Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: Timmy Stuff

Readers!

I haven’t covered the same product two weeks ago in this series and I feel like that sentence can replace the normal paragraph I write above the fold in this series where I express incredulity that my favorite thing in the world could make me feel this consistently terrible. If you’re not like me and you’re capable of only caring about the stuff you care about, you’re probably thrilled that there have never been more chances to buy products and build new decks. The thing is, the best specs are the ones that don’t rely on Commander only, they rely on other formats. Typically a format like Modern will feature a card and a combination of some Modern or Pioneer to a lesser extent (for now, I guess) play with Commander play bodes well for a card. You know what is better than Modern? A format played by the majority of Magic players. The answer is not Commander, believe it or not. No, the format enjoyed by the vast, vast majority of people who play Magic the Gathering is the format “63 unsleeved card I own” and it has been sweeping the nation since 1993. These players are the lifeblood of the game, and while they mostly buy boosters at Walmart, these players are very aware of the internet and how to use it and they buy cards. Caring what cards they buy can help us spec better, and today I want to talk about the casualest casual kind of casual concepts for decks – Lifegain.

Actually, I should have buried the lede under the fold to entice people to sign up for Pro Trader. Let me take that again.

Today I want to talk about… wait, that won’t work. OK, so the cat is out of the bag, I guess. Today I want to talk about lifegain cards, specifically for a deck that is coming out soon or is out already, I am not sure which.

Monks and Lifegain? Is there a more Timmier thing possible? I don’t know if there is, but I’m very excited to see where this goes. In addition to kind of wanting to build the deck, I want to see if there are any Timmy cards in the deck.

Oh yeah. We can work with this.

I think this is a $10 card in waiting, and being able to snag these for $3 from TCG Player seems like a real winner. This is a very Timmy card, granting you lifegain and rebuying spells for you. I honestly with this creature could be Legendary, but I would probably just loop Time Warp with it. Even if this only goes to $7, which it basically can’t if it spikes for a reason, this is still a buy at $3.

Also this.

We mostly missed the boat on this most brutal of White finishers but since it’s $10 on TCG and hit $15 on CK, I’d argue it’s a buy at retail. Reprint risk is impossible to know at this point, so caveat emptor.

This may be the first time I have cited the EDHREC salt score survey that we do like onceish a yearish as a jokeish, but here I go. When these cards first came out, people were furious about outside IP where they try to gather their Magic. Now they seemed to have calmed down a bit, and supply seems real low on this card. I think it’s a good card and being an Advisor doesn’t suck. I don’t know if the Archimandrite will be a real player going forward, I think with the pace of releases those days might be over, but I think Glenn is a $10 card.

How many copies of this card between Legacy and 7th could there really be out there?

Not 0 and not a million. The problem with a card like this is that if it goes up, copies will come out of the woodwork to attenuate the price spike unless you’re insanely quick. I don’t see it. Weird that such an old card is so cheap, though, and it’s great in this deck. Wonder what foils are going for.

Way, way less than I thought. Even 7th seems downright affordable.

How was this $8 in 2019?

When TCG retail is CK buylist, I’m a buyer.

That does it for me this week, nerds. The deck contains a lot more lfiegainy goodies and there are honestly probably 10 more promising cards just on this page. I don’t know if this card will be what does it, but when you look at the Timminess of these cards, you have to admit they don’t really need that much help. Let’s break off some of these sub-200 copy cards and count our money. Until next time!

Casual Fridays

Why is the Festival in a Box still available?

If you are feeling burned out on Secret Lair purchases, that’s valid. It’s been a never-ending stream of cards from the fire hose, with Universes Beyond and Post Malone and 30th Anniversary Countdown, plus everything else that’s come along in the six months before that.

We had something interesting happen, though. A Festival-In-A-Box (hereafter known as FIAB) was released for the Magic event in Philadelphia in March. The last time a FIAB went on sale, it was gone in hours. This time…it’s still available days later, and I want to get into why. What’s changed? Is there still value to be had? Was there ever value? Let’s get into it.

First of all, let’s do the direct comparison. Here’s what you got from the Vegas FIAB last time:

This time, still available for Philadelphia and not shipping till March:

Handily, both were the same price of $270, so we can extrapolate from there. 

The Mystery Booster: Convention Edition is clearly the big draw here. The price went down about $40 as people got their Vegas FIAB and sold the box. These went for around $260 before August; now they are down to $220 or so. That box represents a huge chunk of the value that can be gained from the whole package, and while I respect anyone who wants to resell it, the Mystery draft experience is a great one. 

