Last week I wrote about the difficulties in finding specific foil extended art cards that are in Commander Legends. Today I want to look at a few specific cards and compare the current prices to where I think those prices are going to go.

As I said last week, the foil extended art cards are going to be highly sought after and not terribly common. You’ve got the math for the foil or nonfoil extended art rares and mythics, but the uncommons and commons require a little explaining first.

One slot in a Collector Booster has a nonfoil extended art common or uncommon, from this list:

Then we have two slots for foil regular-frame uncommons and five slots for foil regular frame commons. Under normal circumstances, I’d expect the regular frame foils and nonfoils to end up at the same price, but we have a pair of relevant cards here that have never been in foil: Path of Ancestry (32,700 decks on EDHREC) and Opal Palace (nearly 18,000).

Those two are going to be helped out a lot, price-wise, by being in the common slot. Those are 2/141, but five slots as opposed to the two uncommon slots in a Collector Booster. Even more important, each of those two slots has a 20% chance to upgrade to a foil extended art (FEA) common or uncommon.

Let’s look at some current prices, given the preorders on TCGPlayer.

Command Tower (75 cents for a regular, $9 for regular foil, $13 for EA and $50 for the FEA) – This ought to be in every non-monocolored Commander deck, and there’s already two foil versions: Commander’s Arsenal ($100) and the Judge Promo ($125). Given those two prices, the FEA at $50 feels cheap and the $9 regular-frame foil feels obscene. 

However, I do expect the prices to drop for the first few weeks, and then these are going to be a VERY attractive purchase. Picking up the regular-frame foils for under $5 is going to be a total steal if they drop that low. The FEA isn’t going to stay cheap forever, either. Don’t buy them now, but I’d be surprised if this went under $35. 

Arcane Signet ($2/$15/$10/$38) – Being the first foil printing, this will have quite a premium attached. It’s not going to be the only foil printing, though, and that’s got me feeling a little wary. They haven’t used different art yet, it’s been the same for a year and a half. That’ll change too, and if there’s a new art being used in the reprint (or the Secret Lair) then that’ll preserve some of the price. 

Note that for right now, the foil is pricier than the EA nonfoil, and I suspect those will come closer together. People desperate for a foil are going after them hard right now, and patience will pay off. Forty seems reasonable for the most chase version, especially since you’ll get one FEA Signet approximately every 87 packs. I want the price to come down a little before I buy my personal copies, but it might not.

Keep in mind that in terms of preorders, the Signet is more expensive than several mythics, even though it’s going to be much more common.

Thought Vessel ($3/$8/$8/$22) – Now we’re getting spicy. Just a little more than $20 can get me the FEA version of this first-time foil present in nearly 40k decks online? I don’t know how much lower this can go, but logic tells me it does have a little bit of a dip coming. I’m very very tempted to buy some of these right now for the $22 price, and there’s vendors willing to oblige. 

I’d like to get in on a stack of foils around $5, or hopefully less. This is a very popular mana rock, and ramping from two to four is where you really want to be. 

Terramorphic Expanse (bulk/$0.75/$3/$20) – These FEA commons and uncommons are going to carry a lot of value in these packs, and even if they dip it’s going to be a few bucks. Too many people play this alongside Evolving Wilds on a budget for it to be a cheap FEA. What’s really going to be amazing is that when it drops down to $10, it’ll jump back to $20 eventually.

Path of Ancestry ($1/$5/$7/$15) – Remember that this and Opal Palace (a quarter/$1.50/$4/$15) drop much more often than the uncommons, at least when it comes to the regular-frame foils. These drop at the same rate as Arcane Signet in FEA, but are played a lot less commonly. Path is my favorite preorder right now, given that it’s in 37k decks online and should be in every tribal Commander deck. Frankly, I want to buy a bunch of these right now, but I’m being patient. 

Reliquary Tower ($2/no foils on sale/$4/$13) – Given that this is 31% of all EDH decks online (130,000!) this is another surprisingly cheap staple. There are other foils available of this card, from the original in Conflux to reprints and FNM and the special ‘bring a friend to your LGS’ version. The FEA version is probably going to be the most expensive going forward, but I don’t think it’ll drop much below $10, given the demand.

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.

Commander Legends has been fully previewed, and I’d like to express my appreciation to Wizards for doing this on Thursdays. Makes my life that much easier.

We know what’s in the set, what’s got special frames, and the formulation of each Collector Booster. That means it’s time to do some math and figure out how rare some of these cards are going to be, and that’ll inform our buying decisions.

