Magic’s going through an expansion period, and the dovetailing of multiple factors all at once has led to a development that is exemplified by Collector Boosters: Magic has become both relatively cheap to play AND has never had more expensive cards.
I want to take a look at where prices are in general, where they could go, and what that means for how we get cards: Play Boosters, Collector Boosters, and Secret Lairs.
There’s a theme for recent decks (last couple of years) where most of a deck is pretty cheap, and then you’ll have 1-3 cards which are redonk powerhouses and you need four of these.
Examples from recent history include:
Badgermole Cub
Bristly Bill
Vivi Orniter
Agatha’s Soul Cauldron
Sheoldred, the Apocalypse
Atraxa, Grand Unifier
Cavern of Souls
More words, all mythics, several banned. Sheoldred and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy were $100 cards in their Standard. The common point here is that if you look at Standard, it’s pretty cheap to build a deck until you get to the key/important/overpowered mythics, and that’s what gooses the prices up.
Modern and Legacy are pretty warped, and I’m leaving those out. (Modern is dominated by the Modern Horizons cards anyway). But Magic’s most popular format is Commander, and that is also getting cheaper…depending on what you’re playing.
If you have to maximize your Commander deck for peak efficiency, then yes, Commander is pretty pricey. You’ll need shocklands and fetches and duals, because you need everything untapped.
But if you’re willing to accept a turn slower, or even the chance of a turn slower, you can run cards like Canopy Vista, Deathcap Glade, or Sea of Clouds. The Triomes haven’t been reprinted, but there’s an ocean of cards for helping you with a three-to-five color manabase, if you’re willing to give up one mana (Cascading Cataracts) or entering tapped (Path of Ancestry).
There are absolutely some super-expensive cards that people build around and Wizards reprints at a glacial pace. And if you don’t want to pay for a Rhystic Study, then downgrade a little and play Mystic Remora, Insight, Insight Engine, Ghostly Pilferer, etc.
Commander is a game that doesn’t ask you to optimize, and has a whole level structure for the spectrum from ‘100 random cards’ to ‘100 shark teeth pointed at your groin’ so you can tell people what you’re doing at the beginning, when you first sit down to play.
On the opposite end, if you want to get fancy and be a total Smaug, hoarding the best of everything, then Commander is exactly your jam. I have a Dragon deck stacked with the best and shiniest that I can do, though I’ve had to make accommodations. I don’t want to pay for OG foil Onslaught fetches, so I got the ten fetches from ZNR in foil. Guru basics would be pretty radical, but for the memes I’ve got full-text lands.
Go for artist proofs, or textless foil Gaea’s Cradle, or Alpha Timetwister. Get as fancy as you want. Magic is one of the last bastions of playability over collectability, but you can be sure that there are top-level Commander decks and Cubes out there that are not skimping on anything to be both collectible and powerful.
The point here is that aside from certain staples, no one has to spend a ton on a deck. The cards that get pricey are the ones that make a splash immediately and combo off or represent an incredible boost in a deck’s power. Standard doesn’t need a set of fetches, and even if they reprinted them into Standard, there’s enough on the market that the price is still reasonable.
Shocklands are another great example of Wizards’ dedication to making staples cheap and at the same time, represents the excess someone can go to. Steam Vents, traditionally the most in-demand of the shocks, can be had for just over $10 per copy or $2700 for the cheapest serialized copy on TCGPlayer.
This gap in value, without sacrificing anything but being shiny and serialized, is completely due to Wizards making good cards in Play Boosters and then putting rare/pretty versions into Collector Boosters. No longer are players forced to go lurking through eBay for foreign foils, now we’re given a selection of treatments and Secret Lairs for our magpie selves.
And this is also why most Collector Booster boxes are rising in price: we’re attracting collectors from all over, a trend that started in Final Fantasy. We’re about to get all the Star Trek collectors with signature-playable chase versions of cards, which should make for another Universes Beyond set that brings in a lot of new interest and lots of liquid cash.
Play Boosters haven’t moved much in price, but Collector Boosters have all risen across the board. There’s even sales of the empty CB boxes, a thing I could not have fathomed but I imagine people are decorating with them or using them as backdrop for streaming. Something purely decorative and pretty.
We’re all chasing how Lord of the Rings’ Special Edition went to ridiculous heights, hitting $12,000 sales on TCGPlayer before coming back down to the current valuation of $6,000. Collector Booster boxes for Final Fantasy were under a grand at the start of the year and have climbed to $1,700 with clear eyes on passing two grand.
We haven’t seen that huge growth in other UB sets, but Hobbit is trying real hard, bobbing up to $900 and currently trending down to under $800, but with its cousin being the flagbearer there’s a lot of predictions about where it’ll end up.
I talked about this with James on MTG Fast Finance recently, and I fully believe that opening packs has never been more of a gamble. Every set, I break down the odds of opening every type of card you could want, and even the ‘good’ odds are more than 100 packs to open. Gleaming Splendor, one of the hottest cards from the set, is 90 Collector Booster packs to get a nonfoil book cover, 166 packs to open as a book cover foil, and 333 packs as a surge foil book cover. Just buy the singles you want! Opening packs is a losing proposition, even though it feels so so good.
Know what else feels good? Buying CBs for a good price, then waiting a year and selling them at amazing prices. Keep aware of the trends and stay strong.
Finally, I want to talk a little about Secret Lairs, Wizards’ golden goose. Every Secret Lair drop is ridiculously profitable for Wizards, even things like the Zeta drop which went badly. They have to pay for the art, and a little bit of graphic design, and then the print costs. That’s it, and that’s sold directly to us for $30/$40 or more. Margins through the roof, profit like never before, and now they are doing the hybrid of limited printing and print to demand by offering to let us buy it now and pay for it to arrive in a year.
That method has worked on the Miku decks, which are under $300, compared to the nearly $500 that Goblinstorm immediately got to. I maintain that the Zeta cards are ugly and should end up as the cheapest version of their cards, but the packs selling out in something like 45 minutes of available time means the reselling is fierce and profitable. If I’d known the print run was that small, I would have ignored the appearance and gone for all I could get.
We’re not going to see a decrease in Secret Lair printings. Ignore the ones you want to ignore, focus on value, but the FOMO on the sold-out offerings will power prices to the $100 range immediately. Print run is the big unknown, and will continue to be.
CBs and Secret Lairs are the main products we can make money on by being thoughtful, so stay tuned here and to the podcast for the best insights.
Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the co-host of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.
