Monday has another SL drop, this time focused on The Hobbit. We’ve got food, ghostly Hobbits, and Smaug’s treasures. Lots of fun stuff to buy, but keep in mind that there’s two more big drops happening in the next month.

September 1 brings the Perfectly Normal Superdrop, with Lo-Fi Study Beats girl, Marvel themes, and who knows what else. Two weeks after that on September 14, Masters of the Universe cards arrive! We have to plan, we have to be prepared, and now we have to plan for the one in front of us.

For now, five Hobbit-themed drops. Let’s look at prices, comparisons, and make plans. 

I’m giving you the EDHREC data, but keep in mind the two big problems with this dataset: First, because a lot of people upload a preconstructed deck as-is or with just a few changes, anything that’s been in a couple precons will have really inflated numbers. Second, only a small percentage of players bother to upload decks. The data is a useful reference point, but it is not the be-all and end-all for such data.

I’m also giving you the pricing on premium cards when it exists, even if it’s just pack foils. I’m leaving out the big outliers, like serialized and Pro Tour promos, and sticking with the versions that a new SL would be competing with.

Quantity beats everything else, but we’ve seen a lot of drops with a surprising amount of stock printed. The quantity directly impacts the speed at which it will get sold out, and how quickly the price goes wild. That quantity matters more than most of the other qualities of a drop, so we’ll see how many of each are available. Normally, I’d expect that the He Who Walks Unseen drop, being more pricey and special, would have a lower print run, but we’ve seen a couple of special drops be printed to greater amounts than expected so we’ll have to find out the fun way.

Secret Lair x The Hobbit: Second Breakfast and Beyond

Seven’s a good number for the Food decks, as those decks make many, many food tokens. This is the second food-only drop, behind the Oishii ones, and that was sold for a lower starting price. This is full price, and initially, I was pretty low on this drop. But surprisingly, there’s a lot of $4 food tokens out there, so I don’t hate this drop, but I’m still not buying it. Here I think I like the nonfoil more, just to get in cheaper, but while I don’t loathe the drop, I don’t think it’s worth it unless you’re going to have all seven tokens. 

Secret Lair x The Hobbit: Over the Edge of the Wild

Mischief is kind of a trap here, as the etched Commander Masters is $30 and the Planar Chaos pack foil is $40, but the Breaking News foil is under $10. The Breaking News frame is one of players’ least favorite looks for a card, but this Gollum version is going to be lucky to be a $15 foil.

This is the first premium version of Tocasia’s Welcome, so I’ll be in for this at Dump Week, but I’m surely not buying full-price Lairs for it.

Secret Lair x The Hobbit: Smaug’s Spoils

These cards have been printed a whole bunch, and this is decent. The art is good, and I think the growth should be slow but steady, but the quantity printed is key here. If it sells out first, this has a lot of potential, and there’s a whole lot of decks that would love a premium matched set of the big four staples. 

The other borderless Thought Vessels are nicely priced, as are borderless foil Fellwar Stones, so I see this as a slow gainer if it doesn’t sell out fast. 

Secret Lair x The Hobbit: Desolation

Diabolic Intent has an Invocation and a LTR Hildebrand premium version that are both close to $100, but there’s a lot of regular frames down at $20 and a foil Final Fantasy version at $35.  You’re placing a pretty big bet on the DI to hold the value for the Lair, and if this was the first printing, I’d be enthusiastically in, but there’s a lot of this card already out there.

That said, this art style generally does well over time. So I think this is worth buying, with the hope that this is a Lair that sells out quickly. Black-and-white Lairs often take a lot of time to increase in value.  

Secret Lair x The Hobbit: He Who Walks Unseen

So this is the last Lair they spring on us, and we don’t have videos of this, but the pictures seem to indicate that we’re getting some kind of foil with a ghostly outline of Bilbo doing stuff with the Ring on. We’re leaning pretty heavily on the comboriffic Curiosity and Windfall here, and that’s tricky. Windfall has the Eddie version that’s pretty expensive from a quick-to-sell Lair and a lot of denial combos. The Ghostbusters version of Windfall is not even $15. Curiosity’s most expensive version is the Lil’ Giri printing, with a regular frame but from a convention-only Lair. The Enchanting Tales foil was printed at Uncommon, no Confetti version, and is under $5. 

I want to think that this is a very limited drop, especially because it’s $60 and foil-only, but with the higher print runs lately, especially for Universes Beyond, I’m hesitant. I’ve got many Deadpool Pool Party foils telling me to think this through. I think this is the only Lair I’m going to try hard for, mainly because the first time they do a certain look, that almost always hits. Looking at Pool Party again

Additionally, this Lair is left out of all the bundles. The Non-Foil bundle has zero discount, and the All-Foil bundle has $10 off. The Everything bundle, incredibly misnamed as it leaves out the Walks Unseen Lair, is going to be $260, which is a total of about $20 off buying one of (nearly) everything. Spending $199 gets you a sweet Arcane Signet, something I’ll definitely be picking up when they get dumped on the market.

