but has grown over the past year.

That many packs means it’s about 5000 packs to crack a serialized Markov, which is pretty darn rare in the scheme of these things. Are there 500 Vampires players with the deep pockets needed? We’ll find out.

As we get more information, I’ll update this section with more concrete data, but for now, that’s the best estimate I’ve got.

As for the rest of the set, I hope that this glimpse at the underlying numbers will help you make good decisions about the things you want to buy and when you want to buy them. If you have questions about the math or the methods, please feel free to reach out on social media or the ProTrader Discord!

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) 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 official substitute teacher 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.

There’s been four Secret Lair decks so far: Coin Flips, Angels, Cats and Dogs, and Cute to Brute. In order, those go for $340, $420, $300 and $250 on TCGPlayer right now. All of them cost $150 to order off the website, and that is quite a pattern to set.

However, it’s been on sale for several days, and has barely gotten to the ‘low stock alert’ level. If it’s guaranteed money, why isn’t it sold out already?

Let’s get into the value of the cards, and the potential reasons why this deck hasn’t sold out yet, and my plan for this drop.

The sealed decks mentioned before, those prices are a bit misleading. Each of those decks has five newly foiled cards with new art, and the strong majority of those prices are held in those new cards. For each of the decks, let me break down the specifics: 

Note: If you look up the last column of cards on TCGPlayer, you should look for ‘The List’ version, because these reprints have the little planeswalker symbol in the bottom left. 

Until 20 Ways to Win, the decks were all printed to order, so that plays a big part in the quantity that were available. Only the people who wanted to order it got it, and a whole lot of those people kept it all. Speculators got some of the decks, sure, but it’s taken a while for those decks to gain value. 

It’s also worth noting that the first four decks are much more upgradeable for the themes they have, so you could get the deck and add some sweet cards, with a great experience. The newest deck pulls you in a lot of different directions, but has little support for the twenty ways. For instance, there’s not a single other Shrine to trigger the Go-Shintai, and the only clone effect for Biovisionary is Rite of Replication.

My last point about these decklists is that several of these cards are going to take a hit as people dump the cards onto TCG after cracking it open. Clever Concealment and Kynaois and Tiro are two cards that were Commander sets only, and have a tiny amount in circulation. We’re about to get a good deal more, and those two especially should drop down a good deal before starting to slowly climb again. 

Wizards has set the limit at two decks per account, and while there’s plenty of folks who have more than one account set up in order to bypass this exact sort of limitation, they don’t seem to have gone after this with the needed fervor to cause the deck to sell out. I would imagine that they used the numbers sold from the first four decks to tell them how many of this one to print, with maybe a bit extra added in.

What this deck lacks is the juicing with expensive cards that we got in the Marvel drops. Outside of the ten special cards, the aforementioned Commander reprints and the Heliod are the only extra-pricey ones at $10 or more. It would not have been difficult for Wizards to add a couple more cards and make sure it felt like a big value.

To be clear: I think this deck is a fine buy. It should gain in value slowly, but what I’d prefer to do is spend $300 on the foil singles when they become available. Revel in Riches in in 86,000 decks on EDHREC, and Approach of the Second Sun is close behind at 83,000. After that, there’s Triskaidekaphile at just under 60,000, just about as many as Simic Ascendancy, and then Felidar Sovereign is at 50,000. That’s a great set of targets when people start getting the decks in hand. 

That way, I’m going after all the cards with high growth potential and unique art, without the large storage issue or the need to break down the sealed decks. The tanuki art should grow nicely over time, and are definitely the cards to target. 

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) 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 official substitute teacher 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.

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is ‘When should I buy (insert name/treatment of card they want that likely just came out)? I don’t want to overspend.’

This is a valid question, as it gets to the heart of the matter: How do we make sure that we get the things that we want for the lowest possible price? This is an especially important question when we’re at the beginning of a format, and prices are generally at their highest. How long can we wait to let the prices find a bottom, and can we stand to wait that long when it’s a card we really, really, REALLY want?

