There’s a page in the back half of my binder that I think of as the faerie page, even though only about four cards on it are faeries. It’s everything I kept from roughly 2007 to 2009, jammed together because that’s the order I sleeved it in when I was seventeen and had no system. Lorwyn, some Shadowmoor, a couple of Shards of Alara rares with that awful brown border treatment.
I flip past it constantly. Last week I stopped, because I’d been reading about how many of these old MTG cards are still in Commander decks, and I wanted to know whether the page was worth anything or whether I’d just been carrying nostalgia around in a nine-pocket.
The list of old MTG cards Commander kept is short
EDHREC ran a piece a few days ago going through Lorwyn block, Shards block, and Magic 2010, pulling out what survived. Their framing is that the format staples from this era show up in anywhere from about 900,000 decklists to over 3.6 million, which are numbers I have trouble picturing but fine.
The survivors, roughly: Exotic Orchard and Reliquary Tower at the top because they’re colorless lands that go in literally anything. Devoted Druid. Mutavault. Bitterblossom. Mycoloth. Ad Nauseam, which is on the Game Changers list. Springleaf Drum, Vigor, Scapeshift, Fleshbag Marauder, Mirror Entity, Taurean Mauler, Kederekt Parasite.
Fifteen-ish cards out of something like fifteen hundred printed across those years.
What strikes me about that list is that not one of those cards was made with Commander in mind. The first official Commander product didn’t exist until 2011. In 2008 the format was a thing some judges played between rounds and Wizards had no particular reason to care about. So everything that survived from this era survived by accident, and you can see the accident in the shape of the list: mana fixing, cheap combo enablers, and two changelings that happen to be every creature type at once.
I have a soft spot for Mirror Entity specifically because of a Friday night around 2009 where I cast it with eight mana into a board of four 1/1 kithkin and killed a guy who was, in fairness, at nine life and had been talking a lot. That deck was terrible. I built it around Wizened Cenn. But it did that one thing, once, and I’ve kept the Entity ever since out of what I can only describe as gratitude.
The foil numbers on this era are stupid
Springleaf Drum was a common in Lorwyn in 2007. It got bumped to uncommon when it came back in Lorwyn Eclipsed this January, and that new copy is 35 cents. The 2007 non-foil is 68 cents.
The 2007 foil is $81.09.
I re-ran that one a few times assuming I’d grabbed the wrong printing. The rest of the era does the same thing. Devoted Druid, also a common, also from this block: $1.84 non-foil out of Shadowmoor, $79.61 in foil. Taurean Mauler is $2.91 and $63.50. Exotic Orchard is $2.85 and $54.29. Mirror Entity, my sentimental kithkin murder weapon, is $2.41 and $27.98.
Modern sets don’t do this. A foil from a 2026 Play Booster runs maybe 1.5x to 3x its non-foil, sometimes less, because Wizards prints a lot of foils now and puts one in nearly every pack. Lorwyn-era foils came out of a much smaller print run at a time when a much smaller number of people were opening packs, and then most of the ones that did get opened spent fifteen years curling in a shoebox. Old foils warp badly, and a near-mint one from 2007 is genuinely scarce in a way that a near-mint non-foil just isn’t. Why the multiplier is so much steeper here than on, say, Zendikar or Scars of Mirrodin foils two years later, I genuinely don’t know. Print run sizes moved around a lot in that window and I’ve never seen good public numbers for it.
Now, I want to be careful here, because an $81 listing on a card with maybe two copies for sale is not the same thing as $81 in your pocket. I’ve watched cards like this sit unsold for months. If you’re planning to actually liquidate, a buylist is going to laugh at that number and offer you something closer to half, and you may wait a long while for a retail buyer who specifically wants a foil Springleaf Drum for a cEDH Rograkh deck. Though, having said that, foil Springleaf Drum has been expensive for years rather than spiking last Tuesday, which is usually the sign that the demand is real and thin rather than fake. So I’d believe the number more than I’d believe a fresh spike.
Where the original printing still wins
Bitterblossom is the one card on the list where the 2008 copy beats everything that came after it. Morningtide sits at $37.40. Double Masters 2022 is $32.00, Ultimate Masters is $36.12, Modern Masters 2015 is $33.88, the Special Guests version from January is $32.70. Six reprints deep and the original still carries a few dollars of premium on top.
Mutavault does the same thing more quietly: $6.57 for the Morningtide printing against $4.94 for Magic 2014 and $4.15 for the Baldur’s Gate copy. Scapeshift’s Morningtide printing is $56.06 against $47.73 for the Core Set 2019 version.
And then Devoted Druid goes the other way entirely. The Shadowmoor original is $1.84. The Special Guests printing from this January is $11.54, six times the price, because it’s a pretty new treatment in a set people are actively opening. Same card, same text, and the eighteen-year-old copy is the cheap one.
Kitchen Finks is the sad case. Fifty-five cents for the Shadowmoor copy. I remember that card being fifteen dollars and effectively unaffordable to me, and it has been reprinted into Modern Masters, Ultimate Masters, and Mystery Booster 2 since. It’s draft chaff now. The reprint math on old staples grinds down almost everything eventually, and the filter lands from the same block split right down the middle on exactly this depending on which half of the cycle Wizards decided to stuff into precons.
What I’d actually do with the page
Sort it by foil first. Not by set, not by name. Foil.
That sounds like a dumb tip but it’s the only thing on that binder page that reliably predicts value, and it’s the one attribute people skip when they’re eyeballing old cards, because a curled 2007 foil sitting in a sleeve doesn’t look special the way a modern etched or surge foil does. It just looks like a card with a slight sheen and a bend in it. I scanned my whole faerie page in about six minutes, foil flag on, and two cards accounted for more than the other seventy combined.
So yeah. The page. Turns out it’s worth about $150, and $118 of that is one foil common and the Bitterblossom, and I would have thrown the common into a trade binder without thinking twice. The rest is genuinely, completely bulk. Vivid lands. A Shriekmaw. Three copies of Cloudgoat Ranger that I cannot explain.
If you’ve got a similar page, the thing I’d check before anything else is whether your Bitterblossom is the Morningtide one or one of the six reprints, because that’s a five-dollar difference hiding behind a set symbol most people can’t identify by sight anyway. The bottom line of the card tells you, assuming you can read it under a sleeve in bad light.