We were given a hint of Dominaria United, and there’s been some leaks, but the more notable news is that some Secret Lairs have shipped with Foil Extended Art Slivers!

If you’re new to that creature type, that’s okay. We haven’t gotten any new Slivers since Modern Horizons 1, so it’s been a few years since the tribe of tribes has gotten some love.

However, if we’re about to get new Slivers, the world is about to go wild.

So far, I’ve been able to find pictures of six Sliver cards, including their collector numbers:

617: Ward Sliver

628: Winged Sliver

646: Two-Headed Sliver

649: Horned Sliver

657: Tempered Sliver

668: Sliver Hive

This tracks with the usual arrangement of collector numbers: WUBRG order, with lands last. It’s those five colors, then multicolor, then lands. Secret Lair has been different, with collector numbers starting at lands and going sort of chronologically. The Left-Handed Lair started at 9999 and worked its way downward, for instance.

In terms of how many Slivers there might be, we’ve got a big frame. Before Ward Sliver, the last SL collector number we see is 609 for the Hawkins National Lab and then 676 for the Pyrite Spellbomb from the Fortnite lair.

The big deal here is that there’s a LOT of Slivers left to go…and also, not too many. If there’s a new round of Slivers, we know full well what happens to the existing ones: the prices go crazy. Let’s get into some examples.

Sliver Queen is on the Reserved List. We aren’t getting more. I don’t put it past Wizards to print Sliver King as WWUUBBRRGG and have some ridiculous way to make a horde of Sliver tokens, though. The graph here doesn’t do the spikes justice, as copies sold for just under $600 during the most recent spike last year.

However, being an already expensive Reserved List card is going to make the Queen go bananas again. Near Mint Copies are currently in the $275 range, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see NM Queens break $500 with a new Commander or a new batch of Slivers. Keep in mind that Sliver Queen has some interesting offshoots: The oversized Commander’s Arsenal version is more than $100 and the Duel Masters version should see a jump too.

But if you want to make money without buying high-end RL cardboard, we’ve got other options.

Sliver Overlord is at its lowest it’s been in some time, with all three printings in the $30 range. The Scourge foils with the old border are up there in price, but with so few copies moving around, I’d expect big jumps there. The other versions should at least hit $50, given that Overlord has always been the most logical Commander for the tribe, given those two amazing abilities.

It’s entirely possible that for minor Slivers, that we get a FEA version tossed into Secret Lairs. I’m inclined against the big ones being in there, because we already got Overlord and Hivelord, but most of the useful ones will possibly make an appearance. 

The First Sliver and Sliver Hivelord are pretty safe, I think. Both are wonderful inclusions in the deck and are worth evaluating in their premium versions. The First Sliver in retro foil at $22 is the most appealing, but there’s also etched versions out there too. I definitely like the retro versions over the pricier original MH1 versions in foil, but the big risk is both the SL yet to come and what version might be coming in Dominaria itself.

Sliver Hivelord should be pretty safe, as there’s already been a SL version in the Thomas Baxa Lair. The cheapest foil version of Hivelord is the SL version, as the M15 version is $100 and will go crazy indeed in the new wave of Slivers. Right now there’s a few foil SL versions under $20, but it ramps pretty quickly to $25 and beyond.

Lavabelly Sliver as a MH2 retro foil is probably not going to get a reprint, but Cloudshredder Sliver in retro foil as part of Time Spiral Remastered is much safer. The TSR print run is done, we’re not getting more and frankly, we didn’t get a huge amount of what there was. TCG has only 38 foils listed for the retro foil, most in the $20 range, and considering what abilities you get, most Sliver decks want to have a copy.

It’s worth mentioning the FNM Crystalline Sliver too. There’s not a lot of this available, and Shroud is an ability that can have downsides, like no equipment or untapping. Still, if the wave breaks, I wouldn’t be shocked if this 20-year-old FNM promo broke $100.

