Wizards of the Coast has had two big products get ordered recently, and this is before we get into any new Superdrops. The 30th Anniversary Countdown (hereafter known as the Countdown) set was 30 known cards, each packaged singly, with a 30% chance of being foil. The 30th Anniversary packs (which I’m gonna call the Anniversary set) was basically a reprint of Beta packs, with a little bit of editing, twice the dual lands, and a retro frame slot.

The Countdown was sold for $150 each, where you knew the floor was 30 specific nonfoils. The Anniversary packs, where you could open a Lifelace and a retro Chaoslace or perhaps Mox Sapphire and retro Black Lotus, were sold for $1,000 as a set of four packs.

One of these sets sold out in an hour, and the other was pulled after 39 minutes of apparently very lackluster sales. The question is why, and it’s worth thinking about in the context of future purchases and special sets.

It’s a touch simplistic to presume that guaranteed value is the only reason that the Countdown sold out, but that is where we need to start this discussion. Anniversary packs at $250 are easily the most expensive packs ever sold by Wizards, even the VIP from the first Double Masters was under $100 at the time. People expect a lot of their packs these days, after years of Booster Fun treatments. 

More to the point, though, it’s a contrast between an expensive and potentially profitable lottery ticket and buying $7 for $5 worth of pennies. We knew from the outset what the cards were in the Countdown, including the art and frame variations. We could easily establish a baseline based on current prices, including the most expensive card, Chrome Mox. 

These copies from Eternal Masters were $90 around the time of the announcement, and have fallen to around $70, close to the price for the Countdown. We are at max supply for that copy, and while you can crack for singles and make around $30 all told, I’m being patient with my copies.

Chrome Mox was just the most expensive card in the Countdown set, but it gave us a floor. When the entire set was revealed, we could do the math and see how singles were a bit over $200 at the time, and figured it would drop some once it came out, which it has. 

Even better, because any card is 30% to be foil, the value has nowhere to go but up! There’s a decent chance that the average Countdown kit is worth *more* than its cost, even accounting for the race to the bottom. TCGPlayer is bearing this out, with sealed sets selling for $200. After taxes, fees, and shipping that’s not a lot of profit, so I’m being patient, as I said, but this is when supply is maxed. 

Contrast this with the Anniversary packs, and the enormous gap between what might get opened. I spoke of opening two Laces, or two Lotuses, and that’s a delta measured in several thousands of dollars. We clearly love gambling, as Magic players we’ve been conditioned to rip open packs and look for that sweet sweet value. 

We’ve always had the chance that packs will contain cards which will be worth a lot less, even plenty of Foil Extended Art mythics aren’t worth the cost of a Collector Booster. However, that’s opening a $25 pack, or opening a dozen from a $200 box of those. Wizards is asking those players to fork over a grand for the chance to open a piece of Power or a dual land, when those duals can be had in NM for a lot less than $1000!

Also, none of these are ‘real’. We’ve had this discussion all over the place, especially in the context of gold border cards being ‘legal’ for Commander play. As game pieces, these are too expensive for what they are doing.

However, in those 700 words, I didn’t mention the collectors at all. These duals, these new Power cards, they aren’t going to be mistaken as actual A/B/U cards. Instead, these are new collectibles, rare as hell. That’s a different animal entirely, and that’s what you have to look at for Wizards’ thinking behind ‘wtf did they think would happen’?

A majority of Magic players are collectors too. We want to collect sweet versions of cards and then play with them too. The value of the card, its collectibility, is validating to us, giving us a rush of dopamine when we gaze upon that backwards-printed Viscera Seer and realize that I have only one of a hundred of these in the entire world. 

Not only do we get that feeling of joy, of satisfaction, but we also get to show it off in some way, most likely in a Commander deck or a sweet Cube. We get to experience the unique sensation of displaying a rare and valuable collectible, and the recognition of others who know how rare a card that is. 

This is why the serialized cards are performing so well: We love this stuff, and sports card manufacturers have been blazing this trail for a long time. We’re going to see more super-expensive packs, but we aren’t going to see this enormous gulf in the $250 packs. We’ll see one-of Unlimited Lotus Replica in foil with a rainbow Richard Garfield signature, packaged with a sleeve and slabbed case. 

