Monday has another SL drop, this time focused on The Hobbit. We’ve got food, ghostly Hobbits, and Smaug’s treasures. Lots of fun stuff to buy, but keep in mind that there’s two more big drops happening in the next month.

September 1 brings the Perfectly Normal Superdrop, with Lo-Fi Study Beats girl, Marvel themes, and who knows what else. Two weeks after that on September 14, Masters of the Universe cards arrive! We have to plan, we have to be prepared, and now we have to plan for the one in front of us.

For now, five Hobbit-themed drops. Let’s look at prices, comparisons, and make plans. 

I’m giving you the EDHREC data, but keep in mind the two big problems with this dataset: First, because a lot of people upload a preconstructed deck as-is or with just a few changes, anything that’s been in a couple precons will have really inflated numbers. Second, only a small percentage of players bother to upload decks. The data is a useful reference point, but it is not the be-all and end-all for such data.

I’m also giving you the pricing on premium cards when it exists, even if it’s just pack foils. I’m leaving out the big outliers, like serialized and Pro Tour promos, and sticking with the versions that a new SL would be competing with.

Quantity beats everything else, but we’ve seen a lot of drops with a surprising amount of stock printed. The quantity directly impacts the speed at which it will get sold out, and how quickly the price goes wild. That quantity matters more than most of the other qualities of a drop, so we’ll see how many of each are available. Normally, I’d expect that the He Who Walks Unseen drop, being more pricey and special, would have a lower print run, but we’ve seen a couple of special drops be printed to greater amounts than expected so we’ll have to find out the fun way.

Secret Lair x The Hobbit: Second Breakfast and Beyond

Seven’s a good number for the Food decks, as those decks make many, many food tokens. This is the second food-only drop, behind the Oishii ones, and that was sold for a lower starting price. This is full price, and initially, I was pretty low on this drop. But surprisingly, there’s a lot of $4 food tokens out there, so I don’t hate this drop, but I’m still not buying it. Here I think I like the nonfoil more, just to get in cheaper, but while I don’t loathe the drop, I don’t think it’s worth it unless you’re going to have all seven tokens. 

Secret Lair x The Hobbit: Over the Edge of the Wild

Card	EDHREC Decks	Premium Version
Cloudshift	169,000	$3
Tocasia’s Welcome	160,000	$5
Stony Silence	24,300	$2
Imp’s Mischief	184,000	$30
Seize the Spoils	154,000	$1

Mischief is kind of a trap here, as the etched Commander Masters is $30 and the Planar Chaos pack foil is $40, but the Breaking News foil is under $10. The Breaking News frame is one of players’ least favorite looks for a card, but this Gollum version is going to be lucky to be a $15 foil.

This is the first premium version of Tocasia’s Welcome, so I’ll be in for this at Dump Week, but I’m surely not buying full-price Lairs for it.

Secret Lair x The Hobbit: Smaug’s Spoils

Card	EDHREC Decks	Premium Version
Fellwar Stone	2,350,000	$15
Lightning Greaves	2,340,000	$20
Liquimetal Torque	243,000	$5
Sol Ring	7,940,000	$15
Thought Vessel	2,350,000	$15

These cards have been printed a whole bunch, and this is decent. The art is good, and I think the growth should be slow but steady, but the quantity printed is key here. If it sells out first, this has a lot of potential, and there’s a whole lot of decks that would love a premium matched set of the big four staples. 

The other borderless Thought Vessels are nicely priced, as are borderless foil Fellwar Stones, so I see this as a slow gainer if it doesn’t sell out fast. 

Secret Lair x The Hobbit: Desolation

Card	EDHREC Decks	Premium Version
Defile	144,000	$5
Diabolic Intent	366,000	$95
Dread Return	235,000	$6
Mirkwood Bats	409,000	$6
Read the Bones	257,000	$3

Diabolic Intent has an Invocation and a LTR Hildebrand premium version that are both close to $100, but there’s a lot of regular frames down at $20 and a foil Final Fantasy version at $35.  You’re placing a pretty big bet on the DI to hold the value for the Lair, and if this was the first printing, I’d be enthusiastically in, but there’s a lot of this card already out there.

That said, this art style generally does well over time. So I think this is worth buying, with the hope that this is a Lair that sells out quickly. Black-and-white Lairs often take a lot of time to increase in value.  

