So it’s been about six months since March of the Machine came out, and that’s the timeline where I like to take stock of a set and evaluate what the prices have gone down to, what’s worth stocking up on, and what I’m glad I waited on.

Do remember that while I’m focusing on Commander use and eternal formats, MOM is legal in Standard for two more years. That’s a long time for new strategies and decks to emerge. 

For each card, I’m giving the price on the cheapest version, the most expensive and the number of decks on EDHREC that list the card. As always, I’m aware of the limitations of EDHREC data, as it’s got a tendency to loop on itself and it’s only the most plugged-in of users who bother to upload a deck. It’s good data, but not the be-all and end-all for this sort of thing.

City on Fire ($4 to $5, 31k decks) – Fiery Emancipation just got reprinted in the Enchanting Tales subset as a rare, down from mythic.It’s now a $3 card, when right before the reprint it was close to $30. There’s clearly a market for ridiculous enchantments that triple your damage output. City on Fire is easier to cast, thanks to Convoke, and we’ll see if having two versions available at once affects the prices. This sort of thing might well have become bulk, or nearly so, as we saw with Gratuitous Violence until the last couple of years. 

The other thing that’s worth mentioning is that the foils and nonfoils are very close in price. This means players don’t care which version they get, they just want a copy. When there is a bigger gap between versions, that means players are being more judicious, chasing the foils instead. In the modern day, with four versions of most cards, we usually see three of them bunched together and then the FEA/Showcase foil having a more premium price. That’s not the case here. 

Chandra, Hope’s Beacon ($4 to $9, 10k decks) – That gap is evident here, as the borderless foil is clearly the rarer and the basic versions are less than half the price. It’s interesting that this is so much more expensive than Double Vision, which as an enchantment is more robust than the Planeswalker.

Chandra’s other abilities are not to be trifled with, to be clear. In addition to the copying, you get mana, spell casting from exile, plus some big damage. Yes, she’s six mana but you get a lot for it and both the copying and the exiling are popular abilities in Commander.

Tribute to the World Tree ($6 to $8, 50k decks) – It’s been a while since a card premiered at a certain price and stayed at that price, barely moving up or down, but that’s what we’ve got here:

Someone decided early on that this was a $6 card and while it’s sold copies at $7 thanks to the Direct bump, the graph has stayed remarkably consistent. It’s one of the top inclusions from the set and only a very restrictive mana cost keeps this from kicking butt all over the place. It does two things all at once: draws you cards for the big things, and puts counters on the little things. Depending on your deck, you might want one or both of these effects. The popularity of this card has me thinking that it’s a great candidate to increase in price soon, but don’t look for this to light up Mono-Green lists anytime soon outside Commander.

Faerie Mastermind ($10 to $12, 43k decks) – Blessed few World Championship winners have made bad cards, and the Mastermind is good on a bunch of levels. First of all, we just got a couple of new Faerie toys plus some use in Standard, which is why we’ve left behind the low price of sub-$5:

It’s pretty easy to flash this in and draw a card in response to something an opponent does in any game of Magic. We’ve mostly learned that drawing cards is good, and there’s not much that’s better. 

He’s a Rogue, in case the Party is a thing or Prowl effects come back into vogue. Mainly, though, this is a fun reactive card in Standard and something really fun to use in Commander, where your generosity is not only greater for yourself, it’s a political tool up for negotiation. I can see this coming back down if it falls out of favor in Standard, but the Commander use will always be there.

Kami of Whispered Hopes ($0.75 to $4, 35k decks) – One of the rules for Commander deckbuilding is that if you want an effect, you want as many versions as possible for that effect. So if you build a Nekusar deck, you include effects like Underworld Dreams and Fate Unraveler. 

The Kami works on a similar axis, where if you’re in a +1/+1 counters deck, you want every effect that increases those counters. Plus, you get extra mana for it! 

As an uncommon, you’d normally be stuck at having a regular or a pack foil, but there’s a promo pack version that I’m advocating for. Only a couple of vendors have notable walls, and given the number of people who have these promo foils listed for $9 or $10, they are also believers that there’s nowhere to go but up for this card.

Etali, Primal Conqueror ($5 to $12, 35k decks, including 4k as Commander) – Not only is this Etali a roaring good time, giving you four spells for one casting, it’s remarkably easy to build. Stuff your deck full of ramp spells, as Etali gets killed a whole lot, and keep replaying the tops of their decks.

