If there’s one thing I wish people would stop doing, it’s pre-ordering cards. 

The prices right now for Modern Horizons 2 are incredibly high due to hype and lack of certainty, two factors that combine with the recent price spikes of older cards to lead to a real ‘What on earth is going on?!?’ sort of feeling.

I’m here to tell you to calm down, to not buy anything yet, and be patient. Let’s talk about some current examples of preorder pricing and examine why these are such bad ideas.

First of all, today’s focus is on the regular frame, nonfoil versions of things. There are some scattered preorders for special frame/special foiling versions of MH2 cards, but frankly, we don’t have enough to support a trend. Most vendors are content to sell what they open, and not over-commit to what’s coming and what’s going to be opened.

Second, most of my pricing is taken from eBay, which makes it relatively easy to find numbers for sold items.

Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer (multiple sold at $80 on eBay) – Is this a good card? Absolutely. Is it overpriced because people are talking it up as a new Dreadhorde Arcanist in Legacy? Partially. Having the Dash ability does make this resistant to sorcery-speed removal, but this price is ridiculous. 

It’s not going to hold a price above $50 unless this is literally the best red creature ever printed. I’m going to go out on a limb and forecast that Ragavan will be available for under $20 within six weeks. (I actually think it’ll go even lower, but a 75% loss is already a big drop)

Subtlety ($45) – Force of Negation premiered in the $40 range, hopped up briefly, then settle back down into the $30-$40 range as blue players gained a greater and greater need for the card.

I expect Subtlety to follow a similar path, but I don’t want to be buying right now. If at all possible, I want to be waiting and buying copies in about two months. Remember that Forgotten Realms is due out on July 23, so the hype is going to move and what stores draft will change. (If your LGS is even open!) I think this has a lot of potential in the long term, but $45 for the regular nonfoil is too high a buy-in when I’m expecting a whole lot of this product to be opened.

Grief ($60) – Interesting. Thoughtseize needed less than a year to hit $75, getting near $100 as it became one of the most common spells in Modern. Repeated reprints have made it cheaper than ever, too:

But now we have a no-mana variant, Unmask in a different form, and it offers some truly backbreaking potential turn 1 with Ephemerate (three cards!!!) or even Cloudshift. We know what Thoughtseize can do, financially, but we don’t know how popular this will be. Thoughtseize broke $60 as a rare, and Grief might be worth it at $60. 

My thought, though, is to let the hype settle down and get to the $30-$40 range if you’re thinking about playing with the card. Most prices are going to fall, and this will be no exception. If the card is real, and if paper play is back, this will shoot straight to the moon.

Dauthi Voidwalker ($40) – If Grief is a big player, this will come along too. It’s an excellent aggressive followup to turn one discard, having a 3/2 unblockable that will sometimes be able to cast their huge spell is a winner too. This is also quite overpriced, though, and I’m expecting this to fall by at least half, and more likely to $15 as a rare.

Damn ($15) – The only sweeper that can kill both Thrun, the Last Troll and Gaddock Teeg, this is a phenomenal card. Being able to kill one or kill all is a really potent combination, even if the BB mode is also sorcery speed. This flexibility is going to lead to this seeing a lot of play in both Modern and Commander. I think this will make it back up to $15, given time, but in the meantime it’s going to fall as far as $5-$7.

Now let’s talk about some of the reprints, and where those will be heading.

Fetchlands (3 at $40-$50, 2 in the $30 range) – We’re about to get a lot of fetchlands. Granted, a big chunk of the fetches opened by individuals will be slotted right into decks, but every Collector Booster box is going to come with 3.3 fetchlands, on average. Keep in mind that these are regular rares, and if we’re cracking a ton of product to run drafts at newly-reopened stores, that’s a large amount entering circulation. Flats and Mesa will be under $20, and I think you’ll have a chance to buy Tarn, Misty, and Verdant at under $30. Make sure that you end up with enough fetches for your current decks, and set aside a few extra to sell or trade when they climb back up again.

Cabal Coffers ($60) – Let’s see what the graph looks like for a card that helped get Prime Time banned from Commander, yes?

