There’s a lot of cool stuff in the set. 

Some of the new cards do new things in a new color, and that can set off a whole set of spikes. Let’s look at what has been previewed so far, and some potential specs. Many of the legends that were previewed early, like Doctor Doom, King of Latveria, I’ve already written about and we’ll see if any of those specs get there. (Come on, Mesmeric Trance!)

I’ve chosen four of the new legends, cards that do a neat thing in a way not really done before. No promises that these are the only legends people want to build around, just my first pass. 

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Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) 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 co-host of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

Today, I want to go over a feeling that many of us have gone through. 

You had a plan for a spec, you bought in at the right time, and then just as predicted, it went up. You posted at the perfect price at the most opportune moment, and locked in a significant profit, and did that process over and over, netting yourself the funds needed to move on to the next target.

And the card kept going up.

How do you deal with that? Why did it happen? Are there ways to mitigate it? Should we mitigate it? Today is less about the picks and more about the mentality, so come with me and let’s review what success means. 

This topic is timely for me, as just a month ago at MagicCon Vegas, I sold off a stack of my leftover English-language Hatsune Miku cards. I’d already made significant profits by repackaging the four individual lairs and selling them as a group on Ebay. (I was in at $160 per foil set, and selling at $600+, a most delightful margin!) I had a dozen or so assorted Lairs that I’d cracked, looking for a Snapcaster, and I sold off the individual foils and nonfoils from every set other than the original Sakura Superstar.

Again, all of this was profit on top of profit, and I got $23 for each of six Rainbow Foil Miku, Divine Diva, a card that was selling for around $45 as of a month ago.

In case you didn’t hear, someone’s Goblinstorm deck was shipped with what appears to be a Hatsune Miku Commander deck, with a reskinned Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice as the only card visible through the sealed plastic. As a result, everything that is Miku and is in green or white has gone up like mad, and the cheapest copy of that same Elspeth is now just under $100 on TCGPlayer.

This is only the most recent (and therefore most painful) example of a phenomenon that absolutely will happen to you the longer you’re buying and selling something. It happens with stocks, it happens with real estate, it happens in crypto. There’s no single name for the phenomenon, which is interesting, as I thought folks in the stock market had a cute phrase for just about everything, like a ‘dead cat bounce’ or ‘economic moat’ or ‘diamond hands.’ In the ProTrader Discord, I’m open to coining a phrase, if you’ve got a fun idea get it in there and let’s make it work.

Let’s start with the feelings that follow a post-sale spike.

First of all:  You won! You had a plan, you did it, and you made money. Hell yes! High Five! Buy yourself that sweet foil with the profits. Recognize that you did it. Other people might make more, and as time passes, you might feel bad about what you made and when, but wallowing in regret will only lead to you making bad decisions, like not selling when you could make a profit. 

Magic finance is littered with examples of holding too long, and most spikes represent opportunities for you to sell and make your profits. Let’s take a recent example of a Commander who made an enormous amount of cards spike: Hashaton, Scarab’s Fist. This was a card that premiered in Aetherdrift’s Commander decks in January 2025, and immediately made a big splash. One of the cards that went wild was Tortured Existence, a Stronghold common that went from $3 to a top price of $14. 

The reason you sell into a spike is because there’s no guarantee that the prices stay high. Attention moves on. Tortured Existence has gotten a Secret Lair printing since its spike and can now be had around $5 a copy. If you have a $3 card go up to $14, you set your prices at just over $10, make your 3x profit, and move on. You’re gaining cash that you can use on your next spec, or roll it into value for a Commander deck, or remodel your kitchen. 

Please remember a tough lesson to learn personally: Your cards have a ‘worth’ only when you go to sell them. The moment you do sell them, that’s when the profit is locked in. Owning a card that is spiking feels great, but if you don’t move to liquidate the card, you run the risk of it settling back down at the post-spike price.

The right time to sell is tricky. Let’s stick with the Miku example and focus on foil Elvish Mystic, the bonus inclusion for the first Miku drop. It was at $30 or so, and here’s the current set of prices for the evening of 5/28:

If you have one copy in a Commander deck, you should be tempted to sell. This is a huge jump and not one I’d expect to stay high. I would respect your desire to sell at $50, and I would understand your desire to list at $96.69 and wait a bit. We don’t even know when the Miku deck will come out, and as we’re seeing in the midst of Goblinstorm sales, selling into the original preview hype can mean less profit than selling when people get cards in hand. The correct play with the Mystic could be to wait until people get the Miku deck and then more folks are in on the buying.

We can’t know for sure what the right play is, and that feels brutal. We are conditioned to avoid the situations that make us feel bad, including the feeling of selling too early.  However, there are two concrete plans you can implement to help prevent this set of negative feelings, neither of which works after the fact.

System #1: Make the plan and trust the plan.

It’s remarkably easy to have your emotions in a moment derail what is usually an orderly set of feelings. Buy the card, sell the card. When we start adding regret, though, and the potential of regret, things can really go off the rails. In poker, this is often referred to as being on tilt, where your emotions cloud your judgment like you’re Anakin about to slaughter some younglings. 

When you make a plan ahead of time, you free yourself from that doubt and regret. Doesn’t matter if the card goes up or goes down, you got the profit you wanted and you had a plan for that profit! You are a success and doing better every time! Having a system, a set of preplanned sell points, allows you to worry less about what could be.

And if it looks like a card might keep going up, well, that leads to the other systematic approach.

System #2: Cover your entrance costs, and everything after that is free money. 

