I bought this the other day:
It’s one booster from the brand new Magic expansion, and it cost me $13. That’s right, thirteen dollars! This is by far the most I’ve ever paid for a booster, so you’d imagine it would be worth it correct? Every card is a reprint, and the set is known to contain a few highly sought after cards. Let’s see what was inside my pack…
There are the commons, a mixed bunch to be sure. Few of them are playable, even fewer have a spot in any of my decks. Even better/worse: those that do I already own. In fact I already own multiple copies of all of these. So for me, the above cards are essentially worthless.
But what are they actually worth? Let’s use the Star City prices (a popular MTG reseller) and add them all up. Going through their list, 7 of my commons sell for $0.15, two for $0.49 (the mongoose and drake) and one for $0.99 (Kird Ape). That’s a total of $3.02 in commons if bought separately.
These were the uncommons. Again, disappointing in that none are attractive to me (or my decks) and I already own multiple copies of each. In the order of the photograph, the values from Star City of the above three cards is $0.25 + $1.49 + $0.25 which sums to $1.99.
That’s a decent card and is playable, but it’s not flashy or exciting in any way. And you guessed it: I already owned one. Even before checking the price online I knew it would be a ‘dollar rare’. I was wrong: Star City sells it for $0.69. It’s one of the lowest valued rares in the set.
So it’s not looking good: The ‘value’ of the cards in my pack if bought separately is only $5.70. And that’s assuming I even would buy them (which I wouldn’t). Looks like this gamble didn’t pay off so far.
But what about the other two cards?
There they are: a foil common and a soldier token. The Screeching Skaab foil sells for a quarter; the soldier isn’t even listed (but is worth maybe $0.10). So no last-minute save here folks!
My $13 turned into less than $6 of cards I already had. Needless to say I’ll never buy another booster from this set.
Some of you at this point are wondering why I bought it in the first place. Mostly it is because I buy at least one of every MTG booster, but even then the price didn’t discourage me for two reasons:
1) I like supporting my local game store
2) There are some very sought-after and pricey cards in this set. Had I been lucky to pull a foil Wasteland or Force Of Will I would have ended up with a $200+ card that I could have resold to the store or traded for many other packs 🙂