The Big Things - Aftermath's Correction

How is it that Nissa, Resurgent Animist, a standard-era Magic card with only a selective home in Modern, has been able to explode in price over the past month, reaching and sustaining nearly 75% the value of Modern’s poster child, Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer? Is the Elementals deck just that good? Is Nissa the new Commander flavor of the month? What else is going on here?

The short answer? Bottlenecking.

Aftermath: An Overview

March of the Machine: The Aftermath is an oddball of a product. A 50-card mini set purchasable as either five-card Epilogue Boosters (24 packs to a box), or six-card Collector Boosters (12 packs to a box), it released more along the lines of a dressed-up selection of the new-to-Commander cards, which are typically released within yearly preconstructed decks. Couple this limited-release schedule (no Draft Boosters for players to crack and inject into the market supply) with Aftermath’s Standard legality, and suddenly the set was facing a conundrum: the primary driving force for single cards to enter the market was no longer an option.

This is the base problem the set’s singles supply faced – from a design perspective, Aftermath was a booster product which was solely built to be cracked for singles, as opposed to drafted. While this does put the emphasis on singles, it actually serves to significantly hinder the availability of cards in the wider marketplace, as discounting the sheer quantity of cards opened from events such as weekly drafts significantly limited the opportunity for singles to enter the market. By limiting Aftermath to small, singles-focused booster packs, Wizards of the Coast had inadvertently doomed the ability of those cards to become widely available.

Booster pack structure issues aside, it’s also important to look at overall card contents of Aftermath. Given the limited size of the card pool from which packs can be filled - 15 uncommons, 25 rares, 10 mythics - the likelihood of duplications skyrockets. This means that Epilogue and Collector Boosters of Aftermath didn’t just contain fewer cards, but they contained the same cards over and over again. The odds of opening any given rare/mythic in a Collector Booster was nearly 11% for Aftermath, vs 4% in March of the Machine.

The limited offering from Aftermath’s card pool created a competing force against the structure issue. On one hand, one key avenue of injecting singles into the market was blocked (that being the removal of a draft product). On the other hand, the limited amount of product which was opened supplied the market with a plethora of duplicates. This certainly worked to ameliorate the supply issues, but it was far from enough to combat them completely. The end result? A partial inflation of Aftermath singles prices across the board.

So far, we’ve covered the “standard” issues facing Aftermath; that is, the structure and content-based problems which came with releasing a limited-pool supplemental set in atypical, non-Draft booster products. What we’ve skirted around a bit, however, is the actual appeal of the set - or, more precisely, lack thereof.

Market Reception

Preview scandals aside, the broad player reaction to Aftermath has been tepid at best, and knee-jerk rejection at worst. This can be seen in the price collapse of booster boxes across the board. Similar to the collapse of set-specific Jumpstart products, very few players are actively opening sealed Aftermath products at all. Outside of a few standout cards, the cardpool has largely been dismissed as a disappointment; an experiment in product design gone awry out of concerns for too severely rocking the Constructed format boat.

This is where we get to bottlenecking. The market perception of Aftermath is that it's a weak product - the set was poorly constructed and the means of card delivery was largely unappealing to the player base. Booster boxes aren’t selling, and those that have sold are selling across the board at a nearly 30% discount, marking the first significant sealed product-loss in 2023. The scarcity created by this toxic inventory designation has worked against the weak card duplication pressure mentioned earlier, further inflating the price of keynote singles from the set. In effect, this has led to players and stores avoiding sealed Aftermath products, with the only real market attention being paid to the top three cards of the set - Nissa, Resurgent Animist, Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin, and Karn, Legacy Reforged.

Nissa, Resurgent Animist	CardKingdom $32.99	TCGPlayer $21.16
Nissa, Resurgent Animist (Retro Frame)	CardKingdom $39.99	TCGPlayer $25.45
Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin	CardKingdom $7.49	TCGPlayer $4.62
Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin (Showcase)	CardKingdom $14.99	TCGPlayer $8.99
Karn, Legacy Reforged	CardKingdom $12.99	TCGPlayer $8.80
Karn, Legacy Reforged (Retro Frame)	CardKingdom $20.99	TCGPlayer $17.45

The Wrap Up - Correction Potential

Singles prices can only rise - and sealed products fall - for so long. Eventually, there comes a point when the expected value of the singles within a sealed product becomes high enough that it pushes the overall value higher. Aftermath is reaching that point. Or, alternatively, the price of singles will fall. This set is an excellent opportunity to watch the price correction process happen in real time, as the inflationary pressures from limited box opening begin to weaken with time simultaneously with the gradual price stabilization of sealed products. 

Nissa, Resurgent Animist is almost certainly a much cheaper card than the market price is currently reflecting. There is real transaction data to support the current price, that's true. But as with all new Magic products, prices can turn on a dime. Sealed boxes of Aftermath have begun to trek upwards in value as players begin to notice that a single card can pay for half the box, but this renewed interest is weakening the expected value all the same. If you’re sitting on any Aftermath singles, I’d list them soon. But if you need them, keep an eye on the market. Prices are swinging.

Check out these other articles:

Price of Knowledge - Cyclonic Rift by Ryan Cole

Modern Times: The State of Modern Speculation by Corey Williams

Kidnapped By Yetis by Jason Alt