I do not think Morophon, the Boundless would end up in five-color Sliver decks. While it’s a neat trick, it’s a lot of mana to pay for not a lot of effect. What I am very interested in, though, would be other tribal enablers. Guardian Project is a great one, but don’t overlook things like Herald’s Horn and my favorite for Slivers: Reflections of Littjara. 

Reflections is dirt cheap right now, both in FEA and the bundle version with alternate art, but Slivers more than most other tribes would really benefit from doubling each one that comes into play, since so few of them are Legendary. Plus, doubling up on static effects or ETB abilities gets out of hand real quick. Dormant Sliver is a strong contender to be an EA inclusion, but if you want to really get nuts with the card drawing, you want Kindred Discovery. 

I don’t think the current price of $6 is the bottom for this card, either. We’re on a good track, but in terms of a long-term spec I fully expect this to dip to $5, but with every tribal deck that can play blue, this should be one of the first inclusions. Not only does it trigger with tokens, there’s no size restriction (such as Temur Ascendancy or Garruk’s Uprising) and if you run out of things to play, then attack and draw some more cards! 

While I’m leaving out mention of most of the possible SL inclusions as FEA versions, there’s one Sliver that rises above the rest for me and deserves special mention: Hibernation Sliver. This stupid card is so dang backbreaking, as it allows Slivers to escape all sorts of situations. It’s an odd one, in that the original nonfoil from Stronghold is about $4 and the shiny Premium Deck version is a couple bucks more, but neither has a lot of copies online. This is the Sliver that every deck wants to have in play, an emergency exit in case of board wipe, and the one I’m going to buy up fast if it’s not reprinted.

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.

I am remaining steadfast in my stance that I’m not going to let Double Masters 2022 get me. I still want to buy some staples, and frankly a lot of those staples, but the prices are going to trickle downwards for a while yet. My research has indicated that six months is new the sweet spot, at least for the basic versions of cards. We’ll see if this holds true to premium versions.

What came out six months ago? Innistrad: Double Feature! I especially love the Silver Screen foils from this set, and the massive multiplier for these cards indicates how little of the product was opened and how rare these foils are. Most of these cards have a pretty low supply, mainly due to the lack of interest in the cards, but also because the set had double the rares and mythics. Each card is that much rarer, and especially in foil.

Also, there were no Collector Boosters of Double Feature. No increased drop rates of anything. Just draft booster packs and 1-3 foil rares per box, the way Richard Garfield intended!

So here’s a list of the cards that have the right intersection of low price, good demand, and limited supply.

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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.

We’re a couple of weeks into Double Masters 2022 and prices are all moving downwards from where they started, and that’s good! That’s the entire point of the set, frankly, to put more copies in circulation and let people buy cards that they couldn’t have gotten before this reprint set.

One of the hardest things to do at this moment is to be patient. We’ve only had the set in hand for a couple of weeks, and while distributors are certain that we aren’t getting any more huge waves of product, we’ve still got a lot of packs left to open. 

With that in mind, let’s talk about ‘the dead cat bounce’, and what it means to us as Magic speculators.

The phrase ‘dead cat bounce’ is a stock trading term, used to indicate a time where prices go up for a little while, even as the total trend is downwards. I think we are in the process of seeing this on Imperial Seal:

Yes, that’s a graph that’s trending upwards, but it’s also a graph that is only showing two weeks’ worth of data. Let me give you an example of this effect in a true staple, Doubling Season:

This is the Double Masters from 2020 edition, and you can see how the price has gone back up over time. The dead cat bounce is not the big jump in price just before April 2021. It is a small bump upwards at the very beginning of the graph. Let’s circle it, make it easier to see what I’m talking about:

 Yes, that’s a small bump near the beginning of a big price graph, but this is what I’m talking about. A small upward trend in the midst of an overall decline. Let’s zoom in on the circled area, and see what the graph looks like.

So yes, it went up $5 in a couple weeks, and then down again, bumped back up, and within a couple of weeks was at $35 and at $45. Of course, because Doubling Season is its own level of staple, it eventually recovered and got expensive again.