The Anniversary packs were apparently pulled after 39 minutes of underwhelming sales. The lows were too low on these packs for Magic collectors, but don’t forget that Magic collectors have had 30 years to get their actual Power and dual lands. There is value in having these collectibles, but the whales who would be the market here weren’t going after anything better, just different. 

Fundamentally, I think that was the error here. Wizards thought there was a market for expensive packs, and there is, but the ratios were off. I won’t be surprised when there’s an announced run of 200 packs, with a selection of limited cards, and the packs are $1000 each.

This run at higher-end collectibles missed, but having this happen in the midst of the very successful serialized cards demonstrates that the market is there. Get ready for more.

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 are far enough into the set’s cycle that I can say this with confidence: It’s pretty amazing that we’re going to be able to buy so many awesome cards for some very cheap prices, and that they printed a set with two subsets: BRO, plus the BOT and BRR sets. Amazing stuff.

Right now, the serialized artifacts are taking all of the time and attention and money for this set. It’s understandable: there’s exactly 500 of each card, numbered and everything. It’s a gorgeous foiling, too, and we’ve even got crimped or other misprinted serialized cards running around! All the pieces are in place for the non-premium versions to tank pretty hard in the upcoming months. 

As such, I like to plan out my targets in advance for this sort of thing. I’m not buying now, and I’m not buying in three months. I’ve learned, and written about, the new timeline for cards being six months from release.

A note about the EDHREC rank: These rankings represent only the people maximally online and invested in uploading their decks. I haven’t put any of my decks up there, and there’s also a bias towards preconstructed decks. This is useful information, but it isn’t an all-knowing Oracle on the hill, nor a foolproof metric.

Swiftfoot Boots, Ashnod’s Altar, and Chromatic Lantern are by far the most popular cards here, but they will only be viable if the price drops to nearly bulk. Both of them have a lot of printings, and while the retro border is cool, this is absolutely a stay-away for me. 

Burnished Hart is in similar straits, but this at least is the only unique frame for the card. What’s warning me off is that there’s a Foil Extended Art from Commander Legends 1, when the FEAs were notably rarer, and that price is still super cheap. If you can get a lot of shiny versions for very very cheap, you might have a buylist play in the future, but I’m still not planning to buy.

Aetherflux Reservoir (current lowest priced version at $5, highest is $30, listed in 84,000 EDHREC decks) – Now here’s a card I can spec on. Foils for the retro and the schematic frame are $8 and $20, respectively, and that’s a big gap for cards that exist with the same drop rate. It’s got a pedigree, it’s a plan on its own in Commander, and it’s headed for its lowest price ever. I’m hopeful for foils in the $5 range in a few months, and that’s a lovely price for a mythic.

Altar of Dementia ($3 to $20, 64k decks) – There’s only two foils of this, one from Conspiracy and one from Modern Horizons, which you can see was released in June 2019:

We can see how cheap the card has been, and now we’re getting a whole lot more copies put into circulation. It’s a mythic now, not a rare, but that shouldn’t matter too much, given how frantically people are opening BRO Collector Boosters. I like this a lot long-term, and what I’m hoping for is that the foils (currently $5 and $13) keep tumbling lower. Even the Retro foil would be super attractive at $3, given that the other foils are over $11. I would also be interested in nonfoils if they got to the $1 range.

Mox Amber ($22 to $115, 58k decks) – You wouldn’t think that I’d be waiting on the big hit to come down, but I sure as heck am. The mad dash for serialized cards has Amber dropping from its all-time high:

And in fact, let’s zoom in on the recent part:

Yup, it’s fallen by half in the first month since its reveal and it’s definitely not done dropping. This is a marvelous candidate for buying something like 50 copies at ten bucks each around Easter. I can’t wait. The foils for the retro and schematic should get somewhat cheaper too, and will make the Dominaria foil prices look silly.

My only concern is that this card is an excellent candidate for Dominaria Remastered, and whatever special thing they have in mind for that set. Since that’s coming out in January, though, I’ll have enough time to make that decision.

