Praise be, Wizards released something on a Thursday night for once and made my gig 1000% better. I was worried that I’d only have a few glimpses from the Twitch stream, but apparently they have heeded my calls to adjust their timing.

We now have the whole list of 121 cards that are available in foil, and there are some doozies. What’s this mean for the current foils and the ones now being released? Let’s get into that…

Let’s start with a review of how many foils are out there. There’s 121 cards in the list, meaning that you’re going to get one copy every five boxes. (Remember, Mystery is in boxes of 24, not 36.) While that doesn’t sound like a lot, we are about to have a TON of these boxes opened, because the average value on the Mystery reprints is pretty high for now. There are some basic ideas I want you to keep in mind here: 

Idea #1: All Mystery foils will be cheaper than the pack foils.

How much cheaper is something I can’t estimate for all the cards, but as you’ll see, the amount of play a card gets is the main predictor of its future price. Sen Triplets? Not a lot of play, but foil mythics from a small set ELEVEN years ago are going to have very few copies left. Alchemist’s Refuge? Tons of play.

Idea #2: Pack foils will be fine. 

I and many other writers have expounded on the topic of reprints representing a buying opportunity. Especially for staples, when a price dips, you want to buy in. Here’s an example of Pact of Negation:

It was in Future Sight, and Masters 25, and Modern Masters 2013, and even had an Invocation during Amonkhet. Every time the price went down, you’ve got a shot at buying in for the new price. More on this in a moment. 

Idea #3: Everyone’s a mythic here.

One in five boxes will have a foil Sen Triplets. One in five boxes will have a foil Sosuke, Son of Seshiro. The sought-after foils will have a higher price, not least because players will put that card into their decks. At MagicFest Reno last weekend, a lot of the Mana Crypts being opened weren’t being sold, but were instead going into Commander decks, because for some dumb reason, it’s legal there.

Idea #4: When predicting price, pay attention to playability and don’t be distracted by age/supply.

Sen Triplets, currently the most expensive foil on the list, is an awesome card but only goes in Esper+ Commander decks. Minamo, School at Water’s Edge is in five times as many Commander decks and even sees some niche play in Modern/Legacy, as a source of blue with upside. When it comes to the Mystery foils, I don’t think Triplets will have a high price, but Minamo will be above it.

Idea #5: If the average value of a box of Mystery (Retail) is above $75 or so, stores will open them and sell the singles.

This is the main point of having a calculated box EV. Stores can’t buy Mystery (Convention) for themselves and that’s how you can sell them copies of Rhystic Study all day long. Stores can and will buy lots of this set in order to crack packs. 

To phrase it another way: If I add up the value of these foils and then divide by 121 to get an average of the value of the foil slot, I currently get about $15 (depending on mid vs. market and condition) and that means the average box has $360 worth of rares.  (Here’s a link to a Tappedout page with the total TCG coming out to $2100)

That cannot hold, and will not.

As much fun as it is to draft this set, Wizards is going to print a bunch of this, and then have at least one more wave like they did with War of the Spark. Drafters aren’t going to be the big movers, the big stores will be. I’d expect that the small stores might not bother because the variance is quite wide, and there’s going to be a lot of bulk within a couple of weeks.

Stores will open boxes and sell singles until the prices fall low enough to make that economically infeasible. Given what’s in the set, and the variance of what might get opened, I think a lot of prices are going to fall. The staples will recover (and be good buys, wouldn’t you like to stock up on Rhystic Study for $10? $7?) but the rest will crater and stay there for a long while.

With all that in mind, one thing stands out to me: There’s not a lot of excitement in the foil slot. A lot of solid value if you go by current retail prices, but those are not a strong predictor of price going forward. So many of these are niche, printings from forever ago or from an era when foiling wasn’t popular. The price is high on foil Celestial Dawn because it was on the Timeshifted sheet and a pretty rare thing to find even then. The price isn’t high because everyone wants to play the card. 

