I’m back on my particular signature brand of BS for this week and it’s going to be a fun article to write. Finally, we get to write about cards I like to play. By that, of course I mean cards I want to put in decks. Notice I didn’t say “deck” because with the stupid, stupid, stupid, idiotic stupid poison counter theme in Phyrexia: All Will Be One (PAWBO for short), we have another theme that works hand in hand with it, enables other strategies (Planeswalkers) and is heavily in the best color combination (Simic). I am talking, of course, about Landfall Proliferate.
Proliferate is a big subtheme in PAWBO, but between the set which gave us a few Proliferate cards and the precons which seemed to ignore the main set in that regard, we have old cards and new cards that are both getting some new looks. While Ezuri is of course not the most popular commander in the set, I think it’s the best place to see the Proliferate cards that matter. Let’s take a look.
I really expected a reprinting of Inexorable Tide, but I think it might be a minute for a reprint. I also think if Inexorable Tide gets printed, it’s unlikely to be in a big set and that could hurt its upside. Also, this isn’t the first time we made money on this card.
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I know it seems odd to be writing about the Pro Tour in two weeks, when the new set is out now.
My financial advice for people playing in prerelease events remains the same as always: Sell it all. Find someone who wants your lands. Move it and don’t wait around. Someone will see the sweet foil you opened and want to trade for it right now, not realizing (or not caring) that it’ll be 1/3 the price in two weeks.
So whatever you can move, right now, do that.
As for the Pro Tour in Philadelphia, on Feb 17-19, that’s a more complicated plan.
It used to be that Pro Tours were such big events that we (MTGPrice writers) would do round-by-round coverage of the Constructed games. Being featured on camera tends to do amazing things to a card. Here’s an example I made money from:
For context: In July 2017, Pro Tour Hour of Devastation happened, and put six Mono-Red decks into the Top 8. All of them were running three or four copies of Hazoret, who is really the perfect top-end card for an aggro deck. Because so many top results included this card, and so many on-camera matches showed players just wrecking with the card, the price took a huge jump.
Personally, I bought copies that Friday for under $5 and resold them within two weeks at $15-$20, before fees. I even wrote about it that Friday, which when looking through the archives, you might note that we featured round-by-round coverage of the PT. Yes, Hazoret is an example from five years ago, but that’s a really clear example of on-camera play plus tournament results turning a $5 mythic into a $20 mythic.
Wizards really wants this era back. They don’t like to give away the money, to spend the cash on streaming and commentating, but there’s a measurable impact on card prices and therefore tournament participation.
What we’re looking for is card prices moving because of these results. If the prices move significantly, and sell at the new prices, then we’re looking at a notable chunk of the population who meet the following characteristics:
They want to play in paper tournaments
They have a tournament in mind that they are buying for
They are willing to invest into a deck that is good for that format.
There’s a lot to be said for the growth of Arena during the pandemic, and how it papered over the complete loss of paper play/transitioned online play, but when Standard was a healthy, thriving format, everything at Wizards was that much better. A couple years after that PT, we got a Modern-lite format in Pioneer, which is notable for skipping the fetchlands and some of the more busted mechanics.
Pioneer doesn’t rotate, and that’s the format that PT ONE will have. Standard can breed some resentment with more casual players, because your cards are probably going to lose value and they are definitely going to rotate out of the card pool. Pioneer skips that problem, but trades it for only some cards being relevant, both in the metagame and in the financial sense.
At this point, I’m waiting on seeing Pioneer pushing prices, and same with Standard. The smallest subgroup for those three characteristics is probably those who have a paper tournament that they want to play in, because so many stores closed and not many have opened.
It’s not there yet. There’s a small effect, as we can see the card that Nathan Steuer used to overpower people over and over again in the October 2022 World Championships did bump from a dollar to $2.50:
As a counterexample, though, Haunted Ridge was in a tremendous number of decks that weekend, is a big-time Commander card, and is also used in Pioneer. It’s grown in price, but that’s started to trend downwards at it looks towards rotation in a few months:
This is the edition that paper tournaments would be exerting pressure on if there was a lot of demand. Not the foils, not the FEA, not the Double Feature versions. It’s hanging out at $10, which is still very good for a rare, but given the decks it is in, I would have expected it to keep the $12-$15 price a bit longer.
So to put it all together, I’m not expecting to see any big jumps this weekend, at least none that have staying power. I won’t be shocked at some cards having minor gains, but there’s nothing on the horizon that makes me think there’s long-term use going on. When I see cards getting big gains from tournament results, I’ll rethink this policy, but for now, I’m avoiding trying to cash in on one event’s results.
