We’re a couple weeks into the  Universes Beyond: Lord of the Rings set, and hype is about to flip over to the Commander Masters release at the beginning of August. LOTR has done some interesting things which I’ve written up already, but today I want to give you my long-term and short-term plans for the set. There’s some dynamics at play that might not be on your radar, and these will inform your buying.

First of all, let’s talk longevity. The hype cycle is about to move on to Commander Masters, and then Wilds of Eldraine, and then we’ll get the information about next year’s releases, and so on, and so on…

You might be thinking that LOTR is a product with a short turnaround time. That’s not what will play out. Aaron Forsythe, director of Magic R&D, has said that this product will be in print for an extended amount of time, in addition to the holiday release that’s planned. (More on that in a minute.)

So what I’m expecting is a pattern much like Modern Horizons 2, a product that wasn’t the draft format for a long time, but had a steady supply of cards pushed into the market for a very long time. Fetches are the cheapest they’ve been since they were in Standard, and we’re talking OG Zendikar Standard here:

I know that graph isn’t perfect, but we’re going over data from 2011, and it gets tricky on that sort of timeline. 

I bought some retro foil fetchlands more than a year ago, expecting them to appreciate, and instead, they’ve gone down even more! That’s the effect that a constant flow of product has, and it’s why I’m not going to spec on any LOTR cards for some time…with one exception.

If you want cards for personal use, in Cube, Modern, whatever, go ahead and get those. You’re going to get good mileage and enjoyment out of them, so go ahead and get what you need/want. Also because of this timeline, I’m going to vote against buying the full borderless panorama scenes, unless you’re setting it up for just yourself. There will eventually be a market for these scenes, but buying in now is super early. Be more patient, and it’ll cost you a lot less.

My exception, though, is The One Ring itself. We’re getting a glut of these right now, and I’m expecting to get at least one more special version in the Holiday edition. The gift bundles are just landing, and that’s going to add a lot of copies…but this is also an extremely good Commander card, and when a card is taking over Modern AND Commander, watch out for its price.

The One Ring is going to be a staple until it’s banned, which probably means it’ll be good forever. I don’t think I’ll have a good window to get in cheaply before the Holiday edition arrives in November, but sometime around Valentine’s Day, after the end-of-year sales and such, I’ll be ready to evaluate what copies I want to buy. Still too many unknowns about that set to make firmer plans as yet.

Speaking of the Holiday release, a new frame was revealed way ahead of time, and that makes me really pause on LOTR cards at the moment, because we’re getting a mix of old and new, it seems, plus a new Showcase frame. That much uncertainty makes me want to be patient, have plans but be flexible with those plans.

If we knew that it would be a completely new set, then that would clear up my plans, but we’ve been given very little information about the set and what is in it. We do know that there will be a new set of scenes, even coming with a frame for displaying those cards together. Since we don’t know the cards or the pricing, it’s hard to get too excited, because if we get art cards for display plus the actual game-use cards, those prices will get quite low indeed.

I’ve written a lot about the foil extended art cards only available in the Sample Packs, and unless you’re buying in significantly below TCG or Ebay’s listed prices, I can’t tell you to buy these for long-term growth. If you want a card for your deck, get it, but I have a hard time thinking that these will go up or down significantly. In eight months, we might see prices a bit lower, but the quantities are so low that the usual pattern of undercutting each other won’t really apply.

Again, the Sample Packs come with the Commander precons, so now that the big operations have gone through their allotment, they are unlikely to hit a big batch of those special cards. The main way that more copies will come on the market is from Commander players who buy the deck and decide to sell the card rather than keep it and put it into a deck. Greed is a powerful motivator, and for a lot of folks, it’s a no-brainer to sell a card for $60 or more that you opened in your $60ish Commander precon.

Finally, the Realms and Relics subset is a strong ‘wait and see’ right now. All three versions are getting cheaper as time passes, and as this set stays in print, the nonfoils, the traditional foils, and the surge foils are all going to trickle downwards in price. I’m very excited to pick up some of these cards at cheap prices, but the key is being patient for the bottom of the market. 

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.

It’s here, it’s here, thank goodness the precious has arrived fully!

However, as I wrote about last week, there are some really specific things going on with this set that are outside the normal experience, and it’s worth going over the details here. There’s money to be made as well!

So let’s talk about the choices Wizards made here, and how different the situation is with Foil Extended Art (FEA) cards from Universes Beyond: Lord of the Rings.