You should start with the belief that the vast majority of the foils aren’t going to be worth much. Maybe not bulk prices, but not above $3-$5. A couple of these stand out, though:

Amulet of Vigor:The retail for a foil one of these is close to $50, because it’s a key card in Amulet Titan decks in Modern. Getting two mana immediately from a bounceland is amazing, especially when combined with extra land drops. This is one of the top-tier decks in Modern, and Amulet is a four-of. I’d expect this price to be in the $30 range.

Alchemist’s Refuge:It’s pretty sweet in Commander, and a staple land if you’re in these colors. This is one of the few cases where I’d expect the new foils and the pack foils to be close in price.

Scourge of the Throne: If you get to attack with this it’s usually good enough to end the Commander game but the pack foil from original Conspiracy has a tiny amount in circulation. This will be a $20 foil, but not close to the original’s $80.

Braid of Fire: Niche, but awesome. Coldsnap happened at a weird time, in a weird amount, and foils from that set are tough to come by. Not a lot of decks can use this well, so I expect this to be under $10.

Intruder Alarm: Not as common in Commander as you might think, but still a combo enabler for a wide range of strategies that will often win your pod. There’s only one foil from 8th Edition, and that’s always been super scarce. Should land in the $25 range.

Sen Triplets: This grabbed headlines for being a $150 foil you can open, but these aren’t going to sell for anything like that price. If you open the first one you’ll get $75 for it, but very quickly the demand is going to dry up. Price memory is going to kick in and keep it from getting too cheap, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that by June, you can buy this foil for under $30.

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.

The Challenger decks for 2020 are out and they are doozies.

We don’t normally get this much value packed into these sets, but then again, we were warned that this was a year of reprints. So what do we do if we had lots of Bonecrusher Giant? Is not the time to stock up on Fabled Passage?

I’m here to help.

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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 have the decklists for the Mythic Championship XXVI 2020, and it’s wonderful to have such a concise list of what’s good in the eyes of the pros. Standard is not solved but there are clear tiers of decks, and it’s not a rock-paper-scissors sort of arrangement. 

Let’s take a look at the archetypes and the potential for growth in each. 

I’ve written about it before, but we’re coming into the time when I want to make sure I’m not holding excesses of cards that are about to rotate and don’t see Eternal play. If it’s good in Pioneer/Modern/Legacy/Commander I’ll think about keeping extra copies, but this dataset is more geared towards the next eight months of Standard. 

The metagame is neatly sliced up, with only Piotr Glogowski ruining what would have been four groups of four:

That’s a beautiful chart, and gives us five archetypes to look at. If you go to the official page and scroll past this graphic, you’ll see a breakdown of which cards are played most. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of 16s in there, but there are a few cards getting more play than that:

Bonecrusher Giant ($3.50 regular/$3.50 foil/$4 Showcase/$7 Showcase foil)

A four-of in the Mono-Red Aggro and a three-or-four-of in Jeskai Fires, there’s a lot to love here. It’s marvelous value, giving you a kill spell and then a no-drawback 4/3 creature. I don’t need to convince you that is a good combination, but that’s two rather different archetypes that are packing high quantities of the card. Jeskai Fires could be playing Shock for mana efficiency, but they chose the Giant for flexibility. It’s wonderful to see a card that’s good in mono-red and good against mono-red!

What I’m really impressed by is that this card has until October of 2021 to make waves in Standard. I’m in. I’m advocating you get your copies now because by the end of the weekend it’ll be pushing $5. What’s the upper end for this? It’s played heavily in Pioneer too, a format that can’t be any hotter, so getting in now around $4 and getting out at $10 next Christmas seems quite likely.

Robber of the Rich ($5/$6/$8/$25)

This card is already spiking and I apologize if these prices are no longer available. 

The big thing here is that it’s a fun card in mono-red but it’s part of a semi-transformational package for the Jeskai Fires decks. Sometimes you need the 2/2 for two, as a blocker or as a Teferi-killer with that haste. This is a mythic getting played in high amounts, and that’s a formula for very high prices. 

Robber could have been had for $2 just a few weeks ago, but that ship has sailed. This isn’t getting Eternal play like Bonecrusher is, but being a mythic is going to mean this card likely breaks $10 if aggro wins this event or Fires makes it look like a key card after sideboarding. The wonderful news is that you’ve got a long time for it to get good, but this is much more of a quick flip. If you can get your LGS to sell you their copies before the flood of publicity, great, but this is a card that’s going to rise and fall with the metagame. 

