It might seem odd, but there’s yet another Secret Lair going on sale next Tuesday, August 27. 

We have ended the Brain Dead and the Festival in a Box has another 60 days to go, but yes, it’s time for the 50th Anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons! We’ve got five drops that are coming out and we need to look at if these are worth buying.

For each drop, I’m going to list the cards, their EDH inclusion rate, and the current most special version of the card and its price.

For mega-staples, the number of premium versions isn’t a huge deal, but for most of these cards, there is no other special version aside from the pack foil.

Fell the Mighty (50k, Surge foil 50¢)

Faithless Looting (364k, Mystical Archive foil $14)

Goldspan Dragon (130k, FEA $40)

Reality Shift (200k, Borderless foil $1)

Monster Manual (51k, Prerelease foil $8)

Ponder (285k, SL Showdown foil $120)

Acererak the Archlich (17k, 900 as Commander, $48 Ampersand foil)

The big draw here is the Goldspan Dragon, who sees play in any number of Treasure decks. This is the drop that appears to be the best value on its own, between the Dragon and several cards lacking special versions but have good inclusion numbers. None of these are bad cards, and even if you’re not currently running them, they are worth considering. 

Reality Shift needs special attention, because it feels like this version should be more than $1 but there is an absolute boatload of the borderless foil uncommon out there. I think this version will end up as the most expensive, but it’ll be hard for this to be too much more pricey than the borderless version.

Astarion, the Decadent (20k, incl. 3k as Commander, Prerelease foil $17)

Exquisite Blood (109k, SL Dracula foil $34)

Sanguine Bond (129k, TSR Retro foil $17)

Anguished Unmaking (244k, Textured foil $27)

Mortify (122k, Player Rewards $4)

This is solid value, considering that there’s a whole lot of Mortify and Unmaking out there. Having the two enchantments that combo off together (plus you gaining life/opponent losing life) with matching art is good, and this drop should also hold value well, even if you don’t like the character as a being or as a card. So many decks play the pair of five-drop enchantments, and so I think this will be a solid drop.

Karlach, Fury of Avernus (65k, prerelease foil $37)

City on Fire (72k, FEA $7)

Stranglehold (12k, Judge foil $8)

Thrill of Possibility (228k, Mystical Archive 50¢)

Dolmen Gate (38k, Lorwyn pack foil $120)

City on Fire feels like it should have gotten there, but Karlach being in so many decks is a testament to the awesome ability to gain a second combat, with first strike added, for no cost beyond her own. It’s very hard to argue with the ability, though it’s difficult to copy/clone.

If you’re buying this drop, it’s either in the bundle or you believe in this Karlach long-term. The other cards just aren’t played enough to be worthwhile. (Dolmen Gate’s price is an effect of too little supply. This version will be lucky to be $10.)

Karazikar, the Eye Tyrant (25k, 1k as Commander, $12 EA nonfoil)

Oubliette (22k, Arabian Nights nonfoil $31)

Fling (44k, Blood Bowl SL $4)

Fire Covenant (36k, SL foil $31)

Snuff Out (51k, Mercadian Masques foil $180)

Defile (77k, MH1 Timeshifted Foil $5)

Snuff Out is in a lot more decks than you’d think, but it hasn’t been made really popular online. This is a very mid-tier drop, and I will be happy to go after singles here. There are several $7 versions of Snuff Out, and the price should be attractively low here when the drops start arriving. 

Xanathar, Guild Kingpin (15k, 1500 as Commander, $24 Ampersand foil)

Bribery (24k, $180 Mercadian Masques foil)

Stifle (14k, $60 Invocation foil)

Delay (65k, $14 Future Sight foil)

Blood Money (41k, $5 Prerelease foil)

Drown in the Loch (71k, $23 Special Guests foil)

Xanathar is a popular choice for the decks that want to do things with other peoples’ decks. Tasha, the Witch Queen and Gonti, Canny Acquisitor are excellent examples of these decks, and Xanathar fits right into such strategies. The sneaky card to watch out for here is Drown in the Loch, as it’s still a played card in Modern and occasionally in Pioneer. Blood Money isn’t a bad choice if you want a black Wrath, and Bribery will always have a home. 

I think this drop will hold value nicely, as it’s hard for me to see special versions of these cards not holding a total of $40 in value, and I plan on getting some extra copies of Drown in the Loch, hopefully as low as $5-$10 when supply reaches its maximum.

We don’t yet know the bonus cards, or the level of bundle discount, or if there will be any bonuses for higher spending. The ‘spend X, get X’ promotions haven’t been needed to help some Lairs sell out fast, so we might not get these anymore.