In most sets, FEA is a treatment given to the cards that didn’t get the Showcase treatment. For this set, Lord of the Rings, the showcase is a Ring-centric frame, like this:

It’s a neat l;ook, works well with the stuff that’s going on, and while it’s a little plain, it makes a lot of sense for the set. The Script around the edge is probably pretty sweet in foil, too.

For this set, we also have Borderless cards that are part of a Scene:

Generally speaking, in past sets, if a card didn’t get a special version, it would get an Extended Art version, where the art from the regular frame version would be extended to the left and right, keeping a border on top and bottom:

It’s not uncommon for a card to have an EA frame as well as some other special version. In Modern Horizons 2, there were several versions of fetchlands: Original, EA, Etched Foil, and Retro frame.

For Lord of the Rings, there’s an additional wrinkle with the EA cards: foils are not in the Collector Boosters as usual. Instead, the FEA versions can only be found in the two-card Collector Booster Sample Pack that comes with Commander preconstructed decks. I gave a mathematical breakdown of what your odds are for pulling specific cards last week, but the tiny numbers of FEA cards in circulation have me looking for more data. If you’ve opened ten or more of these packs and happened to write down exactly what you got from that mini-pack, hit me up on the Discord or on Twitter.

Since last week, I’ve been scouring ebay, TCGPlayer, most of the big sites for FEA cards and I’ve mostly come up blank. I preordered some on TCGPlayer, but more than half of those have been canceled on me, stating they don’t have the card after all.

The big operations will crack precons for selling the singles, but it’ll be hard for the precons to keep any value that way and the Sample Packs have a lot of cards in there that are repeats of cards already in the Collector Boosters. I watched a YouTube video with 80 packs being opened, and they got four foil mythics: Two of them were FEA versions of ‘face commanders’, which are the eight cards already in Collector Boosters. One was a Foil Borderless Scene card (also in those boosters) and there was a single FEA Palantir of Orthanc in that stack. 

This set is already a lottery-ticket dispenser with the special Rings and the Surge foil Realms and Relics, they didn’t need to add in the FEAs this way but here we are, with TCGPlayer having no FEA versions (yet) of most of these cards, or if there are any, they are at absurd prices.

Complicating this is that the majority of players who buy a preconstructed Commander deck aren’t going to sell the Sample Packs cards online. They will open the bonus pack, get a sweet foil, and look for a deck to put that card into, or perhaps pop it into a binder for trading. It won’t go on the usual sales sites, lowering the available quantities even further.

So in these first weeks, we’ll want to pay attention to the cards whose only premium version is FEA. If there’s an FEA and a Borderless/Showcase, I’ll notice it but players will have a clear choice. For instance, Delighted Halfling has a FEA and a Borderless Scene. The FEA has sold consistently over $40, and the Scene version in foil sells for a dollar or two more than the regular nonfoil. Given the card’s popularity, I’ll be watching, but I’m leery of a $40 card the first weekend turning into the $70-$80 I need for a reasonable profit after taxes, fees, and shipping.

FEA The One Ring is going to be really rare. Remember that The One Ring comes in bundles, so copies of the card will be all over the place, along with the Scene version, but FEA is going to be the most expensive version for quite a while.

Let’s get granular here about specific cards. Wizards has released the official list of what has an FEA and what doesn’t.

What does:

Now, here’s the table for the cards that do not have Extended Art versions:

It appears, according to TCG and other sites, that these are all in such low quantities that it’s hard to be sure that foils of all of these actually exist. I know of the preordering I did, none of the cards from Jumpstart or the Starter decks were fulfilled. I’ll update this article as needed throughout the weekend if I get reports that these foils exist. It’s quite possible that only Main Set cards got FEA treatments done, and those are mixed in with other foil variants in the Sample Packs.

The small quantities and the difficulty opening one, combined with the range of changes, is also probably causing a fair amount of mislabeling and/or incorrect inventory. People who open a lot of Collector Boosters but don’t read up about the drop rates might think, “Oh yeah, we get a handful of FEA cards every set” but those aren’t going to pop up here, leading to cancellations.

Those 25 Main Set rares and Mythics are the cards I’m especially keeping an eye on. The assorted ‘Surge Foils’ might become targets once we have more data, or perhaps an announcement. Mithril Coat is worth playing alongside Hammer of Nazahn, or maybe replacing it completely. Elven Chorus is a card just about every Green deck ought to play. Horn of the Mark is a draw engine for aggressive decks, just the thing to keep the aggression flowing, and so on.

