Buckle up, everyone, because Wizards made some unexpected decisions when it comes to the distribution of special frames and foils. This will DEFINITELY affect your buying patterns once the set is out, so let me walk you through how frequently you’re going to see different versions of the cards in the set.

We don’t know exactly all of the cards in the Mystical Archive yet, but we know how many of those cards there are, and therefore how many alternate-art, Japanese-language Mystical Archive cards there are as well. All of this information has been taken from the stream on Thursday and the Collecting Strixhaven article released the same day.

Just to make this easier for me to write, when I say Japanese version, I mean the alternate-art Mystical Archive card. Global refers to the language that the rest of the cards is in.

A few overall things to note:

When it comes to the Mystical Archive spells, there is both a traditional foil treatment and an etched-foil treatment. This applies to both the global and the Japanese. So yes, there’s four foil versions of each Mystical Archive spell to go with two nonfoil versions. (Note that nonfoil Japanese alt-art versions can only be found in Japanese-language Set and Draft boosters.)

Non-foil Mystical Archive spells have a guaranteed slot in Draft Boosters. For that slot, 10/15 openings will be an uncommon, 4/15 will be a rare, and 1/15 will be mythic. That’s how it works out with the 67%/26.4%/6.6% math that we’re told.

Draft Boosters also have a chance for traditional foil Mystical Archive spells, but the exact ratio isn’t known. When I’m able to find that, or some helpful person links it to me in the comments or on Twitter, I’ll update this post.

In Collector Boosters, you’re going to get at least one global Mystical Archive spell and one Japanese Mystical Archive card. Your booster will have a third Mystical Archive card, which has a 50/50 chance for being global or Japanese.

I’m writing this guide before we know all 45 cards that are in the Mystical Archive, but when a card’s rarity is revealed, you should remember that rares will be twice as common as mythics unless they tell us something else specifically, like they did with the Draft Booster slot. This is also why uncommons get their own slot.

With that settled, let’s get into some of the details. Here’s the image Wizards used as a summary, and what the odds are for certain cards. 

Slot #1: Foil-Etched Mystical Archive rare or mythic – With 30 rares and 15 mythics, you’d expect a 1/45 chance for any given card. Turian uses a misleading framing here, saying you can get any of those 45 cards. This is true, but the chances aren’t equal. You have a 1/37.5 chance of pulling a given rare, and a 1/75 chance of getting a specific mythic. If this one is in the global language, then Slot 2 will be a Japanese card, or vice versa. You’ve got a 50/50 chance of this card being global language or Japanese.

Slot #2: Foil-Etched Mystical Archive Uncommon – There are 18 Mystical Archive uncommons, so this is very straightforward. You’re still 50/50 on global vs. Japanese, but the uncommon versions of these cards are going to be impressively easy to use.

Slot #3: Traditional foil Mystical Archive (global or Japanese alternate-art version) rare or mythic rare, borderless mythic rare, or extended-art rare or mythic rare – You’re reading that right. Your third slot is going to have a whole lot of options, each one making the other more rare. We need to break things down here. This could be:

Traditional Global foil for the Mystical Archive (30 rares, 15 mythics)

Traditional Japanese foil for the Mystical Archive (30 rares, 15 mythics)

Foil Extended Art for the rares and mythics of Strixhaven (69 rares, 12 mythics)

Foil Borderless Mythics (9 mythics – the five elder dragons and four planeswalker cards)

Again, the numbers are misleading. It’s not an even 180 cards, and you get one of those. It’s one out of 309, for a given mythic of the assorted types, with your chances of a rare being doubled to 1 in 154.5 packs. 

That’s really rare for any of these, the only slot with Foil Extended Art versions, a throwback to the Commander Legends treatment. This is bonkers. If you’re wondering where Turian got the 48% figure when discussing getting a fourth Mystical Archive card in a single pack, this is where. Take 150/309 and you get 48.54%.

Slot #4: Traditional foil Mystical Archive uncommon – Again, a 1/18 chance in this, very straightforward, there will be lots and lots of the uncommon Mystical Archive cards.

Slot #5: Nonfoil Borderless/Extended Art Rare or Mythic –  With this being nonfoil, some might not care as much, but this slot will have a lot of value because there will be a lot more copies. You’ve got 69 rares and 12 mythics, so you’ve got a 92% chance of pulling a rare and only 8% of all Collector Boosters will have a mythic in this slot.

