No, I’m not talking about Double Masters 2022, which isn’t officially releasing until next week. Nor am I discussing Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate. What I’m thinking about is Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, and if we’ve hit bottom. 

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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.

Welcome, let’s get down to the numbers of Double Masters 2022. We’ve got only 24 Draft Boosters per box and a mere 4 Collector Boosters per box, effectively upping the price for each pack.

We are also getting double the rares and mythics, along with some incredibly expensive reprints. Quite the assortment of value here, and with the numbers doubled, we’ve got some really amazing things and some real bulk mixed together.

So let’s dive in and see how rare these cards are, especially compared to rarities of sets past, as try to figure out what’s worth it and what isn’t.

The basics: 120 rares and 40 mythics means twice the odds in Draft Boosters (more on that in a minute) but the last two slots in a Collector Booster are split unevenly. 

We know which rares and mythics have a Borderless version and a Textured version. All rares and mythics have a foil-etched version. This list is going to be updated as previews get finished off.

Let’s deal with the Borderless slot first. With 30 rares and 20 mythics, this is almost very straightforward in this slot of the Collector Booster. The rares are in the pool twice, then add the mythics. As a result, to get a specific Borderless rare, you’ve got a 1/40 chance. 

For the mythics, it’s a touch more complicated. The fifteen mythics that do NOT have a Textured version are a straight 1/80 to show up in that slot, but for the five that do, you need to flip a coin and see whether you get a Textured or not. 

To put in more specific terms, I’m 1/80 to get a Borderless Wrenn and Six of any type, but I’m 1/160 to get either a Textured foil or a Borderless.

The foil-etched slot has a lot more options. The set has 120 rares and 40 mythics, and that means the potential pulls are from 280 cards. Any foil-etched rare is 1/140 and any mythic is 1/280.

Have a table, to help summarize these things.

Because Wizards has a slot for the etched, and a slot for the Borderless, we’ve got an interesting situation. The rarest special versions this set will not be borderless, or even the textured foils. It’ll be the foil-etched mythics that do not have a borderless version.

Have another table:

As is the tradition, let’s have a comparison of cards at different rarities and finishes, to give another perspective:

And to finish off talk of Collector Boosters, let’s review where these packs and these cards rate as compared to sets from the last couple of years. Do note that these tables do NOT account for the different prices of packs, a problem which I will rectify soon.

Now the cards: 

The way that Wizards changed the number of packs in a box, and therefore the cost per pack, outweighs the progress they made when increasing the drop rate for these cards. It’s also worth noting that a lot of Double Masters 2022 will end up at very low prices because of low demand for a lot of these cards. These slots will be very swingy indeed!

Draft Boosters are also relatively straightforward. There are no foil-etched cards, and there are no textured foils. Just foil Borderless and regular frame foil.

There’s two slots dedicated to rares or mythics. Same deal as the foil-etched slot applies, twice the rares means that any rare is 2/280 or 1/140, and any mythic is 1/280. Those are nonfoils, though, and represent how we’re going to get prices on regular copies so very low.

Trickier is that Borderless foils can show up in the third and fourth slots, along with foils in the regular frame. We’re explicitly told that your chances of a borderless foil rare or mythic in those slots is 1.25%, which comes out to 1/80 per slot for a borderless foil of either rarity. Since rares are twice as common as mythics, there’s a 1/240 chance of any borderless foil mythic in that slot and 1/120 for any borderless rare. Then we have to multiply by the number of cards (30 for rares, 20 for mythics) to get the chances of a specific foil borderless card. 

One more step. I’ve calculated all of these on a per-slot basis, so then this table has those odds x2, due to the pair of potential slots.

I’m happy to talk about the math and my methods in the comments here, on Twitter, but especially in the ProTrader Discord. Please feel free to stop by and discuss your experiences and your pulls!

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.

There’s a few adages in Magic finance that always made a lot of sense to me:

• Let someone else make the last 10%.
• Sell into the hype.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel.

That last one is especially relevant now, with Double Masters 2022 previews starting up as of yesterday. At least one of the previewed cards is a reprint of a reprint, and so we know how this song goes.