Using EDHREC or, if you want to do it the hard way, I guess, other sources, it’s easy to see which cards are getting played in Commander and which aren’t. Look at a set and see what’s getting played with. That used to be enough information for us. Barring reprints, cards were printed the same amount, roughly, foils were flat and still special and older cards went up when new cards made them matter again. The problem is, the more they wanted us to buy, the more the cards had to be good. They need to keep pushing the gas, which means more good cards per set, more sets, which means more cards you need to play. Do you build a new deck or take cards out of the 3 week old deck you’ve played twice to make room for the new cards that made your old ones obsolete? And if a card is too good to be made obsolete, do you take comfort in that and invest or do you worry about what the card that makes people stop playing Dockside Extortionist is going to look like? I personally worry about how just getting played a lot doesn’t matter, and also doesn’t seem to be useful for figuring out where prices will go. Let’s look at a few cards, shall we?
Forgive my hasty alignment using paint of all programs, I don’t want to take the time to fix it because I wanted to make a point. Both of these cards are played a lot in new Elesh Norn decks, and in the format in general. One costs more than the other despite being newer. Does that mean Terramancer is played more across the format?
No, in fact. There are lots of versions of Welcoming Vampire, and Deep Gnome Terramancer was in a set that has a lot of really good cards. Do I expect Terramancer to hit $10 when Welcoming Vampire is played more and hasn’t come close? How many reprints and variants and promos does it take to drag a card down to being a buck less than a card played half as much? As there other factors at play here?
The real question here is that whether Deep Gnome Terramancer is a good pickup at under $5. We’d love for it to hit at least $10 if we’re outing at retail prices, much more if we want to clear our shipping costs buylisting them. Is this sort of spec dead? Moreover, is being a format staple even good enough anymore?
We used to be impressed by a card being in 10,000 decks as far back as EDHREC measured, and one of the reasons I cautioned against arbitrary levels like that was that the number would have to constantly change and no one would know where it should be. At this point, is 22k enough? Why can’t 41k and a year of time offset multiple promo versions? What trajectory is Terramancer even on?
If 4 is the floor on this card and it’s already rebounding, will it pull farther away from Vampire despite being played less? What are we to make of these contradictions? Worse, is being in 40 or even 50k decks enough anymore? With all of the new keywords comes enablers and that means cards get more and more specialized until the decks build themselves. We used to be at a sweet spot where staples were an index and individual cards being buoyed by new releases meant some narrow cards would get a new look and that scrutiny would lead to buying and price increases. Now, the cards are so specialized that people are basically leaving the precons as-is a card being in a 40K deck matters more than being in 40k decks, you know?
The neon Hidetsugu and the promise of extended art foil Boseiju and foils of the EDH precon cards continued the unsustainable trend of collector boosters being opened until the prices were all meaningless. Is The Reality Chip a buy at $3? More than that, are we OK with a game where the 9th most played card in the most popular format is $2.50? Let me rephrase that, of course I want a game like that, but is it worth doing Mtg Finance the way I have done Mtg Finance the last decade if the demand can’t ever catch supply?
The days of snagging like 100 cheap copies of something you think is going up on TCG Player seem over. Mtg Finance has always been “adapt or die” and after taking a month off to grapple with how I felt about my current approach to Mtg Finance, I think I am ready to adapt. To that end, I’ll be spending the next few months developing and reporting on new techniques and pointing out times where my old approach pays off.
It wasn’t that Kibo, Uktabi Prince couldn’t move prices, it’s that Ravenous Baboons were the only card the really went anywhere. The price immediately went back down as there wasn’t much real demand since the card doesn’t especially synergize with Kibo and it was more likely just an old Monkey people remembered because they’ve been playing as long as me.
My current method, which we’re updating, is still useful for paying attention to movement, usage, relative ubiquity. Staring at the Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines page on EDHREC doesn’t feel like it used to where specs would leap off of the page at me. I just see the same mono-White Blink deck stuff that I said would go up based on another White Blink commander but didn’t. Cards used to be cards, but now the product matters a lot. Limited releases like Baldur’s Gate give us stronger signals, faster. Look what is in 40k decks and has been out exactly as long as Deep Gnome.
Moving forward, I’ll be targeting older cards for specs and only straying into newer card territory when it makes sense to do so, or if it’s in a dynamite set like Baldur’s Gate. I think Baldur’s Gate has more to give us, so I’ll be diving directly into that set next week. Until then, I usually include specs and this week I mostly told you what not to buy, so here are some presented without explanation.
Welcome back to this ongoing series of attempts to calculate exactly how lucky the luckiest pulls are for every set with Collector Boosters.
Phyrexia: All Will Be One (hereafter written as ONE) has some very interesting formulations, and every slot appears to have a variation in distribution. Thankfully, Wizards has given us a lot more information about ONE than they have for previous sets, making my task both easier and more difficult.
So let’s get into it, and calculate exactly our odds for opening certain packs, then compare those rates with chase cards from previous expansions.
All of today’s math will come from the Collecting Phyrexia: All Will Be One article, or explained using that math as a basis. That article has specific percentages, which I’ll copy over.
Also, we need to refer to this image to talk about what slot has what:
We are going to focus on the step-and-compleat slot, and the final slot with all of the Booster Fun treatments.
