A textless Dance of the Dead is a very funny thing to put in Atlanta’s Festival in a Box. An enchantment with enough Oracle text to qualify as a small rental agreement, stripped down to a picture. I’d want the rules open on my phone before handing that one across a Commander table. The art gets the whole card, though, and I can see the appeal even while imagining the questions.
Wizards confirmed the bundle on October 5. It goes on sale October 19 for $249.99, limited to two per customer while supplies last. That’s $50 above the Amsterdam Festival in a Box, with a different Mystery Booster product inside. My inclination is to buy this only if the draft box already interests you; buying the whole package for one fancy commander leaves a lot of money depending on prices that haven’t settled.
Tymna the Weaver is the promo doing most of the tempting for me. Full-art, textless, foil, and recognizable enough that the missing words feel less alarming than they do on Dance. Whether that temptation adds up to a purchase takes a little more work.
What Atlanta Festival in a Box actually includes
The $249.99 package contains one Mystery Booster Commander Edition display with 24 boosters, the four-card Secret Gallery: Atlanta Foil Edition drop, and four additional promos. October 19 is the sale date. The announcement doesn’t provide a delivery date, so I wouldn’t schedule a home draft around that Monday.
Secret Gallery: Atlanta features Parallax Tide, Regrowth, Viridian Revel, and Assassin’s Trophy, all in foil with artwork by Atlanta artists. The separate promo group is Dance of the Dead, Tana, the Bloodsower, Tymna, and Auspicious Aquarium. The first three are full-art textless foils. Aquarium is a playtest card designed and illustrated by Mark Rosewater.
That gives you eight specific cards alongside the sealed display. Keeping those two piles separate helps, because almost every confident value total I’ve wanted to calculate runs into the same missing information: what will people actually pay for these exact eight printings once copies arrive?
As of October 8, Scryfall has no USD or foil USD prices for the Atlanta promos or the four Secret Gallery printings. Those blank fields deserve to stay blank. A preorder asking price somewhere else could tell you what a seller hopes to receive, but I’d want completed sales before treating it as money available to offset the bundle.
The existing cards add up very differently
Here are reference printings checked through Scryfall on October 8. These are existing versions you can compare against the new treatments, with the finish stated explicitly. They aren’t a valuation of the Atlanta cards, and this selection isn’t a cheapest-copy shopping list.
| Card and reference printing | Finish | USD price |
|---|---|---|
| Tymna the Weaver, Commander 2016 #48 | Foil | $31.47 |
| Tana, the Bloodsower, Commander 2016 #45 | Foil | $4.83 |
| Dance of the Dead, Ice Age #118 | Non-foil | $14.92 |
| Parallax Tide, Nemesis #37 | Non-foil | $15.00 |
| Regrowth, Masters 25 #187 | Non-foil | $0.51 |
| Viridian Revel, Scars of Mirrodin #132 | Non-foil | $1.43 |
| Assassin’s Trophy, Murders at Karlov Manor #187 | Non-foil | $1.32 |
Total: $69.48 for those seven reference copies. Aquarium stays out because there’s no established price to use.
Even that total can flatter the package if your aim is simply to play the cards. The Final Fantasy: Through the Ages #18 version of Tymna, with its Cecil Harvey treatment, is $10.76 non-foil. Substitute that for the Commander 2016 foil and the reference total falls to $48.77. You might prefer the original Magic character and happily pay more. I’d just make that preference an explicit part of the budget.
Parallax Tide and Viridian Revel have especially dangerous comparison numbers. The original Nemesis foil Tide is $199.99 in Scryfall, while the Scars of Mirrodin foil Revel is $14.39. Copy those into a spreadsheet alongside the new Secret Lair foils and the bundle suddenly looks absurdly generous. But those prices belong to particular older printings with their own supply and buyers. Nothing in the announcement establishes that the new foils will trade at the same levels.
I do like the Atlanta Tide. More than I expected, actually. The old foil price makes me suspicious of the sales pitch, then I look at the new art and start negotiating with myself about how much an art preference should cost. That’s allowed. I’d rather admit to wanting a pretty copy than make a twenty-six-year-old foil do the accounting for it.
The broader reprint question also belongs here. A new printing gives buyers another version to choose from. How much that affects the old one depends on which buyers were chasing the card’s function and which were chasing that specific edition. I don’t know how much of Tide’s original foil price survives this release, and these snapshots alone can’t answer it.
How much do you want the draft box?
Mystery Booster Commander Edition is the largest part of the purchase. Wizards’ product breakdown confirms 24 packs of 20 cards, with new-to-Magic cards becoming Commander-legal on November 13. The October sale gets you a place in the order queue; it doesn’t move that legality date forward.
Each pack includes fifteen colored commons or uncommons, a reprint wildcard, a reprinted rare or mythic commander, a new-to-Magic commander, a special-treatment slot, and a playtest card. The special-treatment slot can contain a Future Sight frame card or, at less than 1%, a foil acorn-stamp card. Some secondary descriptions make those sound like separate guaranteed slots. Use Wizards’ list when budgeting your expectations.
I covered the early Mystery Booster Commander Edition collector questions before the bundle contents were confirmed. For this purchase, I’d put a personal spending limit on the sealed display and see what remains for the eight extras. These are hypothetical budgets, not predictions of the display’s market price:
| If you’d happily pay this for the display | The bundle leaves this for the eight extras |
|---|---|
| $150 | $99.99 |
| $175 | $74.99 |
| $200 | $49.99 |
Use your actual checkout total if shipping or tax adds to the $249.99. And use the value of the cards you want to keep, plus realistic net proceeds for anything you’d sell. A card listed at $30 takes more than a listing to put $30 back in your account.
So, okay. Suppose you already want the box at $200. Fifty dollars for the extras sounds pretty comfortable. Suppose you only want Tymna. Then you’re spending $250 and assigning yourself the job of selling a display and seven other cards. Photograph them, list them, pack them, wait. I can feel my enthusiasm fading somewhere around finding the shipping supplies.
There’s also a perfectly reasonable group purchase here. Twenty-four packs cover an eight-player draft at three packs each, making the bundle about $31.25 per player before additional checkout costs. Decide who gets the fixed cards before collecting money. You could allocate them to the organizer, sell them to reduce everyone’s contribution, or agree on some other split. I’d get that settled before anyone sees the Tymna in person.
For a collector opening the display alone, keep the fixed promos in their own inventory group. In Eldwyn, I’d record the exact printings as they come in and keep the bundle receipt alongside the purchase record. Your collection total will change as those currently blank prices fill in. That change can reflect newly available market data even when you haven’t acquired another card.
I’m leaning toward waiting for singles myself. The artwork is doing a lot of work on me, and I’d want a draft group committed before taking on the display. If you’ve already got seven people asking when they can come over, your calculation probably looks much better. Just tell them October 19 is when you can order it, and leave the actual game night penciled in.