I know that there are realities to the coronavirus that far, far outstrip Magic and drafting. I’ve eschewed family this holiday season and my kids haven’t seen their grandparents in more than a year. 

That being said, the virus took away quite the run of sweet draftable products. We lost out on months of Mystery drafts, there haven’t been Jumpstarts cracked all over the place, Double Masters was a delight…but the pinnacle of things for me have been the Commander Legends drafts I’ve done on MTGO.

This set is awesome to draft. It’s pointed right at players like me, with the combination of politics, drafting synergies, and good reprints. Unfortunately, we’re not able to draft this set in person in the US, and so our supply of cards has been through the Collector Boosters. 

We are approaching the maximum of supply for Commander Legends, though there is some more product undoubtedly coming. I don’t think there will be enough to depress prices more than ten percent or so. 

I’m still going to be patient until after Christmas for buying quantities, but I’ve moved in on personal copies for my Cube and my Commander decks. Let’s talk about the best deals and what they might get to.

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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.

Look, I’ll be honest: I don’t think you should buy anything from Commander Legends this weekend unless you’re getting a great price and/or it’s something you have to have for a deck. I just bought a couple of things for my Commander decks, but I’m waiting for people to finish opening their Collector Booster boxes. 

Instead, I want to look at the set we left behind, and compare prices to their Commander usage, and tell you what to stock up on.

The reason I want to just look at Commander numbers and nothing else is simple: I don’t think we will be playing in person (in North America) until next summer, when this is on the verge of rotating. Plus, all the big movers during the pandemic have been Commander-based anyway, and I’m looking for cards that are going to increase in value.

Some caveats: nonfoil, regular frame and foil regular frame mean about the same thing at this point when it comes to prices. I’m working on the math and crunching a lot of numbers, and I promise, I’m close to having something I’m comfortable reporting to you.

So, about Ikoria. It’s a fun set, with a lot of cool interactions, but to no one’s surprise, the most popular Commander card is a set: 

Not a shocker, really. These lands are incredibly versatile: fetchable, three colors, and can be cycled away. That’s really, shockingly, amazingly useful. Commander doesn’t tend to be a format with a whole lot of ‘got to hit my mana on curve every turn’ action, and in my Ur-Dragon deck, I fetch for one of these before I go get a dual land. 

Naturally, I think you should be all over these versions: 

They are prettier, that’s a given, but they are also a lot more rare than the originals. We don’t yet have data on what happens to a reprint of a card that has an Extended Art version, aside from the pure reprint of Fabled Passage, which included EA and Foil EA. Frankly, the data on that is stunning: 

This was a $100 card during Throne of Eldraine, it’s still the only fetchland in Pioneer, and it’s in 32k commander decks online. I know that I meant for this to be about Ikoria, but the ToE version is about twice as much, and there isn’t a huge supply of either version on TCG. Picking up FEA versions from Core 21 for $25 and under feels like a great deal at this point.

The Triomes are technically Showcase, not Extended Art, and that’s an important distinction. A reprint on these cards is inevitable, perhaps in the right set of Commander decks in a year or two. What won’t be the same is that these Showcase version have different art and a different frame, making the price gap between the Showcase versions and the regulars just too small. Why on earth would I buy the regular for $7, when the Showcase is $1.50 more?

I absolutely think you should get Showcase foils of these lands if your budget can accommodate it, because these are gorgeous. They are going for $20-$30, depending on the specific land, but they are among the best you could hope for in that color combination. 

These lands have a high EDH pedigree, even popping up in Modern, they are fantastic to look at and they are available for a good price. Proceed accordingly, but again, focus on the Showcase versions and not the regular frame.

One more aside: Lurrus of the Dream Den and Yorion, Sky Nomad are the only companions worth paying attention to. Lurrus gets a LOT more play, across a lot more formats. Again, I think you should go for the EA versions, but the reprint risk here is more random. Companions probably won’t be another mechanic in Standard again for a long while, but Secret Lair: Companions is much more likely in my view. 

Back to Commander, and what might be the most unfriendly card in this article:

Yes, that’s right. No Commanders for anyone, no flashback, no recast from the yard, etc. Just pure, good, wholesome fun. This is the most used card by the numbers, and 8000 people using this in just seven months is pretty impressive for a card. It’s pretty fun to deny things to other people.

The FEA foils tell the same story, starting at $19. There’s only 26 vendors on TCG with NM FEA versions of the card, and only one of those has four or more. That’s a really small number for a mere rare, not a mythic. For comparison’s sake, there’s about the same number of copies of General Kudro of Drannith in FEA.

A card with very little Constructed play but a lot of potential as a Commander hate bear is somewhere I want to be. $20 is reasonable for the foil, and EA versions at about $5 would be decent pickups too.