As a result, I’m talking myself into the He Who Walks Unseen Lair, and out of the rest, I’m mainly into Smaug’s Treasures. I can’t bring myself to buy the Food, the claymation Lair has only the Welcome that I’ll go for at Dump Week, and I’ll dabble slightly in the Desolation Lair, but that might be all about Dump Week too.

I’m also trying to recover from other buys recently, so my spending is a touch constrained. If you want to discuss what I’m buying, and convince me to change my mind, come over to the ProTrader Discord and let’s chat!

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.

Welcome back to the long-running, incredibly-complete series where we take Wizards’ obfuscations about drop rates and give you a clear answer to the question everyone wants: How hard is it to open the card I want from a Collector Booster? Or to put another way, what are my chances in these super-expensive packs?

It’s a well-known tidbit that you should never open packs, they are almost never worth it. The theory is extra-true in the modern day, where the Expected Value of a Collector Booster box is way out of line with the amount it takes to buy that box. 

Hype and FOMO are carrying the day, and if you’re feeling the heat, let’s go over some stone cold numbers, as we know the absolute truth for almost every card you could open. Let’s get to it!

All of the information on these tables is taken from Wizards’ own posts, mostly the Collecting article that tells us the drop rates for each type of card in a Collector Booster. If you know the percentage, and how many cards fall into that category, a little division and then taking a reciprocal gets us to the answer. 

Let’s start with nonfoils of Booster Fun treatments, which take up two slots in the pack, meaning that we get twice as many. Could also be some lovely spec opportunities in future too. 

This generally lines up well with other nonfoils, but a couple of things jump out here. First of all, more than half the nonfoils opened in these slots will be Extended Art or a Scene card. Taken a step further, combine those categories with Box Toppers and Dragon Hoard and you’re at more than 80%. There’s gonna be a lot of those cards out there.

The individual Box Toppers are gonna be a tougher pull than people anticipate, because there’s forty of them. Close to twice as difficult to nab in nonfoil as some of the mythic variants, we’ll have to see what the prices end up at.

Now for the Booster Fun foils: 

We’ve got four categories where specific cards can be more than 300 CB packs to get opened, where MSH has only two categories like that and only the Silver Scroll foils from Secrets of Strixhaven were over 300. Mythic Scrolls were 650 packs each, where the rares were about 324 packs.

So in terms of pure statistics, Surge Foil Box Toppers, Surge Foil Mythic Book Covers, Surge Foil Mythic Rare Dragon Hoard and Traditional Foil Dwarven Language cards are roughly as hard to open as Rare Silver Scroll Foils. There’s a lot of other factors at play, so don’t go confusing price with the pack odds, but if you want to know equivalencies, there you go.

I’m interested in how the prices settle out on the Box Toppers, too. We know the relative drop rates for the nonfoil and the Surge Foil, both of which are in the Collector Boosters. The unknown is how many of the Traditional Foils will be opened, since you get one of those per Play Booster box/CB box. The math says it’s roughly $6,800 worth of cards to open to get one specific Traditional Foil (given $170/box and 40 boxes) but only $6,300 for a nonfoil and $12,800 worth of product to get the Surge Foil. Will the market prices reflect these rates? Likely not, but I can’t predict mass psychology.

Finally, let’s talk about the big bad of the set. Smaug the Magnificent is the headliner, the chase, the one you want to open above all else. We’re told that roughly 500 of these bad boys were put into circulation, and with that number, we can start doing some estimating. 

We know for certain that the first Lord of the Rings print run for Collector Boosters was 3.3 million packs, and for the Holiday Edition, that’s 1.5 million, based on the numbers they told us at the time. They no longer give us enough specifics to get that number (and that’s quite deliberate on their end) but that’s where we can start estimations. If the print run for The Hobbit is the same as the summer LOTR, then you’re looking at one golden Smaug every 6,666 packs, or 555.5 boxes of Collector Boosters. If you think the print run is equal to the smaller Holiday Edition, then it’s every 3,333 packs, or 278 boxes. We don’t have hard numbers (if you know the actual print run, that’s wonderful information to share) so your guess is as likely as mine.

Under duress, I’d put the number somewhere in between, so it’ll take around 4,000 packs, maybe 4,500, but I have to reiterate that I don’t have an ironclad set of numbers to work with. The drop rate is incredibly low, and with Magic collectors hitting quite the fever pitch, I fully expect the first Smaug on the open market to go for $35,000 or more. Vendors are offering mega-bounties, as they have buyers lined up to pay even more. 

So there you have it, a comprehensive list of the drop rates for every card type in Collector Boosters. If you want to know about more niche things like uncommons and such, drop in on the ProTrader Discord and I’ll give that a look for you. Good luck in your packs!

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.