The Demonic Tutor sitting in the Pokémon sleeve at the back of my Commander binder (don’t ask, it was the only sleeve I had the night I pulled it in 2021) is still worth $76.82 on Scryfall this morning. When Wizards announced a Mystical Archive sequel for Secrets of Strixhaven last month, I assumed that was about to change. It didn’t.
I spent an hour this morning checking both set lists against each other and I think a lot of people are going to be pleasantly surprised, or disappointed, if they were planning to panic-trade their old copies this week.
The original Mystical Archive is mostly not getting reprinted
The new set, confusingly, is called “Secrets of Strixhaven Mystical Archive” (set code SOA). It’s a 195-card insert printed alongside the main Secrets of Strixhaven release on April 24. Wizards has been calling it a return to the Mystical Archive, which made me assume it was essentially a reprint of the 2021 Strixhaven Mystical Archive (STA) set with a new frame.
It’s not. Almost none of the cards overlap.
The top STA singles — Demonic Tutor, Teferi’s Protection, Tainted Pact, Natural Order, Time Warp, Dark Ritual, Ephemerate, Counterspell — none of them appear in the new SOA set. If you’re holding any of those, nothing is happening to your pile.
The top SOA cards are a completely different set of classics: Force of Will at $68.75 for the new printing, Vampiric Tutor at $54.90, Jeska’s Will at $30.66, Cyclonic Rift at $28.71. Akroma’s Will, Berserk, Ad Nauseam, Flusterstorm round out the chase mythics. None of those were in the 2021 Mystical Archive, so the “return” isn’t really a return. It’s a sibling set with a different card pool.
I’ll caveat: there’s a small overlap buried in the main Secrets of Strixhaven set. A few classic spells appear there as the back face of new “Emeritus of X” split cards. Demonic Tutor is stapled to a new “Emeritus of Woe” card at $21.12. Swords to Plowshares sits on the back of “Emeritus of Truce” at $8.40. Technically new printings of those cards. But they’re less prominent than the SOA cards and haven’t dented the STA originals.
What this means if you’ve been hoarding old STA singles
Short answer: mostly nothing.
If you pulled a Demonic Tutor out of a Collector Booster back in May 2021 and have been watching it slowly climb from $40 to $76, the next six weeks are not going to hurt you. Same with Teferi’s Protection ($52.65), which has been one of the best-performing STA mythics since release. The cards that made you glad you sat on Strixhaven Collector Boosters aren’t in the new set.
The one weird exception is Lightning Bolt. The STA version is $4.48, and there’s a new Lightning Bolt in the main Secrets of Strixhaven set sitting at $3.58. That’s indirect pressure. I don’t think the STA Lightning Bolt drops much further because it’s mostly a novelty printing for the Japanese art treatment, but I’d be less confident about the non-foil than the foil.
Brainstorm is worse. STA Brainstorm is $3.67. The new SOS Brainstorm is $0.92. That’s a meaningful gap. If you’re holding a stack of STA Brainstorms for trade stock, now might be the moment to move them. Or, you know, play with them. I have four in a Pauper cube I never actually play.
What the new reprints ARE doing
Interesting stuff happens if you own non-STA versions of the cards that ARE in the new Mystical Archive.
Take Vampiric Tutor. Historical printings cluster tightly between $64 and $72: Dominaria Remastered $65.78, Commander Legends $65.82, Eternal Masters $68.44, Sixth Edition $64.33, Visions $71.99. The new SOA printing is $54.90. That’s already ~$10 under the historical baseline, and it’ll pull the other printings down with it over the next few months. Buylists haven’t caught up yet but they will.
Force of Will tells a similar story, barely. Historical clustered at $69-81 across Dominaria Remastered, Double Masters, Eternal Masters, and the original Alliances. New SOA: $68.75. That’s at the bottom of the historical range but not wildly below it. Force of Will hasn’t had a proper bulk reprinting in a long time, so expect the older copies to drift down gradually rather than collapse.
Cyclonic Rift is the clearest casualty. Historical: $30-41 across Ravnica Remastered, Commander Masters, Double Masters, Modern Masters 2017, Commander 2014, and Return to Ravnica. New SOA: $28.71. Already under the baseline and heading lower. If you own an old RTR or C14 copy thinking “it’s a $40 card,” it’s not anymore, and the gap is widening.
Three-month tell: watch the Ravnica Remastered Cyclonic Rift. That was $41.35 this week. If it’s still $41 in July I’ll be shocked. My guess is $32 by then, maybe lower.
The buy, hold, sell list
For the original STA cards from 2021, my read:
- Hold: Demonic Tutor, Teferi’s Protection, Tainted Pact, Natural Order, Time Warp, Dark Ritual, Ephemerate, Counterspell, Blue Sun’s Zenith. No direct reprint pressure from the new set. They’ll move on their own supply/demand curve, which for most of these has been trending up.
- Move soon: STA Brainstorm, STA Lightning Bolt. Direct reprint in the main SOS. Prices will compress toward the new versions over summer.
- Neutral: Everything else at the bulk-mythic tier. Nothing’s happening either way.
For cards getting the NEW Mystical Archive treatment, if you own older copies:
- Move before summer: Old Cyclonic Rift copies (any printing), Vampiric Tutor from Dominaria Remastered / Commander Legends / Eternal Masters, Jeska’s Will from Commander Legends.
- Fine to hold: Force of Will. Reprint-resistant because demand is enormous and supply is still thin relative to Commander demand.
- Probably nothing: Berserk, Ad Nauseam, Flusterstorm. These weren’t trading at crazy multiples before the reprint so the new copies won’t crater what’s already priced in.
I’ll walk the Force of Will take back a little. Maybe. There’s a world where enough Collector Boosters get cracked that even Force of Will slides another $5-10 by fall. I don’t actually know. It hasn’t happened in previous reprints but the new set has a heavier Collector Booster ratio for the archive slot than Eternal Masters did, so the supply bump might be larger than I’m modeling. Take it as “probably safe, with an asterisk.”
What I did this morning
So I pulled my Commander binder off the shelf, flipped to the Mystical Archive pages, and did what I always do when a reprint rumor hits: opened Eldwyn and scanned everything to get a current-value snapshot. Fifteen STA cards, about eight minutes, including the two foils where the app asked me to angle the light a different way. Total: $317 at current market.
Then I did the same thing with the Cyclonic Rifts, Vampiric Tutors, and one Force of Will I have scattered across three different Commander decks. $234. That’s the pile that might lose $30-40 by July if my read is right.
Not a ton of money either way. But it’s the difference between “ignore the news” and “move two cards to buylist credit before the floor moves.” Mostly you ignore the news. Sometimes you don’t.
If you’ve got a larger pile from 2021 that you haven’t touched, now’s a fine moment to run through it and see what’s actually there. Which, I know, is suspicious advice coming from the guy who makes the scanning app. But honestly most of the people I watch panic-trade in reprint windows are the ones who haven’t looked at their binder in six months and are reacting to a headline instead of their actual exposure. That’s the fix, not the trade.
For broader context on how I’ve been thinking about set-level reprint windows this year, the 2026 collection triage post is the framework. The Lorwyn Eclipsed retrospective is the companion piece for post-release price tracking. And if you’re weighing Secrets of Strixhaven sealed product against singles, the product guide covers the box-level decision.
My Demonic Tutor is staying in its weird Pokémon sleeve. Nothing about next week changes that.