All of the numbers we’ve been given are percentages that have been rounded, and that’s a source of error I can’t control for.
In the Step-and Compleat slot, we’re given these percentages: “There are 6 commons (38%), 7 uncommons (29%), 26 rares (22%), and 28 mythic rares (11%)” Normally, I’d talk about the distribution of 10:3:1:0.5 that Draft Boosters have, but that math doesn’t work out. What we do know is that the cards which appear the least, the 28 mythics, make up 11% of your potential pulls.
What we do is multiply the percentage by the number of potential cards. In this case, that’s 11% times 1/28 to get a chance of 0.39% for a certain mythic. In terms of packs opened, you need to divide the denominator by the numerator, also known as taking the reciprocal. That gives you approximately 254.5 packs to open a certain mythic.
Let’s make this into a table for the Step-and-Compleat categories:
Step-and-Compleat Foils
Percent chance for any card of that category
Percent chance for a specific card of that category
# of CBs to open one specific card from that category
Mythic Rare
28%
0.39%
254.5
Rare
22%
0.84%
118.2
Uncommon
29%
4.14%
24.1
Common
38%
6.3%
15.7
One thing we need to pay attention to: There are multiple versions of cards available in this slot, such as four different Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines with this foil treatment. You’ve got the same odds to pull any variation from the slot.
The other important slot is the final one, that compares everything possible except for the Step-and-Compleat versions. This includes something we usually don’t get: Foil Extended-Art versions of Commander and Jumpstart cards. Now here, we’ve been given some percentages for individual variations, rather than the overall number like we’re used to. As an example, we get “5 mythic rare Phyrexian-language planeswalkers (3%)” in the nonfoil slot. Because the nonfoil slot makes up 51% of the distribution of cards in the foil slot, I’m going to go ahead and run these rates in another table, taking the nonfoil rates and multiplying by .51:
Nonfoil Booster Fun Treatment
Percent chance for any card of that category
Percent chance for a specific card of that category
# of CBs to open one specific card from that category
5 rare borderless “fast lands”
13%
2.6%
38.4
16 rare borderless ichor cards
41%
2.54%
39.3
10 rare borderless manga cards
25%
2.5%
40
10 mythic rare borderless ichor cards
13%
1.3%
76.9
5 mythic rare borderless manga planeswalkers
3%
0.6%
166.7
5 mythic rare Phyrexian-language planeswalkers
3%
0.6%
166.7
5 mythic rare borderless concept praetors
2%
0.4%
250
Borderless Elesh Norn by Junji Ito
<1%
0.2%
500
Phyrexian-language Elesh Norn
<1%
0.2%
500
The estimate of 500 packs is because Elesh Norn has two extra variants, the borderless manga and the Phyrexian, that the other Praetors don’t have in this set. Five variants in one set!
(If you really want the math: All copies of all variants for one card should be equal to all variants of another card at the same rarity. Since Elesh Norn has two extra variants, I split the rarity for the borderless concept Praetors, as those are all add-ins to this set. When we get to foils, these will be plenty rare enough. If I get more concrete data, fromWizards or large operations, I will update this and the running tally.)
Now we’re basically going to take everything in this table and multiply by .51, because we’re told that for foils, 49% of that slot is the extended-art rares from the set, plus select extended-art Commander and Jumpstart foils. They don’t tell us exactly which are foil options in the article, which is incredibly frustrating. When I have better information there, I will update the section about the FEA cards. There’s no FEA mythics in the main set this time around either–they all got one of the other variant frames.
So here’s the table with everything you can get in that slot, along with my estimates for the FEA cards.
Foil Booster Fun Treatment
Percent chance for any card of that category
Percent chance for a specific card of that category
# of CBs to open one specific card from that category
5 rare borderless “fast lands”
6.63%
1.33%
75.41
16 rare borderless ichor cards
20.91%
1.30%
77.20
10 rare borderless manga cards
12.75%
1.28%
78.43
10 mythic rare borderless ichor cards
6.63%
0.66%
150.83
5 mythic rare borderless manga planeswalkers
1.53%
0.31%
326.80
5 mythic rare Phyrexian-language planeswalkers
1.53%
0.31%
326.80
5 mythic rare borderless concept praetors
1.02%
0.20%
490.20
Borderless Elesh Norn by Junji Ito
0.10%
0.10%
980.39
Phyrexian-language Elesh Norn
0.10%
0.10%
980.39
FEA Main Set Rares
23.89%
0.82%
121.43
FEA JMP/Commander Rares
23.06%
0.82%
121.43
FEA JMP/Commander Mythics
2.06%
0.41%
242.85
Again, as I find out which FEAs are an option and which aren’t, I’ll update this table. This is the rarest possible outcome for the FEA rares/mythics, your odds will only get better from here.
As always, if you notice errors or want to talk about my methods, please reach out in the comments or the ProTrader discord!
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.
MAGIC: THE GATHERING FINANCE ARTICLES AND COMMUNITY