For others, the tune isn’t so clear…

Double Masters 2022 was always going to be a big deal. The first one made lots of people lots of money, especially with the VIP packs predating our Collector Boosters. What’s really going to juice the amount of product opened is not the big-ticket price of packs, but the fact that Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate was not a big deal financially. Yes, a couple of the rarest dragons are expensive, but value-wise, the set is quite underwhelming in the short term.

That’s not going to be a problem with DXM2. Immediately we got told that Dockside Extortionist is in the set, with foil-etched and borderless variants. The hits just kept coming from there, and some of them are clearly going to make us some money.

Let’s start with one of the big reveals from Thursday’s stream: Phyrexian Altar.

We know exactly how good this card is. It’s been registered in 44,000 Commander decks online via EDHREC, and that number is only the serious players who bother to set it up online. Plus, this has had only two printings, Invasion and Ultimate Masters. See if you can spot when the reprint happened:

As an additional bonus to that 44k number, it’s never been in a Commander precon, which can really goose some of the inclusion numbers. 

So yes, I’m telling you to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and buy Phyrexian Altar when it gets cheap. I’m especially telling you to go for the regular, nonfoil copies, as those should get to a wonderfully low price, likely under $20 and maybe as low as $10. This is as straightforward as things get in Magic finance, and it’s advice I would give to anyone who asked me for an example of how all this works. I mean it, too: Buying 20 copies when it was $15 (as the UMA copies were for a few months) and holding for two years would get you $60 a copy before fees. If you held for three years you’re looking at $80-$90!

Granted, there were no reprints of any kind for this card, and that’s relatively rare these days. Between Secret Lairs, special inclusions, and a new set every six frigging weeks, there’s a whole lot of reprinting going on.

Doesn’t take away from the simple truth that putting $100 into plain copies of Altar will double your money in a year, and might go higher. Note that this will be a rare again, meaning there will be a lot of copies to go around.

Let’s look at another Ultimate Masters card, this time a mythic:

Mana Vault is one of those cards that I, as a long-time, very enfranchised player, used to put between the spokes of my bike because I was an ignorant little snot who didn’t know how to do this properly. If that teenage jerk had just saved his cards, I’d have a mansion in the hills!

Anyway, we have here the same pattern: Got expensive, got reprinted, got cheap, and then got expensive again. Given that there will be multiple versions of the Vault again, I would repeat my advice that the best return on your money would be to buy the regular, nonfoil copies and then just wait patiently. Don’t spend all your money on any one of these cards, please be sure to diversify, but Double Masters 2022 is going to offer us a lot of opportunities to put some money in and get a lot more out.

This one I’m slightly less sure about, as there’s complicating factors: 

There’s no question that Bloom Tender is a powerful card. It’s an infinite mana engine with Freed from the Real, it’s an Elf, and in five-color decks, it gets out of hand very quickly indeed. Eventide was a low point in Magic sales, which is why the OG foils are so very expensive. This was in the Mystery Booster, and that put juuuuuust enough copies into circulation as to keep the price from going much higher. Then last year, arriving at the same time as the Phyrexian Praetors, this was in the Secret Lair: Jen Bartel edition. 

Again, that’s enough copies to keep the price from going up, which is notable for a card listed in 40,000 decks online. 

What I’ll be watching for, very closely, is the floor on regular copies. Right now, there’s some optimistic pre-orders for around $20, and that bodes very well for future opportunities. I ignore pre-orders, generally speaking, but remember that almost all cards start out at their highest prices, and drop from there. 

Bloom Tender should be no different, and I’m hoping it gets to $5 when all is said and done and all the packs are finally opened. It’ll definitely get to $10, which is an okay buy-in price, but I’ll be much more excited about it if it goes even lower. Having the Secret Lair copies available for $40-$50 depending on foiling puts a pretty hard cap on what Bloom Tender can do long-term, though I’d be expecting to buy in at $5 and get out when it hits $20-$25 retail in 12-18 months.

This is just a sample of what I’m expecting from Double Masters 2022, and as we get more previews, we’ll also be able to focus on what our long-term plans for the set are. Stay tuned!

