Takeaways From the Spider-Man Crash

By and large, Magic is in a bull market right now. The consumer base is growing faster than it ever has before, Hasbro’s earnings reports continuously tout just how much money Wizards of the Coast is bringing in, and recent Collector Box releases have been home run after home run. 

Well, until Marvel's Spider-Man released, that is. 

Despite skyrocketing to nearly $1,000 during the pre-sale hype window, Magic’s most recent crossover release – Marvel’s Spider-Man – has tanked in recent weeks. Sure, the set contains a $25,000 ultra-rare chase card, but that hasn’t seemed to be enough to sustain the price of Collector Boxes. Rather, the boxes dropped like a rock, hitting nearly $500 in recent weeks. 

So, is this the end of the raucous run on Collector Boxes? Or is Spider-Man just a blip in an otherwise stellar market?

What Happened With Spider-Man?

First off, we need to set the scene.

Before Marvel’s Spider-Man released, Magic debuted an in-universe expansion: Edge of Eternities. Initially met with some skepticism during the preview season, Edge of Eternities wound up being, like most other releases this year, a home run. The return of Shocklands, Galaxy Foils, and Play Booster-available chase cards like Ancient Tomb kept the set stocked with value. 

Sure, it didn’t have the parabolic price rise like that of Universes Beyond: Final Fantasy, but people were happy and the value was solid.

In effect, Edge of Eternities served to cap off an arc of Collector Boxes that – upon release – continued to go up in value rather than stay flat. Gone was the post-release consolidation period which most Magic products anticipated; instead, the earlier you could get in, the better. This mattered specifically because Edge of Eternities was assumed to be the only-ok set that followed in the wake of a stellar release. Hype for the set was minimal, so the idea that even (theoretically) lackluster sets would still retain a greater-than-MSRP Collector Box price in the window immediately following release was crucial.

Then came Spider-Man. Bolstered by speculation about potential secondary-market profit margins thanks to the Final Fantasy explosion and reinforced by the positive trend displayed by Edge of Eternities, prices for the set exploded far before any significant portion of the contents had been revealed. $700, $800, $900; prerelease prices moved just as quickly as post-release Final Fantasy, all based on the premise that the set was going to be another Universes Beyond home run. 

It wasn’t. As cards from the set trickled out into release, it rapidly became clear that the power level of Spider-Man was less than stellar. Beyond that, the overall care taken for the set was lackluster: minimal notable reprints, repeat characters across nearly every legendary creature, and flavor that wound up being all too close to Magic’s first Universes Beyond “hat set.” 

Looking Ahead

When I think about the collapse of Marvel’s Spider-Man, it ultimately reminds me a lot of another recent set: Aetherdrift.

Both Aetherdrift and Spider-Man underwhelmed on just about every front. The flavor wasn’t quite there. The power level didn’t blow anyone away. And, save for some individual standouts, the value wasn’t great. 

Digging into that last point a little bit more, Aetherdrift was headlined by serialized copies of The Aetherspark, with the second-most expensive card in the set being the ultra-rare First Place Foil Chrome Mox. It had some interesting individual cards – Stock Up, a cycle of five Verge lands, and Ketramose, the New Dawn – but overall the set wasn’t a big success. Similarly, when looking at Spider-Man, the set has the headliner version of The Soul Stone, plus its other incarnations (Borderless and regular), but other than that the only real value in the set comes from a handful of near-$10 mythics. 

The point here being, even if a set has a crazy lottery ticket in it, that isn’t really enough to sustain broad value for the long term. There has to be alternate interest.

Ultimately, the overall weakness of Spider-Man is likely going to continue to suppress the price of the set in the near-term, like Aetherdrift or Murders at Karlov Manor before it, but that won’t stop it from growing. On the positive end, the set has some mechanically interesting designs that’ll likely appreciate over time (The Green Goblin is certainly putting in work in cEDH, for example), but if you’re looking for current value then things are pretty much tied up in The Soul Stone. 

The only question left for the set itself, however, is where the immediate price floor is. Collector Boxes are still falling, so while recovery is near-inevitable, we still don’t know when it will kick in.

The Big Picture

There’s one more crucial point to extract from the Aetherdrift comparison: Aetherdrift’s crash didn’t spell the end for Magic more broadly. Tarkir: Dragonstorm released shortly afterwards and blew away Magic players and collectors, with boxes flying off shelves immediately upon release. While the scale of value lost in the Spider-Man crash may be enough to scare off some of the extra money currently being siphoned into Collector Box speculation, it’s far from severe enough to completely sink the market. 

More eyes will be on the success of Magic’s next crossover – Avatar: The Last Airbender – that’s for sure, but preliminary spoilers from Avatar are already better than just about anything seen out of the totality of Spider-Man.

Spider-Man crashed in large part because it was a self-contained bubble that burst. The set was speculated on and that speculation left people burnt. So, while it will certainly take time for Spider-Man to recover, it’s worth remembering that the $1,000 price point it hit was never a market price point – just the presale excitement. 

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