Surprisingly, the next card has a promo to chase, and it’s already been chased pretty hard: 

The Promo Pack version has a foil and a nonfoil, but there’s no Extended Art version at all, since it’s an uncommon. We see Cultivate and Kodama’s Reach as two of the most-played green spells in Commander because of the ramp, but Migration Path is a worthy #3 and is several dollars less for the sweet foil version. 

Cultivate and Reach are still good late-game, but Path gives you the flexibility of a re-draw if you don’t want to ramp up and cast your Commander again. It’s been widely adopted and you should have some copies handy when the day comes that the foil promo version is $7. 

Finally, I want to talk about the Ultimatums. Yes, they are hard to cast, but two of them are clearly the best, with the other three still being good but not game-breakers the same way. Eerie and Ruinous are enormous card advantage, and have the prices to back it up. Genesis will get you some amazing plays, and the other two are just not as powerful.

I think the EA versions are decent pickups, but the FEA copies are still $15 or less and that’s really where you want to be for the best two, and possibly Genesis as well. This is a card that’s difficult to reprint unless they add it to a Commander deck of exactly these colors, which isn’t impossible. Even then, you’d be looking at a regular frame nonfoil copy, while you’ve got the sweet ones. Get yours while you can.

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.

When a card gets reprinted, it will lose value. That’s one of the bedrock principles of Magic finance, and probably isn’t news to you.

However, there are some exceptions to this rule, and some of them may be surprising to you.

Let’s take a look at some examples of cards which went UP after being reprinted, flying in the face of conventional wisdom.

The first set of foils that came to my mind in terms of reprints are pretty iconic: the OG Ravnica-block shocklands. Let’s look at Hallowed Fountain’s graph, though you can use just about any of them. Keep in mind that Ravnica was in 2009, Return to Ravnica was 2012, and Guilds of Ravnica was 2019. The original shocklands are quite well aged.

Yowza, that’s an expensive shockland, especially when you look at the price of its reprint:

Note that the Guilds reprint in 2019 didn’t faze the RTR price much, but caused the Dissension price to jump enormously. The other shocklands have had hops from time to time, but the pattern of growth is there despite the reprints. Reprints which included BFZ Expeditions in 2015, mind you.

Now you might be saying, “Yeah, but those are for the shocklands, and those are cards with mega-cross-format appeal!” You’d be right, but there’s no appreciable reason for the 2005 card to be four or five times as expensive as the 2012 one. Especially because there’s not a lot of space between the 2012 foil price and the 2019 foil price.

That’s the shocklands, though. Let’s try something else with an older foil and a lot of reprints.

Karn Liberated has been popular since his first printing in New Phyrexia (2011) and while he’s not a big deal in Commander, Tron has been the real deal with the ability to slam him down turn three and exile something. The price on the OG foil, now nearly ten years old, tells quite a tale:

Something happened in late 2018: Ultimate Master Box Toppers. But even that price has been impacted in 2020 by Double Masters, which gave us another borderless treatment.

The difference here is probably one of use: Karn is big in Modern, but tiny in Commander. Fountain, though, is in 50k+ decks online, literally half the decks that could have the shockland do.

All right, so let’s try a commander card with an original foil, and no special frame reprint. Seedborn Muse meets these criteria, though there hasn’t been a foil reprint since Battlebond in 2017:

I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of using a card with the old border foil in this thought process, but $200 as TCG low vs under $50 for 9th, 10th, and BBD foils is right in line with expectations.

How about a commander staple with an old border AND a special frame reprint? Let’s talk about the Sad Robot, Solemn Simulacrum:

The price on the foil has stayed under $50 for a long time, being the Invitational card back in 2003. There was a reprint in Magic 2012, which included a foil version, but the real event was in 2016, when the Invention version showed up and started soaking up the dollars of people who would have otherwise paid for the OG foil. We got a new FEA version in Core 2021,which seems to have impacted the price on this card, given how the price has fallen this year.

So to summarize: original pack foils are pretty safe from reprints until a special version shows up. ‘Special Version’ can mean a lot of things, such as in Sakura-Tribe Elder’s case, where there’s an FNM and the awesomely shiny JSS treatment. Mostly, though, it’s going to mean a foil extended art.

This rule does not apply if the special frame becomes more expensive than the original: collectors will then start chasing the most pricey version of the card, and the prophecy will fulfill itself. For instance, I can’t see the new Zendikar Rising Expedition version of Scalding Tarn ever being more expensive than the Battle for Zendikar Expedition version. Godless Shrine, though, the BfZ Expedition became more than the Dissension card and never looked back.

If you own an original foil of a card and a special version shows up, don’t panic. Definitely don’t panic sell, especially if it’s the original foil of a staple in Cube or Commander. There are cards that are resistant to this pressure, and playability is a big part of that calculation.

Duel Decks don’t count, as I see with Avenger of Zendikar and a couple of other cards. Those have been rotten egg of reprints for quite a while, though it’s good that some foil versions remain cheap.