Etali is about to benefit from the Dinosaur hype, too, but there’s a weird thing happening with this card. The Showcase version, which highlights a medallion for each side, is sitting several dollars lower than the regular, something we haven’t seen since the Monster Manual versions of Baldur’s Gate. With the upcoming Lost Caverns and Jurassic Park subset, I fully expect Etali to go up, even the less-desirable Showcase version.

Ozolith, the Shattered Spire ($4.50 to $6, 32k decks) – As I said, a deck wants all possible versions of an effect, and this one gives a bonus and activates to get things rolling. And if you need to, just cycle it away!

It’s never really dropped in price from the early days, but the Commander demand plus the occasional sighting in Hardened Scales decks means that the long-term growth should be there. Picking up a few copies now, preferably of the FEA versions, should pay off nicely.

Invasion of Ikoria ($6 to $12, 27k decks) – The foil version is up $3 in the last six weeks and you’re rapidly losing your chance to get this at a reasonable price. Some decks can’t handle the ‘no Human’ aspect but generally speaking, you’re going to kick butt here. 

Sunfall ($3 to $4, 13k decks) – We’ve got no shortage of good board wipes in Commander, but the mass exile clause is powerful indeed, especially when you get a decent-sized token left behind. Being a bomb in its limited format probably helps here, but I’d be surprised if this ended up going much above $10 in the long term.

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.

Wizards may be turning off a lot of folks with the velocity of new cards, but the Warhammer 40K set taught them that we love Commander decks stuffed with new, thematic, and fun Commanders and cards. Every week, there’s a different Surge Foil from those decks that pops off in value, and that probably won’t stop for a while.

With Universes Beyond: Doctor Who, we’re getting a new formula for getting cards. Every new card can be had in regular frame nonfoil if you buy the Commander decks, but if you want shiny versions, or alternate frames, you have to go right to the Collector Booster. 

As a result, there’s some information out there regarding what you can open, and I’m here to turn that glimmer of light into a useful and focused beam.

One thing before the numbers: The original Commander decks had a code for how often a card was in the decks. If it was common, it was in all the decks. Uncommon was three decks, rare was two, and mythic-coded cards could only be found in one particular deck. That isn’t in use anymore, and with this set, everything is equally rare, even if coded as rare or uncommon.

Let’s begin with a discussion of the thirteen Serialized Doctors, who add up to 6591 unique cards. We’re told you have a less than 1% chance of opening such a card, and here’s the breakdown of how many total packs it takes to go from 1% to .05%.

So our estimates say that there’s less than 100k total CB boxes out there. Note that even at its rarest, WHO is getting less than a third of the 3.3 million CB packs made for the original LOTR release.

Just so you can see what we’re working with, here’s the set by rarity symbol: There’s 23 Commons, all reprints plus Planechase cards. Here’s the list of commons. The uncommons are a mix. Link to 33 new cards plus 30 reprints, 63 overall marked as uncommon. Rares are a mix as well. 222 total, 151 new, 71 reprints including several land cycles. Mythics are super weird. 5 for the set, that’s one display commander per deck and then Wedding Ring. I don’t know why it was the only other card marked as mythic.

Now, slot by slot, according to the Collecting Dr. Who article.

Slot #2 is dedicated to foil Doctors in the regular frame, of which there are 13. Exactly 10% of these are Surge Foil, which means you have these odds:

Slot #3 through #7 reprint one card from each deck. I’m basing my odds on the inclusion of basic lands, there’s anywhere from 6-11 of those in these decks. These are all regular frame and have the same 10% chance to upgrade to surge foil from traditional foil. Since basic lands aren’t specifically excluded here (as they are in other sections), I think they are potential pulls. If that changes, I will update this section.

That’s right, we’re already at some one in one thousand odds, so if you like regular frame surge foils, they will probably be pricey. However, each CB will have multiple paths to the same cards, if not very good ones.

Next up, we have Extended Art cards for six slots. 

Then we have a Surge Foil Wildcard, which could be any card that isn’t TARDIS framed or basic land. That total is close to 1100 cards, and so you have a 0.09% chance of getting any particular card from that slot. If there’s one million Collector Booster packs out there, which is a legit estimate based on the drop rate for Serialized Doctors, then you’re looking at 900 extra copies of each Surge Foil card from this slot. 

For the EA and TARDIS Surge Foils, that’s not a big deal, but for the regular frame Surge Foils, that nearly doubles the amount in circulation.

Finally, we have two slots dedicated to the TARDIS frames. The first is nonfoil, the second traditional foil with a 10% chance of Surge foil. That last slot is also where the serialized Doctors will show up. Both of these slots can have the same set of 30 cards in equal chances (3 uncommons, 23 rares, 4 mythics) no matter the printed rarity.

