There’s a shelf in my office that is, at this point, mostly a precon graveyard. Nine or ten of them, some still shrink-wrapped, a couple cracked open and half-scavenged for the mana rocks. Every set for the last two years has shipped four or five Commander decks and I have bought more of them than I want to admit, usually on the theory that I’d play one eventually.
Reality Fracture ships one.
Not one I’m interested in, one total. The Multiverse Reforged Commander deck, $49.99, and that’s the entire Commander precon lineup for the set. The five Foundations decks landing the same day are a separate beginner line at $29.99 each, which I went through already and which aren’t Reality Fracture cards in any meaningful sense. So for a mainline Standard-legal expansion, this is the smallest precon footprint in years.
I said in the Collector Booster guide that I was leaving this deck alone until the full list dropped. It dropped Tuesday. So here’s the math I owe that post.
The reprints alone are $134.84
I pulled all 86 unique cards in the deck, threw out the ones that are brand new, and priced every reprint at its cheapest currently available printing. Not the pretty printing, not the one that matches this deck’s frame. The cheapest one you could actually buy on TCGplayer this afternoon.
That comes to $134.84 across 68 cards.
Against a $49.99 box, that’s a ratio precons almost never hit. The Marvel decks I ran the same numbers on in June came in around break-even on three of the four.
But the shape of it is the usual shape, which is to say three cards are doing most of the work:
- Archfiend of Despair, $23.84 in Battlebond
- Flawless Maneuver, $20.96 in Commander 2020
- Reflecting Pool, $15.32 in Baldur’s Gate
Sixty dollars of the hundred and thirty-five, in three slots. Meanwhile fifty of the sixty-eight reprints add up to $26.76 combined, which works out to about fifty cents each. That’s the Sol Ring and signet layer, plus a pile of tapped duals nobody’s chasing.
Both of those numbers are true at the same time and people will quote whichever one suits them. The deck is a genuinely good pile of cardboard for fifty bucks, and it’s also a deck where if somebody else gets to the Archfiend first, the rest of the box deflates fast.
Worth flagging the obvious: Flawless Maneuver at $20.96 and Archfiend at $23.84 are about to get a fresh injection of supply, and that’s what this product does to them. The reprint trap works in both directions. If you own spare copies of either, the window for selling them at today’s number closes around October 2.
The part that isn’t priced
Eighteen cards in this deck have never been printed before. Collector numbers 1 through 18, and none of them appear in a Play Booster, a Collector Booster, the Bundle, or the Secret Lair Bundle. One product, one printing.
That lines up with Wizards’ own count, incidentally, once you work out the discrepancy. Their decklist article says “98 non-foil cards, including 16 new-to-Magic cards,” which had me second-guessing my query for a while until I realized the two foil borderless commanders get counted separately in that breakdown. Sixteen plus Jace and Nissa is eighteen.
Three of them are a land cycle: Turbulent Crater, Turbulent Shore, and Turbulent Wetlands, dual lands that enter untapped only if your opponents control eight or more lands between them. Catch-up lands, basically. They’re fine. They’re also going to be the cards people quietly need four of two years from now, and there is exactly one box they come in.
Then there’s Darksteel Angel, which is a nine-mana artifact Angel with flying, indestructible, and a Platinum Angel clause bolted onto a rider that stops your creatures getting -1/-1 counters. It is currently sitting at $40.45 as a preorder single.
And I don’t believe that number even slightly.
I’ve written this exact complaint twice this year already. Preorder singles pricing on a card that doesn’t physically exist yet, inside a product nobody has opened, is a handful of speculative listings and a thin order book. It was $41.59 when I started pulling data for this post and $40.45 by the time I finished writing the section, which tells you roughly how much weight it can bear. It’ll probably settle somewhere under twenty once people start breaking decks up in October.
Probably. Although the supply argument cuts the other way here in a way it didn’t for the Hobbit cards I was skeptical about, because those were booster cards and this one isn’t. The only way a Darksteel Angel enters the market is somebody buying a $49.99 deck and dismantling it, and the deck has two commanders and sixty dollars of other reprints giving people reasons not to. I still think forty is too high. I’m less confident than I was three paragraphs ago.
What this does to a collection you’re actually tracking
Single-source cards are their own category and most people don’t sort them that way until it’s inconvenient. A card that exists in nine printings has a floor: somebody somewhere is dumping a played copy. A card that exists in one precon has whatever supply the people who bought that precon decided to release, which for a deck that’s actually fun to play is not much.
So the practical move, if you care about these eighteen, is to buy the deck rather than plan to pick the singles up later. That’s not advice I give often. Usually I’m the one telling people to wait for mid-October and buy singles once preorder noise clears out. It just doesn’t apply to cards with no secondary supply to wait for.
Here’s the bit I keep forgetting to do myself, though. I opened a Strixhaven precon in April, played it twice, and left it sleeved on the shelf, and when I did a collection audit in June I had a genuinely confusing forty minutes trying to work out why my totals didn’t match. Turned out I’d never logged the deck at all. A hundred cards, sitting in plain sight, counted as zero. Scanning the whole thing took about six minutes once I actually sat down and did it, which made the forty minutes of confusion feel worse in retrospect.
So yeah. Log the precon when you buy it, not when you eventually take it apart. I know. I know.
Should you buy it
If you want any of the eighteen, buy it, because there’s no other door.
If you want the reprints, it’s the best precon-to-singles ratio I’ve priced this year and it’s not particularly close, with the caveat that $60 of that $134.84 is three cards and you should check whether you already own them before you get excited.
If you just want a Commander deck to play, I have no idea yet. It’s four colors, the face commander is a five-mana Jace who makes opponents pay a tax to attack any of your Jaces, and I haven’t seen anybody put it on a table. Ask me in November.
The thing I’d actually watch between now and prerelease weekend on September 25 is whether that Archfiend price moves. It’s the load-bearing card in the whole value case, and if it drifts down before the deck even ships, the $134.84 number goes with it.