Secret Lair x The Hobbit: He Who Walks Unseen

Card	EDHREC Decks	Premium Version
Arcane Heist	29,200	$2
Contentious Plan	67,700	$1
Curiosity	215,000	$23
Solve the Equation	147,000	$7
Windfall	522,000	$40

So this is the last Lair they spring on us, and we don’t have videos of this, but the pictures seem to indicate that we’re getting some kind of foil with a ghostly outline of Bilbo doing stuff with the Ring on. We’re leaning pretty heavily on the comboriffic Curiosity and Windfall here, and that’s tricky. Windfall has the Eddie version that’s pretty expensive from a quick-to-sell Lair and a lot of denial combos. The Ghostbusters version of Windfall is not even $15. Curiosity’s most expensive version is the Lil’ Giri printing, with a regular frame but from a convention-only Lair. The Enchanting Tales foil was printed at Uncommon, no Confetti version, and is under $5. 

I want to think that this is a very limited drop, especially because it’s $60 and foil-only, but with the higher print runs lately, especially for Universes Beyond, I’m hesitant. I’ve got many Deadpool Pool Party foils telling me to think this through. I think this is the only Lair I’m going to try hard for, mainly because the first time they do a certain look, that almost always hits. Looking at Pool Party again

Additionally, this Lair is left out of all the bundles. The Non-Foil bundle has zero discount, and the All-Foil bundle has $10 off. The Everything bundle, incredibly misnamed as it leaves out the Walks Unseen Lair, is going to be $260, which is a total of about $20 off buying one of (nearly) everything. Spending $199 gets you a sweet Arcane Signet, something I’ll definitely be picking up when they get dumped on the market.

As a result, I’m talking myself into the He Who Walks Unseen Lair, and out of the rest, I’m mainly into Smaug’s Treasures. I can’t bring myself to buy the Food, the claymation Lair has only the Welcome that I’ll go for at Dump Week, and I’ll dabble slightly in the Desolation Lair, but that might be all about Dump Week too.

I’m also trying to recover from other buys recently, so my spending is a touch constrained. If you want to discuss what I’m buying, and convince me to change my mind, come over to the ProTrader Discord and let’s chat!

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.

Welcome back to the long-running, incredibly-complete series where we take Wizards’ obfuscations about drop rates and give you a clear answer to the question everyone wants: How hard is it to open the card I want from a Collector Booster? Or to put another way, what are my chances in these super-expensive packs?

It’s a well-known tidbit that you should never open packs, they are almost never worth it. The theory is extra-true in the modern day, where the Expected Value of a Collector Booster box is way out of line with the amount it takes to buy that box. 

Hype and FOMO are carrying the day, and if you’re feeling the heat, let’s go over some stone cold numbers, as we know the absolute truth for almost every card you could open. Let’s get to it!

All of the information on these tables is taken from Wizards’ own posts, mostly the Collecting article that tells us the drop rates for each type of card in a Collector Booster. If you know the percentage, and how many cards fall into that category, a little division and then taking a reciprocal gets us to the answer. 

Let’s start with nonfoils of Booster Fun treatments, which take up two slots in the pack, meaning that we get twice as many. Could also be some lovely spec opportunities in future too. 

This generally lines up well with other nonfoils, but a couple of things jump out here. First of all, more than half the nonfoils opened in these slots will be Extended Art or a Scene card. Taken a step further, combine those categories with Box Toppers and Dragon Hoard and you’re at more than 80%. There’s gonna be a lot of those cards out there.

The individual Box Toppers are gonna be a tougher pull than people anticipate, because there’s forty of them. Close to twice as difficult to nab in nonfoil as some of the mythic variants, we’ll have to see what the prices end up at.

Now for the Booster Fun foils: 

We’ve got four categories where specific cards can be more than 300 CB packs to get opened, where MSH has only two categories like that and only the Silver Scroll foils from Secrets of Strixhaven were over 300. Mythic Scrolls were 650 packs each, where the rares were about 324 packs.

So in terms of pure statistics, Surge Foil Box Toppers, Surge Foil Mythic Book Covers, Surge Foil Mythic Rare Dragon Hoard and Traditional Foil Dwarven Language cards are roughly as hard to open as Rare Silver Scroll Foils. There’s a lot of other factors at play, so don’t go confusing price with the pack odds, but if you want to know equivalencies, there you go.

I’m interested in how the prices settle out on the Box Toppers, too. We know the relative drop rates for the nonfoil and the Surge Foil, both of which are in the Collector Boosters. The unknown is how many of the Traditional Foils will be opened, since you get one of those per Play Booster box/CB box. The math says it’s roughly $6,800 worth of cards to open to get one specific Traditional Foil (given $170/box and 40 boxes) but only $6,300 for a nonfoil and $12,800 worth of product to get the Surge Foil. Will the market prices reflect these rates? Likely not, but I can’t predict mass psychology.