I am doubtful that this set of drops has a fast sellout, but the overlap between Magic and D&D cannot be discounted. My guess is that it never sells out completely, but I wouldn’t be shocked if the D&D art one sells out first, just due to the staples present within. If the bundles turn out to be the right level of discount, none of these are truly bad, but more than one will take a long while to be profitable.

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.

I admit it: I adored the first Mystery Booster experience at conventions. I went to GP Reno, in late February of 2020, just before Covid shut everything down. It was glorious, a set of packs that could hold just about anything, including a lot of pricey reprints. I’d gone to the GP, towing a big light-up sign that advertised CUBE DRAFT in big letters, because I love cubing. When I was there, though, I found that people didn’t want to Cube: they wanted to draft MYB over and over again. 

Looking back through my messages, I believe I did eleven drafts over the three days, and I probably could have squeezed in a little more. The reprints in the set, such as Mana Crypt, Ancient Tomb, Rhystic Study and Vampiric Tutor, offered a chance to spend $20 on a draft, open a chase rare and resell it, then do the whole thing over again. 

On top of that, I knew that the packs were hot sellers, to the point that judges were pre-opening packs. Sealed MYB1 packs were going for something silly like $25 if I remember correctly, and the playtest cards were at wild prices, including several hundred for things like Slivdrazi Monstrosity.

All this to say that the new Mystery Booster product is formulated much the same way, offering a unique experience that we can get at home via Secret Lair offering us Festival in a Box.

So let’s dig into what’s in the packs, what’s in the sale, and if it’s getting our money.

Mystery Booster’s core concept is simple: Each slot of the pack is pulling from a sheet of 121 cards. There are 1,815 cards possible in a pack, so your experience is going to go wild. I remember getting an easy 3-0 with a mono-black Mystery deck in Reno, and such things will be possible again. 

The distribution isn’t as perfect as ‘one slot is foil, you have a 1/121 chance of getting a certain foil card’ but it’s more like the Time Spiral Remastered OBF, where you had a slot that could be foil.

Officially, you’re going to get a Future Sight Frame foil in less than 5% of packs, and in less than 1%, it’ll be an Alchemy foil, one of seven special acorn-stamped foils.

Let’s take a beat and look at what it takes to get a foil card here: If you’re 5% to get a foil, that’s 1/20, times the 121 options for foils (according to the Card Image Gallery, there’s 9 white, 26 blue, 14 black, 18 red, 17 green, 5 multicolor, 25 artifacts, 7 lands) and that means to get a specific card, it’s one in 2,420 packs to get the specific foil you want. And that’s with rounding up to 5%!

There’s 24 packs in a box, so you’re going to need just under 101 boxes to get that Foil Oracle of the Alpha your cube is craving.

The other guaranteed slots are the white border (lol) and the playtest card. Each has 121 options, and that’s your odds, just over 5 boxes to get the white border Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath that you really want. 

As a result, the highs on this set are going to be stratospheric. The foils should all be at a premium price, considering the amount of product needed to get it and that there’s only two ways we know of to get them: Attend a MagicCon (This may or may not include other big Magic events, we’ll see) or buy the Festival in a Box, which goes on sale this coming Monday, August 19, at 9 am PST/12 noon EST/4 pm GMT.

This is available on the Secret Lair website and includes a MYB2 box, 3 Collector Boosters (Wilds of Eldraine, Commander Masters, and Lost Caverns of Ixalan), a pack of nonfoil convention promos, and a Secret Lair Drop: Li’l Legends. This has foil chibi versions of Reya Dawnbringer, Orvar, the All-Form, Drana, the Last Bloodchief, Lavinia, Azorius Renegade, and Omnath, Locus of Creation. The first three have no special versions, Lavinia is in retro and is a new white border in MYB2, and Omnath has a textless promo to spar with. Not an exciting Lair if it were by itself. 

(Keep in mind this is before the D&D 50th Anniversary Secret Lair Drop coming August 29!)

I think the quantity printed of the Li’l Legends Lair is what’s going to define the availability of this Festival in a Box. I imagine it’ll be available in similar amounts as other Lairs which didn’t sell out recently, and those numbers we can only guess at. The important detail, though, is that we know it takes roughly 100 boxes to get one specific foil and that means even if they sold 100,000 of these (more popular than any SL ever) that’s only 1,000 copies of each foil–for now. 

There will be more Festivals in a Box, and more MagicCon events to go to and open packs. It’s not confirmed that SCGCon will have MYB2 events, but you can be sure that every convention is pushing hard to get this product in order to get attendance up.

My inclination is to think that the hype right now will make this FIAB sell out, probably within the first 12 hours. We’ve been put in Secret Lair fever, and it’s been immensely profitable to grab the best drops early for reselling. Even at $249 for the kit, you’ve got a solid $50 in boosters, plus a foil Lair and nonfoil promos that will offset costs by $30-$40 or so.