Helm of the Host ($6 to $30, 57k decks) – I was surprised to see that this had only gotten a List reprint, but everything I said about Amber holds true here: It’s falling fast, it’ll fall for a while, and I won’t be shocked to see it in Dominaria Remastered. Once that hurdle is past, though, I’m really hoping that this ends up near one or two bucks a copy. Perfect buylist play once the retail gets to $5 again, and it undoubtedly will. This is one of the biggest equip costs commonly played in Commander, but there’s both ways around it and it’s always worth it anyway. There’s no special frame out there and not even a Secret Lair, so all the interest is going to go straight to these copies.

Ramos, Dragon Engine ($4 to $25, 13k decks total, 4k as Commander) – Finally, let’s discuss a card that has been looking for the right reprint home for some time. Wizards has done a lot to make Dragons a fun species to play, and five-color decks especially. There’s no shortage of ways to abuse this card, including ways to bounce and replay and break this ability right in half. Scrapbasket and Transguild Courier are cards I’ve seen do hilarious things. We can see the effect of all the recent Dragon goodness, as well as the effect of previewing the card, in the graph:

However, this card has been in tiny circulation for the longest time. It was a foil in the original Commander 2017 printing, and it was an Etched Foil for Commander Legends. That was it, till now. Its price was propped up by such small printings, and as such, I fully expect this to drop quite a ways…where I want to buy it up.

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.

If you are feeling burned out on Secret Lair purchases, that’s valid. It’s been a never-ending stream of cards from the fire hose, with Universes Beyond and Post Malone and 30th Anniversary Countdown, plus everything else that’s come along in the six months before that.

We had something interesting happen, though. A Festival-In-A-Box (hereafter known as FIAB) was released for the Magic event in Philadelphia in March. The last time a FIAB went on sale, it was gone in hours. This time…it’s still available days later, and I want to get into why. What’s changed? Is there still value to be had? Was there ever value? Let’s get into it.

First of all, let’s do the direct comparison. Here’s what you got from the Vegas FIAB last time:

This time, still available for Philadelphia and not shipping till March:

Handily, both were the same price of $270, so we can extrapolate from there. 

The Mystery Booster: Convention Edition is clearly the big draw here. The price went down about $40 as people got their Vegas FIAB and sold the box. These went for around $260 before August; now they are down to $220 or so. That box represents a huge chunk of the value that can be gained from the whole package, and while I respect anyone who wants to resell it, the Mystery draft experience is a great one. 

I doubt that the box prices will have recovered much by March, and frankly, I’d expect the value to take another tumble. Remember that while there are 23 cards in that set currently retailing for $10+, there’s nearly 1700 cards in the set. Lots of people buying, lots of opening, lots of reselling. I wouldn’t be shocked if boxes of MYB were down to $175.

One other thing: they made minor alterations to the set, taking out Rhystic Study but adding in a second Sakashima the Impostor and some others. The full list of changes is near the end here, and the changes were done mainly to distance themselves from artists Wizards has deemed problematic. 

Amazingly, they seem to be out of the promo Sol Ring to give out. This was a giveaway for so many things for so long, and now it’s the Gauntlet Arcane Signet that’s going for just over $20 right now. It’s a cool one, but there’s competition in the Secret Lair (old border!) and the Foil Extended Art and the Warhammer versions and the other Secret Lair…you see what I mean. I’m glad it’s getting traction, but I’m doubtful that it’ll hold $20 for much longer, especially when the FIAB arrive in March.

I’m also going to call the Commander decks a wash. They chose what they had extras of, and those are the ones that didn’t have a lot of valuable reprints. The decks aren’t bad, they just don’t come with a Black Market Connections or anything like that. 

I think Look At The Kitties is a defensible set of choices, with some really cute art. The first cat-themed Secret Lair is reselling for a pretty penny indeed, and we are getting a decent selection of cards. None are super-pricey, but solid choices and good art mean that it should appreciate over time like all of the non-land Secret Lairs have. 

Atraxa Sleeves and a matching playmat, when that’s the most popular commander of the last few years…it’s really an inspired choice. There’s a boatload of those players out there, and it’s just going to take a few hundred who are willing to pay a premium to have the sleeves and the playmat match up. I think this will be a surprisingly profitable item, topping off a valuable package and worth the buy, especially if you’ve got someone you can gift the Commander decks to.