This hasn’t had a reprint since Planechase in 2009. Twelve years of Commander players getting more and more insistent that they need the big mana, and of them paying bigger and bigger bucks for that big mana.

Coffers is one of the biggest reprints in this set, and it’s a mythic. A lot of money is going to chase the borderless and the borderless foil, and picking these up in regular nonfoil seems likely under $30. I’m going to try and be patient on this one, but it’s going to rebound from this reprint pretty easily.

Patriarch’s Bidding ($16) – I can see why people want to get this at $16. It’s a $40 card from Onslaught. NINETEEN YEARS they waited to reprint this card! Again, a lot of copies are going to get kept by the people who opened them, which will cut off circulation a little, but there’s generations of players who are clamoring for this in whatever tribal deck they are playing. It’s only good for those tribal deck, though, and only the ones with black as a color. As a result, I think this will fall pretty far…all the way to $5 and if I’m lucky, lower still. If it got to $3, I’d buy them all.

Mirari’s Wake ($17) – Another casual star with minimal reprints, Wake got to its cheapest point when it was reprinted in Conspiracy, followed a couple years later by a Commander reprint. This gave a big window for prices to be down and stay there:

The card is too good, though, and as you see, the price has come roaring back. With this printing, we’re going to see a lot of copies circulating, and that’s going to lead to a race to the bottom. I’m sure it will drop to under $10, but I’m not certain how much lower it’ll go and how many copies it’ll take before I have had enough. If it’s $7, don’t you feel buying it all up is the right play, even for the regular frame nonfoil?

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.

Here we are, another set and another whole raft of treatments for us to obsess over. We’ve got some odds to break down, some examples to peruse, and tables to try to make everything simpler. Let’s get to it!

Let’s start with the things they made easy: a link to the treatments in MH2 and the official Collecting Modern Horizons 2 post. 

In Wizards’ ongoing effort to make sure that programmers and sorters and sellers lose their minds, there are going to be a whole lot of different treatments available for Modern Horizons 2. I’ve tried to make this easy for you with a handy-dandy chart:

Does that make it easier? This is a LOT of stuff that they are cramming into one set, and I want to try and clarify things whenever possible.

We’ve seen some short videos with the foil-etched cards, and so far they seem closer to Commander Legends than Mystical Archives, which should bode well for their popularity. That said, the old border foils are clearly the most important variants in this product formulation so it remains to be seen how the market will price the etched foils given their higher drop rates and lesser importance.

Notable from this chart is that the Modern Horizons 1 reprints are not available in nonfoil in any MH2 products at all. If you want the old border, you are getting something shiny, and you have to go through Collector Boosters to get them.

Now, let’s talk about how you get these different cards. 

In Set Boosters, you’re going to find a wide variety of nonfoils. Clearly, these won’t be as hard to find as the foil versions, and I can’t say for sure how many people are going to open Set Boosters when the Collector Boosters beckon. Still, understand that each Set pack will give you at least one (and as many as four) rares and/or mythics.

There is one slot for traditional foils, but you can get a card of any of these: “It can be a main set card of any rarity; a new-to-Modern uncommon, rare, or mythic rare; a showcase treatment card of any rarity; or a borderless rare or mythic rare.” I won’t even calculate how many potential outcomes there are here, but rest assured, this is the lowest-probability slot I’ve ever seen… 

…until we get to Draft Boosters, where it’s even worse. You have a 1 in 3 chance at a foil from that same formulation, so whatever infinitesimal chance you had at a borderless mythic rare from that slot in a Set Booster, take those odds and multiply by .33 to get your odds in a Draft Booster.

Fine, I did some of the math before I got disheartened. For just the ‘main set card of any rarity’ you’re at 0.76% to hit any foil mythic and 4.6% to get a foil rare in a Set Booster, and for a Draft Booster it’s 0.25% for any foil mythic and 1.5% for any foil rare. All of those are before I add in the new to Modern cards plus the rest, and since not everything is spoiled, I can’t tell you how much more tiny those odds will get.

However, as we get more data from big operations who crack lots and lots of boxes, we’ll be updating this section. Figuring out the distributions of foils and special cards in the Draft Boosters especially is a priority, and we’ll keep you aware of new developments.

