The Lost Caverns of Ixalan set has been out for a couple of weeks now, and there’s some really interesting things happening with the prices. Specifically, there’s some ears we need to talk about, why they are too low or too high.

Part of this discussion is knowing that these cards are going to be Standard legal until the big fall set of 2026. Three full years! We’re going to have a very long time for things to get cheap and then to get expensive again. I don’t think every card will get expensive, to be clear, but some of these have a very good chance to become pricey.

To the cards!

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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.

Six months, that’s my new timeline. I’ve written about it before but the truth of the matter is that in the Booster Fun era, it takes around six months for the cards in a Standard set to find their floor. It’s also enough time for combos to be found, hype to build up and wither away, or for Commander players to plant their flag yea or nay for a card.

We know that Commander play drives most demand these days, and one of these cards is a case study in that phenomenon. So what I want to do is take a look at the special set of March of the Machine: Aftermath, which was a very small set put into regular and Collector Boosters (they weren’t called Collector Boosters, but six/half dozen) and given some premium treatments.

To the cards!

The rest of this content is only visible to ProTrader members.

To learn how ProTrader can benefit YOU, click here to watch our short video.

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.

The new set is out, and prices are on the move. Mostly they are falling from the highest highs that a preorder can get to, but there are some surprising risers in this list too. Today I’m just looking at some of the biggest movers so far, and if they are done moving.

Chimil, the Inner Sun ($16 from $21) – It’s hard to argue with two things that Commander players love: ‘don’t counter my stuff’ and ‘give me free stuff’ are a pair of guiding principles I can get along with. It’s colorless, so you can put this into any deck you want, and you get the first Discover trigger at the end step that turn. Don’t even have to wait!

That said, this is neat but not terribly powerful. I expect a lot of players to try this and then take it out for something more impactful, more predictable. We have something similar in The Prismatic Bridge, but that’s five colors and makes you wait. 

I believe this price will drop a lot farther, and if you want it, just wait. Lots of copies are coming into the market.

Ojer Pakpatiq, Deepest Epoch ($6 from $11) – Rebound is a fun ability, and this land is one of the easiest to flip back into a creature–just gotta be patient with it. 

I am not expecting great things from this, but it’s cheaply costed enough to play it and immediately cast something for value. If it stays in play, I would expect the blue player to go absolutely bonkers, which is 100% what I would do.

Roaming Throne ($14 from $9) –  I can see how people really want this card for their Commander decks. I’ve got three in my cart as we speak. However, people need to calm down. This is too high, and as the set gets opened, there’s going to be a whole lot of these around. I’m expecting this to settle in around $5.

The last rares to break $10 and stay there, for context, are mega-staples in Commander and constructed. Fable, Ledger Shredder, that sort of thing. Roaming Throne is neat, and most Commander players will want one, but be patient here.

Cavern of Souls ($30 from $35) – I’m not ready to buy in and I might never. Cavern is in the main set, and has the Cosmium Ink treatment, in addition to the LOTR versions we got in the summer and now in the Holiday version. The 2X2 printing hadn’t yet recovered from the summer versions, so adding these in will keep the price quite low for some time. It’ll probably get to $25, maybe even $20, because there’s not really a big typal deck that wants four of these in Constructed.

It’s a mega-staple in Commander, and rightfully so, but you should get your personal copies in a few months if you can stand the wait.

Bonehoard Dracosaur ($17 from $14) – I’ve already bought a borderless foil copy for my Ur-Dragon deck, and while I know the price is high right now, I want it. Commander players agree, as this hasn’t made a splash in 60-card formats yet, so it’s the casual players who are drawn to this icon of draconic card advantage.

If you get to untap with this card, it’s quite difficult to go wrong. You get two things you can play immediately, and bonuses for what they are, either a Treasure or a 3/1 creature. It’s also an overlap between a hot new creature type and one of the most popular decks in Magic. 

I will be surprised if this goes much below $10, but even a smattering of play in Constructed will see this climbing pretty high.

Jadelight Spelunker ($0.50 from $3) – The Jadelight Ranger was at one point over $15. Granted that was a different era of Magic five years ago, but the core concept of value creature is still good, just not as good. This is one point of power weaker than the Ranger, which is real, but it is a powerhouse at every other point on the curve. I expect this card to be a weathervane for Standard paper play in the coming years, as it’s hard to imagine a Standard where this is unplayable. 

Echoing Deeps ($3 from $6) – This isn’t as good with Dark Depths as Thespian’s Stage is. Stage can copy the card in play, and avoids the ‘enters with ten ice counters’ text. Deeps has that problem of coming in as a copy, so you still need a Vampire Hexmage to get the job done.

Otherwise, this is a super-niche card. It might see play in a Lands deck, or some Lotus Field backup, or some folks might play this in Commander, but this will be very close to bulk until the combo pops up.

Saheeli, the Sun’s Brilliance ($3.50 from $7.50) – There’s a lot to like about this Saheeli. She fits into Breya decks quite well, as well as Brudiclad and any other UR artifact commander. I don’t think that’s enough to keep her price from getting lower still, but the long-term demand for her in artifact decs should keep her out of the bulk bin.