We don’t have specific price data on the foils you can open (TCG has these cards as Presale until October, which severely limits who can sell on that platform.) but again, these are some very chase cards and we have the example of Time Spiral Remastered to see what can happen with a low drop rate. Remember what those early OBFs were going for? That’s what we’re dealing with. 

To be clear, I think that this first FIAB is very likely to lead to a profitable resale of the MYB2 box right away, but I’m not sure about every FIAB that will be offered. Every event that has this product increases the amount out there, and the ease of picking up singles. Vendors at these events will be ravenous to get the foils and resell, too. 

I’ll be interested to see what the prices are like for these cards after Vegas’s hype has died down, say Thanksgiving or so, and that’ll tell me if I’m going after the FIAB for other events too. For now, I think I’m likely to get two of these on Monday, with the intent to flip the boxes ASAP.

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.

Bloomburrow has been out for two weeks, and there’s been some impressive price changes already. Some have rocketed up, and others have fallen hard. Usually there’s only one or two cards that jump this early, but this set has some unusual things going on, so let’s talk about the gainers and losers so far.

Big winners:

Caretaker’s Talent (up to $7 from $1.50) – Even before you level it up, having the ‘make a token, draw a card once a turn’ effect is something a boatload of decks can use. There’s a lot of ways to make sure it triggers on your opponents’ turns as well, so this is an engine just at level one. Bumping to level 2 is good, one mana to draw a card, and then bam, you get a mega-anthem at level 3.

This started out far too cheap for its appeal, and right now I’d be a seller if I had any. I’ll be curious to see where the price drifts down to over time, as this is a must-include in basically all token decks from here to infinity. Please note that you can draw from any token, not just a creature. So if you make a Food, a Treasure, anything, you can go wild. 

Patchwork Banner (up to $4 from $1) – I’m not surprised that this is a popular card, it goes right into any number of kindred decks and does two very useful things for the chosen group. I thought we’d have a little longer for this to be cheap before it went up, though, and while I want to believe that this will go back down, I’m aware that we have all of Duskmourn to get to in just six weeks. This started cheap, has gone up, and might never have a chance to go back down. The fast turnaround time means that we might not get the big supply needed to push this back to a cheaper price.

The foils being available in the $6 range are tempting, and even if that drifts down by a dollar or two it should pick back up. I fully expect this card to be in a Secret Lair sometime soon, it’s really the perfect card for that. 

Innkeeper’s Talent (up to $20 from $6) – Having lost to this card a whole lot in draft already, I don’t need to be told how good it is. Adding +1/+1 counters is a deck in and of itself, and this gives that deck access to another Doubling Season-esque effect. Magic players love redundancy in their overkill, and this does exactly that. This is easily the least mana for adding a counter every turn, and in a color that goes from Atraxa to Halana and Alena.

Also, this says ‘permanents’ and that makes the Doubling Season comparison relevant. It’s six mana total, but on an installment plan, and does something on its own, even the turn you play it. And then it’s enabling Sagas to go wild, or instant ultimate on planeswalkers. Choose your own busted adventure.

That being said, it’s quite unusual for an in-print rare to hold a price tag this high for long, and if you have or open spare copies, I would sell. This card alone is adding serious EV to opening boxes, and I would not want to be caught holding as I hoped for $25 or $30. Take your profit and move on before it dips back down.

Every Raised Foil – As I explained in The Mana Math of Bloomburrow, it takes 573.77 Collector Booster packs to get one specific raised foil. This is exacerbated by them being cute animals, and that there’s no other version of the foil. It’s the regular frame, the foil regular frame, and then this anime raised foil. No nonfoil anime, no regular foil anime, no Extended Art or other Showcase, just straight to the most premium version.

As a result, none of these can be had under $50 and several are $200+ in price. I’m hesitant to say that the cheap ones are a buy because they are cheap, but it won’t take many purchases to get it up there. Right now, on TCGPlayer, Finneas, Ace Archer is available for $49 plus shipping in a NM raised foil. If that sells, and 14 more sell, then we’re looking at $150 copies.

This is the time when supply should be near to maximum, especially with Duskmourn being released in six weeks the Bloomburrow cards are going to get forgot about fast.

Big losses:

The Infamous Cruelclaw (down to $5 from $9) – I imagined there would be all sorts of silly Commander decks trying to build this plus one devastating spell, but such decks are glass cannons and you literally can’t add other interaction to it. It’s a powerful card, and I’ve seen it do good things, but it is not the end of the world. Do note that it’s a Mercenary, though, and as such, we might see it add into other Outlaw decks in fun ways.