The biggest thing is the quantity out there. I fully expect that Wizards is selling a lot more of these FIAB than they did for Vegas. It’s unlikely that they are going to sell too many at this price and without the cache of the big return to gathering, but there’s no doubt that there will not be scarce quantities of this package out there. 

I’m not going to be buying a bunch of these for spec purposes, but if I had an Atraxa deck, I’d 100% be buying one for my personal use and selling off the other pieces.

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.

Here we are, everyone, another installment of ‘How rare is rarer than mythic rare’ and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by some of these numbers. Things aren’t as insanely rare as they used to be, and yet they are still going to require a lot of packs to get what we want.

This set has TWO subsets of cards we care about: the Transformers subset and the Retro Artifact set. Each of those sets has chase versions too! There’s a lot to keep track of, but luckily, I’ve gotten good at parsing small details and figuring out some approximate drop rates for these cards.

So let’s dive into the odds and the math and the likelihood of getting the cards you want!

This set, everything we care about is in the Collector Boosters, as opposed to other sets where Set Boosters might have some of what we want. So all of these figures are calculated for those boosters and those alone.

It’s also worth mentioning that these are estimates based on best information. These aren’t for sure, locked in figures. The nature of statistics and probability means that some people will have better results and some will have worse results. 

One of the core principles I use in calculating these drop rates is the ratio of cards in a Draft booster: 10 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare or .5 of a mythic rare. Since we don’t get half of a card, I double that, so for every mythic rare, there’s 2 rares, 6 uncommons, and 20 commons.

There’s a slot dedicated to the nonfoil Commander and Jumpstart cards from this set. To be specific, that is the Commander cards plus the Jumpstart cards for a total of 26 rares, 6 mythics.

	Mythic	Rare
% chance to open any card of this rarity	10.3%	89.7%
# of packs needed for a specific card	58	29

Not a lot to see here, as there will be plenty of EA nonfoils going around. No foils to be had at all for these, unless something weird comes out like they’ve done in past sets.

In the Transformers slot, it gets interesting. First of all, the subset has the name BOT, which is so on point it hurts. Secondly, we’re told that all of them are mythic, so all are the same relative rarity. We’re outright told that 12% of this slot is Shattered Glass, the flipped-mirror universe where Deceptions are good and Autobots bad. We’re also told that foil SG cards are about as rare as Neon copies of Hidetsugu, Devouring Chaos. Happily, I have that math handy from that article, so I know that it’s all about .6%, or 1 in 151 to get any Shattered Glass foil.

The article also indicates that nonfoil Shattered Glass is about as common as foil Generation 1 cards, so we get a rough breakdown of 75% nonfoil G1 (6 of 8 packs), 12.5% nonfoil Shattered Glass (1 in 8), 12% foil G1 (again, about 1 in 8) and finally foil Shattered Glass, which will be the 1 in 151 or so that we got from Hidetsugu, less than 1% chance. 

Then we get to the last slot in the pack, which has: Foil Extended Art, Foil Borderless cards, Foil Alternate-Art Planeswalkers, and foil Rare and Mythic Retro or Schematic artifacts. That’s a lot, and let’s look at the breakdown for how many of each type there are in that slot.

	Extended Art	Borderless	Alt-Art PW	Retro Artifact	Schematic
Rare	58	6	0	30	30
Mythic	19	0	2	15	15

Doubling the rares gets us to a pool of 299 cards, and that’s where we can get a table that matches.

Chance is:	Extended Art	Borderless	Alt-Art PW	Retro Artifact	Schematic
Rare	1/149.5	1/149.5	0	1/149.5	1/149.5
Mythic	1/299	0	1/299	1/299	1/299

This is one of the lowest drop rates for rares we’ve had in a while, and might well lead to things like the borderless foil painlands being more expensive than expected. 

When it comes to the Artifact Archive, there’s a lot to unpack. Keep in mind that the schematic and the retro have equal numbers or each rarity. Schematic Helm of the Host is just as rare as Retro Helm of the Host. I don’t expect the prices to be equal, but the rarity is the same. 