Yes, you’re reading this right. Surge Foil regular frame cards are more than three times rarer than Surge Foil TARDIS frame cards. 

Let’s summarize with a comparison of cards and drop rates.

My biggest takeaway is that the regular frame Surge Foils are easily the rarest pulls in the set, and there’s less than 2000 of each of those cards. 2000 regular frame Surge Foil Mind Stone, 2000 regular frame Surge Foil The Thirteenth Doctor. I don’t know that the market will figure this out right away, but this is why I crunch the numbers every set: to find the value that they hide in weird printing strategies. We know what the availability is for these cards, and we can estimate a few key points:

1. There are nearly twice as many of each reprint as the new cards when it comes to the EA frame. All the versions have that 71 vs. 132 number going on, and that should be in your mind when you see the prices they are listed at. 
2. Surge Foils in the regular frame are about 7.5 times rarer than Surge EA foils, and at most, have about 2000 copies in existence. 
3. The rarity symbol doesn’t matter on these cards. Once upon a time it did, but Displaced Dinosaurs is as hard to pull as a mythic rare.

I hope this helps inform your buying, and I trust you’ll crack packs responsibly!

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.

We’re going back to Ixalan pretty soon, and one of the themes we’re dealing with is Dinosaurs! This is a creature type that’s gotten some heavy support since the last time we were here, including reprints, new Etali, and still has one of the most amazing Commanders you can play in the species: Gishath, Sun’s Avatar, whose price has been climbing. It’s not a super popular Commander based on the stats we have available to us, but it’s such a neat and flavorful tribe I suspect that casual demand has soaked up a lot of copies over the six years since Ixalan.

It’s possible they give us something better than Gishath. I don’t know what it could be, perhaps something like The Ur-Dragon’s Eminence ability? A five-color Dinosaur isn’t really needed, as blue and black only have three of those creature type each. I strongly suspect there will be some form of reprint for Gishath too, I’d be selling any extras I have about now. 

Today, though, I want to talk about some cards that have excellent potential to pay off if Dinosaurs become a popular genre of deck. It’s not just Gishath, though that’s the best Commander if you’re playing a lot of the Dinos. These would be good in any Dino-Deck. Because of that, though, it’s also quite probable that one or more of these cards is reprinted in the main set, a subset, a Commander deck, etc. 

For each card, I’ve got the current price range, its current EDHREC usage (mostly the 12,000 Gishath decks listed on the site) and which versions I’d be going after.

Quartzwood Crasher ($3 to $6, 27k) – Every time I look at this card I wince, remembering how easy it was to lose to this in Limited games. Five mana for a 6/6 trample, and with the potential of getting tokens the turn you play it?? Plus, it snowballs out of control ridiculously quickly.

Honestly, I wish this was Legendary so I could build a Trample deck around it, but we play with the cards we have. This ticks all the boxes, being low-cost, high-impact and we even has a Foil Extended Art to go after. 

The relatively small gap between the regular nonfoils and the FEA versions tells me that players just want a copy, they don’t care which. If this isn’t reprinted at all, I’d definitely have more profit to be made on the nonfoils, but the final reveals and decklists will determine what I’m buying.

Forerunner of the Empire (50 cents to $5, 12,000 EDHREC) – There’s only 36 vendors with a foil copy, and only two of those have even four foils available. It was an uncommon back in Ixalan, so you’d think there would be plenty, but even a year ago it was a $3.50 foil. Slow and steady rise, no big spikes, just the market draining out slowly. I fully expect this to be in at least one of the Commander decks as a nonfoil, but I’m not ruling out some unexpected special version. 

If this is the only foil after the new set has come and gone, then it’ll double up quickly and could go a lot higher, especially if Enrage is back as the Dinosaur keyword. In the unlikely event that they reveal the whole set and there’s no versions of it anywhere, even regular copies could break $3.

Kaheera, the Orphanguard – Halo Foil – (25 cents to $200, 15k EDHREC, including 5k as Companion) – Kaheera has support for several creature types, and I had to blink three times when I saw that Dinosaur was randomly one of them. As a result, if the saurians get popular, the Halo foil versions from March of the Machine’s bonus sheet is where I’d want to be. 

Folks can get downright enthusiastic about Companions in Commander, and the Halo foils for Kaheera were not easy to pull, taking roughly 375 packs to nab a rare like Kaheera. No huge walls for the card, and being a premium version, it could jump from its current $7-$8 range up to $20. Serialized versions are between $250-$275 right now, and those could see a nice bump as well. 