The big caveat here is that if you plan to get some FEA cards and resell them for a higher price, you’re going to have to move fast. The Holiday Release will have at least one new frame, but also might include FEA cards, putting more into circulation. The cards I’ve preordered, I’m planning on turning over before August is over, just to avoid any potential reprint risk. It may turn out to be fine, but we won’t know till it’s announced or leaked, and then it’ll either go crazy or drop like a rock. I don’t want to be holding rocks.

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.

Buckle up, people, because we’ve got a lot to talk about. Every set, Wizards gives us some information, and from that information, we can calculate very specific ratios and odds for what we can open out of Collector Booster packs.

So let’s get to it, and insert your own ‘find the precious’ joke here.

First of all, the whale in the kiddie pool. The One Ring (001/001) is the first serialized singleton in Magic’s history. There’s a couple other exceedingly rare, or one-of cards, in Magic’s history but those are prizes and giveaways. This time, someone’s going to open it. 

We’re outright told in the Collecting Lord of the Rings article that there’s less than a 0.00003% chance of opening the card. In math terms, that’s less than 0.0000003. If you remember reciprocals, that’s handy here as that decimal is also expressed as 1/3,333,333 and that’s how many packs we’re talking. 

Granted, there’s a ‘less than’ in that sentence, so it could be that there’s 3.5 million Collector Booster packs that are eligible. Or four million. We’re going to use the 3.3 million as a known figure, and know that the odds aren’t going to get better, just potentially worse. Wizards likes to be cagey about its actual sales numbers to the public, but this 3.3 million is a helpful guide for future sets.

So one pack in 3.3 million will have The One Ring. There’s three other serialized cards: Sol Ring with Elven art, Dwarven art, and Human art. Respectively, there’s 300 copies, 700 copies, and 900 copies. We know how many copies there are, and we know there’s at least 3.3 million packs, so we can estimate how many packs it would take to get one of those serialized Sol Rings.

That’s some long odds, but if Sam and Frodo could do it, don’t give up hope! Someone’s going to open these, and claim quite the windfall. 

Let’s talk for a moment about what we can get in terms of special treatments. Last week I wrote about the Box Toppers, and how every box gets a traditional foil. In Collector Boosters, those can show up in nonfoil in one slot, and Surge Foil in the final slot.

There are three special versions of LOTR cards: The Showcase Ring frame, the Borderless Scene cards, and Extended-Art cards. Every card has at least one of those, except for the Sagas, which exist only in regular frame foil and nonfoil. In the last slot in a Collector Booster, you can get any of these cards:

Yes, you’re reading that right. Surge foil Box Toppers are going to be slightly more rare than Human Sol Rings. Given 3.3 million packs, there’s approximately 867 of each Surge Foil Box Topper. 

Of course, these aren’t serialized Surge Foils, and that’ll keep the prices lower. There’s also some less appealing choices in the list, such as a Thorn of Amethyst, that will mess with folks’ perception of what these prices should be. 

Here’s one thing that’s missing from that slot: Foil Extended-Art cards. Wizards hasn’t had a problem shoving all sorts of cards into one slot before, but this time, FEA cards from the main set and the Commander product aren’t going to be in the Collector Boosters. There’s slots for non-foil EA treatments, both main set and the Commander cards, but FEA got left out of these packs. 

Instead, they’ve been added to the Collector Booster Sample Packs, the two-card packs found inside of Commander precons. Here’s what’s officially in those: “a 2-card Collector Booster Sample Pack (contains 1 Traditional Foil or nonfoil special treatment card of rarity Rare or higher and 1 Traditional Foil special treatment Common or Uncommon card).” 

We know from the Collecting article that there are 28 rares and 9 mythics from the main set in the EA treatment. The Sample Packs have everything from the last slot in a CB, minus the Box Toppers and adding in those 13 FEA rares and 5 FEA mythics from the main set. There’s a stack of rares and mythics with no FEA version at all.

With all the options in a Sample Pack, here’s how the data breaks down:

We don’t have the same estimates on how many Commander decks get made as we do for the number of Collector Boosters printed, but it’s still an intimidatingly small ratio to get that FEA mythic. 

With all that said, let’s come up with some relative rarities for individual cards/treatments: 

The biggest takeaway here is that Surge foils are crazy rare, and preorder prices bear this out. We should look for these to sell quickly, or at very high price points. 

Secondarily, we want to keep a close eye on the FEA cards from the main set that are only in the Sample Packs. Especially if there’s no other special version of the card, these foils are going to be opened quite infrequently. Prices might rise fast, and quantities will be low.

I hope all this math helps inform your buying, both of packs and of cards, and as always, if you have data you want to show me, please reach out on Twitter or our 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.