Finally, let’s talk about the big bad of the set. Smaug the Magnificent is the headliner, the chase, the one you want to open above all else. We’re told that roughly 500 of these bad boys were put into circulation, and with that number, we can start doing some estimating. 

We know for certain that the first Lord of the Rings print run for Collector Boosters was 3.3 million packs, and for the Holiday Edition, that’s 1.5 million, based on the numbers they told us at the time. They no longer give us enough specifics to get that number (and that’s quite deliberate on their end) but that’s where we can start estimations. If the print run for The Hobbit is the same as the summer LOTR, then you’re looking at one golden Smaug every 6,666 packs, or 555.5 boxes of Collector Boosters. If you think the print run is equal to the smaller Holiday Edition, then it’s every 3,333 packs, or 278 boxes. We don’t have hard numbers (if you know the actual print run, that’s wonderful information to share) so your guess is as likely as mine.

Under duress, I’d put the number somewhere in between, so it’ll take around 4,000 packs, maybe 4,500, but I have to reiterate that I don’t have an ironclad set of numbers to work with. The drop rate is incredibly low, and with Magic collectors hitting quite the fever pitch, I fully expect the first Smaug on the open market to go for $35,000 or more. Vendors are offering mega-bounties, as they have buyers lined up to pay even more. 

So there you have it, a comprehensive list of the drop rates for every card type in Collector Boosters. If you want to know about more niche things like uncommons and such, drop in on the ProTrader Discord and I’ll give that a look for you. Good luck in your packs!

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’ve got quite the gauntlet of Secret Lair drops coming, one after the other for the next four Mondays. All of them appear to be worth buying so far, so we’re going to start with the first two.

Stardew Valley’s drop is this coming Monday, and that has three separate Lairs making up the superdrop, and after that, on the 3rd, it’s the end of the order time for Their Magic is Limitless, Wizards’ annual charity drop that is print-to-demand. Yes, it’s been a month already and there’s a real effect going on. 

So let’s get into these drops, the cards and the outlook, and decide what to do this week and next, before Miku and Hobbits terrorize our wallets.

For each of these drops, I’m listing the current EDHREC inclusion rate, and I’m using an estimate for the premium versions of the card that exist. It’s getting tricky these days, with the many different versions out there, so if you see prices that are higher/lower for a sweet foil, don’t be too shocked. 

Let’s start with the three Lairs of the Stardew Valley, known as the Moonlight Jellies Superdrop. 

Secret Lair x Stardew Valley: Welcome to Stardew Valley

Card	EDHREC Decks	Common Expensive Version
Stardew Valley	n/a	New to Magic!
Wedding Ring	123,000	$20
Dawn’s Truce	31,000	$5
Swords to Plowshares	1,020,000	$30
Rites of Flourishing	77,000	$10
Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis	17,000	$15
Sol Ring	All of them	Too much

First off, this has a new-to-Magic card in Stardew Valley itself, a land that makes Food and allows you to give permanents (which includes tokens!) to other people and you get a card for it.

The most recent drops we had with one new-to-Magic card and some accessories was the Sony drop, and while this isn’t the aggressive bent of Jaws, Relentless Predator, it’s locked in on one of the most popular games in the casual farming genre. A ton of people have played this game, and this Lair is nostalgic in art and effective in card choice. Group Hug is a time-honored plan, and we get the four-color, giant-toughness pair in Kynaios and Tiro who let you draw a card and then put a land into play at your end step. Your opponents can do either, only you get both. 

Financially, I like everything about this Lair. I like a mechanically unique card (well actually I hate putting these sorts of cards into SL drops, everything needs to be in a pack) and I like the IP and the art style and there’s a couple of staples here too. 

Secret Lair x Stardew Valley: Life in Pelican Town

Card	EDHREC Decks	Common Expensive Version
Crop Rotation	381,000	$18
Fountainport	64,000	$8
Homeward Path	153,000	$35
Command Tower	1,340,000	Just too many
Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth	292,000	$45

Don’t get caught up in Crop Rotation–it’s less than four bucks for the newest Mystical Archive version in nonfoil. These are good versions of cards that are in a lot of decks, though, and that’s what we’re always after. Homeward Path has had a SL before, and Yavimaya has a sweet (and expensive) version from the Realms and Relics set of Lord of the Rings. A solid drop, and as a companion to Stardew Valley, has great future potential.

