Checking in With Doctor Who Collector Boxes
When Magic released its crossover with Doctor Who, fans and players alike were all in all pretty happy with it. It had no super-chase One-of-One Ring to hunt, nor a broken roster of cards dominating Commander tables.
But it did have a bevy of special treatments – including serialized cards, an exciting slate of unique designs, and all the flavor any Doctor Who fan could ask for.
Since then, just about every Universes Beyond Collector Booster Box has hit stellar highs.
Let’s dig in to how the set is really doing, and see if Doctor Who is an actual dud, or a gem waiting to be brought to light.
The Singles
First off, let’s get started with the cards that make up Doctor Who.
Like Fallout, Magic’s Doctor Who crossover set debuted as a Commander-only product. As such, all the new designs for the set are uncommons, rares, or mythics, no commons in sight. However, it also means that the set is absolutely chock full of desired reprints from across the multiverse, making the full set roster for Doctor Who into something like a Core Set – plenty of new designs, but with a backbone of reprints.
Looking at this backbone, most of the cards in it have absolutely plummeted in price. Sure, there are standouts that have held a couple dollars –
This trend continues, albeit not as severely, with the new designs in the set. There, the focus is on a handful of interesting legendary creatures that have gone on to see either renewed play due to new card designs (such as
The Chase Cards
Everything about price changes, however, when we move from talking about the regular printings of cards and shift to focusing on the Surge Foils, Doctor Who’s premier non-serialized chase treatment.
Like the Lord of the Rings Holiday Release, Surge Foil cards in Doctor Who are decently prevalent, with most booster packs seeing at least one. This Surge Foil treatment can be applied on top of other treatments – such as Extended Art – or be the only differentiator, as is the case with the Surge Foil treatment on most uncommons in the set.
Despite this increased rate of appearance (relative to something like Final Fantasy, where Surge Foils barely appeared), this treatment still makes all the difference, causing $1 cards to be worth more than $15.
Additionally, Doctor Who can’t really be fully discussed without talking about the serialized cards it contains. Each Doctor (all thirteen of them) was serialized with a base number of 500, plus an additional one card per iteration of the Doctor. So, the First Doctor has 501 serialized cards, the Second has 502, etc.
While an interesting gimmick that’s sure to give room to individually valuable cards (such as 513 for the Thirteenth), the real impact that such an expansive serialization rate had on the set was that it bolstered the drop rate of a serialized card substantially. It may not have quite been the same level as
A Note on Collector Boxes
Moving briefly to the state of affairs for the Collector Booster Boxes themselves, and things for Doctor Who actually look a bit healthier than the rest of its contemporaries. Despite still lagging behind in price, it has rallied nearly 80% in the past year alone - an absurd jump by any asset class standards. Sure, it may not have an absolute dollar jump quite as high as Lord of the Rings, but it’s moving up.
Similarly, while its day-to-day volume is lower than plenty of other Collector Booster Boxes these days, the transaction rate for Doctor Who is remarkably stable, rather than parabolic. This suggests that the price momentum the set is experiencing is here to stay, rather than a more episodic incline.
Wrap Up
Doctor Who is a bit of an oddity in the world of Universes Beyond. Like Fallout, it’s among the few products released that only had preconstructed decks and Collector Booster Boxes to choose from, and as such its impact on the broader game of Magic was far lesser than something like Final Fantasy or Lord of the Rings, both of which had full sized releases and impacted formats far beyond Commander.
That all being said, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of a bull market to rise all tides; Doctor Who is far from a failed set. If anything, it might just be the next crossover to pop.
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Harvey McGuinness
Harvey McGuinness is a student at Johns Hopkins University who has been playing Magic since the release of Return to Ravnica. After spending a few years in the Legacy arena bouncing between Miracles and other blue-white control shells, he now spends his time enjoying Magic through CEDH games and understanding the finance perspective. He also writes for the Commander's Herald.