Brazen Borrower ($23/$26/$37/$70)

First, the graph.

Yup, the time to buy in was Halloween, when we were all wondering why this was a mythic and not a rare. Ouch. 

BB has a lot of game outside Standard, and that’s driving the price of the more ornate versions. When something makes it into Legacy Delver lists, you know it’s a paragon of efficiency. Allow me to quote-tweet Autumn Burchett here:

Having the flexibility on both sides is key, and it appears we’re not all evaluating Adventure cards with an eye towards the built-in card advantage. It’s not card to get a full card out of the bounce effect, and then you get a 3/1 flyer whenever you want. With flash, even!

I like this to go higher, but I’m not sure how high it can go. Forty bucks seems like the highest it might get to, but the amount of Eternal play this sees makes me feel pretty good about buying a couple playsets right now. Even if it never gets to lofty heights in the next 18 months, I’ll feel good about the long-term prospects.

Teferi, Time Raveler ($20/$32/$67 Stained Glass/$27 JP Alternate/$107 JP Alt Foil)

It is hard to argue with the efficiency of this card. He’s exceedingly annoying for decks that want to do things sneaky-fast, and he’s capable of protecting himself while drawing you a card. It’s nigh impossible to be behind on cards when you drop him into play, and if you want, you can even draw a card on an empty board!

Teferi’s power is evident in every format, and even though this is the time where you want to be unloading extra copies, I’m stoked to buy up copies in the summer. I’m hoping he falls as low as $7, but that’s probably too optimistic for someone seeing as much play as Teferi does. 

I think the stained glass version has room to grow. It’s $40 less than the Japanese alternate art foil, and I can’t imagine there’s too many stained glass in circulation. It’s hard to get that level of growth, so the safer play is just to sit tight and wait on Teferi. I do not advocate buying in at the $20 range for regular copies right now, though: you’ll have a long wait for those to get profitable.

Fabled Passage ($18/$20/$27/$80)

I picked this back in December on MTG Fast Finance, and the reasoning remains the same: It’s super popular in Standard and Pioneer, the only fetchland in either format. There’s probably not going to be much growth on this before rotation in the fall, when we lose shocklands and one set of temples. Yes, we’re going to get some form of dual lands in the sets to come, but Passage is super popular and something I want to have in stock.

Mystical Dispute ($3/$7) is actually the most popular nonland at the Championship, and I’m pretty sure that the foil isn’t done growing in price. It’s already a $3 uncommon, and is wildly popular in Pioneer to so with all the Standard play it’s seeing. I don’t think you’ll be able to gain much profit from it, but if you have some foils (or nonfoils) I’m holding on. Remember that Eldraine rotates in a year and a half, so you’re going to have a chance at some even greater gains.

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.

Today begins Players’ Tour Phoenix, a Pioneer event that promises to do two things:

1. Create calls for a card to be banned.
2. Spike the prices of some cards significantly.

Now, both points might apply to the same card; we can’t know for sure. What we do know is that a lot of Magic pros have taken the time to tell us what they are playing, and that offers some chances to get in on cheap cards before they get camera time, victories, trophies, and rise in price.

It’s not easy to make money off of cards in a weekend. You’re not trying to buy today and sell tomorrow. Too many people won’t ship the cards at the pre-spike price. What we’re doing is identifying value now, as Pioneer is an eternal format. If it’s good now, it’ll still be good when you sell in a week or two.

Mono-Black Aggro

There’s a lot to like in this list, but there’s two targets that stand out to me:

Bloodsoaked Champion ($2.50 nonfoil/$5 foil)

Scrapheap Scrounger (40 cents/$4)

These are recursive and aggressive threats that can close a game very very quickly. There’s other one-drops, but Champion is from much longer ago and Scrapheap is much cheaper. Both are played as the full four and I won’t fault you if the other cards catch your eye here.