Secret Lair x Stardew Valley: A Flicker in the Deep

Card	EDHREC Decks	Common Expensive Version
Treasure Vault	82,000	$18
Atsushi, the Blazing Sky	50,000	$15
Mitotic Slime	31,000	$8
Arcane Signet	1,050,000	$12
Sword of Forge and Frontier	74,000	$35

Sadly, I’m a touch less enthusiastic about this one, since none of these (aside from Signet) cracks the six figures. Each of these also has at least one sweet version to compete with, though the long-term growth is definitely there. Mitotic Slime has a sweet promo version but mostly it’s a buck. This will sell out last, I’d imagine, though we’ll see what the bundle-buyers get up to. Speaking of, we’re told that the only Bundle Discount is $10 off if you buy the Grandpa Would Be Proud bundle, which is one of each of the six, and you get $10 off total. We’ll also get a themed Puca’s Mischief in certain bundles only, not based on the amount you spend.

It’s very important that you know that there will be a wave of nonfoils of the main drop sent to WPN stores on August 21 in the US/Japan and mid-September for Europe/Asia, so don’t pin too many hopes on that part of the drop.

For me, I’ll be content to focus on the foils here. I’ll get some bundles, and when I get extras I’ll be prioritizing the Welcome and Pelican Town drops. Flicker in the Deep isn’t bad per se, and should do well long-term, but I’m facing wallet fatigue and I need to just not buy everything. (Except Hatsune Miku. Buy all of that.)

In addition, there’s another lair ending next Monday, which the most recent charity lair for the Global Fund for Women: Their Magic is Limitless:

Secret Lair Presents: Their Magic Is Limitless

Card	EDHREC Decks	Common Expensive Version
Dark Ritual	360,000	$40
Cultivate	1,090,000	$12
Finale of Devastation	398,000	$45
Lathril, Blade of the Elves	114,000	$20
Coat of Arms	187,000	$35
Sol Ring	1,300,000	$15
Path of Ancestry	622,000	$10
Llanowar Elves	790,000	$15

The Elf Warrior tokens are not a given, apparently there’s more, or a mix? It’s unclear as yet. 

Finale is pretty much worth it for this drop, and it’s solid value. Most of the charity Lairs that were print-to-demand age decently, but not quickly. Both Sheldon’s Spellbook and Nuestra Magia are a touch over $70 at this point, with no signs of being in a hurry to go higher. There’s a few reasons not to buy in here as a spec.

First, there’s going to be a lot of it out there. I love the Llanowar, that should age nicely, but this will not be hard to find. Second, they sold out of the initial printing and there’s not room for the next wave until April 2027. We were unlikely to resell it before then, but damn does that sting. Finally, I think we’ll have a chance to buy in at good prices during Dump Week now, and perhaps a second time when that April 2027 wave lands. I’ve got a lot of both the other Lairs left, and I’d rather focus on singles soon, instead of sealed in a year.

Be careful about adding this Lair to your Stardew order, too, because if you click to combine shipping, your order will be delayed till that April batch is ordered. 

Good luck in your queue times!

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 had a preview this week of Star Trek, which is out in November. There’s two sets between then and now: The Hobbit (getting its own stream today, Friday, July 17) and Reality Fracture. Wizards likes to do this, to give teasers, to get people fired up, to make the attention machine go brrrrrrr but this is really knocking it out of the park. 

So let’s go over the highlights of the stream and the set, and see what sorts of speculation we can get into. 

I want to lead off by saying that like many men of my age group, I watched a lot of The Next Generation (affectionately TNG) and much less of the other series. It’s just timing for what was on TV at the time. I didn’t give nearly the attention to this world as I did to Final Fantasy, but that’s okay, as I’m still pretty stoked for this set. 

The headliners for this set are something very unique, a set of seven cards that feature autographs from Star Trek actors.

First of all, we know there are seven of the signature cards, and roughly 250 of each. Most notably, they are hand-signed by the actor, not a printed signature but they gave Shatner and Mulgrew (and five more actors) a stack of 250, asked them to sign each one, and then distributed those into Collector Boosters. Super neat, excellent collectible, and gives the whales a set to chase instead of individual cards. 

We don’t know who the other five are, but Wizards said that they aren’t all captains. My betting is on the four major captains (Shatner, Stewart, Mulgrew, and Brooks) plus some combo of Takei, Ryan, Spiner, Dorn, and Frakes. No inside info, just a sampling of the four big series. I know this leaves off Discovery and Enterprise, as well as the movies, but you can’t have it all. 

