On August 27 I wrote that Chandra, Chill of Compliance was sitting at $48.00. On September 23, in a post about Planar Chaos, I mentioned in passing that she was $24.71. Today she’s $19.53, and I didn’t notice any of this happening because I was never looking at her on purpose. She just kept turning up in things I was writing about, a little cheaper each time.

So this morning I did the thing I should have done a month ago. I pulled every Reality Fracture price this blog has published since spoilers started and checked each one against today’s number. Prerelease weekend started yesterday, people are sitting at kitchen tables sorting their pools right now, and the price they’re looking up for each rare is sitting on top of a curve most of them haven’t seen.

Chandra, Chill of Compliance from Reality Fracture, down from $48 in August to under $20

Every Reality Fracture price I wrote down, and where it is now

Each of these was quoted in a post here, on the date listed. Same collector number both times, so this isn’t me comparing a borderless copy to a regular one.

Seven for seven, all down, and most of them by roughly half. Liliana lost two thirds of her price in four weeks. Emrakul went from the most expensive card in the set to something you could buy with the change from a fifty, and that happened in ten days.

The treatments didn’t save anything either, or at least not consistently. The borderless Liliana at 305 was $79.99 in August and is $30.52 now, which is almost the same percentage drop as her regular copy. The one that held up was the borderless Theorist at 363, $82.47 on September 16 and $70.62 today. Fourteen percent. I don’t have a good explanation for why that one and not Liliana. It could be that Jace is the face of the set and people want the fancy version of the face. It could be that there are fewer listings and the number just hasn’t been tested yet. I genuinely don’t know.

None of this should surprise me, and it still sort of does

I wrote a whole post in July about how The Hobbit’s preorder prices were lying, and then another in August showing Smaug falling from $72 to $27 two days after release. So I know the shape of this. What’s different with Reality Fracture is the timing. With The Hobbit the big drop came at release, once boxes got cracked. Here most of it happened before almost anyone had opened a pack. Emrakul lost more than half her price in the ten days leading into prerelease weekend.

My best guess is that the spoiler season was long, and the market had time to talk itself down before the product showed up. Every set review that said “Stingcaster Mage is good but not fifty-dollars good” took a few dollars off. Some of these cards probably just had nobody willing to sell them at those early numbers, so the first price anyone saw was a guess.

Which raises the obvious question: is the drop done?

What the Hobbit shortage actually did

Here’s the part I keep going back and forth on.

Reality Fracture Play Boosters are going to be short after release weekend, because a ship full of them is stuck in the Panama Canal (I wrote the whole weird hydrology saga up in August). Collector Boosters and Commander decks are fine. The shortage lands on the packs that carry most of the base-frame mythics on that list up there.

The Hobbit had a similar squeeze in August, where delayed Play Boosters left stores short for a few weeks. And during that window prices went up, not down. Gleaming Splendor went from $34.01 to $53.25. Thorin, Mountain-king doubled from $2.59 to $5.53. I’d told people to let Thorin go and I had to write a whole post admitting it.

So my first instinct was that the same thing would happen here. Short supply in October, prices bounce, and anyone who dumped their prerelease pulls this weekend sells into the bottom.

Then I checked what those Hobbit cards are worth today, now that the delayed boxes actually showed up and got opened. Gleaming Splendor is $33.21, below where it was two days after release. Smaug the Magnificent is $20.79, down from $31.22 at the peak of the squeeze. Thorin is $3.69. The bounce was real and it lasted about three weeks, and then the boxes arrived and all of it went away.

So yeah. That’s the whole shortage effect. A few weeks of higher prices, and then everything goes right back to sliding. If you’re a seller, those few weeks are your window. If you’re a buyer, they’re exactly the weeks you shouldn’t be buying.

Hexhaven Invigorator from Reality Fracture, the most expensive card in the set heading into prerelease

The card that’s on top now

Hexhaven Invigorator is currently the most expensive regular card in Reality Fracture at $43.08. It’s a four-mana green creature that costs GGGG, and whenever it’s dealt damage it fetches that many lands onto the battlefield. It isn’t in any of my posts. I never mentioned it once during spoiler season, which is the second set in a row where the card on top of the board is one I didn’t bother writing about.

It’s also falling. Another printing of it was down about a quarter over the last eleven days according to the price tracker I checked. So it’s on top partly because it held up better than the planeswalkers did, not because it went anywhere. Omnipresence is right behind at $30.13, and I’d put roughly the same asterisk on it.

Anyway, I have a bad history with prerelease-weekend green mythics. At the Kaldheim prerelease I opened an Esika’s Chariot, decided it was a limited bomb and nothing more, and traded it that same afternoon to a kid for a foil Koma, Cosmos Serpent because Koma was the one everyone at the table wanted. The Chariot went on to be one of the best cards in Standard for a year. (It’s forty-eight cents now, which somehow doesn’t help.) I think about that trade more than I should, and it’s the main reason I don’t make any decisions about prerelease rares while I’m still in the store.

What I’d do with the pool

If you pulled one of the cards on that list and you don’t want it for a deck, I’d list it this weekend or during the first stretch of October, while the Play Booster squeeze is still holding prices up. That’s the one period in this set’s life where the numbers have a reason to stop falling for a bit. Once the canal clears and the delayed boxes hit stores, there’s no reason left.

If you did pull something you want to play with, keep it and stop checking the price. Seriously. The number will look worse in November, and it doesn’t matter if the card’s in a sleeve in your deck.

And whatever you do with them, write down what they were worth on the day you opened them. I scanned my pool into Eldwyn in the parking lot last night, and it took about five minutes. The reason isn’t that the number is right. It’s that a month from now, when Chandra is twelve dollars or thirty, I’ll have my own record of what I was actually holding and when. Chandra’s slide is the same idea at a smaller scale. I wasn’t tracking her on purpose, I’d just written her price down three times, and the dates did the rest.

If you’re thinking about selling, it’s also worth knowing which place to sell each card through, because a $10 Liliana and a $70 borderless Jace probably shouldn’t go to the same buyer.