Marauding Raptor ($2 to $5, 15k) – Again, this has high potential for a reprint in the Commander set or something, but this is absolutely a card to keep an eye on. There was some speculator interest when the return to Ixalan was announced, but we’re now down to under 30 copies on TCG Player and there’s no doubt that the card is amazing at what it does. This is another card that really wants Enrage to be back on the market, and if no new premium versions land, the Magic 2020 foils should break $15 pretty easily, maybe even $20.

Wakening Sun’s Avatar (fifty cents to $18, 13k decks) – This just got a reprint and an etched foil in Commander Masters, but it’s an all-star in Dino decks as you can recur this one-sided wrath pretty easily. It requires a recast from hand, yes, but you’ve got a lot of ways to bring it back to make that happen. 

There’s a whole lot of copies out there from CMM, so I think my target would be the etched foils. 

Polyraptor ($20 to $35, 13k decks) – Never reprinted, and as such an excellent anchor card for a Secret Lair or other subset, I expect there will be other versions of this card during our newest visit to Ixalan. This is more of a combo card, but players will dream. I’m also expecting some form of Enrage enabler to come along and help make this card into quite a beating.

Runic Armasaur ($4 to $6, 28k decks) – If you haven’t played with this card, it’s the sort of thing that makes eye go wide and jealousy become inflamed. It’s also never been reprinted, meaning it’s got a great graph:

Runic has all the traits you’re looking for in a spec like this: one long-ago printing, some interest to prove its chops, and part of a group that’s about to take off. Since there’s no super-premium version yet, we do have that risk, especially as this looks just like a Stegosaurus, but they can’t reprint this entire list on us.

Temple Altisaur ($3 to $12, 14k) – There was a surge on this one when the set was announced, but the prices have come back to earth. There is money to be made here, depending on its inclusion and what versions we get. Foils are probably safer, because this a very strong candidate for being a nonfoil in the Dinosaur Commander deck.

Thrasta, Tempest’s Roar – Borderless – ($1.50 to $4, 10k) – Finally, a pet card of mine. I have this in a deck and it makes me so dang happy when I play it, kill a planeswalker and still deal some damage to its owner:

Love the art, love the card. It’s a mythic from MH2, a set that got lots and lots of packs busted over the last couple of years, but this borderless foil doesn’t have any huge walls and is available under $4. Even fifty sales, one at a time, will get this into the $10 range, and if it makes a splash on one of the popular Commander shows, it’ll break $20.

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.

If you’re confused by an additional set of cards with the same set code and even more variations on the Lord of the Rings theme, you’re not alone. Wizards decided that the trip to the Undying Lands wasn’t ready to happen yet, and so decreed that on November 3rd, you’ll be able to buy Special Edition Collector Boosters, another round of Jumpstart boosters, and Scene Boxes.

Let’s talk about all of these, and what you might get, and how hard it will be to get those things. Additionally, we’re going to spend a little time discussing the ramifications of not just a reprinting of a premium product, but adding serialized versions and higher drop rates to such cards.

First of all, the Scene Boxes are sweet. You get six foil cards, knowing what they are on purchase, the matching art cards so you can enjoy the panorama, plus three set boosters. Anytime Wizards does ‘we guarantee you’re getting these cards’ I like it, as it makes everything simple for me. Do I want one of these cards? What’s the price? Sold, or not sold. Accompanying singles should be cheap and while these aren’t going to flood your local big box store, there will be plenty of these cards available.

The Jumpstart Vol. 2 is hopefully the last gasp for this particular product. Jumpstart was semi-phased-out of Wilds of Eldraine, but I can imagine that Vol. 2 of LOTR was finalized and printed before they made the decision to end this product line. I have to say that these cards have a lot of potential, and I won’t be shocked when some of them make a splash in tournaments or in Commander.

Both the Jumpstart and the Scene Box cards can be found in nonfoil editions (borderless for the Scene Box cards, extended-art for the Jumpstart cards) in the Special Edition Collector Boosters (hereafter shortened to SECBs), as they have their own slot and you’ve got good odds to pull what you’re looking for. There will not be a shortage of either.

Now, these SECBs are something impressive. There are no serialized Sol Rings, nor the 1/1 One Ring which Post Malone now owns. What we do get, though, is two different sets of serialized cards. Each is serialized to xxx/100, instead of 500 like others we’ve gotten, but not only are there 3000 serialized versions of the Realms and Relics, there’s an additional 2000 serialized trippy-music-poster versions of 20 mythics from the original LOTR set. 