First of all, let’s look at the raw numbers on the set: 141 commons, 120 uncommons, 77 rares, 22 mythic rares, 1 special (The Prismatic Piper).

Of those, 69 legendary creatures (from any rarity) can show up as foil-etched in a special frame. Add to that 32 more reprinted legends in that frame, including all of the original Partner commanders.

From a finance perspective, the most relevant pieces of information are that Extended Art foils and nonfoils are ONLY in the Collector Boosters. The etched foil legends (Only foils, there’s no nonfoils of these cards) can be found in the draft boosters, as can the borderless planeswalkers in foil and nonfoil. We know there’s one foil of any rarity per Draft Booster, but that’s a regular foil, not an Extended Art foil, but it could be a borderless planeswalker in foil.

Thankfully, we also have a breakdown of precisely what’s in the Collector Boosters. Feel free to look at the breakdown, but I’m going to be focusing on the odds and the chase cards.

Most regular-frame common and uncommon foils I’m not too worried about. Yes, this is a first foil for a lot of Commander-specific cards, but there’s a special list of 33 commons and uncommons available as extended-art foils, and that’s the spicy stuff. 

Collector Boosters have one slot for a nonfoil EA of one of these cards, so you have a 1 in 33 chance of getting a particular nonfoil EA from this list per booster. 

For foils, it’s notably rarer. There are two slots for foil uncommons from the entire set, but about 20% of the time, that upgrades to a foil EA from this list. So in one pack, you have two runs at these, at 1/5 the rate of the nonfoil. 

That works out to a 1.2% chance, per pack, of getting a specific foil EA common or uncommon. If you like fractions, I did the math and it’s 1 in 82.5 packs for getting that foil EA Arcane Signet. At 12 packs per box, and six boxes per case, you will get .87 FEA Signets per case, or any other particular card from the list of 33.

For the foil-etched legends, there’s a slot for the 36 uncommons, a slot for the 32 reprinted legends, and then a slot for the 23 mythic and rare ones. Those are guaranteed, so the rate is much better than the 20% drop rate for the FEA uncommons.

One slot is dedicated to nonfoil EA treatments, and that will help keep those prices in line, but there’s 65 of those cards that could drop. That’s just a 1.5% chance of getting a specific EA rare or mythic rare in your collector booster pack.

Now, the super-chase cards: The foil extended-art cards at rare and mythic. There’s one slot for a foil rare or mythic rare, and 30% of the time, that card upgrades to a foil Extended Art.

In that slot, 30% of the time, it goes to FEA rare or mythic. There’s 52 rares and 17 mythics. That means that on a sheet of 121 cards, each rare is on there twice and each mythic once.

If you don’t like percentages, let’s expand it out a little.

How about a visual? Each column is the foil rare/mythic rare slot in a Collector Booster:

Many thanks to sods, Alexis, and Ra0Ra in the MTGPrice Discord for explaining math to me over and over again.

So what does this mean for us? 

First of all, these Collector Boosters are going to have some very big swings in value. The Extended Art cards will carry a lot of value in the big ones, and some won’t be very expensive, but FEA mythics are going to be hyper rare. 

There will be excellent value in the FEA uncommons as well. The first-time foils like Arcane Signet and Thought Vessel will carry value even without being Extended Art, but the FEA Signets and Vessels should be very high out of the gates and likely won’t come down too much. Don’t sleep on Path of Ancestry (first foil), Myriad Landscape (78k decks on EDHREC, second foil printing) or Three Visits (a P3K reprint).

Commander Legends is already impacted by production delays and the coronavirus shutting down North American stores. It’s quite possible that some of these cards never have a chance to get cheap–Jeweled Lotus will be in FEA once every 33.3 boxes, or 5.55 CASES of Collector Boosters.

I don’t have enough information on the delays and the impact on the total number of Collector Boosters out there to predict the effect that’ll have. I do advocate that you definitely get your personal copies before Christmas, but don’t be a buyer the first week or two. Let the frenzy calm down a little and then get what you need. Be more patient when it comes to your investments in this set.

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.

Previews are happening and I’m really excited. There’s going to be something for everyone, with trinkets for your favorite tribes, tools for beloved mechanics, and some flavor wins that are out of this world.

Oh, and a Lotus that’s preselling for more than $100. Please don’t buy Jeweled Lotus yet.

There are 22 mythics to be found in packs. You can get the foil-etched legends (both the new ones and reprints) in regular packs and collector boosters, but extended art (foil and nonfoil) will only be in the collector boosters. 