This is how I approached the Miku cards. I’d already sold a ton of the cards, and I was way ahead on all of it. Whatever I got from these leftovers was just super bonus money, and should be viewed as a nice addition to the systematic profit I’ve already made happen. 

The common variation on this is to buy a card, and when it spikes, immediately sell just enough to cover what you paid. After that, hold forever or sell immediately, and you’ll always be winning when it comes to your sales. This is a systematic approach, but allowing you to flex as the situation changes. 

Whichever plan you have, I also want to tell you that the social aspect is big. It helps a lot to hear from other people that you did the thing and you did it well, even if there was more profit to be had. Some people like to buy cards and then never sell them, and down that path lies madness and storage units and lots of cobwebs covering mildewed boxes. Magic is turning into a game of churn, and if we want to maximize profits, we need to execute our plans and keep up with it all. 

Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) 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 co-host of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

We don’t have a lot of specifics about The Hobbit set yet, and that’s fine, since there’s still all of Marvel Super Heroes to get through. What we do know is enough to do some early preparations, and sometimes, forethought is all that’s needed to make some wonderful profits. 

Let’s go through the categories, then some specific cards. 

Borderless Classic Artist Cards

This set is already off to a great start, with reprints of original LOTR cards coming. We’re told of Tom Bombadil, Sauron, the Dark Lord, and of course, The One Ring. There will be 40 of these cards, and there’s nonfoil plus surge foil in the collector boosters, with traditional foils being in a special one-card Box Topper pack. 

It’s important to note that these are not exclusive to the Box Toppers, as has been the case in the past. The Toppers are merely a bonus, something you get with Play Booster and Collector Booster boxes alike. If the special packs were the only way to get shiny cards, then we’d have some difficulties, but two foil versions means we can be reasonable about this. 

We should expect most of the popular LOTR cards here: Bowmasters, Delighted Halfling, Mithril Coat, etc. I’ll be interested to see if there’s nine more Nazgul for us to collect, but mainly, I want to buy all of these when supply maxes out. Will it take another three years for us to get The Silmarillion and a third printing of these cards? Perhaps, but I surely bought enough Halflings at under $10 to resell at $25 to make me interested in maxing out known staples.

The One Ring having cribbed art, and admitted to it, is not going to affect the price all that much of this new version. It’ll be the cheapest. I expect older versions to go up in price some, since they are, by far, better looking. Even without Frazier having copy-flip-pasted the Ring itself, the background is dull and everything else is better. I’ll absolutely be buying these for later resell, but I’m under no illusions regarding the tiers of demand here. 

Dwarven Language Cards

So far we know about Arcane Signet, and there will be four more. Your guess is as good as mine, Signet would not have been on my list as a card that “captures a moment from The Hobbit, such as this Arcane Signet which depicts the mark carved into the door of Bilbo’s home.”

We will get more of these, but I’m not fixated yet unless there’s a Dwarven Rhystic Study lurking.

Book Cover Cards

This is a lot cooler than the other covers we’ve seen, like the D&D module books and the like. These are legible, and it’s obvious what they are. I personally don’t like cards where they are pre-aged to look like the corners are already jacked up, but that’s just me. We’re only getting ten of these cards, with two of them known already. 

Dragon Hoard Frame Cards

The detail of having the red version missing a scale is top-notch, the sort of thing they do very well in a lot of the Universes Beyond products. (Personal favorite: Shadowfax having the meaning of haste!) 

We’re getting 25 of these cards, with three of them previewed, and this should be the sort of thing that performs well. Important to note that there’s both nonfoil and regular foil of these in Play Boosters, with the Collector Boosters getting the Surge Foil versions. 

Glittering Gold Smaug

They didn’t serialize this card, but they announced that there will be ‘approximately’ 500 copies of this card. On one hand, I am deeply suspicious of this methodology. They were allowed to serialize lots of things three years ago, why not slap a number on here? Further than that, why didn’t we get an approximate number for the super-chase Sothera, the Supervoid, or the Headliner Turtles, or The Mind Stone, and so on?

And on the other hand, I feel like Smeagol looking at the Precious for the first time. I wants it, yes I do, and I’m aware that I’ll have to pay an exorbitant amount to get it. The TMNT Headliners are several grand, but with them publicizing the amount of Glittering Gold Smaug out there, the big collectors will be all over this and copies will not last long in the market. I’m doubtful that any will get sold on TCGPlayer, but we’ll see. My expectation is that this is $4k+ out of the gate and rises from there. I wish I was kidding. 

Individual Cards

Smaug is a fantastic card, one that fits well into a wide range of decks but definitely amazing in those that are Treasure-focused. Imagine Smaug into Goldspan? Boom! I appreciate that he’s four power and hasty and low costed. I’m becoming resigned to not owning the Glittering version with each of these words.

Thorin is a perfect inclusion in every Equipment deck, giving a lot of mana for equipping, plus a big smack to a creature. Don’t forget that he can target himself too, so hopefully one of your equipment grants haste. 

The Arkenstone and My Precious are solid cards that have good Adventure spells, but since the Adventures have colors, it restricts where these cards can go. A lot of decks would love the combo, though. 

Bilbo, Thief in the Night is going to form some interesting combos. Mana reduction for the Commander is good, but from the yard, from exile, from foretell or even from Adventures is remarkably flexible. I don’t know what the endgame is for this card, but it’s got a great first ability and a very useful secondary, so there will indeed be some craziness. 

Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) 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 co-host of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.