Slot #6: Nonfoil Extended-Art Rare or Mythic from Commander 2021 – Yes, the five decks are upon us, releasing the same day as Strixhaven itself. There’s a total of 80 cards that are new to Magic in those five Commander decks, and this slot in a Collector Booster will give you an extended-art version of those cards (but nonfoil). The only foils of these new cards are the five ‘face’ commanders, but even the EA versions in this slot are nonfoil. 

Slot #7: Foil Lessons – As colorless cards, there’s going to be some interest in these cards, especially the rare and mythic. We know there’s a total of 20, and we’re given a rough breakdown of the odds: “On average, if you opened six Collector Boosters, you would expect to get a combination of 5 common and/or uncommon Lesson cards, as well as 1 rare or mythic rare Lesson card.” Once I know exactly how many of each rarity there are, I can do a bit more math.

Slot #8: Foil rare or mythic – Pretty standard, but again, 92% to be a rare and 8% to be a mythic. I’m not expecting a lot of value here, or from the rest of the slots which are commons, uncommons, and tokens.

So let’s have a chart, giving us what sorts of cards we’re looking for, which slot of a CB they are in, the percentage for that, and the number of packs to open to get a specific card. Remember that global language refers to the language it was printed in. English will be the most common, but they are also available in French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. All languages will have Japanese alternate art versions of the Mystical Archive.

Card type/rarity	Slot number	Percent chance in a single CB	Number of packs to get one particular card (approx)
Global foil etched Mystical Archive Mythic Rare	1	17.5%	150
Global foil etched Mystical Archive Rare	1	33%	75
Japanese foil etched alt art Mystical Archive Mythic Rare	1	17.5%	150
Japanese foil etched alt art Mystical Archive Rare	1	33%	75
Global foil etched Mystical Archive Uncommon	2	50%	36
Japanese alt art Mystical Archive Uncommon	2	50%	36
Global Traditional Foil Mystical Archive Mythic Rare	3	4.8%	309
Global Traditional Foil Mystical Archive Rare	3	19.4%	154.5
Japanese Traditional Foil Mystical Archive Mythic Rare	3	4.8%	309
Japanese Traditional Foil Mystical Archive Rare	3	19.4%	154.5
Extended Art Foil Mythic Rare	3	3.8%	309
Extended Art Foil Rare	3	44.6%	154.5
Borderless Mythic or Planeswalker	3	2.9%	309
Global Traditional Foil Mystic Archive  Uncommon	4	50%	36
Japanese Traditional Foil Mystic Archive  Uncommon	4	50%	36
Nonfoil Borderless or Extended Art Mythic Rare	5	8%	150
Nonfoil Borderless or Extended Art Rare	5	92%	75
Nonfoil Commander 2021-Exclusive Mythic Rare	6	12.5%	80
Nonfoil Commander 2021-Exclusive Rare	6	87.5%	40
Nonfoil Mystical Archive Uncommon	Draft Boosters	67%	27
Nonfoil Mystical Archive Rare	Draft Boosters	26.4%	114
Nonfoil Mystical Archive Mythic Rare	Draft Boosters	6.6%	227

For two comparisons from recent sets, you were one in 256 Collector Boosters for a Phyrexian Vorinclex, and one in 400 for a FEA Jeweled Lotus.

So to summarize, that third slot is going to have a FEA rare more than half the time, a Mystical Archive about 40% of the time, and only 7% of Collector Booster packs is going to have a FEA mythic or a borderless card in that slot. FEA mythics, borderless foils, and traditional foil Mystical Archive mythics are all the same rarity in this slot: one in every 309 packs.

Another notable facet of this is that the etched-foil versions of the Mystical Archive will be at least twice as common as the traditional foil Mystical Archive of the same card, requiring roughly twice the number of packs to open to get one particular card. 

I hope this table and this information helps you make good decisions as Strixhaven previews continue. If you found an error, leave me a comment or drop me a line on Twitter.

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.

While a lot of the attention is rightfully on the old border cards, and the foil versions thereof, we’ve got other cards in the packs of Time Spiral Remastered, a lot of which are relevant cards and needed a fresh injection of copies. Given the focus on the old border cards, and the money being thrown at them, we need to be disciplined and remember that every reprint set offers an opportunity to pick up cards that needed a reprint at their lowest possible prices.

A caveat here about when to buy these cards: By all indications, this is a short-run set. Vendors are selling as of today, and individuals who like to open boxes are getting their product this coming week, exactly when Strixhaven previews begin. I do expect that most of these prices fall further, which makes buying in that much more attractive.