I want to look at what’s new in this set first, and then when we know all the reprints, then I can focus on those. This being the first few days of a preview season, preorder prices are sketchy. If I find some I trust, I’ll mention them, but one of my evergreen pieces of advice is never preorder cards. A little patience saves you a lot of money.

Jeweled Lotus – This isn’t going to break Commander as a format. This isn’t as broken as you might think it is. Some decks really want to pump their general out early, but in a format with the wraths and removal like this, I don’t think you need to fall all over yourself to play it. If you have a three-color general, it better cost at least five mana, else you’re not getting full value from this. I’m not going to play this in The Ur-Dragon. Some commanders are awesome and aggressive, and much will depend on the deck. Does it help to think of this as a worse Dark Ritual? Ritual can help you out with other things, but this mana is exceedingly narrow.

I’ve got to admit that I don’t think these listings are real. Someone is doing false listings on eBay for reasons that are unclear to me. Please be patient on this card. 

Arcane Signet (EA and EA foil) – Finally, we’re getting the shiny treatment for a card that’s sorely needed it for a year. This is only available in the Collector Boosters, and will be one of the best hits. I expect the progression for the card to be something like $2.50 for the regular, $10 for the foil, $5 for the extended art, and $30+ for the EA foil. That’s a set of guesses, and it presumes that people will be more interested in a shiny version of the regular art than the nonfoil EA treatment. Right now, most foils are about as much as the regular version of a card, but I think that Signet is going to be one of the most in-demand foils for some time. It’s in 24% of all EDHREC decks online, for a card that didn’t debut until last year in Throne of Eldraine. It’s gotten reprints, thankfully, but it’ll get the foil treatment infrequently. Keep in mind that a lot of people who open EA or foil copies recreationally will just put copies into their decks, and not let them enter circulation at all.

As an additional warning, be aware that this is definitely not the last time we’re going to get this card in foil/EA foil. Other printings will definitely be coming. If you want them for your decks, that’s fine, but if you’re planning future gains, I don’t think that’s a very safe bet. It’ll be possible, with careful management of where you get these (Europe!) and how quickly you resell them. Command Tower is in a similar place, though there’s other foils of Command Tower out there already, the EA foil will have quite the premium until the next EA foil printing.

Jeska, Thrice Reborn – This is a miss for me, as it’s extremely niche. The zero ability requires you to have some creature in play that you can do significant damage with and gain advantage that way. I like the meme value of using Jeska with Brash Taunter and Blasphemous Act, for example, but there’s blessed few ways to gain consistent advantage. What’s really a bummer is that Jeska’s second ability doesn’t scale well. Three mana lets you ping three targets for one damage each. Five mana, and you’re dealing two to each. Seven mana to deal three damage to three different things is not great. Yes, it’s possible that you’re casting the partnered commander some, and if you’re pushing that angle hard you can get much better value, but that’s slow and a lot of work. Jeska is going to be a very cheap mythic, which is a shame for a character with so much lore. (The same character is Jeska, Warrior Adept, Phage the Untouchable, and Karona, False God.)

Tevesh Szat, Doom of Fools – Now this is a card to get people excited. There’s a lot to do with two free creatures to sacrifice, and the plus one to sac something and draw two is also strong…but the ultimate is what’s got people buzzing. This is exactly what people want to do in Commander, making huge swingy plays, and I fully expect some wonky combos based around cranking these counters ASAP. I appreciate that Doubling Season isn’t enough on its own, usually that’s a slam-dunk, but this is such a powerful ability that they needed to edit the cost even higher. I expect this to be somewhere around $10 for the base version. Right now you can get it for $20, which is much too high. The borderless treatment will have a premium, but nothing too outlandish.

Vampiric Tutor – What a time to reprint this card, and with an EA treatment:

Granted, this was a mythic two years ago, and that’s a good timeframe for most any card, but ouch. This is a gorgeous piece of art, and I wouldn’t be shocked if the EA foil was $200. It’s tough to see on this graph, but the price on TCG has fallen by $50 in the last week due to this being previewed. People who own Eternal Masters foils want to get what they can for the card before the new versions land.

What I’m really interested in doing is picking up a few copies at a cheap price. This was about $40 for a few months after its printing and climbed up above $120 before we got this preview. Let’s all learn a lesson here and buy it cheap around Valentine’s Day, shall we?

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.

So we’ve gotten some cards from Commander Legends revealed via some random person who got their hands on some packs and tried to sell stolen goods on eBay, and we’re getting the official previews starting Monday. 