These promise to be some pricey cards, though they won’t be on the Cosmic Stone level of pricey, since there are 1500 in all. I wouldn’t take less than five figures if I opened one. 

We also get the Shocklands being reprinted into Standard yet again. I’d thought that we’d lose this, but frankly we are spoiled for manabases already.

I adore full-art lands, and giving this the LCARS (Library Computer Access and Retrieval System) treatment is awesome. No, this doesn’t look like an overgrown tomb, but this is cool. Expensive? We’ll have to see what the drop rates are, but while Play Boosters can get you foil or nonfoil, Collector Boosters offer you nonfoil, foil, and Surge foil. Lots of premium shocks already out there, including Edge of Eternities’s versions, but this should hold a good price.  

There is a Beam Me Up bundle to be had, and that bundle will have two Schematic cards out of a possible eight, and frankly, these are wonderfully designed. 

I’m not expecting these to be Chocobo-bundle good, but these ought to be big gainers over time. It’s very cool and futuristic and unique, all things I want in my chase cards. I’ve pre-ordered the bundles on Amazon, a practice that works well this far out. I can cancel if it looks like it won’t be worth the money, and I can do that up until the week it ships. Plenty of time!

We got some individual cards, some showing a mechanic, others on a theme. I’m only going over a few that scream out ‘Build around me!!’ as they do something new or consistent. I also need to note that there are four Commander decks with this set, and that’s a lot of potential for reprints. Watch out, and spec carefully. 

Facing a dilemma is basically every time you make a choice, as in ‘choose one’ or ‘choose one or more’ and while we used to call those modal spells, now we’re calling it facing a dilemma. This does not include the choice of paying for Rhystic Study and the like.

Important to note that villainous choices do not trigger Seven’s ability, so you’re stuck with the 253 modal spells that could fit in a Seven of Nine deck. There is a Commander deck set coming in Esper colors, so some might get hit, but here’s some great choices to tack ‘draw a card’ onto: Rankle, Master of Pranks, Mystic Confluence, Dread Presence, Umezawa’s Jitte, The Vision, Dreamshackle Geist, Energy Chamber, Retreat to Coralhelm, Retreat to Hagra, and my favorite, Black Market Connections. Strong chance of reprint there, but it was just in MSH so let’s hope not. 

I focused on dilemmas you can face over and over again, but the list of modal instants and sorceries is truly out there. No wrong answers. 

Dr. Crusher tells you exactly what to do and then rewards you for it, which is my favorite thing in a new commander. She could have doubled the life you gain, but anything can do that, like Boon Reflection, The Wind Crystal, or Rhox Faithmender. She could have gained you bonus life, as in Cleric Class, Angel of Vitality, Heron of Hope, Leyline of Hope, or Knight of Dawn’s Light. There’s a ton of cards which gain life to get counters, but there are two big-potential cards I want to highlight and one deep cut.

Heliod, Sun-Crowned is always amazing in a deck like this, and it won’t be hard to set up a lot of lifegain triggers. Archangel of Thune, freshly reprinted in Marvel Super Heroes is timely and underpriced but the card I’m calling out as the greatest potential is Qala, Ajani’s Pridemate, a Jumpstart Uncommon from Foundations. There’s a lot of copies up on TCGPlayer but it does everything you want all at once.

Federation is an interesting mechanic, in that it wants lots of types but that non-Borg clause means you can’t just stuff Changelings into such a deck. I’m not sure how to break this card yet, but I’m working on it. 

Janeway, I’m certain, has some kind of combo with Elvish Warmaster, or maybe Ashaya, Soul of the Wild, or perhaps both, but there’s a lot of fun to be had here and someone will break the card in half, just you watch.

Assimilate might be the greatest flavor + mechanic combo ever. To add their distinctiveness to your own, you take it, you make it bigger, you make it into a Borg and it loses every type. Hell yes.

We’ve gotten a whole lot of amazing artifact goodness lately, and much of what I might mention has spiked already due to Ultron, Artificial Malevolence. I’m expecting this to be a tough ability to use, since stealing someone else’s creature is pretty unbalanced in Limited settings. The Queen is super-powerful, and note that you keep the thing even if she leaves play or is flickered. 

Calling the reprint sheet Stardates is a wonderful callout even if it makes no sense. This is the third Benedict Cumberbatch card we’ve gotten in less than a year (Dr. Strange, Smaug, and now Khan) but Sheoldred has desperately needed reprinting. Even if you don’t like human faces on your Praetor cards, this is a reprint you’ll want to buy cheap.

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.