When Everything Is Rare...

There was a time when a chase card meant something. Jace, the Mind Sculptor didn’t just headline Worldwake — it was the set’s financial narrative. Yes, the card was designed to be a highlight, but it wasn’t relegated to the far away corners of Collector Booster packs. Instead, players saw it and naturally accepted it as the boogeyman of the Magic zeitgeist. Opening power became the same as opening value, and everyone had an equal shot.

In 2025, the story is different. Every product – Standard sets, Commander decks, Secret Lairs, specialty releases – features chase treatments. Etched foils, borderless anime frames, serialized variants, gilded art deco promos, the list goes on. Wizards has created a world where there is always something rare, but that isn’t the same as always being valuable. 

Being a chase card is no longer strictly organic; straight off the printing presses, some cards are deemed more rare – more collectible – than others. So, in this new environment where chase is defined ever more so by form rather than function, how should Magic players and collectors think about the modern chase?

Rarity Inflation

For most of Magic’s life, a chase card was something that was sought out by players due to a functional quality. Jace, the Mind Sculptor wasn’t just a mythic – it was the most powerful mythic, and decks across formats wanted to play it. So, as play demand skyrocketed, so too did the price of the card, and, in turn, its notoriety. Even if you weren’t playing a deck that cared about running Jace, you knew about how powerful – and expensive – the card was, so you’d still be pretty happy to see one pop up in the back of your Worldwake booster pack.

Beyond just seeing a regular Jace, the Mind Sculptor, there was also something even more elusive, something all the more exciting to see in the furthest reaches of a booster pack – a foil Jace, the Mind Sculptor. As Magic’s first specialty treatment for a card, foils spent decades as the most high-end version of the average card. Some individual cards had promotional printings, but by and large the “rare” version of a card was immediately identifiable by whether or not it glistened in the light. Not anymore.

In Jace’s heyday, a base printing from Worldwake cost around $150, with a foil printing shooting past $400. Those numbers may sound crazy by today’s standards – especially when it comes to Jace’s current price near the $20 mark – but that was a pretty natural foil multiplier, clocking in at just under 3x the price. Looking at contemporary foils, they might as well be one and the same.

In Tarkir: Dragonstorm, Ugin, Eye of the Storms stands out as the chase card of the set – something that’s most widely desired by players regardless of personal need for play reasons. Looking at its price, however, there’s barely a 10% price premium for a foil copy. Why? Because foils are everywhere – and they aren’t even the most premium version anymore.

Since the release of Collector Boosters, every card has brought with it a bevy of alternate printings of varying rarity, adding more rungs to the ladder of premium options. Non-foil? Well, for Ugin here that could mean base treatment or borderless. Foil? Well, now you’re also contending with specialty foils – halo, Japanese borderless, etc. With so much going on, identifying the most special version of a card isn’t immediately doable anymore, and that has a real effect on prices.

The Fragility of Manufactured Scarcity

This manufactured scarcity isn’t just muddying the waters on cards players already want, though. Rather, it’s distorting the prices of bulk and over-hyped duds as well.

Looking at Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines as our next case study, we can see just how readily this muddying of financial signals can contribute to price cannibalization. At launch, Elesh Norn was – like Jace and Ugin – the premier card of the set, arriving in full multi-treatment glory with eight distinct versions. Some of these were pricier than others, depending on the popularity of the particular artwork or foiling, but the sheer quantity of options rapidly eroded each individual printing’s price. Now, most can be had for under $50.

Moving next to over-hyped duds, let’s take a look at Mox Jasper. This card is certainly better than bulk – it is a Mox that supports one of Magic’s most iconic creature types, afterall – but it is by no means a Jace or an Ugin. However, when we look at the prices of its specialty versions, we can see that the showcase treatments are sending mixed signals, retaining some of the early hype from when this Moxen debuted.

This is further exacerbated by Mox Jasper’s selection as Tarkir: Dragonstorm’s serialized card. While the sample size for its transaction data is small, there is a clear trend that the serialized Mox Jasper is eroding in value, too. Sure, it’s a serialized card with a limited artwork and frame treatment, so it certainly won’t tank to the hundreds of dollars, but it also doesn’t benefit from any sort of natural player chase. At its core, the card just isn’t that good.

Mox Amber, the only other serialized Mox, is routinely played across Commander, and that card is currently trading at half the price of Mox Jasper. The conditions for its serialization were different – no unique art, for one – but that’s more than counteracted by natural play demand for the card. So, how do we evaluate Mox Jasper? Critically – as a card that likely has some more room to fall, just like plenty of Magic’s other less-than-stellar serialized picks.

Wrap Up

Magic’s recent releases have nailed the short-term collectability factor. Players can latch on to whichever version of a card speaks most to them, and oftentimes this can be done without too much of a premium. In the world of Magic finance, however, this has come as a real detriment to the price support of cards in the long run. 

When a single card has nearly ten specialty treatments, then it’s hard to justify that label – let alone have the market agree to place a high price on all of them. Even for Magic’s most premium treatment, serialization, cards are still vulnerable to erosion when there isn’t a natural player desire for the base game object.

Further Reading:

The Value of the Secret Lair Commander Deck Everyone's Invited

Cards to Watch in the Post-Breach Modern Meta

Fringe Picks Related To Recent Commander Unbannings