My point here is that the graph for Imperial Seal is not something that makes me want to buy in. I said that this card would get cheap, and I still believe it will. We know exactly what the card is, and what the usage for it will be, as a second copy/strictly worse version of Vampiric Tutor. That card, amazing as it is and widely available thanks to Eternal Masters into Commander Legends, is in 145,000 decks on EDHREC, where the most invested players make sure to optimize lists and share them out.

Because we’re all trying to make sure we buy copies before they get expensive, our very eagerness causes the Dead Cat Bounce. It’s not that Imperial Seal is three to four times better, but it is rarer. Seal is only listed in 28,000 decks, that’s a lot of people who are going to add Seal into their decks. That’s a lot of copies that never make it into circulation, and instead get put right into decks.

I still think Seal will go below $100, and possibly below $75, but every time we flinch and buy copies, it makes the decline take that much more time.

We can’t overlook price memory here either. This phenomenon has to do with a belief that a card is worth a certain amount, even if the actual price is different. Let me give you an example from early in my Magic career.

It’s 1995. I knew Ice Age would be coming out soon, though I didn’t know exactly when. There were no emails, no Internet, just Scrye magazine giving a price guide and vague release dates. Prereleases weren’t even a thing yet! So I stroll into my local shop and there at the front is a double-row box of Ice Age cards for a quarter each. I’m super stoked and start looking through these cards, thinking that I wanted to find new sweet cards for the decks I had, and there it is, staring at me: Counterspell.

To this point, Counterspell had been uncommon in Revised and earlier, but was something like $8 at the time. And here it was, mixed in with a bunch of quarter uncommons! So I frantically searched the box, and bought probably a dozen copies, all the ones I could find. 

Then I went and found my gaming friends, and said, ‘Look! They mixed these with the commons! I just got like a hundred bucks worth of cards for three dollars!’ To which they replied, ‘Sorry, Cliff, it’s common now.’ So I bought cards thinking that they had the same value as what I remembered, but actually, the market and the new rarity had spoken.

I imagine there’s a lot of people out there thinking ‘Holy crap, this is a $1500 card and I can get it for $150!?! Take my money!’ and I get it, I do. But we have to compare apples to apples, not apples to previously gilded fruits of legend. We know that P3K reprints come way way down in price, especially on the second reprint like Imperial Recruiter did. 

Warrior’s Oath is down to $20 or so, and given that Final Fortune is also $20, I don’t expect Oath to go much lower. I do expect that the recent minor upticks for prices in Phyrexian Altar, Smothering Tithe, and other staples doesn’t reflect the final price that those cards will be at in a few months. Be patient, as hard as it is, and you’ll get your value.

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.

Whether or not you play the game, Fortnite is a big part of the zeitgeist right now. It’s insanely popular on Twitch and has led to a lot of money and views. After Walking Dead, Stranger Things, Arcane (the League of Legends series), Street Fighter, and now Fortnite, we’re going to get some Warhammer 40k crossover and then next year comes The Lord of the Rings.

What’s interesting from the Fortnite drop is that like the Arcane drop, it’s all reprints and no new legends/characters. The art for this drop is super on brand, though, and we’ve got the time-honored formula of ‘one semi-expensive card and a bunch of $5 or less’ cards.

So let’s get into this drop and see if it’s worth a purchase, for the right now and for the long term.

First, let’s make a table with the most relevant information about the nonland drop:

So let’s start with something that should be pretty clear off the bat: The cards, by themselves, aren’t worth the likely $40 nonfoil/$50 foil price we will be charged. This drop doesn’t have any super expensive card by itself, which is usually a thing, like Rhystic Study in the Arcane drop.

We know full well that reprinting a card drives down the value, but in case you needed a reminder that original supply is important, here’s the graph for Grim Tutor:

This was more than $300 at its peak, was $200 when the reprint came, and it doesn’t appear to have found the floor for the white border version. Even being listed in 51,000 decks online doesn’t save the Foil Borderless price from being in the mid-$20 range. Remember, those online decks are from the most invested folks, the ones who are super into optimization. It doesn’t really take into account the more casual players. 