Let’s get concrete, and personal, with an example. I have a Commander deck based around The Ur-Dragon, and this is my pride and joy. Ten dual lands, a matched set of ZNR Expedition fetches, serialized Dragons whenever possible, the works. It was my project over the quarantine, to move cardboard and gain value until this was as wonderful as could be.

So naturally, when Twinflame Tyrant was previewed, I knew I needed one. No regular frame foil for me, though, oh no. I’m all about the fracture foil, a card that has started expensive and has come down by around 30% since it was first put on sale: 

The spike in sales represents the same as of today, Black Friday, the start of the holiday shopping season and also when TCGPlayer started a 10% (or more, if you’re a paying subscriber) store credit promotion. Things have been selling briskly on the site, and that’s what accounts for Twinflame Tyrants selling one or two per day and then suddenly 8 moved all at once. 

Let’s get extra wild and look at the graph for the Llanowar Elves in fractured foil. 

We had some opportunities on the Elves to get in early in the $200-$300 range, and I have to admit, I looked at that price and said, “Now wait just a moment here. Why are these new sparkly Elves going for just as much as the same card in Near Mint from ALPHA edition? There’s no way!” And then as of Friday night, the cheapest NM fractured foil is $550. The demand for these pretty, sparkly, and incredibly rare cards is there, especially if you add in people with the income to spend and a desire for the new thing, as opposed to the 1994 thing. As we know, it takes just about 1500 Collector Booster packs to get one specific fracture foil card, so these will never be very common.

Same forces are at play for Doubling Season, a card that’s been printed three times in the last 18 months, including a sweet confetti foil treatment in Wilds of Eldraine. This time, though, we’re combining the forces of doubling and the desire for a basket full of cute kittens, and I’m not surprised one bit to see the fractured foil leave the confetti foil in the dust. 

I haven’t bought myself a fractured foil yet. I will be buying one, but I’m content to be patient as yet. Let’s look at the last couple of sets for some examples that might help us understand and plan for the current generation of fractured foils, from the Tyrant down to the new hotness of the anime Llanowar Elves.

Duskmourn’s fracture foils range from $75 for Overlord of the Boilerbilges to $190 for Overlord of the Hauntwoods. All ten of these particular cards have been on the downward trend since their opening bell, and even if some have been stable for a couple months, they aren’t rising the way the Elves are. The obvious answer is that these ten cards are all new, with no reprints the way Foundations did it. People are upgrading their Cubes and Commander decks with these versions, and Elves especially is one of the top Green cards of all, being in 21% of all Commander decks on EDHREC running Green as a color. 

The set before that in Bloomburrow, we had raised foils featuring four reprinted planeswalkers, a subset called Imagine Critters filed under BLC but opened in the chase slot of Collector Boosters, and those eight range from $50 to $350 for the fox-faced Jace, the Mind Sculptor.

The more popular cards have trended upwards over time, the others have not. I realize that’s not an earth-shattering piece of analysis, but it’s good to know that the usage of the cards, not just the rarity, is what pushes the prices. 

So where would I bet the Foundations cards go?

I think that there’s going to be a trickle of new cards coming on the market over the next month or two, but FDN Collector Booster boxes are already under a lot of price pressure and that’s a combination which can lead to some sky-high prices. Doubling Season is on track with my expectations, but the Elves are way out there. The demand is clearly there for this version of the card, and so if it ends up at $700 by the new year it won’t shock me. 

The card with the most potential to gain from this small set would, in my opinion, be the Muldrotha, the Gravetide. It’s up $20 since the beginning of November and it’s got the Commander chops to get there. It’s a very popular Commander, being in the top 30 all-time, and this is clearly the most chase version so this is what you’ll aspire to have as the Commander. 

For the four new cards, I would expect them to go a bit lower over time, and as the cards are adopted in Commander they might trend back up, but we aren’t seeing that pattern for the other new-to-Magic cards recently, so until that pattern changes, I’m gonna keep that trend in mind. 

Cliff (@WordOfCommander) 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 official substitute teacher 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.