There’s a Damnation in my trade binder that stops people. They lift the page, tilt it, check the back, and ask if it’s a proxy. It’s purple. The whole frame runs a muddy violet no matter what the card’s actual color is, which Magic did for one set and then quietly retired.
It’s a real card. It’s from Planar Chaos, which hit shelves on February 2, 2007, put 45 cards in that frame, and never printed another one.
Reality Fracture arrives October 2 with its echo-pair conceit, every booster carrying a legend and its warped counterpart, and everyone keeps reaching for the same comparison. Wizards has been pushing back. Mark Rosewater says the color pie is intact this time, which is fair, and I already went through what the set actually does to your binder. But it’s close enough that I wanted to know what happened to the last batch of cards Magic shoved into the wrong color. Nineteen years is a long time to let a pricing experiment run.
The purple frame is worth nothing
In non-foil, anyway. I lined up every color-shifted card that’s been reprinted against its reprints, and it’s the same card twice at the same price.
Damnation is $21.58 in Planar Chaos. The Double Masters 2022 printing is $21.42. Time Spiral Remastered, which reverted it to an ordinary black frame, is $22.29. Keen Sense is $3.28 in PLC and $3.38 in TSR. Seal of Primordium is $0.33 and $0.36. Mana Tithe is $1.07 and $1.16. Simian Spirit Guide is $3.91 and $3.39. Essence Warden is $7.72 in the purple frame and runs $7.61 to $11.22 across its four normal-frame reprints, with the Commander Masters one sitting eleven cents below the original.
Nobody pays for the frame. The market priced a treatment that exists on 45 cards in Magic’s entire history at exactly zero, which I find genuinely odd, because that’s the kind of one-off scarcity collectors usually can’t leave alone.
Then I looked at the foils
Simian Spirit Guide is a common. Its Planar Chaos foil is $147.26.
Damnation’s PLC foil is $101.99 against $24.73 in Time Spiral Remastered and $24.55 in Double Masters. Keen Sense: $99.50 in PLC, $31.65 in TSR. Seal of Primordium, a card worth a third of a dollar, has a $19.58 foil in Planar Chaos and a $1.14 foil in Time Spiral Remastered. Seventeen times over, on a bulk green enchantment that removes an artifact.
So yeah, the foils. I knew the old ones ran hot. I wrote something last week about how the modern foil premium basically evaporated while the 2007 to 2009 stuff stayed silly. What got me was the size of it on cards nobody would call good. A foil Seal of Primordium. Who’s buying that? Somebody, clearly, and they’re paying twenty dollars for the privilege.
Then I tried to prove the obvious explanation and it fell over.
My assumption was the frame. Purple cards exist in one set, foils of them are the scarcest version of a treatment that happened once, so the purple foils should carry a premium the rest of the set doesn’t. Easy enough to test. I took the foil-to-non-foil multiplier for all 45 color-shifted cards and for the other 119 cards in Planar Chaos, and compared the medians.
Color-shifted: 6.45x. Everything else in the set: 8.15x.
Backwards. The ordinary cards carry the higher foil multiplier. Rough // Tumble is 43 cents with a $24.97 foil. Body Double, 56 cents, foil $23.69. Braids, Conjurer Adept is 54 cents and $16.66. Dash Hopes is 76 cents against a $25.00 foil, and Dash Hopes is a card whose entire function is asking your opponent nicely.
Caveat on my own numbers: the Lorwyn and Shadowmoor medians I quoted in that foil post were a rares-and-mythics cut, and this one is every card in the set. Don’t line them up and draw a trend line. I should go back and redo that one consistently at some point.
I drafted Planar Chaos twice at a shop in a strip mall that shared a wall with a tanning salon, so the whole place smelled faintly of coconut. Second draft I opened a foil Simian Spirit Guide and passed it, because it was a 2/2 for three that did nothing in Limited, and the guy to my left made a small noise. I assumed he was being dramatic. He was not being dramatic. That one card is now worth more than everything else I opened that night put together and I have no idea where the deck ended up.
Although, going back to the multiplier thing. I’m not certain I measured the right question. The four priciest foils in the set are Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth at $199.99, Simian Spirit Guide at $147.26, Damnation at $101.99, and Keen Sense at $99.50. Three of those four are purple. So the frame does concentrate at the top even while the median says it doesn’t, and a median flattens precisely the cards anyone actually cares about finding. I’ll keep the finding, with less confidence than I had an hour ago.
What to do with a Planar Chaos box
Sort by foil first, then by card. The frame is the last thing to look at, not the first.
36 of the 45 color-shifted cards are under a dollar in non-foil, and nine of those have foils over $5. Pull the purple ones out first because they’re visually obvious and you’ll finish the satisfying part of the job with most of the value still sitting in the pile, scattered through normal-looking commons and uncommons in the other 119 slots. The eye-catching sort and the profitable sort aren’t the same pass.
Pyrohemia is the one I’d check before anything else if you played around 2007, since it’s an uncommon at $13.86 with a $65.00 foil and it’s the red Pestilence, which is the kind of card that quietly ends up in Commander decks. Essence Warden too. Both of them spent years as the cards you shoved in a trade box.
One wrinkle if you’re logging these. Sixteen color-shifted cards also turn up on The List wearing the same purple frame with a set code reading PLST instead of PLC. Non-foil only, and they price a little under the originals. Any scan reads the card face, not the four characters at the bottom, so check which printing got assigned before you trust the total. I had a Mana Tithe filed wrong that way for about a month. Same reason it’s worth a slow pass through whatever’s left in your bulk box from that era rather than a fast one.
Whether any of this predicts Reality Fracture
Barely, honestly.
Chandra, Chill of Compliance, one of the headline echo cards, is sitting at $24.71 in preorder with a foil at $17.78. The foil is cheaper than the plain version, before the set has even shipped. In 2007 a foil was the only premium version of a card and there was roughly one per pack. Reality Fracture has six treatments, borderless echoed pairs, Japanese showcases, a Secret Lair bundle, and the pack foil is the least interesting shiny object in the lineup.
Where Planar Chaos might rhyme is much further out. The purple frame turned out to be worth nothing by itself, and I’d guess the echo watermark lands the same way. What held was scarcity of a specific physical object in decent condition, nineteen years after anybody cared about the gimmick that made it. Slow answer, and not much use if you’re deciding what to buy next Thursday.
Go dig out your 2007 box. The purple ones are pretty, and the foils behind them are where I’d look.