If there’s one thing I wish people would stop doing, it’s pre-ordering cards. 

The prices right now for Modern Horizons 2 are incredibly high due to hype and lack of certainty, two factors that combine with the recent price spikes of older cards to lead to a real ‘What on earth is going on?!?’ sort of feeling.

I’m here to tell you to calm down, to not buy anything yet, and be patient. Let’s talk about some current examples of preorder pricing and examine why these are such bad ideas.

First of all, today’s focus is on the regular frame, nonfoil versions of things. There are some scattered preorders for special frame/special foiling versions of MH2 cards, but frankly, we don’t have enough to support a trend. Most vendors are content to sell what they open, and not over-commit to what’s coming and what’s going to be opened.

Second, most of my pricing is taken from eBay, which makes it relatively easy to find numbers for sold items.

Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer (multiple sold at $80 on eBay) – Is this a good card? Absolutely. Is it overpriced because people are talking it up as a new Dreadhorde Arcanist in Legacy? Partially. Having the Dash ability does make this resistant to sorcery-speed removal, but this price is ridiculous. 

It’s not going to hold a price above $50 unless this is literally the best red creature ever printed. I’m going to go out on a limb and forecast that Ragavan will be available for under $20 within six weeks. (I actually think it’ll go even lower, but a 75% loss is already a big drop)

Subtlety ($45) – Force of Negation premiered in the $40 range, hopped up briefly, then settle back down into the $30-$40 range as blue players gained a greater and greater need for the card.

I expect Subtlety to follow a similar path, but I don’t want to be buying right now. If at all possible, I want to be waiting and buying copies in about two months. Remember that Forgotten Realms is due out on July 23, so the hype is going to move and what stores draft will change. (If your LGS is even open!) I think this has a lot of potential in the long term, but $45 for the regular nonfoil is too high a buy-in when I’m expecting a whole lot of this product to be opened.

Grief ($60) – Interesting. Thoughtseize needed less than a year to hit $75, getting near $100 as it became one of the most common spells in Modern. Repeated reprints have made it cheaper than ever, too:

But now we have a no-mana variant, Unmask in a different form, and it offers some truly backbreaking potential turn 1 with Ephemerate (three cards!!!) or even Cloudshift. We know what Thoughtseize can do, financially, but we don’t know how popular this will be. Thoughtseize broke $60 as a rare, and Grief might be worth it at $60. 

My thought, though, is to let the hype settle down and get to the $30-$40 range if you’re thinking about playing with the card. Most prices are going to fall, and this will be no exception. If the card is real, and if paper play is back, this will shoot straight to the moon.

Dauthi Voidwalker ($40) – If Grief is a big player, this will come along too. It’s an excellent aggressive followup to turn one discard, having a 3/2 unblockable that will sometimes be able to cast their huge spell is a winner too. This is also quite overpriced, though, and I’m expecting this to fall by at least half, and more likely to $15 as a rare.

Damn ($15) – The only sweeper that can kill both Thrun, the Last Troll and Gaddock Teeg, this is a phenomenal card. Being able to kill one or kill all is a really potent combination, even if the BB mode is also sorcery speed. This flexibility is going to lead to this seeing a lot of play in both Modern and Commander. I think this will make it back up to $15, given time, but in the meantime it’s going to fall as far as $5-$7.

Now let’s talk about some of the reprints, and where those will be heading.

Fetchlands (3 at $40-$50, 2 in the $30 range) – We’re about to get a lot of fetchlands. Granted, a big chunk of the fetches opened by individuals will be slotted right into decks, but every Collector Booster box is going to come with 3.3 fetchlands, on average. Keep in mind that these are regular rares, and if we’re cracking a ton of product to run drafts at newly-reopened stores, that’s a large amount entering circulation. Flats and Mesa will be under $20, and I think you’ll have a chance to buy Tarn, Misty, and Verdant at under $30. Make sure that you end up with enough fetches for your current decks, and set aside a few extra to sell or trade when they climb back up again.

Cabal Coffers ($60) – Let’s see what the graph looks like for a card that helped get Prime Time banned from Commander, yes?

This hasn’t had a reprint since Planechase in 2009. Twelve years of Commander players getting more and more insistent that they need the big mana, and of them paying bigger and bigger bucks for that big mana.

Coffers is one of the biggest reprints in this set, and it’s a mythic. A lot of money is going to chase the borderless and the borderless foil, and picking these up in regular nonfoil seems likely under $30. I’m going to try and be patient on this one, but it’s going to rebound from this reprint pretty easily.