Now let’s get to Collector Boosters, which has some attractive guarantees and one wild-as-hell slot, which is what Wizards seems to have settled on for these boosters. Here’s the handy guide that they’ve released to us:

Slot one we care about, as it could be any rare or mythic from the set, but in a regular frame. This could include fetchlands! Counting up the numbers we’re told when discussing foil-etched cards (main set, new to Modern, and MH1 reprints), there’s 61 potential rares and 16 potential mythics. You have an 11.6% chance to hit a mythic in this slot, and you’ll have a 1/138 chance of a particular one when you open a pack. For rares, you’ll hit on 88.4% of packs, and a particular rare will show up every 69 packs. Nice!

We don’t really care about slots 2 and 3, those are basic lands and C/UCs, just know there’s gonna be plenty of those around.

Slot 4, however, is where the big money is going to be found. You’re guaranteed a traditional foil rare or mythic, and this is the only spot where traditional foils of the new frames can be had. Also, this is the only spot for Foil Extended Art cards. All of these are crammed into the same spot, though, and that means this one slot is going to be carrying most of the value of a Collector Booster. If a CB box is $400, at 12 boosters that’s $33 each, just to give an idea of the spending people are about to do.

The big table:

Yes, you’re reading that right. There are NO FEA mythics in this set. They are all borderless/sketch/retro framed. Borderless is basically EA, just with different art. Here’s an example, a subtle one no less.

Showcase borderless for the mythics means they aren’t CB limited as per usual.

For some historical perspective, this 1/253 chance for specific treatment mythics means that each one is about as rare as Phyrexian foil Vorinclex (1/256 packs) but more common than traditional foil mythics in the Mystical Archive (1/309 packs) and way more common than FEA Jeweled Lotus (1/400 packs), which is a rarity I doubt we’ll see again.

Slot 5 has a nonfoil borderless or sketch frame card, either rare or mythic. Given the numbers of those, you have an impressive 35% chance of getting a mythic and 65% to pull a rare. To get a particular mythic, it’s 1 in 77 packs for that mythic and 1 in 38.5 for a particular rare.

Slots 6 and 7 are going to be more commons and uncommons, and again, in nonfoil these will be plentiful. I expect some great spec targets here once we know the whole set, though.

Slot 8 is the last one of any financial significance, having an extended-art rare. There’s only 39 of these, so your odds are 1/39 to nab something specific, but these are nonfoil. Secondary targets financially, but potentially worthwhile if they start off cheap or end up cheap. Remember that the non-foil EA of Jeweled Lotus isn’t cheap, nor is nonfoil Phyrexian Vorinclex. 

The other slots are foil commons and uncommons, plus a land and a token, none of which are going to make a serious dent in prices for a long time. 

So to review, the rarest cards from this set are going to be the Traditional foil mythic rares, in sketch/retro/borderless frames. You’ll have a 1/253 chance of pulling a specific one of those rares from a Collector Booster. Interestingly, about one in 8 Collector Boosters will have a mythic of some kind in slot 4, but because there’s so many variants, each individual one will be quite rare.

Because people tend to focus on fetchlands, let’s do a little more math for those. You can get them in Slots 1, 4, and 8. Slot one has a 5/69 chance of a fetchland (foil etched modern frame), Slot 4 has a 10/126.5 chance (5 traditional foil old border plus 5 foil extended art), and Slot 8 has a 5/39 chance (nonfoil extended art). This comes out to about a 28% chance of any one Collector Booster having any fetchland of any type, and the average CB box will have 3.3 fetches. That’s not a guarantee, it’s just the probability. Some will have more, some less. Note that about half the fetches opened will be nonfoil EA, and that might be the place to invest.

It’s also worth mentioning that the sketch frames are another unique twist on Magic cards. Adding the art description is inspired here, giving an insight into the process that a lot of players don’t get. If you don’t like this look, I can respect that, but don’t overlook the opportunities if these get cheap. A lot of people like this look, and this popularity might lead to some surprising prices.

If you’ve noticed some discrepancies here, or if new information comes out that changes these numbers, please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, drop a comment on this page, or come tell me about it in the Protrader Discord. Good luck with your packs!

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.