These two cards represent the most potential profit, due to age or a low cost of entry. If this deck does well, I’d expect Champion to double to $5/$10 or so, and the Scrounger should become a $3/$7 card. 

Fatal Push is a card I want to love and a card I’ve made money on in the past, but it’s in the Mystery Boosters and I can’t condone buying in right now. It’s possible that this weekend, the card jumps from $5 to $10 on the back of being amazing, but we’re going to get a whole lot of copies coming when stores get to order Mystery boxes for in-store play in March. 

Castle Locthwain is another one to keep an eye on, as the graph has started to rise from maximum supply just a few weeks ago: 

If you want to get in on the Extended Art version around $11-$12, that’s certainly tempting too. It remains to be seen how prevalent foiling and using EA cards will be in Pioneer, whereas in Modern people do love their foils.

Mono-Black Vampires

This is a spicy one, full of card draw and synergies. I’m sad that Vampire Nocturnus is not quite Pioneer legal, but there’s a lot to like here. If you’re playing against a combo deck that stumbles, they are dead very very quickly. Sorin into Champion of Dusk is real and powerful. 

Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord ($12/$17)

Champion of Dusk ($1/$2.50)

These are the best two targets from this deck, mainly because there’s only the one printing of each. I’m delighted when a deck requires a playset of a mythic, makes me feel very good about my purchase. Yes, Sorin was a couple bucks cheaper a while ago, but he’s the key mythic in this deck and if it does well on camera, $25 is likely and $30 quite possible.

Champion of Dusk is a card that could hit $8 or $10 in foil in this circumstance, and if you’re buying in Friday morning at $10 for a foil playset, well, you’re going to feel very good about this. For both of these, I’d prefer to be in on the foils because there’s no EA versions to contend with and supply is much shallower on foils. There’s only about a hundred foils on TCG right now, and that includes Promo Pack foils and Prerelease foils. For a mythic that’s played as a four-of, that means only 25 people have to see Vampires do well and decide to jump in. 

Niv to Light

Oh, does this deck make me happy. Bring to Light is a card that I know I’ve mentioned before, and frankly, this is the best shell for it. You’ll get a 6/6 flyer and probably 2-4 cards if it resolves. Best of all, you’ve got a good chance of casting Bring to Light or Niv-Mizzet Reborn a turn or two early. 

Niv-Mizzet Reborn ($8/$17) and Bring to Light ($2/$7) are the big winners here, as the headliners for the deck. Sylvan Caryatid at $11/$18 is a bit high for my taste. I’m not worried about the supply of Niv due to War of the Spark uncut sheets, because there was only one Niv per sheet and getting a perfect cut out of one of those is HARD.

Dimir Inverter

Tons of words have been written about this deck, and I’ll be honest: I don’t like the odds that it survives the next set of bans. I cannot recommend buying into this deck, because of the difficulty interacting with these triggered abilities. Splinter Twin was easier to disrupt than Inverter into Oracle!

Lotus Breach Combo 

The deck a lot of pros are talking about, here’s a list courtesy of Pascal Vieren at HareuyaMTG that is using Underworld Breach, Lotus Field, and a lot of other fun choices to kill your opponent dead on turn three or four. It goldfishes very well, is amazingly redundant, and is another strong contender to get banned before too long. Interestingly, both this deck and Dimir Inverter use the either/or of Thassa’s Oracle and Jace, Wielder of Mysteries as the win condition. The JP version of Jace is $20/$80 on TCG, the Secret Lair stained glass version is $60, it’s a winner in Commander…but can the two decks using him survive the next bans unscathed?

I’ve spoken before about my love of the Breach, how it’s a combo card waiting for the right shell…and here it is. Underworld Breach is currently at $4/$7/$9 EA/$44 EA foil and given what this is doing in Pioneer, with that card pool, I am tempted to get in on the EA versions for Modern and Legacy play. How long till this is busted there too?

There’s other decks, like UW Spirits, UW Control, Heliod Combo…the list goes on. My sampling is just that, a few of the decks to watch for and prepare for. If I missed your favorite deck, feel free to call it out in the comments or let me know on Twitter, or perhaps in the ProTrader Discord channel.

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.