Interestingly, a lot of these cards are reprints of reprints, meaning that the supply has already been increased once or more since original Time Spiral. If it’s been reprinted before, and the price recovered, that makes these solid buys for the most part. We know for sure that demand is high enough to make the price higher eventually, and a low cost plus patience will often lead to value. Buying in at the low point is a core mechanic for what we do.

Venser, Shaper Savant ($6) – This is one of the top non-OB cards in the set, going by EDH inclusion rates. Ten thousand players have registered this online, and countless cubes carry this mega-bouncer as well. This is a pet card for a lot of players, because while some spells can’t be countered, this is just returning to hand, buying you some needed tempo. His price has been as high as $20, and weirdly had a spike to nearly $30 for the original Future Sight version just a few weeks ago. The Modern Masters 2017 reprint never made it above $11, and that is our ceiling. Venser is a rare in this set, and I’m looking for this to drop another couple of dollars before moving in. 

Prismatic Lens (Foil) (75 cents) – You might be wondering why I’m talking about an uncommon here, but the foil from original Time Spiral is $6, the better-art foil from Ultimate Masters is $3, and the reprint in Eternal Masters is $2. I don’t want to buy in before it hits 50 cents, or preferably a quarter, but the value will be there if you like growth. At the least, grab copies for your Commander decks while the card is at its low point. More than 20k decks have done the same online, and that’s why this foil tends to recover its value over time.

Magus of the Moon ($8) – The Iconic Masters version had crept up to nearly $20 when this reprint arrived. Picking this up is a testament to how much paper play you think will happen in the next year or two, as this is a popular Modern sideboard card, with a smattering of Legacy play included. Given that paper play is nonexistent at the moment, I’m really hoping this falls even farther, ideally to under $5. 

Pact of Negation ($18) – Worthwhile to note that there’s already a couple of people on TCG putting this as low as $15, so let’s watch this angle downwards a bit more before diving in. On EDHREC, 10% of all decks that can run this do, more than 25,000 people want a free counterspell in Commander to go with the Modern players who can win this turn and don’t care about five mana next turn. Bonuses to the ones playing Hive Mind! This was available as low at $10 when the first Modern Masters came out, and if this got as low as $10 it would be an excellent pickup going forward. We know it’s got the chops to be a $30 card, and all it’s going to take is a little patience to recover in value.

Akroma’s Memorial ($14 vs $36) – The reprints have been as you’d expect with this card. 

The M13 version was available very cheaply, and while I don’t think it’ll get down to $5 again, it’s easy to see this as being $10 in a couple of weeks. Given that it’s only registered in about 6,000 decks, I’m not expecting to see this grow quickly. Picking up cheap cards and being patient feels good, but I’m not waiting seven years to cash this in. This has a while to fall on TCG, as Card Kingdom has it for much much less right now. Be patient, and pick your spots.

I also want to take a moment and talk about some other cards that are not good pickups, even though the reprint is quite attractively priced compared to the original.

Reiterate (TSR is $6, TSP is $15) – Only in 3,000 Commander decks online, the original price is simply a relic of the tiny supply. This will be nearly bulk relatively quickly.

Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir ($4 vs. $7) – the Iconic Masters and FTV reprints have kept the price low on this, and while it is a mythic, I’d need it to hit bulk status before I moved in. There’s a whole lot of copies out there and the Commander demand isn’t what you might expect.

Wheel of Fate ($1 vs $4) – Mystery Booster had this, there’s Commander copies out there too. Bulk and never to recover.

Coalition Relic ($2 vs $3) – Once the gold standard for mana rocks, the Relic has just been middling these last few years. There are 10,000 decks online that have it registered and likely a lot more that just play it because it’s good, but this is another card where the reprints have been a touch too frequent to let the price recover. If I knew they weren’t going to reprint this for another five years, this would be a solid buy.

Time Spiral Remastered is a set aimed at reprinting cards that have had a low supply and maximizing player nostalgia. As part of this, Wizards gave us a whole sheet of cards that were timeshifted backwards, a move foreshadowed by the old border Sword of Fire and Ice that was a judge promo a while ago.

This old border sheet of 121 cards is going to drive a lot of the value of the set. Foils are silly rare, you’re getting 1.3 of those per box. The nonfoils offer some intriguing opportunities if the prices drop low enough. Let’s talk about where those prices will go, and when I want to buy in.

I want to reiterate something I said before: about 1-2 weeks after release is your target timing. Regular folks will have gotten their boxes and cracked them, looking for value. Given the premium on the foils, I am expecting everything else to take a dive. Today, though, I want to look at the preorder prices for the old border cards (from now on, abbreviated as OB and OBF) and decide when I want to be buying.

