There’s a d20 in my card bag that I’ve used twice in my life, both times in the summer of 2021, both times to roll a Delina, Wild Mage trigger that copied something irrelevant. I’ve moved apartments since then. The die is still in the bag. I carry it around because at some point it stopped being a die and became part of the bag.
Adventures in the Forgotten Realms came out July 23, 2021, so we’re five years and two months out. That’s a useful distance for a collection. When I looked at Lost Caverns of Ixalan at the two-year mark a lot of it was still moving around. At five years that stops. Nothing in the set is rotating, nothing is spiking on a spoiler, no reprint announcement is looming over it in any way I can see. The prices are just what they are now.
EDHREC published their top-ten most-played AFR cards yesterday, and I read it with a price list open in the other tab, and the two lists have almost nothing to do with each other.
The most-played card in the set costs 43 cents
Deadly Dispute. 645,311 Commander decks, which is the kind of number that stops being a statistic and starts being a fact about the format. Second place is Unexpected Windfall at 387,532, and then it falls off a shelf.
The AFR printing of Deadly Dispute is $0.43.
Not because nobody wants it. Because everybody wanted it, and Wizards noticed. It’s been in Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate, Ravnica: Clue Edition, Fallout, Bloomburrow Commander, Outlaws of Thunder Junction Commander, Tarkir: Dragonstorm Commander, Foundations Jumpstart, Marvel Super Heroes Commander, a couple of Secret Lairs, The List, and probably two more I missed while counting. Twenty-odd printings in five years. The card is load-bearing infrastructure for sacrifice decks, and the response to that was to make sure there’s one in every box.
Same story all the way down the play-rate list. Treasure Vault is in 271,834 decks and costs $2.17. Wizard Class is in 209,777 and costs $3.29, which at least is something for an uncommon. Unexpected Windfall is a common sitting at $3.39, and honestly that’s the one number on the list I find genuinely surprising, since commons that hold three bucks usually have a Pauper reason and this one doesn’t really.
I keep going back and forth on whether “play rate doesn’t predict price” is a real insight or whether I’m just describing reprints in a roundabout way. It’s mostly reprints. But not entirely, and the exceptions are where the money in this set went.
The value is in two mythics and then a cliff
Old Gnawbone is the most expensive card in the set at $52.86, and she’s also seventh on the play list with 159,195 decks. So the two lists do touch, once. A seven-mana 7/7 dragon that turns combat damage into Treasure is exactly the kind of card that doesn’t get reprinted into the ground, because it’s a Commander card and only a Commander card, and the Commander product treadmill has other slots to fill.
Tiamat is second at $23.28. Third is Circle of Dreams Druid at $17.50, then Xorn at $13.38 and Teleportation Circle at $10.75. By the time you’re eight cards in you’re at The Book of Exalted Deeds for $7.93, which is a mythic whose entire résumé is a Standard combo with Faceless Haven that people were brewing the week the set dropped. Past that it’s five dollars and change, then two, then bulk, for four hundred more cards.
So yeah. Two cards. Out of 424. That’s the set.
Which isn’t a knock on AFR specifically, that’s just what a Standard-legal set looks like at five years, and if you went and did this exercise with any summer release from the early 2020s you’d get a similar shape. I’d guess. I haven’t checked, and now I’m a little curious.
Two of EDHREC’s top ten aren’t in the set
This is the part that actually matters if you’re going through a box.
Grim Hireling sits fifth on the play list at 163,963 decks and costs $12.80, which would make it the fourth-most-valuable AFR card if it were an AFR card. It isn’t. It’s from Forgotten Realms Commander, set code afc, the precon set that shipped the same day. Mantle of the Ancients is tenth on the list at $8.52 and it’s also afc.
Neither one was ever in a booster. You could have drafted AFR every weekend of that summer and opened zero copies of the two cards that ended up carrying half the set’s reputation. If you’re searching your collection for “Forgotten Realms” and coming up short on these, that’s why, and the set code printed at the bottom of the card is the thing that tells you which pile you’re actually looking at.
The fancy version is often worth less
Here’s where AFR gets weird, and it’s the bit I didn’t expect when I started pulling numbers.
Xorn’s regular printing is $13.38. The showcase version, the one with the Dungeons & Dragons module cover art that people bought Collector Boosters to chase, is $9.26. Delina is $6.11 normal and $4.84 in showcase. For a decent chunk of this set the “premium” treatment trades at a discount to the plain one, because the showcase frames were printed in volume and the people who want these cards for decks mostly don’t care what the frame looks like.
Old Gnawbone breaks the pattern, of course. Her borderless printing is $66.88 against $52.86 for the normal one, and the foil borderless is $107.29. And then there’s the in-store embossed promo, which is a foil-only printing sitting at $207.21 and which I would bet real money most people holding one have logged in their collection as “Old Gnawbone, $53.”
Bruenor Battlehammer is my favorite piece of trivia from this whole exercise. The showcase printing is a 77-cent nonfoil. The foil of that exact same showcase printing is $10.12. Thirteen times the price for the shiny version of a card nobody pays a dollar for, which runs completely against the way the foil premium has flattened everywhere else in the last couple of years. I don’t have a clean explanation. Uncommon legend, popular budget commander, foil showcase copies only came out of Collector Boosters, and there just aren’t that many of them floating around. That’s a guess dressed up as an answer.
If you’ve got an AFR box in a closet, the five-minute version of this is: check whether you have Old Gnawbone or Tiamat, and if you do, check the collector number before you write down a price. 197 and 296 are different cards as far as your total is concerned. Everything else in the set you can more or less treat as what it’s worth in a deck rather than what it’s worth in a binder, which is a perfectly fine outcome for a set that gave us dungeons and a reason to own a d20.
I’m going to go put that die back in the bag.