I doubt that the box prices will have recovered much by March, and frankly, I’d expect the value to take another tumble. Remember that while there are 23 cards in that set currently retailing for $10+, there’s nearly 1700 cards in the set. Lots of people buying, lots of opening, lots of reselling. I wouldn’t be shocked if boxes of MYB were down to $175.

One other thing: they made minor alterations to the set, taking out Rhystic Study but adding in a second Sakashima the Impostor and some others. The full list of changes is near the end here, and the changes were done mainly to distance themselves from artists Wizards has deemed problematic. 

Amazingly, they seem to be out of the promo Sol Ring to give out. This was a giveaway for so many things for so long, and now it’s the Gauntlet Arcane Signet that’s going for just over $20 right now. It’s a cool one, but there’s competition in the Secret Lair (old border!) and the Foil Extended Art and the Warhammer versions and the other Secret Lair…you see what I mean. I’m glad it’s getting traction, but I’m doubtful that it’ll hold $20 for much longer, especially when the FIAB arrive in March.

I’m also going to call the Commander decks a wash. They chose what they had extras of, and those are the ones that didn’t have a lot of valuable reprints. The decks aren’t bad, they just don’t come with a Black Market Connections or anything like that. 

I think Look At The Kitties is a defensible set of choices, with some really cute art. The first cat-themed Secret Lair is reselling for a pretty penny indeed, and we are getting a decent selection of cards. None are super-pricey, but solid choices and good art mean that it should appreciate over time like all of the non-land Secret Lairs have. 

Atraxa Sleeves and a matching playmat, when that’s the most popular commander of the last few years…it’s really an inspired choice. There’s a boatload of those players out there, and it’s just going to take a few hundred who are willing to pay a premium to have the sleeves and the playmat match up. I think this will be a surprisingly profitable item, topping off a valuable package and worth the buy, especially if you’ve got someone you can gift the Commander decks to.

The biggest thing is the quantity out there. I fully expect that Wizards is selling a lot more of these FIAB than they did for Vegas. It’s unlikely that they are going to sell too many at this price and without the cache of the big return to gathering, but there’s no doubt that there will not be scarce quantities of this package out there. 

I’m not going to be buying a bunch of these for spec purposes, but if I had an Atraxa deck, I’d 100% be buying one for my personal use and selling off the other pieces.

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.

Jason Alt, Unlocked ProTrader

Unlocked Pro Trader: More than Meets the Eye

Readers!

We got dese dumb Transformah decks and I think they’ll do… not nothing? I expected more impact from the Street Fighter Secret Lairs and it seems like there are finally so many products that large numbers of people cannot be relied upon reasonably to engage with all of them. It’s great that not every product is for everyone, but how do we guess which products are for no one? People are going to buy these Transformers cards, sue, and some of them might even play EDH. However, I have no idea whether this will matter enough to sell singles. I’m going to do what I have always done hoping things just click or I figure out the next technique, but I feel a ton of instability in my life right now and it’s making me worry about everything I used to believe in.

I am going to act as though I think these Transformers cards will impact the game to enough of an extent that prices move, something that Street Fighter hasn’t really borne out yet. I’m hoping the Transformers stuff is important, but if it’s not, all I did was waste an article slot. You will have spent money. I am not telling you I don’t believe in my picks because I’m a bad at this, rather I am saying that I don’t have the normal confidence in the premise of this being a worthwhile exercise – I will identify picks the same way I always do. As always, there is risk – if this was easy money, everyone would do it and I would be a carpenter or something. Anyway, let’s do that thing we do.



We have a whopping 15 commanders in this product. It’s a lot of cards. I don’t know, I hate this, what do you want from me?


Let’s go in order of popularity until we stop wanting to, shall we?




High Synergy card piles are starting to look like the first 10 cards reprinted the next time they do a precon, something they do 11 times a year now. I don’t know, it’s really hard to be excited about these staples, especially when half of them were in a precon to begin with.




This is a real Timmy card and at $2 for a mythic and $4 for an EA mythic, I think we are basically at the floor. You can get these from TCG Player for basically buylist. I don’t know what the future holds, but a big, dumb, dorky creature like this that makes so much power is great, especially in a deck where you’ll creature 12 pre-combat effortlessly. Flame Rift gives you 12 mana in this deck, you’ll be farting out huge creatures in no time.




This is an absurd card, held in check by its high CMC in a deck where colorless mana is as abundant as water. I’m into this in the format in general. The biggest reason for some of these cards not doing better is people have never seen them before. I suspect Bronze Guardian hasn’t been seen much and any card that can go from $2 to $10 because it was on Game Knights is worth keeping an eye on, and you can keep a very close eye on them if they’re in a pile on your desk like all of my specs.




