When the Trend Turns - Premium Singles Bolstering Collector Boxes

It’s a tale as old as Magic: A set is being debuted, the presale prices of cards are sky high. Then comes release weekend. Singles flood the market as players and retailers alike crack their boxes, selling into the hype as excited buyers pay the “new-thing” premium for the first wave of supply to hit the market. 

The next thing you know, prices begin to tumble as sellers undercut each other, the “new-thing” premium wears off, and card values settle into normalcy. Sure, some sleeper hits will break out in competitive formats, pushing their prices higher, but that’s a one-in-a-dozen phenomenon. Cards come out, their prices start high, and they fall. That’s how it goes…unless it doesn’t.

Ask anyone who’s been paying attention to the singles prices for the Borderless Surge Foils from Magic’s crossover expansion Universes Beyond: Final Fantasy and they’ll all tell you how, in a surprise to the market, these cards came out and exploded in value. Y'shtola, Night's Blessed pushed $800, Cloud, Ex-SOLDIER nearly hit $600; the list goes on. 

So, what can we learn from the surprise success of these standout singles, and what does it mean for Magic moving forward?

The Final Fantasy Case Study

To begin with, we need to start way back at the beginning – back when Final Fantasy’s product details were still murky, and the market had only just learned that there were 77 Golden Chocobos out there. This initial trickle of information was months in advance of the set’s release, but it was the appetite-whetter for the market. 

So, how did it go? Well, players and collectors were certainly excited – the MSRP for Final Fantasy was set pretty high for Standard-set standards, so players had been conditioned for high expectations – but overall the market wasn’t immediately up in arms over it. Thousand-dollar Collector Booster Boxes of Final Fantasy were still a figment of the imagination, much-less $500+ non-serialized cards. Rather, the market initially huddled around the $600-$700 range for a Collector Booster Box.

This matters because, even before the actual cards in the set were fully spoiled, it demonstrated the active-hype price ceiling which the market was expecting. This would push to the low $800s by the time the set finally hit shelves, a number supported by Borderless Surge Foils which maxed out (at the time) in the low $400s.

Make no mistake – these are all absurdly high numbers by Magic standards, but they represent ratios which are sensible by single-to-sealed metrics. For Collector Booster Boxes with a price tag of $300-$400, it’s reasonable to also anticipate the most-desirable also hitting the $200-range. 

If we broaden our analytics to the rarest of rare non-serialized cards (such as the Neon Chocobos from Final Fantasy and the Dragonscale Fetchlands from Tarkir: Dragonstorm), we similarly see that these hype-inducing premier singles can singlehandedly pay for entire boxes, if not more.

Going back to Final Fantasy’s release narrative, however, and it’s at the prerelease weekend that things start to get a bit crazy. It’s not unheard of for popular Collector Booster Boxes to begin to rise in price noticeably as their limited supply dwindles immediately post-launch, but the rate by which Final Fantasy appreciated was absurd. In Final Fantasy’s case, the volume of boxes sold per day quickly pushed the price far past previous Collector Booster Boxes (by rate of appreciation), gaining nearly 50% in a three-week period.

This meteoric rise moved so quickly and so sharply that the price of Collector Booster-only singles didn’t have time to adjust to the sealed counterpart until after a short delay, providing a brief opportunity during which the limited quantity of cards opened from Collector Booster Boxes pre-price spike were rapidly absorbed.

Looking Beyond Final Fantasy

Magic has been leading a bull market recently with its Collector Booster Box lineup. Not only are the products designed particularly well overall (bonus sheets, serialized cards, etc.), but so too has the increasingly-limited printing of these Collector Booster Boxes served to ramp up their prices. 

All of this, mind you, is further compounded by the record-popularity of many of Magic’s recent sets. Before the glamour of Final Fantasy, Tarkir: Dragonstorm was one of Magic’s most popular sets of all time, and Bloomburrow before that was similarly well received.

This series of home runs points to the new price dynamics of Collector Booster Box exclusive singles appreciating in the near-term as having some staying power in the wider world of Magic moving forward, rather than just an oddity for a knock-out success. Rather than crashing alongside the rest of the single market, a new sub-class of premium singles appears to be stabilizing. However, the strength with which these cards carry their prices is going to be heavily correlated to the sealed Collector Booster Boxes from which they originate.

Looking back to Tarkir: Dragonstorm, we can see that Collector Booster Boxes have retraced nearly 20% below their highs and are now sitting at around $325. Similarly, the Halo Foil printing of Ugin, Eye of the Storms (one of the premier non-serialized Collector Booster exclusives) has also retraced by about 20% to rest around $400.

Wrap Up

The recent successes of Magic’s Collector Booster Box lineup, encapsulated by the breakout hit that was Final Fantasy, have set the stage for a new type of premium single card to emerge – one which demands its price not just because of scarcity or playability, but which is also keenly sensitive to the price of the packs from which it is opened. 

This is a striking change for the game; as Magic moved from $4 to $5 a pack, the price of cards within barely budged. Now, as demand drains $300, $500, and even $1000+ boxes from the market near-instantaneously, the cards can’t always keep up – let alone plummet.

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