So Grim Tutor is going to stay cheap, and with another special version, probably won’t get more expensive. Triumph of the Hordes is an uncommon, but it’s a popular one and it’s avoided reprints since New Phyrexia came out. 

I wouldn’t expect it to hold $15 as an inclusion on The List or something like that, either. We’ve just had no copies at all entering the marketplace, and it’s not like we got all that much of NPH in the first place. Remember that sets in that era followed the Big-Small-Small model, and as the third set, New Phyrexia had the least of all. I wrote about this effect seven years ago, and how the ratio of 6:2:1 came to be. Suffice it to say that New Phyrexia uncommons are six times rarer than Scars of Mirrodin uncommons, and the set is from eleven years ago. Not a lot to go around!

So really, what we’re paying for is the art and the Fortnite reskinning of the cards, not the cards themselves. Let’s be clear, the art is top-notch and it’s in a nicely extended frame. Since this is all reprints, and there’s nothing new as there was in Walking Dead or Street Fighter, we have to try and figure out not just what the cards are worth now, but what these might be in a year or two years.

Remember that the lead time for something like this is not short. Art has to be commissioned, designs approved, and all this started at least a year ago, if not more. Fortnite is still a popular game, significantly more popular on Twitch than Magic is.

Here’s a chart of the views and number of channels for Fortnite:

And here’s the same data for Magic, both MTGO and Arena content. Note how different the measurements are along the vertical.

Other sites show similar data, in that Fortnite gets many more viewers and hours watched. Even if you look at the graphs and numbers and think that Fortnite is in decline, their numbers are way, way ahead of Magic. 

It’s not hard to imagine a world in a few years where Fortnite has faded away, and then these cards are a trip down nostalgia lane. Wizards of the Coast is more than happy to capitalize on nostalgia, as demonstrated by their use of retro frame borders. 

I don’t want to compare this Secret Lair to things like Arcane, both because of the cards involved and the timeline is still pretty short. Can’t compare it to Walking Dead either, because that was all new cards. 

The other thing to remember about an unpopular Secret Lair drop, or a very-short-window one like Extra Life, is that if not many people buy it, then it’ll rise in price that much faster. So we’re stuck. I don’t think this is a good IP for the long term, and the cards are certainly not worth it either.

That said, all of the non-land Secret Lairs have generally appreciated in price, as a collectible if nothing else. I am skipping the June 2022 Superdrop because I don’t see enough unique things there to catch my eye. I will probably not buy very much of the Fortnite sets because even if they grow on a long timeline, it will be such modest growth over such a long time, that I’d rather put that money into 2X2 singles when those hit the floor, or bricks of underappreciated CLB cards. 

I respect that if you’re big into Fortnite, this drop will make you happy. The art is top-notch and wonderfully captures the spirit of the game. Buying a couple of sets and waiting is defensible, as you’re unlikely to lose money this way, your money will just be tied up for a really long time. There hasn’t yet been a non-land Secret Lair that went down as a sealed product, but there’s plenty that are still not much over their original cost. I will probably end up getting some singles once the drop arrives, though.

I haven’t mentioned the lands yet, and that’s because if you think I’m lukewarm on Secret Lair lands, I’m even more chilly when it comes to the lands. Yes, some of the Godzilla lands have sold nicely but those were bonus inclusions that weren’t an option on their own. So far, the land cycles in a Secret Lair haven’t lit up the world, or even gotten more than slight gains. It’s very hard for me to care about these, especially at $7 or so per basic land. I would understand if you wanted to get a couple sets of the regular cards, but the lands are a no-go for me. None of the Lairs’ sets of land have been worth it yet, and while that might eventually change, I need to see that change first before I put any money in.

If you want to talk about these points with me or other readers, hop into the Discord channel and let me know!

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.