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.

Welcome to Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate. I don’t know what the cards have to do with the game, or the lore, but I do know that this set is jammed with sweet cards and awesome interactions.

What the set lacks, though, is a headliner mythic in terms of value, a card that everyone is chasing. Granted, the first time around, that was a Jeweled Lotus, which set an incredibly high mark for value and for rarity. We didn’t get a card like that, nor a big-value reprint like a Mana Crypt or Mana Drain or anything like that. 

As a result, the value of these cards has to go somewhere, and the first place to look will be the mythics, the most difficult to get. I went over your odds last week, but let’s get into some examples of the cards in CLB and if I’m ready to buy yet.

Ancient Dragons – The key with these five mythics is that each version is twice as rare as other mythics, because they are the only mythics with two special versions. The number of Ancient Gold Dragons in Borderless foil plus the number of Ancient Gold Dragons in Showcase foil is equal to the number of Battle Angels of Tyr in Borderless foil. There aren’t more copies of AGD because there are more versions, there’s just more options for the same number of copies.

As a result, this cycle is probably going to contain the most expensive cards in the set, at least at the beginning. The early prices bear this out, as people move sooner than they should, but it’s entirely possible that one or two of these dragons follows the Old Gnawbone path and just never gets cheap:

Gnawbone is one end of the potential spectrum here, but the other end is this:

My inclination is that while the Ancient Dragons are expensive mana-wise, they will generally be worth it on the board. We might see things like Garruk’s Uprising tick up as Dragon players want to give trample (and draw cards!) but my hunch is that the borderless foils are going to start high and rarely go lower, even after a couple of weeks. 

Kindred Discovery – This is a card that’s had no support but still has been in registered in 18k decks online. Just the Commander 2017 printing and a meager inclusion in The List. We know the card is good, and it’s popular too. As a rare, it’ll be relatively common leftovers after the big operations are done cracking packs, and this is one of my favorite targets in the set. It’s already down to $3 for the cheapest and $20 for the FEA, prices I am content at but I’m waiting a bit longer for hopefully a farther fall. 

Might not go too low, as this is the first foil printing, but we’ll see.

The Allied Battlebond Lands – We have some exact comparisons here, and that puts this on easy mode. FEA versions of the enemy lands from Commander Legends 1 are around $30, and those are about 2.5 times more common. (1/88 for these vs. 1/206 in original CL) Don’t forget that we have Expedition versions to look at too: 

The presence of these cards in a much rarer frame will do a lot to create a price ceiling for these lands, but frankly, let’s look at the graph for the nonfoils:

Battlebond wasn’t as heavily opened as a regular set, but the steady growth of these lands is a sign that the lands might be the safest bet around. I’m going to look for them to fall a bit further, probably to $5 or even $4, and then I’ll want a nice stack.

Cultist of the Absolute – Backgrounds might be useful in the 99 too, especially giving certain abilities. Static, like auras that don’t need to be recast. I’m very likely to wait until the rare and mythic ones find a floor and then pick up a few. Unique effects like this are usually worth speculating on.

Herald’s Horn – Down to $5ish as an uncommon in CLB Precon, and present in 50k decks online, this is another spec I’m all over, except for one problem. Later this year, we’re going to get the first foil version of the card as a year of the Tiger promo coming with The Brothers’ War, and that will soak up a lot of the money to be made.

Buying staples when they get cheap is a basic principle, and Herald’s Horn definitely fits that description. 

Monster Manual – Elvish Piper is good. This is better. I’m not anticipating this being expensive by any means, but I am looking forward to getting in on this at nearly-bulk prices. There’s so many ways to abuse a card like this, and now we have it as an instant-use artifact instead of a fragile 1/1 that has to wait a turn.

Jaheira, Friend of the Forest – NONCREATURE TOKENS COUNT! So your Treasures are now Mox Emeralds, your Food tokens are Moss Diamond, your Blood tokens are some other artifact that hasn’t been printed but would be too good. This might be good on its own or as an amazing addition to the 99 of some other token-themed commander. Another bulk pick that will one day shine so very brightly.

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.