Patriarch’s Bidding ($16) – I can see why people want to get this at $16. It’s a $40 card from Onslaught. NINETEEN YEARS they waited to reprint this card! Again, a lot of copies are going to get kept by the people who opened them, which will cut off circulation a little, but there’s generations of players who are clamoring for this in whatever tribal deck they are playing. It’s only good for those tribal deck, though, and only the ones with black as a color. As a result, I think this will fall pretty far…all the way to $5 and if I’m lucky, lower still. If it got to $3, I’d buy them all.

Mirari’s Wake ($17) – Another casual star with minimal reprints, Wake got to its cheapest point when it was reprinted in Conspiracy, followed a couple years later by a Commander reprint. This gave a big window for prices to be down and stay there:

The card is too good, though, and as you see, the price has come roaring back. With this printing, we’re going to see a lot of copies circulating, and that’s going to lead to a race to the bottom. I’m sure it will drop to under $10, but I’m not certain how much lower it’ll go and how many copies it’ll take before I have had enough. If it’s $7, don’t you feel buying it all up is the right play, even for the regular frame nonfoil?

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, another set and another whole raft of treatments for us to obsess over. We’ve got some odds to break down, some examples to peruse, and tables to try to make everything simpler. Let’s get to it!

Let’s start with the things they made easy: a link to the treatments in MH2 and the official Collecting Modern Horizons 2 post. 

In Wizards’ ongoing effort to make sure that programmers and sorters and sellers lose their minds, there are going to be a whole lot of different treatments available for Modern Horizons 2. I’ve tried to make this easy for you with a handy-dandy chart:

Type of frame	Available in nonfoil?	Available in foil-etched?	Available in traditional foil?
Basic (Regular? Original?)	X	X	X
Old Border (WotC likes to call this ‘retro’)	X	X	X
Old Border MH1 reprints		X	X
Borderless	X		X
Extended-Art	X		X
Sketch	X		X
Old Border Fetch Lands	X	X	X

Does that make it easier? This is a LOT of stuff that they are cramming into one set, and I want to try and clarify things whenever possible.

We’ve seen some short videos with the foil-etched cards, and so far they seem closer to Commander Legends than Mystical Archives, which should bode well for their popularity. That said, the old border foils are clearly the most important variants in this product formulation so it remains to be seen how the market will price the etched foils given their higher drop rates and lesser importance.

Notable from this chart is that the Modern Horizons 1 reprints are not available in nonfoil in any MH2 products at all. If you want the old border, you are getting something shiny, and you have to go through Collector Boosters to get them.

Now, let’s talk about how you get these different cards. 

In Set Boosters, you’re going to find a wide variety of nonfoils. Clearly, these won’t be as hard to find as the foil versions, and I can’t say for sure how many people are going to open Set Boosters when the Collector Boosters beckon. Still, understand that each Set pack will give you at least one (and as many as four) rares and/or mythics.

There is one slot for traditional foils, but you can get a card of any of these: “It can be a main set card of any rarity; a new-to-Modern uncommon, rare, or mythic rare; a showcase treatment card of any rarity; or a borderless rare or mythic rare.” I won’t even calculate how many potential outcomes there are here, but rest assured, this is the lowest-probability slot I’ve ever seen… 

…until we get to Draft Boosters, where it’s even worse. You have a 1 in 3 chance at a foil from that same formulation, so whatever infinitesimal chance you had at a borderless mythic rare from that slot in a Set Booster, take those odds and multiply by .33 to get your odds in a Draft Booster.

Fine, I did some of the math before I got disheartened. For just the ‘main set card of any rarity’ you’re at 0.76% to hit any foil mythic and 4.6% to get a foil rare in a Set Booster, and for a Draft Booster it’s 0.25% for any foil mythic and 1.5% for any foil rare. All of those are before I add in the new to Modern cards plus the rest, and since not everything is spoiled, I can’t tell you how much more tiny those odds will get.

However, as we get more data from big operations who crack lots and lots of boxes, we’ll be updating this section. Figuring out the distributions of foils and special cards in the Draft Boosters especially is a priority, and we’ll keep you aware of new developments.

Now let’s get to Collector Boosters, which has some attractive guarantees and one wild-as-hell slot, which is what Wizards seems to have settled on for these boosters. Here’s the handy guide that they’ve released to us:

Slot one we care about, as it could be any rare or mythic from the set, but in a regular frame. This could include fetchlands! Counting up the numbers we’re told when discussing foil-etched cards (main set, new to Modern, and MH1 reprints), there’s 61 potential rares and 16 potential mythics. You have an 11.6% chance to hit a mythic in this slot, and you’ll have a 1/138 chance of a particular one when you open a pack. For rares, you’ll hit on 88.4% of packs, and a particular rare will show up every 69 packs. Nice!