Iridescent Vinelasher (down to $3.50 from $6) – Again, this is an Outlaw so it works very well with Double Down and those sorts of things. Long-term, I wouldn’t mind having a few of this card as it seems like an easy way to deal a lot of damage to opponents in decks built to do this. It would be a stronger Commander card if it said ‘each opponent’ but there are a lot of 100-card decks out there that can add five-to-ten lands in a turn without anything too bananas going on. 

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.

Rotation happens as of today, and as we say goodbye (finally) to Streets of New Capenna, Kamigawa, Neon Dynasty, and two Innistrad blocks, I want to take a moment and figure out what lessons the calendar can teach us. Rotation is going to happen every year, and we can’t say for sure what the exact date is, since Wizards likes to mess with release schedules and dates.

However, what we can do is look at heavily played Standard cards, and see when (or even if) their impending rotation caused people to sell on a card. This will impact what we do in the early part of 2025, as we look ahead to the next rotation.

When I say that the schedule changes, I mean it. Innistrad: Midnight Hunt was released on 9/24/2021, Dominaria United on 9/9/2022, Wilds of Eldraine on 9/8/2023, and now Bloomburrow on 8/2/2024. Those release days influence when rotation happens, and that’s a two-month window. I’ll be looking for a timeframe of ‘X months before rotation’ instead of February 28.

Another complicating factor here is that a card’s Standard use is not the only factor in its price. Commander drives most of the sales these days, but the other Constructed formats using a card will also affect its price and can make that card resistant to rotation dips. (See: Sheoldred, the Apocalypse) So when we’re looking at price trends, we want to find cards that aren’t seeing much use in other formats.

An example of unhelpful data is Xander’s Lounge:

This is an extremely good card, but because it’s all over the place in Commander, rotation is barely affecting the price. I would be surprised to find this price dropping, and considering its inclusion rate in Commander decks, I’d buy it up if the price were going down. 

Most lands aren’t good indicators for the effect of rotation, because they are either on their first printing and getting wide use (triomes, the MID/VOW slowlands) or because they have been printed more than once and their price can’t move without major, major things happening (painlands).

Our first bellwether card is Wedding Announcement.

Wedding Announcement is not used in any other Constructed format, and it’s only listed in 19k Commander decks online. Which makes sense, this is a card that gives you one token a turn and then it’s an anthem. Commander can do better. 

The high price for this card was at the beginning of the year, when it was close to $20. Now there’s hundreds of sub-$5 copies on TCGPlayer and plenty available close to $3 as people try to get what they can for the card. We’re looking at about six months for the card, and that’s a good starting point. It’s important to be early on this card: at the beginning of summer it was around $5.50, and that’s clearly too late.

Our second example is Topiary Stomper:

More than 74,000 decks have listed this card, which is more than I’d prefer for something like this but that’s still a mere 4% of decks that have been put online since it was released. Stomper has had some good times, most recently as part of assorted Domain strategies. Its drop is not just about the switch from the Domain deck to the Aftermath Analyst decks, there’s still plenty of Domain going around. 

We see a similar price trajectory here, with the card being cheap most of its time in Standard, spiking at the first of the year, and trending down after that. 

For the last example, let’s look at more of a format staple, something that saw play in a range of archetypes, The Wandering Emperor:

TWE is only in 18k Commander decks, and while she’s a player in some Pioneer decks, that hasn’t kept her price high. This graph shows only the last year, and her early price was above $40, trended down a little, then bumped back up to $30ish before reaching her current spot just above $10. There’s been times where she wasn’t as popular, but her price during her time in Standard never got below $15 until just recently. That is exactly the sort of trend I’m looking for. 

As for what to buy now, I’m leaning away from singles from these four sets. Singles don’t appeal to me as much as the easy money of recent Secret Lair purchases, and it’s all too easy for me to see cards either languishing or getting reprinted.

I’m hesitant to spend money on things from the two Innistrad sets, because the Double Feature printing just put more copies out there. As an example,.Shipwreck Marsh has copies as cheap as $3 but there are enormous walls of the card on TCGPlayer. That might eventually pay off, but the quantities are too high and I’d avoid them as specs. 

Many staples have already had reprints, such as Farewell, but I think the Legendary Lands from Neon Dynasty are strong contenders to start ticking upwards for a while, now that they are no longer Standard legal. They are too expensive for one Secret Lair set by themselves, that would be something like $60+ of cards even in nonfoil. There’s going to need to be a bonus set, or some reskinning, to get these reprinted. I like their growth potential, but the reprint is 100% coming.

Still, it’s good to know that there are cards that can be sold profitably when rotation hits, so we can plan for that around the beginning of the year with cards from DMU, BRO, ONE, MOM and Aftermath. 

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.