Why would this price go down before it goes up? This card is insane. Unfortunately, it’s one of only like 20 cards worth more than $3 from those precons, so…. whee. Does that make the buy-in higher than I’d like? A bit, but it won’t matter in a year.




I have told you and told you to get this card – I sure hope you listened! It’s half on TCG what they want on CK so, that’s something. I love this card and I don’t know why it’s hasn’t been reprinted, but I have basically made money on this card 3 times so it’s about time I lost all of it, I guess. This isn’t a buy because of Optimus Prime decks, but it’s not like those hurt.



The guy that turns into an 80s ghetto blaster is the third most popular, go figure.




So here is another troubling concept.




Curiosity Crafter was shown on Game Knights, to great effect I might add. It spiked accordingly, and hard. It fell way, way off – not settling midway between the spike and pre-spike price, but rather at barely twice it. Buying in at $1 trying to cash out at $2 is hard work, so you need to be ready to pull the trigger and list when they start to pop for $15. Are you that nimble? This is the best case scenario for a lot of specs. Seems stressful, right? This is how you make actual money on a $1 card, though.




I have made money on this card this year, but I’m not ruling out buying back the same copies from CK that I buylisted to them and trying again now that CK retail is below what I buylisted them for. I hope I see my same old copies and get to get paid for babysitting them again. Other cards that do this a lot are Teferi’s Puzzle Box, Anvil of Bogardan and Sunforger. Feels good to sell a company cards you just bought from it for more than you paid, it’s arbitrage without a third part. The dream.




This is the absolute floor for this card. It tanking because of a reprint rather than loss of adoption makes it basically impossible this ever sees $40 again, but what do you want for a seven dollar and forty cent buy-in?


That does it for me this week, nerds. Thanks for reading. Until next time!

Casual Fridays

The Math of The Brothers’ War

Here we are, everyone, another installment of ‘How rare is rarer than mythic rare’ and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by some of these numbers. Things aren’t as insanely rare as they used to be, and yet they are still going to require a lot of packs to get what we want.

This set has TWO subsets of cards we care about: the Transformers subset and the Retro Artifact set. Each of those sets has chase versions too! There’s a lot to keep track of, but luckily, I’ve gotten good at parsing small details and figuring out some approximate drop rates for these cards.

So let’s dive into the odds and the math and the likelihood of getting the cards you want!

This set, everything we care about is in the Collector Boosters, as opposed to other sets where Set Boosters might have some of what we want. So all of these figures are calculated for those boosters and those alone.

It’s also worth mentioning that these are estimates based on best information. These aren’t for sure, locked in figures. The nature of statistics and probability means that some people will have better results and some will have worse results. 

One of the core principles I use in calculating these drop rates is the ratio of cards in a Draft booster: 10 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare or .5 of a mythic rare. Since we don’t get half of a card, I double that, so for every mythic rare, there’s 2 rares, 6 uncommons, and 20 commons.

There’s a slot dedicated to the nonfoil Commander and Jumpstart cards from this set. To be specific, that is the Commander cards plus the Jumpstart cards for a total of 26 rares, 6 mythics.

MythicRare
% chance to open any card of this rarity10.3%89.7%
# of packs needed for a specific card5829

Not a lot to see here, as there will be plenty of EA nonfoils going around. No foils to be had at all for these, unless something weird comes out like they’ve done in past sets.

In the Transformers slot, it gets interesting. First of all, the subset has the name BOT, which is so on point it hurts. Secondly, we’re told that all of them are mythic, so all are the same relative rarity. We’re outright told that 12% of this slot is Shattered Glass, the flipped-mirror universe where Deceptions are good and Autobots bad. We’re also told that foil SG cards are about as rare as Neon copies of Hidetsugu, Devouring Chaos. Happily, I have that math handy from that article, so I know that it’s all about .6%, or 1 in 151 to get any Shattered Glass foil.

The article also indicates that nonfoil Shattered Glass is about as common as foil Generation 1 cards, so we get a rough breakdown of 75% nonfoil G1 (6 of 8 packs), 12.5% nonfoil Shattered Glass (1 in 8), 12% foil G1 (again, about 1 in 8) and finally foil Shattered Glass, which will be the 1 in 151 or so that we got from Hidetsugu, less than 1% chance. 

Then we get to the last slot in the pack, which has: Foil Extended Art, Foil Borderless cards, Foil Alternate-Art Planeswalkers, and foil Rare and Mythic Retro or Schematic artifacts. That’s a lot, and let’s look at the breakdown for how many of each type there are in that slot.

Extended ArtBorderlessAlt-Art PWRetro Artifact Schematic
Rare58603030
Mythic19021515

Doubling the rares gets us to a pool of 299 cards, and that’s where we can get a table that matches.