We don’t really care about slots 2 and 3, those are basic lands and C/UCs, just know there’s gonna be plenty of those around.

Slot 4, however, is where the big money is going to be found. You’re guaranteed a traditional foil rare or mythic, and this is the only spot where traditional foils of the new frames can be had. Also, this is the only spot for Foil Extended Art cards. All of these are crammed into the same spot, though, and that means this one slot is going to be carrying most of the value of a Collector Booster. If a CB box is $400, at 12 boosters that’s $33 each, just to give an idea of the spending people are about to do.

The big table:

	How many can show up in Slot #4	Odds of getting one in Slot #4	How many packs, on average, to get one?	Cost per copy (given $33.33/pack)
Traditional foil retro frame rare	43	34%	126.5	$4,216.25
Traditional foil retro frame mythic rare	12	4.7%	253	$8,432.50
Borderless traditional foil rare	4	3.2%	126.5	$4,216.25
Borderless traditional foil mythic rare	19	7.5%	253	$8,432.50
Traditional foil rare in a sketch frame	21	16.6%	126.5	$4,216.25
Traditional foil mythic rare in a sketch frame	8	3.2%	253	$8,432.50
Traditional Foil Extended Art Rare	39	30.8%	126.5	$4,216.25
Traditional Foil Extended Art Mythic Rare	0	N/A	N/A

Yes, you’re reading that right. There are NO FEA mythics in this set. They are all borderless/sketch/retro framed. Borderless is basically EA, just with different art. Here’s an example, a subtle one no less.

Showcase borderless for the mythics means they aren’t CB limited as per usual.

For some historical perspective, this 1/253 chance for specific treatment mythics means that each one is about as rare as Phyrexian foil Vorinclex (1/256 packs) but more common than traditional foil mythics in the Mystical Archive (1/309 packs) and way more common than FEA Jeweled Lotus (1/400 packs), which is a rarity I doubt we’ll see again.

Slot 5 has a nonfoil borderless or sketch frame card, either rare or mythic. Given the numbers of those, you have an impressive 35% chance of getting a mythic and 65% to pull a rare. To get a particular mythic, it’s 1 in 77 packs for that mythic and 1 in 38.5 for a particular rare.

Slots 6 and 7 are going to be more commons and uncommons, and again, in nonfoil these will be plentiful. I expect some great spec targets here once we know the whole set, though.

Slot 8 is the last one of any financial significance, having an extended-art rare. There’s only 39 of these, so your odds are 1/39 to nab something specific, but these are nonfoil. Secondary targets financially, but potentially worthwhile if they start off cheap or end up cheap. Remember that the non-foil EA of Jeweled Lotus isn’t cheap, nor is nonfoil Phyrexian Vorinclex. 

The other slots are foil commons and uncommons, plus a land and a token, none of which are going to make a serious dent in prices for a long time. 

So to review, the rarest cards from this set are going to be the Traditional foil mythic rares, in sketch/retro/borderless frames. You’ll have a 1/253 chance of pulling a specific one of those rares from a Collector Booster. Interestingly, about one in 8 Collector Boosters will have a mythic of some kind in slot 4, but because there’s so many variants, each individual one will be quite rare.

Because people tend to focus on fetchlands, let’s do a little more math for those. You can get them in Slots 1, 4, and 8. Slot one has a 5/69 chance of a fetchland (foil etched modern frame), Slot 4 has a 10/126.5 chance (5 traditional foil old border plus 5 foil extended art), and Slot 8 has a 5/39 chance (nonfoil extended art). This comes out to about a 28% chance of any one Collector Booster having any fetchland of any type, and the average CB box will have 3.3 fetches. That’s not a guarantee, it’s just the probability. Some will have more, some less. Note that about half the fetches opened will be nonfoil EA, and that might be the place to invest.

It’s also worth mentioning that the sketch frames are another unique twist on Magic cards. Adding the art description is inspired here, giving an insight into the process that a lot of players don’t get. If you don’t like this look, I can respect that, but don’t overlook the opportunities if these get cheap. A lot of people like this look, and this popularity might lead to some surprising prices.

If you’ve noticed some discrepancies here, or if new information comes out that changes these numbers, please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, drop a comment on this page, or come tell me about it in the Protrader Discord. Good luck with your packs!

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.

Strixhaven is all about the Mystical Archive, soaking up the attention and a lot of the value in the set. However, that doesn’t mean the rest of the set is worthless. It just means that the opportunities aren’t quite as obvious. We want to look at the Strixhaven cards that are either super unique or have clear Commander appeal. 

