Final Fantasy is out this weekend, and that’s the start of a wild time in Magic finance. We’ve never seen prices like this for the premium products, on top of the markup Wizards was already frontloading in.
Given the influence of outside collectors, I don’t feel great about recommending cards right now. If you want some of the really chase stuff, I still think you should wait a week or two before moving in.
What I do want to talk about is a phenomenon I’ve noticed when it comes to Secret Lairs. I’ve been looking over some recent lairs that sold out and didn’t, and there’s a trend that may or may not change how I approach my budget for such Lairs.
Come with me and explore the idea of Dump Week.
The core idea here is that when a drop sells out, there is a large group of people who want to get their profit margin out as fast as possible, so they can re-invest in the next drop or whatever else they are going to do. Sometimes, they are selling the sealed drop for something like $45 or $50, but that’s barely enough to cover the taxes, fees, and shipping.
The singles, however, represent a very different opportunity. Let’s start with a relatively recent example: Counterspell from the Spongebob Internet Sensation drop.
Like most cards that are released, the initial pre-order prices are crazy high, and then as the number of copies in circulation grows, people (both vendors and individuals) get their cards in hand and sell the extras. Which is good, as it looks like people were getting about $13 per foil copy. Within a month, that was up to $20 a copy, and it’s crept upwards a bit more since then, into the $23-$25 range.
This is one data point, but it’s got me thinking: If I know which lairs sold out, that means I can know when Dump Week is going to be. And if I know that, I should be able to get in very cheap on the most desired singles.
And as an add-on to that hypothesis, that I might be able to explore in the future: Should I focus the money I was spending on sealed Lairs on the most in-demand singles during Dump Week instead? For a lot of Lairs, the value is clearly there if I can get them at cost, but even if I miss out on a Lair, can I make good money on singles too?
Before I can have an answer, though, we need to do some research on other examples. I’m going to work chronologically backwards, looking at the Lairs that sold out (mostly) to see where we are at on this idea.
One of the cards that got me thinking on this path is the raised foil Underworld Breach, from the Vroooooom! Lair that didn’t, and still hasn’t, sold out. I put the Breach as a card to watch this week on MTG Fast Finance, because even though it’s banned basically everywhere, it’s a low-supply $40 card that will cost $100 to get the Lair which contains it. Seems like a decent formula for a card to be a hold for about a year till it hits $75.
The graph hasn’t started to rise yet, but there’s other factors to consider. It’s a new price point and foiling type, it hasn’t sold out, and there isn’t a lot of demand for it. I don’t think it’s a good indicator of the factors I want to look at, but it’s a data point I want to be aware of, in case my supposition is wrong.
Another card I’ve picked recently is Deadpool’s Deadly Rollick:
This stings a little, because I picked it at $17 and it’s gone to $15 since. I still believe in the card, though. We can see Dump Week happening right away, as the price falls like a rock, then starts to rebound, and then it careens up and down some. If this wasn’t quite so recent, then we may have had a chance to see a smoother overall graph.
Gary the Snail as Toxrill is exactly what I’m looking for here. Immediate dive, recovered quickly, has trended down a little since that big recovery but still on point for the pattern I’d like to find. This is all from people upgrading their current Commander to the cartoon art, though, and that’s not a huge growth market.
Swan Song in Rainbow Foil, though, is a fantastic example of what I want to find. Dumped hard the first week down to $24 or so, and up about $10 in the four months since, with no sign of slowing down. This was a Lair that didn’t sell out immediately in English foil, too, but the quantity dumped that first week was great enough to push the price down nicely. If I can pick out the cards most likely to drop and then recover, this should work out very profitably.
Flawless Maneuver is the right set of conditions, but the graph isn’t as, well, flawless. The first week, it took a dive, but fell a bit further still. I can’t believe I didn’t ever pick this card when it was a $7 foil. Still, it demonstrates the concept that even if I missed out on the Marvel drop, as lots of people did, I could have made great money by picking up $7 foils.
Not every Marvel card has this growth pattern, but we’re not expecting that. We’re looking for the ones that got really cheap as the market got flooded, and then they rebounded. This is going to happen faster with staples, and slower for cards with lesser adoption rates. Another great example, Wolverine’s version of The Ozolith:
It went straight down to $25 the first week as people sought to list theirs and sell immediately, but it’s been pure growth since then. Not all the cards have shown this pattern, or this amount of growth, but I think the concept is sound.
So with that in mind, let’s look at a couple of examples in the Summer Superdrop that have sold out, and as a result, there’s one big wave of inventory to land. We’re looking for staples, preferably without special versions, and we’re looking to get in cheap. We don’t know how cheap these will be, as they haven’t all arrived yet. I think there’s a couple of cards that meet the criteria, but only time will tell if I’m right.
Since these are all from the summer superdrop, they don’t have a big chunk put online yet, but they should in the next couple of weeks. My price predictions are pure speculation, so while I’m planning on buying these cheap, I’m fully willing to admit that the actual buy price might be quite different.
I think that as the most popular card in this drop, and a gorgeous piece of art in its own right, this version of Zulaport should get there. It helps that there’s another SL version already, but that’s from 2020, a different era of Secret Lair. Hopefully this gets below $10 in foil, we’ll see.
The cheapest nonfoils of Rift in RVR were about $37 last year, and they are pushing $45 now. The original copies can be had at NM for under $35, indicating people like the new art. The Final Fantasy version should be one that people are looking to dump quickly and extract fast profit, so I’m hoping for nonfoils to go near $25 and foils for $40. If these don’t get cheap, I’ll have to evaluate again.
Toxic Deluge gets a lot of play, and there’s already a borderless foil going for $32. It doesn’t have the hype that Final Fantasy has, and while this doesn’t have a super popular character on the art (Kefka is an iconic villain, that 8-bit laugh haunted my dreams) I am counting on the number of people who play the card to help this recover and get expensive.
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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