Generally speaking, since these are preorder prices, you can expect prices to go lower as more of the product gets opened. Right now, the people buying are the ones who literally don’t care about price and have to have this card ASAP. Lots of these OB cards are between $5 and $10, and will drop to $1-$2. 

One more item to consider: OB cards that are tournament staples may represent a real shift in how tournament players make their deck unique. Until the introduction of Extended Art and Showcase cards, players had to decide if they wanted to foil out their deck to make it more their own, to have that level of showing off. This involved risk, though, because an incompletely-foiled out deck can have some glaring differences between the foils and nonfoils due to warping/curling issues. If tournament players start moving in on non-foil but special versions of cards, you may see jumps across the board for those once in-person play begins again.

Thoughtseize (OB is currently $65) – Thoughtseize is a staple in Legacy and Modern, and the behavior of this card will be the clearest signal about tournament players’ behavior. There are a lot of options for this, including borderless versions and an Invocation. Should the nonfoil special versions move significantly, other staples won’t be far behind. The 2XM nonfoil borderless is at $30, but that doesn’t have the iconic original art. I think this drops some, but probably not as far as $45. Tournament players who need a full playset are going to keep this card higher than that.

Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker ($40) – This is going to come down a lot. Mystery Booster copies are $15, OG Kamigawa copies can be had under $30. Iconic Masters and Modern Masters versions are also under $20. There will be some demand to go old-border for Cubes and such, but not enough to keep the price high. I’m expecting this to fall to $25 or less.

Panharmonicon ($23) – This is about double the price of the original nonfoils, which have been trending upwards nicely, even as it was put into The List:

With foils still in the $20 range, we’re at an interesting question: Will players seek out OB versions before foils in the new frame? I can’t answer that, but I’m exceedingly curious about the answer. I’m confident that the OB versions will fall down to the $10-$15 range, but will they stay below the pack foils? I love the look of these timeshifted cards, so I’m biased, but my guess is that we’re a little too conditioned to chase foils. These will probably stay under $20 for a while. In the same vein of ‘will pack foils or OB foils be more expensive is Vanquisher’s Banner, a card I’ve long loved as a tribal spec. I’m expecting the Banner to fall much farther, though, down into the $5 range when supply is at its peak. That’s when I’d like to acquire more than a few copies.

Arcades, the Strategist ($20) – I have to admit, I thought this was WAY overpriced, and then I looked at the graph:

Seems this ‘backbone’ sort of thing has legs, and this injection of new copies has come along at the perfect time. Arcades’ growth has been slow but steady, and while the price will take a dive in the short term, it’ll bounce back over time. I don’t expect any movement on the foils, though. This should travel down to being $10 before starting the climb back up. Every new Defender creature or memes like a Giant Ox should see a blip in this price, too.

Wastes ($8) – Speaking of memes, players who need colorless lands are a class all their own. Full-art foils from Oath of the Gatewatch were nicely positioned to be the growth target, and now this. Nonfoils are definitely going to drop a bunch, and I’m not sure I’d want to have a lot of these around. The full-art foil versions were about $15 at release in 2016, and never really got expensive. In fact, after a spike around the time of War of the Spark, the full-art foils are now cheaper than they were after release.

For Wastes to become expensive (any version aside from the most basic) there’s going to need to be a new colorless commander, or other colorless cards that inspire Wastes-based decks. Keep in mind that the decks which play Thought-Knot Seer and Reality Smasher don’t run many basic lands: the Modern versions play the full set of Tron lands and the Legacy builds use Cloudpost & friends. If Wizards made a new colorless commander deck, there would be some number of basic Wastes in there too. If this version got down under $1, I might spec on a few but generally, I’m staying away.

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.

Time Spiral Remastered arrives in two weeks, officially. We’ve got most of the set revealed, including the Timeshifted sheet, which is new cards put into old borders. Because TSR is a limited-run set, especially with Strixhaven coming out on April 23rd, TSR and especially the Timeshifted sheet, offers a very unique opportunity for gaining value. Let’s talk about what to get , how many there will be, and when to get it!

Let’s start with the regular set. There are no Collector Boosters or special frames (aside from the Timeshifted sheet) so there’s just regular and foil for the set itself. According to Ben Bleiweiss over at SCG, foil rares in Standard now drop about one in 18 packs, and foil mythics in one in 144 packs, roughly. This tracks with the ratio we’ve been given of foils appearing in Standard sets and the regular packs.