Sometimes we’ll want to get the Foil Extended Art (or borderless) treatment, or for other versions, we’ll want the cheapest regular nonfoil. Depends on the card and the reprint risk, plus some other factors. Let’s dive in!

Culling Ritual ($2 regular/$2.50 foil/$4 Extended Art/$10 Foil Extended Art) – These are already in a lot of EDH decks and it’s not hard to see why. It deals with a lot of hated permanents, from cheap mana rocks to solving the problem of token decks. As a bonus, it’s semi-free, giving you back the mana if you just kill a Sol Ring, a Mana Crypt, a random Signet, and someone’s Land Tax. Being two colors does limit the decks that it goes into, but that hasn’t stopped 2500 people from listing it just since Strixhaven came out.

I’ve picked up two FEA copies for personal decks and I think this is a fantastic long-term hold. I’m less worried about reprints these days than I used to be, mainly because I make sure to diversify. It’s rare for me to be too all-in on a single card, and that’s a strategy I think you should make use of as well. I could be talked into either the FEA or the basic versions, as both are solid long-term.

Storm-Kiln Artist ($1/$2) – More than five thousand people have registered this card as part of their Commander deck online, and that’s one of the top cards from the set. As an uncommon, there’s no special version past the foil, making this a much easier decision about what to get. Spells are a very popular subtheme for Commander, and this is one of the best creatures to add to a spell-based deck. 

Depending on what you’re doing with your artifacts, this does all sorts of fun things. My favorite might be mixing these Treasure tokens with the effect of Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer. All kinds of goodies await, and remember that the way Magecraft is worded, casting a Storm spell will give you a Treasure for each storm copy. Thousand-Year Storm is also a lovely combination.

Archmage Emeritus ($2/$2/$4/$9/bundle foil $3.50) – Buying a Strixhaven bundle (formerly known as a fat pack) gets you the alternate-art foil of this, but there’s a FEA version that I’d be concentrating on. This feels a lot more like a Commander reprint to me, something to accompany Talrand, Sky Summoner. Having a cantrip on every one of your spells is ridiculously good, and yes, the Archmage will attract removal almost immediately.

When you play cards like this, you’re expecting heat, so playing this when you have a counter handy will be great, especially when that counter immediately draws you a card. Go forth and enjoy it with this card.

Codie, Vociferous Codex ($0.50/$1/$2/$5) – I have to admit, five-color spells isn’t going to get a much better Commander than this. There’s a whole lot of cool things you can do with red/blue spells but rainbow is a different animal entirely. No other five-color legend enables this sort of thing, and being able to cascade off of everything you do, in addition to mana fixing, is really strong. I also really enjoy the restriction of Codie’s first line, locking down a lot of things you can do and can’t do.

Usually, I don’t advocate picking up the commander, it’s better to get the accessories for a certain legend because other decks play those cards too, but this is so unique, so special, that getting the FEA copies for $5 or so seems like a slam dunk. There’s issues with Codie, mainly that there’s no haste or protection built in, but here we go.

Wandering Archaic ($9/$10/$12/$31) – Perhaps the easiest addition to any Commander deck, this is colorless and charges a tax for goodies. It’ll either eat a removal spell with a tax, or get you value when other people get frustrated. This is expensive for a FEA rare, the fourth-most expensive card in this set that isn’t from the Mystical Archive.

It’s never going to be cheaper, either. We know that the big cards have an early dip and then start to rise, and that’s the pattern here. Being a rare, there’s twice as many of these as any Mythic, but because so many people are keeping these in decks (and buying them for decks) the price is creeping upwards. 

Dragon’s Approach ($2.50/$4) – You may think this is a bad card, but every other ‘a deck can have infinite copies’ card has gone on to become quite expensive. Approach is a godawful card in the abstract, requiring 15 mana to tutor through your deck to get your first free Dragon. Strixhaven isn’t going to be opened a lot in paper, though we’re cracking a whole lot of non-Draft boosters in search of the Mystical Archive. While I think that this has growth potential, I just can’t advocate moving in on foils. The card is just SO BAD.

Let me paint a different picture for you. You have a stack of a card just like this, and then a new Commander comes along that literally doubles the impact of the card. Foils jump to an absurd price, but blessed few people pay that price and so the value drop back down within a week. The card went from $3 to $5, not enough to make selling individual copies worth it, and buylisting might get you a profit of a nickel each. That card is Persistent Petitioners: 

Jumpstart gave us a commander to double up the Petitioners, and you can see when the spike hit, but the interest just wasn’t there to keep the price high long term. Dragon’s Approach would be lucky to have a spike like this. As a result, I’m staying away, and buylisting any copies that show up in my Set or Collector Booster boxes.

