There’s a shoebox in my closet with three Commander 2017 decks in it, two of them still in shrink. I bought them the week they came out because I wanted Edgar Markov and didn’t feel like paying singles prices for the rest. The Edgar deck got cracked open and played to death. The other two just… sat there. For eight years. And the dumb thing is they’re now worth more sealed than I paid for all three combined.
EDHREC ran a piece this week breaking the last 15 years of precons into design “eras,” which is a fun read, but it got me thinking about the money side instead. Because if you’ve been playing Commander for any real length of time, you’ve got a graveyard of these things somewhere. Opened, half-opened, traded into oblivion. And a few of them are quietly worth real money while most are worth basically nothing.
The chase card is the whole story
Old precons appreciated for one reason, almost always: a single card in the deck got expensive and stayed that way because it never got reprinted.
The textbook case is Commander 2013’s Mind Seize. Nobody cared about the deck. They cared about True-Name Nemesis, a Legacy-playable card that, for a while, you could only get one way. The deck shot up to triple its retail price on the back of one uncommon. That’s the pattern that repeats over and over through the 2010s. Commander 2016’s Breed Lethality had Atraxa, Praetors’ Voice, which became the single most-built commander of all time and dragged the whole sealed deck up with it. Commander 2017’s Vampiric Bloodlust had Edgar Markov, who was a $60-plus card for years and the entire reason anyone bought that deck.
So the math on a sealed old precon is really the math on its one or two chase cards, plus a small premium for the product being out of print. Breed Lethality sealed has changed hands north of $280. Vampiric Bloodlust unopened has cleared $400. The 2014 “Built from Scratch” Daretti deck sits around $200 sealed. These aren’t theoretical numbers, people pay them.
Here’s where it gets annoying though. Wizards eventually reprints the chase card. Edgar Markov got dumped into Innistrad Remastered last year and the single dropped from the $60-80 range down to the $30s. Atraxa’s been reprinted into the ground, she’s a $30 card now and was once pushing way higher. Kaalia of the Vast, who used to anchor a beloved old deck, is a $2 card after Modern Horizons 3 got hold of her.
So why do the sealed decks still hold up?
This is the part I find genuinely weird, and I’m not 100% sure I understand it. When the singles get reprinted, the loose cards from the precon crater. But the sealed deck often holds its premium anyway, because the product itself never gets reprinted. There’s a fixed, shrinking supply of sealed Commander 2017 Vampiric Bloodlust in the world and it only goes down. Sealed collectors and the nostalgia crowd keep bidding on the box even after the cards inside it stopped being scarce.
Which means a sealed old precon and an opened one are basically two different assets. The sealed one is a collectible. The opened one is just a pile of singles, valued at whatever those singles are worth today, which after a decade of reprints is usually not much.
Teferi’s Protection is the exception that keeps a few opened 2017 decks relevant. It came in Draconic Domination, it’s been reprinted half a dozen times since, including in Marvel of all places, and it’s still a $50 card because demand never let up. If your opened deck happens to contain a card like that, the singles are doing the heavy lifting. Most opened decks don’t have one.
What about everything from 2020 on?
Short version: don’t get your hopes up.
The modern precons, the four-per-set machine that started ramping around Bloomburrow and never stopped, are a different beast. There are so many of them, the reprints come so fast, and the print runs are so large that almost none of them appreciate. They’re products designed to sit on a shelf at every Target in America for a year. Scarcity is the entire engine of precon value and these have none of it.
I wrote a whole thing about why Commander spec cards crash after a reprint and the same logic applies to whole decks now. The window where a precon could quietly become a $300 sealed item mostly closed when Wizards figured out precons sell and started printing four of them every three months.
There are exceptions and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. A precon with a genuinely format-warping card and a smaller print run can still pop. But the base rate on a 2024 or 2025 precon ending up worth a meaningful premium five years out is low. Treat them as decks to play, not lottery tickets.
Okay, but how much are MINE worth
Right, so. The closet pile. Here’s how I actually go through it.
First, separate sealed from opened, because they’re priced completely differently and you’ll drive yourself nuts trying to value them together. Sealed: look up the unopened price on TCGplayer or eBay sold listings, not the “asking” listings, the sold ones. That’s the real number. An old sealed precon is worth what someone actually paid last week, not what some optimist listed it for.
Opened decks are where the work is, and where scanning earns its keep. An opened precon is just its singles, so you need to know what those singles are now, post-reprint. The deck that was worth $120 in singles in 2018 might be worth $35 today because every good card in it got reprinted four times. Or it might be hiding a Teferi’s Protection. You won’t know until you actually price the cards, and pricing 100 cards by hand is how a Saturday afternoon disappears. I ran my opened Edgar deck through Eldwyn in about ten minutes and got a number I trusted, which beat the alternative of squinting at TCGplayer one card at a time and giving up halfway.
The thing nobody tells you is that a lot of opened old precons are worth more to you as a parts bin than as a sellable deck. That decade-old Commander deck has lands, mana rocks, and removal staples that you’d otherwise be buying for your current builds. The build-from-what-you-own approach gets a lot easier when you realize your “worthless” 2015 precon is full of Sol Rings and Commander’s Spheres.
So yeah. Sealed, check sold listings and maybe don’t open it. Opened, scan it and find out if it’s a deck or a parts donor. And if you’ve got something still in shrink from the 2013-2017 window sitting in a closet, that’s the one to actually go look up, because there’s a real chance it grew up while you weren’t paying attention.
I should go check whether my second 2017 deck is the Edgar one or the dragon one. I genuinely don’t remember, and that’s sort of the whole problem.