What does this mean going forward?

Well, for starters, I’m going to flinch at expensive pack foils when reprints are coming. One example of this would be Rings of Brighthearth, which is getting a reprint in Commander Legends and that includes a foil extended art treatment. The presence of that FEA means I’m expecting the OG foil to take a hit. Will it recover? Maybe. Whichever one is more expensive in six weeks is the one I’d want to have going forward. Price memory is going to play a big part in something like that, too.

It also means that I much prefer to invest in special frame versions going forward. Not only are those less likely to be reprinted (note that’s not the same as impossible) but they will also be resilient to reprint drag.

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.

Last week I wrote about the difficulties in finding specific foil extended art cards that are in Commander Legends. Today I want to look at a few specific cards and compare the current prices to where I think those prices are going to go.

As I said last week, the foil extended art cards are going to be highly sought after and not terribly common. You’ve got the math for the foil or nonfoil extended art rares and mythics, but the uncommons and commons require a little explaining first.

One slot in a Collector Booster has a nonfoil extended art common or uncommon, from this list:

Then we have two slots for foil regular-frame uncommons and five slots for foil regular frame commons. Under normal circumstances, I’d expect the regular frame foils and nonfoils to end up at the same price, but we have a pair of relevant cards here that have never been in foil: Path of Ancestry (32,700 decks on EDHREC) and Opal Palace (nearly 18,000).

Those two are going to be helped out a lot, price-wise, by being in the common slot. Those are 2/141, but five slots as opposed to the two uncommon slots in a Collector Booster. Even more important, each of those two slots has a 20% chance to upgrade to a foil extended art (FEA) common or uncommon.

Let’s look at some current prices, given the preorders on TCGPlayer.

Command Tower (75 cents for a regular, $9 for regular foil, $13 for EA and $50 for the FEA) – This ought to be in every non-monocolored Commander deck, and there’s already two foil versions: Commander’s Arsenal ($100) and the Judge Promo ($125). Given those two prices, the FEA at $50 feels cheap and the $9 regular-frame foil feels obscene. 

However, I do expect the prices to drop for the first few weeks, and then these are going to be a VERY attractive purchase. Picking up the regular-frame foils for under $5 is going to be a total steal if they drop that low. The FEA isn’t going to stay cheap forever, either. Don’t buy them now, but I’d be surprised if this went under $35. 

Arcane Signet ($2/$15/$10/$38) – Being the first foil printing, this will have quite a premium attached. It’s not going to be the only foil printing, though, and that’s got me feeling a little wary. They haven’t used different art yet, it’s been the same for a year and a half. That’ll change too, and if there’s a new art being used in the reprint (or the Secret Lair) then that’ll preserve some of the price. 

Note that for right now, the foil is pricier than the EA nonfoil, and I suspect those will come closer together. People desperate for a foil are going after them hard right now, and patience will pay off. Forty seems reasonable for the most chase version, especially since you’ll get one FEA Signet approximately every 87 packs. I want the price to come down a little before I buy my personal copies, but it might not.

Keep in mind that in terms of preorders, the Signet is more expensive than several mythics, even though it’s going to be much more common.

Thought Vessel ($3/$8/$8/$22) – Now we’re getting spicy. Just a little more than $20 can get me the FEA version of this first-time foil present in nearly 40k decks online? I don’t know how much lower this can go, but logic tells me it does have a little bit of a dip coming. I’m very very tempted to buy some of these right now for the $22 price, and there’s vendors willing to oblige. 

I’d like to get in on a stack of foils around $5, or hopefully less. This is a very popular mana rock, and ramping from two to four is where you really want to be. 

Terramorphic Expanse (bulk/$0.75/$3/$20) – These FEA commons and uncommons are going to carry a lot of value in these packs, and even if they dip it’s going to be a few bucks. Too many people play this alongside Evolving Wilds on a budget for it to be a cheap FEA. What’s really going to be amazing is that when it drops down to $10, it’ll jump back to $20 eventually.

Path of Ancestry ($1/$5/$7/$15) – Remember that this and Opal Palace (a quarter/$1.50/$4/$15) drop much more often than the uncommons, at least when it comes to the regular-frame foils. These drop at the same rate as Arcane Signet in FEA, but are played a lot less commonly. Path is my favorite preorder right now, given that it’s in 37k decks online and should be in every tribal Commander deck. Frankly, I want to buy a bunch of these right now, but I’m being patient. 

Reliquary Tower ($2/no foils on sale/$4/$13) – Given that this is 31% of all EDH decks online (130,000!) this is another surprisingly cheap staple. There are other foils available of this card, from the original in Conflux to reprints and FNM and the special ‘bring a friend to your LGS’ version. The FEA version is probably going to be the most expensive going forward, but I don’t think it’ll drop much below $10, given the demand.

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.