Molten Collapse ($3 from $5.50) – This is an upgrade over Dreadbore, a card that has has some success over the years. 

Right now, BR decks are more popular in formats other than Standard, but with the mana bases that exist, and three years’ worth of cards to choose from, this sort of card might become very popular. This will be in Standard for a very long time, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it went down to the $1 range now and bounced back up to $5 at some point in its lifetime.

If Fable and Invoke Despair were still legal, this would be a very popular card.

The Skullspore Nexus ($13 from $18) – This is not the card draw and counters engine that is The Great Henge, but it does have a lot of appeal in decks where creatures die, populate decks want this, and the always popular “Ghalta’s power is now 128 trample” sort of deck. 

The abilities synthesize well together, and there’s going to undoubtedly be some ridiculous combos, but this is going to fall a whole lot farther, probably to $5 or less. Commander players will look at this as Wrath insurance, but you’ll just get one huge token that doesn’t have trample. I don’t think it’ll play out as well as people hope.

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.

Once more, dear friends, we head into the Collecting articles and try to turn a bunch of percentages into numbers that make sense. Wizards is boh obligated to be clear, due to the gambling laws in different areas, but has a vested interest in obfuscating the sheer number of packs it’ll take to get these rare cards.

With a little division and a reciprocal, we can take their percentages for a category and turn that into a clear number of needed packs to get the cards we want. Statistics aren’t guarantees, so keep that in mind when you’re using this guide.

Let’s get to the numbers.

There are THREE subsets of cards in this set. Three! We’ve got the REX set, which is all new cards using Jurassic World as inspiration, a mini-Universes Beyond. We’ve got the Special Guests, who can show up in any booster, and then we’re given Box Toppers.

The Box Toppers are pretty special this time around. Draft and Set Booster boxes get a nonfoil single-card pack, and Collector Boosters get a foil. There are 20 Toppers, referred to as the Treasure Trove and have the same LCC code as the Lost Caverns Commander set. Your odds are not 1/20, though, because there’s three rarities. One card, Chimil, the Inner Sun, is a new LCI card and the rest are reprints.

Let’s have a table, one that lists the rarity of each of your options, and your odds. Remember that you get one card PER BOX, so the numbers here are going to look different compared to the number of packs needed later in this article.

I note that mythics are twice as hard to get as rares, which are twice as hard to get as uncommons. I like when there’s a clear progression, but it doesn’t always track this way. Just appeals to the symmetrist buried deep in my skull. Fifty boxes is 600 packs, and that’s second on today’s list of ‘how damn rare are these rares?!’

In each Collector Booster, there are slots for subsets of cards. We’re going to start around the middle, with the foil Uncommons and their Special Guests, and then jump two slots to the Commander cards, going upwards on this graphic:

Pitiless Plunderer is the main uncommon I care about, but others may have some impact as well. So I’ve arranged a table for these uncommons, and sure enough, the Special Guests are a tough card to open, even at uncommon:

Next, let’s look at the Commander cards, which covers some of the legends and new cards.  We get a slot of alternate frames, with both foils and nonfoils present in the same slot.

Note that the article doesn’t give separate stats for rares and mythics, so I’m forced to presume that they fall at equal rates. This sort of makes sense: rarity in the Commander lists is sort of irrelevant, and this includes what used to be the Jumpstart cards.  If we get data or an update that indicates otherwise, I’ll come back and edit this section with the new numbers.

Next up, a nonfoil Showcase or Borderless card, either rare or mythic. 

After that, a Jurassic World slot! Nonfoil, traditional foil, and Emblem variants all appear here at different rates, ranging from ‘pretty common’ to ‘holy guacamole that is mega rare!’

I’ve been tracking rarities for years, and 3800 is among the hardest pulls without getting into serialized cards. It’s analogous to the original Realms and Relics Surge foils, and slightly MORE rare than Human Sol Rings (xxx/900) were in the summer LOTR release.

Finally, a slot for Booster Fun variants:

The different variants of Neon Ink aren’t listed as how common they are in relation to each other. All we’re told is “Here are the colors as they appear in order from rarest to least rare: three-color, red, purple, blue, green, and yellow.” Yellow is the LGS’s version to give away, and should be the cheapest version by far. I would love to give you more specifics but they haven’t told us yet. Still, at under 1%, you’re looking at ANY Neon Ink about every 142 packs. (for specifically Mana Crypt or Cavern, it would be double that, 284)

One thing that jumps out at me is how close this distribution is to the model we used to get, that rares are always twice as common as mythics. They don’t have it in a straightforward model, at least not quite yet, but for this set, the math holds. 

The second thing I notice is that the foil REX cards are hard to pull at around 224 CB packs for a specific copy, but the Emblem foils are roughly as rare as the 900 serialized Human Sol Rings. These will end up super expensive. If you find some for preorder, I’d imagine a lot of the orders will get canceled.

Finally, let’s get a table in with some specific cards, and I’m skipping the Neon Ink variants because I’m not sure what the precise numbers are.

I hope these tables and figures make sense to you, and if they don’t, I strongly encourage you to reach out on the ProTrader Discord, hit me up on Twitter, or leave some comments. I’m happy to explain my methods. Good luck and open well!

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.