There’s a version of this story going around where Wizards of the Coast is “reprinting Library of Alexandria” in Secrets of Strixhaven, and collectors are having small heart attacks about their Arabian Nights copies. I saw three separate people post the same panicked question on Discord this week. The short answer: the Arabian Nights copy is fine. The longer answer is more interesting than the headline, and it’s different for the two library cards getting this treatment.
Library of Alexandria is on the Reserved List, which means Wizards contractually can’t paper-reprint it. Can’t. The card has appeared a few times since 1993 but always in MTGO-only products like Vintage Masters and Masters Edition IV. When it was announced as a Special Guest in Secrets of Strixhaven, what they actually did was add it to the Arena Special Guests sheet, replacing Library of Leng, and pre-ban it in every Arena format except Timeless. No paper printing. No SPG paper copy with collector number 158a sitting in a Collector Booster. You will never open one.
This flips the usual logic of what a reprint announcement does to a card’s price.
Why the Arabian Nights copy is probably fine
Paper reprints normally drag the original down. New supply floods the market, the collector premium narrows, and the card drops toward whatever the cheapest new printing lands at. Sylvan Library is going to go through a version of that this week. We’ll get there.
Library of Alexandria can’t do this, because the only new copies are digital and they don’t cross into paper. The Arabian Nights printing is still the only paper copy available, and Arabian Nights rares trade at Reserved List paper premiums that aren’t directly connected to Arena supply. If anything, having the card visible on Arena and inevitably featured in a bunch of YouTube videos and “the banned card you can play now” articles creates new awareness and new demand, with no corresponding supply relief.
I don’t want to oversell this into “your $1,300 card is going up” territory. The collector market for Arabian Nights rares is thin, and movement in that segment is driven by vintage tournament interest and Reserved List sentiment more than casual awareness spikes. Usual reprint logic doesn’t apply here. If you have one in a slab or a binder, there’s no reason to sell on the Strixhaven news.
One wild-card angle. If Arena’s Timeless format gets genuinely popular with Library of Alexandria legal in it, a handful of players may decide they want to play the card in paper Vintage. That’s a tiny market, probably a few hundred people globally, but Vintage is also where the buyers with actual disposable income for Reserved List cards live. A revitalized Vintage meta that leans into Library of Alexandria would pull paper copies up, not down.
(Though I’ll admit that Vintage has been in a slow decline for years and I’m not entirely sure Arena hype can reverse it. Mostly guessing on this one.)
Sylvan Library is the one actually getting reprinted
This is the card to pay attention to if you own copies.
Sylvan Library has an absurd print history by now. The Legends original from 1994 sits around $136, which is collector value. Then there are the reprint-era copies: Fourth Edition, Fifth Edition, Eternal Masters (2016), Commander Collection: Green (2020), Dominaria Remastered (2023), and a Secret Lair Drop that ran in June 2025. Now add a borderless Special Guests printing in Secrets of Strixhaven. That’s eight printings, seven of them post-2016. It’s become one of the most reprinted “premium” Commander cards.
The SPG version sits at about $27 regular and $60 foil on Scryfall as of this week. That tracks with the existing reprint tier: Eternal Masters at $28, Dominaria Remastered at $29, Fifth Edition at $27. Sylvan Library’s floor has been camped in the mid-twenties for nearly a decade across six reprints. The new SPG copy adds a significantly prettier version with a borderless treatment and an honestly stunning foil. Foils of the new art are where the speculative money is going.
I’d hold onto old non-foil Sylvan Libraries if you have them. Especially Legends and Fourth Edition. The collector premium on Legends isn’t going anywhere because it’s the original, and Fourth Edition is the white-border oddball that completes old sets and has its own weird niche market. Fifth Edition and Eternal Masters copies are basically interchangeable commodity reprints at this point. Swap them to a fresh non-foil SPG copy if you care about the art. Don’t if you don’t.
Foils are where I get less certain. I have two Commander’s Arsenal foil Sylvan Libraries that have been quietly appreciating in a binder for years. The SPG foil at $60 is undercutting them. Whether the older foils hold depends on how the art-collector community reacts to the new Strixhaven treatment, which I can’t predict. Maybe the borderless version becomes the new default premium and the older foils soften. Maybe Commander’s Arsenal stays the vintage-foil darling and nothing shifts. My actual guess is something in between, with a 10-15% softening on older foils over the next six months.
The memory I keep coming back to
This whole reprint conversation sends me back to 2018. Grand Prix buylist table, Toronto I think, or maybe Cleveland, can’t remember which. Dealer offered me $25 for a Legends Sylvan Library I’d been sitting on forever. I said no because I was annoyed at the price. I got home, looked at the market, and realized $25 was actually the fair paper price at the time. I had somehow convinced myself it was a $60 card.
And I still have that Legends copy today. It’s now a $136 card. So I was wrong about the 2018 price and right to keep it anyway for the wrong reasons. This is the dumb kind of collector decision that somehow works out.
The reason I bring it up: reprint panic makes people do the opposite. They sell on the reprint news, expecting the floor to collapse, and half the time the floor doesn’t collapse. Sylvan Library’s floor has been stuck at $25-30 for a decade across six reprints. The Legends and Commander’s Arsenal premiums haven’t budged. I’d bet against the pattern breaking because of one more mid-tier reprint.
What I’d actually do
If you own a Library of Alexandria: keep it. There’s no paper reprint coming out of this.
If you own a Sylvan Library from Legends or Fourth Edition: keep those. They’re the collector-grade printings and the SPG doesn’t touch them.
If you own Fifth Edition, Eternal Masters, Dominaria Remastered, Commander Collection: Green, or Secret Lair Sylvan Libraries: these are the $25-30 commodity tier. The SPG will join the pile. No action needed and no major loss coming. If you hate the frame you have and love the new borderless, swap for a couple of bucks in transaction costs.
If you own any foil Sylvan Library older than 2025: watch the foil market for eight weeks. If Strixhaven foils establish as the new default premium, older foils might soften 10-15%. If the art-collector community stays loyal to the existing premium foils, nothing happens. I’d wait rather than preemptively trim, because a lot of these old foils only get listed occasionally anyway and the TCGplayer mid is not always real.
And if you have an Arabian Nights Library of Alexandria and you were actually considering selling on the news of “a reprint” — please don’t. Scan it into a collection tracker, put it in a top loader, go play Library of Alexandria in Timeless on Arena, keep the paper copy. Nothing about this announcement changes what that card is worth.