The serialized copies of each of the 63 cards is a tricky problem to solve. Since there’s 500 of each, there’s exactly 31,500 serialized cards in existence. Several have been opened already! To calculate your odds of getting one of these, we’d need to know how many booster packs/boxes exist. We don’t have that exact number, so some estimations are in order.

We know Wizards’ annual reported revenue, and from that we can figure how big or little the revenue is from this particular piece of their pie. Can’t be too small, or too big. We also know that the distributor price (Wizards sells boxes for this price, we get retail with a markup) was around $135.

So here’s a table, with the percent chance and how many boosters, boxes, and income Wizards gets if that’s the number of boosters out there.

My estimate is that you’re at a .7% or .8% chance to open a serialized card, or around one every two cases. If we get new information, I’ll update this post.

What’s especially odd is that the rarity doesn’t matter. There’s the same number of serialized uncommon Bone Saw as there is the rare Ashnod’s Altar and the mythic Aetherflux Reservoir. I don’t think the prices will be the same at all, but the rarity and the drop rate are equal.

It’s also worth mentioning that for a price comparison, the Ampersand promos given to Premium WPN stores were in a similar vein. There were around 3,000-5,000 sets of those distributed, and now we’re getting 500 of each. These artifacts are some of the most popular Commander cards around, and I won’t be shocked to see them fetch truly premium prices. Again, rarity isn’t relevant. Burnished Hart and Swiftfoot Boots have higher EDHREC numbers than any of the mythics in this subset, and they are uncommon in this grouping. 

Does that mean they will be more expensive than mythic serialized cards? My instincts say no. This is the first crack at serialized cards for Wizards, and I am pretty sure that all of them are going to be quite expensive.

So let’s summarize things with a list of chase cards, and then how they compare with other Collector Booster sets.

Card	Odds as a percent	Est. number of packs needed
Extended Art Rootpath Purifier	1.7% chance to open	58
Generation 1 Arcee, Sharpshooter	5%	20
Foil Generation 1 Megatron, Tyrant	0.5%	180
Shattered Glass Ultra Magnus, Tactician	0.5%	180
Foil Shattered Glass Optimus Prime, Hero	0.0004%	2520
Foil Extended Art Tocasia’s Welcome	0.6%	149.5
Foil Extended Art Arcane Proxy	0.3%	299
Foil Borderless Brushland	0.6%	149.5
Foil Alternate-Art Teferi, Temporal Pilgrim	0.3%	299
Foil Retro Ashnod’s Altar	0.6%	149.5
Foil Schematic Aetherflux Reservoir	0.3%	299
Serialized Double Rainbow Foil Helm of the Host	0.0001%	9009

And finally, let’s do a comparison of other Collector Booster sets, and see where we land with this set:

Card/Set	Collector Boosters to open one (approx.)	Card/Set	Collector Boosters to open one (approx.)
Phyrexian Foil Vorinclex (KHM)	256	Foil Etched Food Chain (2X2)	280
Japanese- Language Alternate Art Time Warp Foil (STX:MA)	309	Red Soft Glow Hidetsugu (NEO)	1,828
Foil Extended Art The Meathook Massacre (MID)	151	Phyrexian Foil Sheoldred, the Apocalypse (DMU)	346
Foil Fang Frame Sorin, the Mirthless by Ayami Kojima (VOW)	171	Phyrexian Foil Ajani, Sleeper Agent (DMU)	692
Extended Art Foil Jeweled Lotus (CMR)	400	The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale (DMU:LL)	46,767
Phyrexian Foil Urabrask, Heretic Praetor (SNC)	492	Foil Alternate-Art Teferi, Temporal Pilgrim (BRO)	299
Borderless Foil Ancient Brass Dragon (CLB)	352	Foil Shattered Glass Optimus Prime, Hero (BRO:BOT)	2,520
Phyrexian foil (or foil-etched) Jin-Gitaxias (NEO)	544	Serialized Double Rainbow Foil Helm of the Host (BRO:BRR)	9,009

As always, if you notice things I’ve messed up or overlooked, hop into our ProTrader Discord and tell me what errors I made, so that I can fix them quickly. I hope these odds help improve your buying decisions, and good luck with the packs you open!

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.