My Worldwake Eye of Ugin has a crease. A small one, lower left corner, the kind you only see if you tilt the card under a lamp. I’ve known about it since roughly 2011, and every time the Eye of Ugin reprint question comes up I think about that crease first, because it decides what my copy is actually worth long before any reprint does.

The reprint question is back. Reality Fracture’s Special Guests sheet puts Eye of Ugin into booster packs for the first time since Modern Masters 2015. That’s eleven years. The set releases October 2, prereleases start tomorrow, and the obvious question for anyone with a copy in a binder is whether to sell now before the new printing lands.

Eye of Ugin, the Reality Fracture Special Guests printing illustrated by Marina Banker

My short answer is no. The longer answer is mostly arithmetic.

How many new Eye of Ugins are actually coming

Here’s the collation, straight from Wizards’ Collecting Reality Fracture article. A Special Guests card replaces a common in 1 of every 55 Play Boosters. There are ten Special Guests in the set. Wizards doesn’t say the ten are weighted differently, so assuming they’re even, any specific one shows up in roughly 1 of every 550 Play Boosters.

A Play Booster box is 30 packs. That’s one non-foil Eye of Ugin per 18 boxes or so.

Collector Boosters are a little better. A traditional foil Special Guests card shows up in 6.1% of them, which works out to one specific foil in about every 164 Collector Boosters, or one per 13 or 14 boxes. At $26.99 a pack, that’s an expensive way to get a land.

Compare that to Modern Masters 2015, where Eye of Ugin was a regular rare of a set built to be opened in bulk. Or to Worldwake itself, which was a normal large-print-run expansion that people drafted for months. Both of those put far more copies into the world than a 1-in-550 slot ever will.

This is roughly the same shape as the Sylvan Library Special Guests reprint earlier this year, and I’ll admit I’m reusing my own reasoning from that post a bit. It holds up, though.

What happened to the last Special Guests reprints

I went back through the older Special Guests cards that were worth real money when they got reprinted, and pulled today’s prices for the Special Guests copy next to the originals. I don’t have clean before-and-after price history for all of them, so read this as where things settled.

Stoneforge Mystic is the one I’d point at first, because it’s also a Worldwake card. The Special Guests printing from Outlaws of Thunder Junction is $40.68 today. The Worldwake original is $28.55, so the reprint now costs more than the card it reprinted, which I did not expect going in.

Scalding Tarn did the same thing at a larger scale. Special Guests copy $72.41, Zendikar original $43.30, the Modern Horizons 2 copies in the $35-45 range. Scapeshift is $57.07 in Special Guests and $56.06 in Morningtide. Akroma’s Memorial sits at basically the same $36-38 in every printing it has.

The pattern is pretty consistent. The Special Guests copy becomes the expensive non-foil (it’s rarer and it has the pretty frame), and the old printings stay roughly where the market already had them. The one exception I found is Sword of Fire and Ice, where the Special Guests copy is cheaper than the old ones, but Sword just got reprinted again in Marvel and I covered what that reprint did to old copies separately. The Marvel printing is what’s dragging it, I think.

So is Eye of Ugin actually safe?

I keep wanting to say yes and then second-guessing it.

Eye of Ugin is a weird card to hold. It’s been banned in Modern since April 2016, after Eldrazi Winter, so it has no Modern demand at all. It’s legal in Legacy and Vintage, and I honestly don’t know how much Legacy Eldrazi is playing right now; I didn’t find a recent list with it in the maindeck, but I also didn’t look very hard. Almost all of its demand is Commander, and even there it isn’t a staple. EDHREC has it in 55.7K decks, 0.55% of the decks they track. That’s a colorless-Eldrazi card for colorless-Eldrazi decks, and not much else.

Which is the argument against me. When a card’s whole demand is one niche Commander archetype, it doesn’t take a flood of reprints to push the price around. A few hundred extra copies might be enough. And the Scalding Tarns of the world have Modern, Legacy, and Commander all pulling on them at once, which Eye of Ugin doesn’t.

But then Reality Fracture is quietly pushing colorless, too. Omnath, Locus of the Void is a new card in the Multiverse Reforged precon that pays you off for colorless mana, and Card Kingdom’s review singled it out as a card for colorless decks built around Kozilek, the Great Distortion and friends. More people building those decks means more people wanting an Eye. I’m not going to pretend that math is precise. It probably roughly cancels out the extra supply, and I’m back to holding.

Eye of Ugin from Worldwake, the original 2010 printing

Which copy do you actually have

The printing matters more than the reprint does here. Eye of Ugin has five paper printings and they’re priced pretty differently.

The Expedition is the one I’d worry about least. It’s the priciest version, it was already rarer than a Special Guests card, and the people who want an Expedition Eye want that specific frame, not “an Eye of Ugin.” Same for the Worldwake foil, which sits at almost double the non-foil because it’s the original foil and there’s no replacement for being the original foil.

The Modern Masters and Worldwake non-foils are the ones that compete directly with the new printing. If I had to guess which one gets pushed down first, it’s the MM2 copy, since it has no “original printing” story holding it up. That’s a guess. I’d want to see a month of sales after October 2 before I believed it.

So yeah, if you’ve got one of those. Honestly? I’d just leave it. Or, okay, if you were already thinking about selling it, like, it’s not in a deck, you haven’t looked at it since 2019, now’s not a bad week. But I wouldn’t panic-list it on a Wednesday because a Special Guests image went up. That’s how you sell a $54 card for $40 to someone who read the same collation numbers you just did.

The one time I sold into a reprint

I did sell into a reprint once, and it wasn’t this card. It was a Future Sight Akroma’s Memorial, which I sold the week the Foundations Special Guests list went up because I was sure the new printing would gut it. It’s $38.01 today. I sold it for less than that, at FNM, to a guy who’d been trying to trade me for it for two years, and he knew exactly what he was doing.

Anyway. That’s the whole reason I don’t sell into reprint news anymore. The Worldwake Eye with the crease stays in the binder. I scanned my Eldrazi binder into Eldwyn this week mostly to see which of my Eyes was which, and I’ll check back once the Special Guests copy has a real price, probably mid-October. If you’re holding one, write down what you paid before you decide anything, because a lot of Worldwake copies were bought for five bucks and “down 10% from the peak” is still a very good trade.