If you want to avoid knowledge of the leaked/stolen cards, I’ll respect that. I’m not going to say what’s in them, except to say that the cards I’m talking about today are not yet known to be reprinted in Commander Legends. What I am doing this week is building my shopping list. So many casual and Commander cards are deliciously valued right now, but one more reprint would mean agonizingly slow growth.

This is a list of cards that I want to buy as soon as the full list of Commander Legends is out, so I can feel that I’m in a pretty good position. Reprints are an ongoing issue (especially with The List’s existence) but I’m choosing casual-focused cards that should swing back up within a year, barring the unforeseen reprint. There’s always the chance of a Secret Lair or some other product popping up, and there’s no way to prepare for that these days except to have a diverse selection of cards in your possession.

Cyclonic Rift (Regular Nonfoil $16) – I think we about at the bottom on Double Masters, as I wrote about a couple weeks ago. Now the only question is which cards needed to be printed back-to-back this way. (Some cards did get this amount of reprinting, and we’ve got the leaks to prove it.) Rift is very attractively priced as a rare in 2XM, and a card poised to jump if it’s not reprinted. It was nearly $30 this past summer, before the reprint, and if it dodges being in Commander Legends I’d expect it to immediately jump a couple of dollars. I’m quoting the price and graph of regular versions, but if you want to get in on the more unique Box Topper, that’s a respectable choice too. We saw with Fabled Passage that Wizards isn’t going to flinch at reprinting Extended Art, and that risk is present with Box Toppers too.

Still, being in 40% of blue decks online, an amazing 83,000 decks, means this is a super-staple and if it is reprinted, I’d be happy to buy in at $10, or even more so at $7 or lower. 

Faeburrow Elder (Regular and Foil – $2.50, EA – $6, EA Foil – $27) – For a card that came out just over a year ago, it’s rapidly become popular. I understand that, as it’s a tremendously awesome accelerator for multicolored decks, and can attack for significant damage. On its own it’s three mana and taps for two, and in a five-color deck can really get out of control. If it’s not printed in Commander Legends, there would be no obvious place to reprint this, and that’s a delightful recipe. 

I think you should definitely grab your personal EA foils now, because there’s only a handful of NM foils on TCGPlayer before you’re in the $50 range. If it isn’t reprinted, then I’m grabbing as many sub-$3 copies as I can before it breaks $5, and then I’m settling in for the ride.

Golos, Tireless Pilgrim ($5/$30) – Core 2020 was the last set to not have a special foil version, but it did have an increased foil drop rate. Even with that increase in foils, Golos has been built 5000 times on EDHREC and played a whole bunch as well. Banning from Constructed play doesn’t mean a thing when I’m focused on Commander, and I imagine that the five-color slot for Commander Legends is a hot one. 

A card this new and this popular, with only regular and nonfoil versions, definitely has my attention if there’s no clear reprint route. It was a rare, not a mythic, and it’s ready to pop. If it’s not reprinted here, I wouldn’t be shocked if nonfoils started to climb, and I’d be expecting it to double. 

Ramos, Dragon Engine ($20 foil from Commander 2017) – This has never been a nonfoil card, but it’s a popular and dangerous Commander card. It’s not in a huge number of decks, but I think that’s more reflective of the short supply rather than the lack of demand. The only way to get one of these was to buy the Dragon-themed Commander deck back in 2016. (Full disclosure: I did and I still have The Ur-Dragon as a commander.) So you needed to buy Dragons, want Dragons, but trade/sell away this super-sweet card that allows you to accelerate and fix and do busted things. There’s only 47 vendors of NM foils on TCG, and of those only four vendors have four or more copies. 

A caveat: I think this is going to get reprinted eventually, that’s a given. But I can’t forecast when! Commander Legends is the prime vehicle for that, or some other five-color Secret Lair. It will happen, but there’s a lot of growth that can happen in the meantime.

Sword of the Animist ($8/$24) – Only ten vendors with NM foil copies, a steep ramp up to $40 for the last one, 24k decks and only the one foil version? This is ripe as can be for a reprint or a spike. Equipment is usually a popular subtheme, and those decks are among the most mana-hungry ones. The graph tells a tale that will merit its own article soon:

This was in Mystery Booster as a nonfoil, and that doesn’t seem to have affected the price at all. Most likely, it’s because the people who opened it (drafters at GPs) are among the most likely to open this and have a Commander deck that could use a copy. If this isn’t reprinted this winter, i’ll be diving in on assorted copies and just waiting for the windfall.

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.