A Wizards source on the WPN Facebook groups has confirmed the foil rate for the foil timeshifted sheet: once every 27 packs, roughly. That is a real ‘holy meatballs’ level of scarcity, especially because the timeshifted sheet is just 121 cards appearing at the same frequency relative to each other. With 36 packs per box, you’re looking at four boxes to collect a set of nonfoil timeshifted cards, though in execution that probably won’t happen. Statistics is like that, sadly. 

There aren’t a lot of cards in the regular set that you should be too worried about, though. This is all reprints, nothing new. Granted, most of these cards haven’t been printed since the original Time Spiral block in 2007-2008, but the price is generally due to the low supply, not a super-high demand. 

Time Spiral Remastered is a limited-run product. They aren’t planning on doing a huge print run, this is just to goose the market with some reprints. I’m confident this will be a fun set to draft, but holy smokes, the foils on the Timeshifted sheet are going to carry some very high premiums.

Let’s have a table, summarizing what we know, before we talk about our plans for these cards.

Rarity/type	Overall Frequency (estimated)	Number in the set	How many packs to get one specific card (estimated)
TSR mythic	1 in 7.4 packs	15	111
TSR foil rare	1 in 18 packs	53	954
TSR foil mythic	1 in 144 packs	15	2,160
TSR timeshifted	1 in every pack	121	121
TSR foil timeshifted	1 in 27 packs	121	3,267

For comparison: Foil Phyrexian Vorinclex is about every 296 packs, and FEA Jeweled Lotus was every 400 packs. Foil Timeshifted Thoughtseize will be roughly 8 times rarer than FEA Jeweled Lotus. I grant you that Vorinclex and Lotus were in Collector Boosters, but stores were willing to presell those cards based on allocations.

We have a very narrow window with the Timeshifted cards, in foil and not. It’s more than the four weeks between TSR’s release and Strixhaven’s release. Previews for the Standard set will begin just a couple of weeks after Time Spiral Remastered, draining attention and preorder money.

Luckily, we have a very recent example of shorter-run sets with special cards and the timeframe involved: Commander Legends.

I broke down the timeframe for Jeweled Lotus and I also looked at Phyrexian Vorinclex, because the last six months of YOLO and FOMO have lead to a pretty clear pattern: Don’t buy in the first two weeks, but the time to buy is when regular folks have gotten their boxes, and begin cracking and dumping.  You have to give the preorder people a chance to sate their ravenous, drooling, immediate needs but you have to be cognizant of the small supply involved with these cards.

In this case, with the Timeshifted sheet, we’re looking at some ridiculously rare foils. Preorders are notably rare with the big vendors, because they aren’t sure how many of each they will end up with. They are playing it conservative, which I respect as a business decision (refunding the most rabid customers instead of giving them what they paid so early for) and an indicator of their product allocation (holy crap they really aren’t getting much!).

We’ve got most of the cards on the list of 121 (four more to come out today) and I just can’t advocate for price predictions on the foils. Quantities this small are not something we’ve dealt with before, and the collectors have come out in force for Magic lately. I suspect that even the less-popular ones, like Temur Battle Rage, will have surprisingly high foil prices. 

While it’s true that the old border is not everyone’s favorite, the players who get hit with nostalgia are also going to be the older, more enfranchised players, who are also the ones that tend to have more disposable income. I’m not expecting these cards to go down over time, not one bit. 

So what do I think you should do? Wait one to two weeks, and then put down the money needed to get the foil Timeshifted cards you want for personal use, for your collections, and for later growth. Those are clearly going to be the chase cards, and with there being 1.3 Timeshifted foils per box, with 121 cards all having an equal chance to be that foil, it’s going to take a whole lot to get the copies people want.

The real growth opportunity may well be in the nonfoil Timeshifted cards. With so much product getting opened in search of the high-dollar foils, there will be opportunities to pick up the other cards in nonfoil. Tournament staples like Dismember should be good picks, because not every tournament player has an all-foil deck and like nonfoil Extended Art cards, this may be the way to add uniqueness to the competitive decks. Those in-person tournaments will eventually be held again. 

The number of Commander staples on this sheet also represent opportunity. Sure, those players generally want the foils, but as we’ve seen with foil EA Jeweled Lotus and other such chase cards, the nonfoils won’t maintain too much of a gap. Solemn Simulacrum is my favorite pick here, but Panharmonicon is also really pulling at my interest. Sorting this sheet by EDHREC ranking will help you concentrate on the higher-demand cards, and help you decide where to put your money.

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.