So let’s get right to the math. We’re given a breakdown for each slot again, and with this knowledge, we’re also able to estimate how many SECBs have been created. Let’s do a little math!

We’re outright told that the chance of a serialized Realms and Relics, of which there’s 3000 total, is 0.2%. That is .002 as a decimal, and that means 1 in 500 packs, depending on what they rounded down or up to that 0.2%. 

If it takes 500 packs to get one, that means for the full run of 3000, we’ve got a print run of 1.5 million total. Nice, round numbers to work with going forward. We can even check this number against the other serialized, which is 0.1%. There’s 2000 serialized poster cards out there, and 2000/1,500,000 is 0.00133 (repeating) and that rounds nicely to 0.1%! We will come back to this 1.5 million number when calculating total amounts in play.

Then we get two slots with the same odds, though the outcome is foil or non-foil. Wizards helpfully gives us odds for each rarity, and then a number, so it breaks down real easy for the Showcase frame cards (e.g. Orcish Bowmasters and The One Ring).

The last three slots are the big money cards, with one exception. The landcycling commons in LOTR have proven to be good in Modern and Legacy, and if you haven’t tried them yet in Commander, you really ought to. There’s two slots for nonfoil commons, and then two slots for foil commons. Overall, you’re a smidge over 2% to get a nonfoil Lórien Revealed in the showcase frame and the same odds for a silver foil. Currently those are at $3 for nonfoil and $8 for foil, and now we’re getting a premium treatment. Especially for Lórien Revealed, I’d expect something like $5/$12, especially because the regular versions will be in print for a while but the SECBs are more limited.

In the third-to-last slot, we get Surge Foil Extended Art, which will be messing with the FEA treatment that was only accessible via the Sample Collector Boosters in the Commander decks. There’s 28 rares, 9 mythics, the exact same cards that were nigh-impossible to find in FEA are now going to be relatively common pulls.

The next slot has serialized Realms and Relics (30 cards, 0.2% overall), the regular surge foil Realms and Relics (30 cards, 12.6% overall), Surge Foil Uncommons (10 cards, 50% overall), Rares (5 rares, 11.7% overall), Mythic Rare (6 cards, 2.5%). Also, you have a crack at Surge Foil Borderless Rare lands (5 rares, 4.2% overall) and Mythic Rare (1 card, 0.4%) or a Scene Box Borderless Rare (20 cards, 16.7%) or Mythic Rare (4 cards, 1.7%).

Finally, the Hildebrandt slot. This has serialized poster cards, nonfoil posters, traditional foil poster cards, in addition to nonfoil and silver foil versions of the scenes that they illustrated. Half the time, this slot will gift you an uncommon from that grouping, and half of those uncommons will be nonfoil. 

Yes, half the SECBs will give you an uncommon, but this article promises that you will get a rare in one of the last two slots. One of these two slots will give you a rare or mythic, and the other an uncommon. These two slots are connected, so apparently there won’t be double-serialized packs out there, and neither will there be double-uncommon ones.

A table is needed to summarize the results here.

Yes, you’re reading that correctly. It’s about 1 in 20,000 packs to pull a Serialized Poster Sauron, the Dark Lord, and roughly 1 in 15,000 packs to snag a Serialized The Party Tree (The Great Henge) whereas other serialized cards were never more than 1 in 11,000 packs. Mainly this is because now there’s only 100 of each card, which is going to put a real strain on the whales of collecting, the type who have to have a full set of one of each serialized card.

The real betrayal here is the surge foil reprinting of the Realms and Relics subset. It’s not a new treatment, or new art, it’s the same damn cards, only about thirteen times more common. Last time, it was about 1 in 3800 packs and now it’s more like every 238 packs. 

Let’s go for some real numbers here. We know that the first LOTR run had about 3.3 million Collector Boosters, and given the odds, there were just under 900 Surge Foils of any given card. Now, though, with a print run of 1.5 million but drastically increased odds, we’re about to add another 6300 copies or so into the market. 

Yes, that presumes we purchase and open every copy, but the ratio is still telling. We’re going to see prices fall hard and fast on these. There’s not room for ‘oh snap, originals were crazy rare, we’ll have to see if they hold a price,’ which is what’s going to happen with the original FEA cards that were Commander deck only. Now there will be Surge foils of those cards available, with the EA treatment, and it’s hard to imagine those prices hold when there’s a ton of cards with the same frame and art, just a cooler foiling.

I don’t think Wizards has done a one-two punch like this before. We’ve had reprints, even reprints one after the other, but this is our first taste of something that’s likely to happen again: reprints of special treatments. Buckle up, because these are about to be some wild times.

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.