Chance is:Extended ArtBorderlessAlt-Art PWRetro Artifact Schematic
Rare1/149.51/149.501/149.51/149.5
Mythic1/29901/2991/2991/299

This is one of the lowest drop rates for rares we’ve had in a while, and might well lead to things like the borderless foil painlands being more expensive than expected. 

When it comes to the Artifact Archive, there’s a lot to unpack. Keep in mind that the schematic and the retro have equal numbers or each rarity. Schematic Helm of the Host is just as rare as Retro Helm of the Host. I don’t expect the prices to be equal, but the rarity is the same. 

The serialized copies of each of the 63 cards is a tricky problem to solve. Since there’s 500 of each, there’s exactly 31,500 serialized cards in existence. Several have been opened already! To calculate your odds of getting one of these, we’d need to know how many booster packs/boxes exist. We don’t have that exact number, so some estimations are in order.

We know Wizards’ annual reported revenue, and from that we can figure how big or little the revenue is from this particular piece of their pie. Can’t be too small, or too big. We also know that the distributor price (Wizards sells boxes for this price, we get retail with a markup) was around $135.

So here’s a table, with the percent chance and how many boosters, boxes, and income Wizards gets if that’s the number of boosters out there.

My estimate is that you’re at a .7% or .8% chance to open a serialized card, or around one every two cases. If we get new information, I’ll update this post.

What’s especially odd is that the rarity doesn’t matter. There’s the same number of serialized uncommon Bone Saw as there is the rare Ashnod’s Altar and the mythic Aetherflux Reservoir. I don’t think the prices will be the same at all, but the rarity and the drop rate are equal.

It’s also worth mentioning that for a price comparison, the Ampersand promos given to Premium WPN stores were in a similar vein. There were around 3,000-5,000 sets of those distributed, and now we’re getting 500 of each. These artifacts are some of the most popular Commander cards around, and I won’t be shocked to see them fetch truly premium prices. Again, rarity isn’t relevant. Burnished Hart and Swiftfoot Boots have higher EDHREC numbers than any of the mythics in this subset, and they are uncommon in this grouping. 

Does that mean they will be more expensive than mythic serialized cards? My instincts say no. This is the first crack at serialized cards for Wizards, and I am pretty sure that all of them are going to be quite expensive.

So let’s summarize things with a list of chase cards, and then how they compare with other Collector Booster sets.

CardOdds as a percentEst. number of packs needed
Extended Art Rootpath Purifier1.7% chance to open58
Generation 1 Arcee, Sharpshooter5%20
Foil Generation 1 Megatron, Tyrant0.5%180
Shattered Glass Ultra Magnus, Tactician0.5%180
Foil Shattered Glass Optimus Prime, Hero0.0004%2520
Foil Extended Art Tocasia’s Welcome0.6%149.5
Foil Extended Art Arcane Proxy0.3%299
Foil Borderless Brushland0.6%149.5
Foil Alternate-Art Teferi, Temporal Pilgrim0.3%299
Foil Retro Ashnod’s Altar0.6%149.5
Foil Schematic Aetherflux Reservoir0.3%299
Serialized Double Rainbow Foil Helm of the Host0.0001%9009

And finally, let’s do a comparison of other Collector Booster sets, and see where we land with this set:

Card/SetCollector Boosters to open one (approx.)Card/SetCollector Boosters to open one (approx.)
Phyrexian Foil Vorinclex (KHM)256Foil Etched Food Chain (2X2)280
Japanese- Language Alternate Art Time Warp Foil (STX:MA)309Red Soft Glow Hidetsugu (NEO)1,828
Foil Extended Art The Meathook Massacre (MID)151Phyrexian Foil Sheoldred, the Apocalypse (DMU)346
Foil Fang Frame Sorin, the Mirthless by Ayami Kojima (VOW)171Phyrexian Foil Ajani, Sleeper Agent (DMU)692
Extended Art Foil Jeweled Lotus (CMR)400The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale (DMU:LL)46,767
Phyrexian Foil Urabrask, Heretic Praetor (SNC)492Foil Alternate-Art Teferi, Temporal Pilgrim (BRO)299
Borderless Foil Ancient Brass Dragon (CLB)352Foil Shattered Glass Optimus Prime, Hero (BRO:BOT)2,520
Phyrexian foil (or foil-etched) Jin-Gitaxias (NEO)544Serialized Double Rainbow Foil Helm of the Host (BRO:BRR)9,009

As always, if you notice things I’ve messed up or overlooked, hop into our ProTrader Discord and tell me what errors I made, so that I can fix them quickly. I hope these odds help improve your buying decisions, and good luck with the packs you open!

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