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.

There’s a lot of things clamoring for our attention right now in Magic. Another overhaul of the OP program, stores are finally starting to open up, Modern Horizons 2 is starting previews soon…making this the perfect time to pay attention to Strixhaven’s mini-set, the Mystical Archive.

Some of these cards are surprisingly underpriced, and it’s time we take a look at what’s worth buying. It’s possible that these go a little lower in price, so you may want to be patient, but I’m calling attention to it all now.

It’s also worth saying that I’m paying attention to nonfoils and foils equally. If one version seems underpriced, that’s where I want to be. Play patterns also account for some differences, but I’m not committed to foils, etched, or plain copies. 

Time Warp (Mystical Archive $14, MA Etched $21, MA Foil $34) – I’m looking harder at the foils here, because as you remember from my piece six weeks ago about The Math of Strixhaven, you got a traditional foil mythic rare 4.8% of the time in a Collector Booster, and one foil Time Warp is found every 309 packs. These aren’t easy to find at all. I know that the Japanese alternate-art is consuming all of our attention, but that card is actually MORE common than the English version. (Every language of packs can open JP alternates, but only English packs can open the English yellow frame version.)

It’s also worth looking at the nonfoil for the simple reason that the price has never been lower, and that always has my attention. Time Warp is included in just over 9,000 Commander decks online, and has the benefit of not exiling itself like a lot of other extra-turn cards do. Other versions haven’t really taken much of a hit, even the M10 version from more than ten years ago has only fallen $3. 

Abundant Harvest ($2/$3/$7) – I didn’t know this was a brand-new card, and I’m not sure why. It’s brand-new and doesn’t exist anywhere else. Yet, anyway. It’s also worth noting that this is getting played as a four-of in Legacy Miracles decks, causing the prices of the foil JP alternate to skyrocket recently. Those should settle back down before too long, but when there’s a leading indicator like that, and this is such a unique card, that this is a very tempting card to buy for the long term. My only concern is the risk of being printed in a regular frame, likely as a common, as Adventurous Impulse was. Oath of Nissa was often called ‘the Green Ponder’ during its time in Standard, to the point that it was included on Pioneer’s initial Banned list. 

If this doesn’t get reprinted, I wouldn’t be shocked for this to be in the $5/$7/$15 range within a year.

Crux of Fate ($3/$5.50/$7) – The English version of this card is admittedly Jason Felix’s demonstration of his ability to copy fan art, and I’m admittedly not sure what that means for the price of the card long-term. I’m skeptical that the plagiarism will result in the card itself being cheaper, but I could also see this version being held back from going too high because of that same factor. Really, for me, this comes down to the announcement last week about Adventures in the Forgotten Realms: Tiamat, the newest five-color dragon.

Dragons were already a popular tribe, but Tiamat offers some amazing opportunities in that arena. One of the best accessories you could run in a Dragon deck is Crux of Fate, since it’ll kill every non-Dragon on the table. The JP alternate version started a lot higher and is showing no signs of decreasing. Keep in mind that it’s already in 13,000 Commander decks online, and that’s before the Dragon frenzy that will show up this summer. Tiamat and the anticipation of Dragon goodness is why the price of the foil from Fate Reforged went up $2 this past week as well.

Regrowth ($0.75/$1.50/$3) – You may be thinking that this is a basic card, and not worth it, but twenty-two thousand people bothered to put it into their decks online, which means a lot more folks have done that. Bala Ged Recovery is more expensive, it’s in 14k decks, but it’s a more versatile card. 

Regrowth is worth it as a brick-worthy spec, especially as one of the cheapest rares in this subset of cards. There’s a surprising number of people who like to collect full sets like this, and that’s why I’d also listen if you wanted a stack of Urza’s Rage or Compulsive Research. If you prefer to get in on cheap foil mythics (remember, one every 309 packs) then you’re aiming at Increasing Vengeance and Channel, each of which can be had for under a buck on TCGPlayer.

Growth Spiral ($1/$2/$3) – Spiral is in 20% of all Commander decks with blue and green in them, as well as being good in some Modern and Pioneer decks. Right now, your only choices for a premium version are the pack version and the sweet FNM frame, as well as the JP alternate art. Granted, both the promo and the original features some amazing work by Seb McKinnon, but these new versions are awesome too. I could be talked into any of the MA versions, but I will gravitate towards the cheapest nonfoil or the most expensive foil when it comes to Commander specs. 

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.