The flavor text on the new Winter Orb reads “Amazing how you can make such a dense little ball out of thirty-plus years of other people’s frustration.” Someone at Wizards wrote that on purpose, printed it in traditional foil, and charges $39.99 for it alongside four friends. I respect it. I also wanted to know whether the saltiest MTG cards are actually worth anything, or whether being hated is its own reward.
The timing is good for it. EDHREC’s annual Salt Score polls open Monday, October 5, and run through Friday the 9th. That Friday is also the Magic panel at New York Comic Con, where the booth is selling a Secret Lair called Roadshow: So Salty. Five foil reprints by Skinner: Winter Orb, Narset, Expropriate, Worst Fears, and Scrawling Crawler. So during one week the community votes on which cards it hates most, and Wizards sells a bundle of cards people hate.
The salt list, priced
Here’s EDHREC’s current top ten, from last year’s poll, with the cheapest reasonable printing I could find on Scryfall today. I’ve added EDHREC’s deck counts too, because they turned out to be the whole story.
| # | Card | Salt | EDHREC decks | Price (printing) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Stasis | 3.06 | 18,076 | $11.01 (Revised) |
| 2 | Winter Orb | 2.96 | 48,338 | $22.63 (Eternal Masters) |
| 3 | Vivi Ornitier | 2.81 | 99,445 | $34.43 (Final Fantasy) |
| 4 | Tergrid, God of Fright | 2.80 | 89,815 | $19.20 (Kaldheim) |
| 5 | Rhystic Study | 2.73 | 1,109,886 | $62.93 (Prophecy) |
| 6 | The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale | 2.68 | 14,930 | $3,069.50 (Legends) |
| 7 | Armageddon | 2.67 | 40,453 | $13.21 (Masters 25) |
| 8 | Static Orb | 2.62 | 26,933 | $10.56 (Tempest) |
| 9 | Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger | 2.61 | 92,198 | $16.51 (New Phyrexia) |
| 10 | Thassa’s Oracle | 2.59 | 281,501 | $22.03 (Theros Beyond Death) |
Eight of the ten sit between about $10 and $35. That’s a weirdly tight band for cards printed across 32 years. And the two that break out of it break out for reasons that have nothing to do with salt.
Rhystic Study is in over a million decks on EDHREC. A million. It’s the second most common way to make the table groan, and it’s also a blue staple everyone runs because it draws so many cards, so of course it holds $60 across basically every printing, including the Jumpstart ones nobody thinks of as fancy. The salt comes along for the ride. Tabernacle is a different animal entirely. It’s on the Reserved List, it’s from Legends, and there will never be another one. It’d be a three-thousand-dollar card if everyone loved it.
Look at Stasis next to it, though. Number one on the list, saltiest card in Commander for years running, and a Revised copy is eleven bucks. Its Beta printing is around $490, but that’s Beta being Beta. Being hated by everyone isn’t a price driver. Being played is, and nobody plays Stasis. Eighteen thousand decks is nothing.
I was going to argue salt actually pushes prices down, since people refuse to play the stuff in casual pods and that kills demand. I don’t think the data supports that either? Armageddon has been the Commander villain since before Commander had a name, and it’s holding $13 across Masters 25, Revised, Fourth, Fifth, even Portal (Portal Second Age is $39, which I can’t explain and won’t try). If salt were suppressing it you’d expect it to be bulk by now. It just sits there at thirteen bucks, unbothered.
So yeah. My actual relationship with Armageddon. Kitchen table, 2002-ish, my friend Danny’s basement, I cast it on turn four with a Serra Angel already out, felt like a genius, and nobody wanted to play with me for the rest of the night. Like, actually packed up. I traded my Revised copy away the next week for a Shivan Dragon because I felt bad about it, which, financially, um. Not my best trade. Anyway.
So Salty already happened once
Here’s the bit that most of the NYCC coverage I’ve read skips. Roadshow: So Salty isn’t a new drop. It debuted at PAX East on March 26, 2026, with the same five cards, the same Skinner art, and the same collector numbers (SLD 2396 through 2400). The mtg.wiki page notes it rolled out to MagicCons and other conventions after that. NYCC is another stop on the tour.
Which is great news for anyone who owns the originals, because the reprint damage, whatever it was, has already been done. We get to look at it after the fact instead of guessing.
Back in March, coverage of the PAX reveal put the five cards’ cheapest printings at about $37 combined and called the $39.99 foil price “an easy $7 profit.” Here’s where the So Salty foils themselves sit now, six months on:
| Card | So Salty foil | Original printing |
|---|---|---|
| Scrawling Crawler | $30.54 | $6.88 (Foundations) |
| Expropriate | $13.27 | $15.71 (Conspiracy: Take the Crown) |
| Winter Orb | $14.90 | $22.63 (Eternal Masters) |
| Narset, Parter of Veils | $5.22 | $1.21 (War of the Spark) |
| Worst Fears | $4.98 | $2.35 (Journey into Nyx) |
That’s $68.91 in singles for a $39.99 box. MTGStocks has sealed copies at around $65 market, with an all-time high of $200, presumably from the stretch when the only copies in the world were coming out of PAX. I’d bet the NYCC run pushes sealed down a bit more, since every convention stop adds supply.
Scrawling Crawler being the most valuable card in a box built around Winter Orb is very funny to me. It’s the newest card in the drop and the least salty by reputation, and the So Salty foil goes for more than four times the Foundations original. Part of that is Skinner’s art, I’d guess. Part of it is that Crawler just got reprinted again this week in the Foundations Commander decks (that copy is $3.82), which makes the cheap version cheaper and the pretty version relatively scarcer. I’m honestly not sure how much of the gap is each.
Expropriate and Winter Orb are the two that matter if you own the older printings, and both originals stayed above the Secret Lair foil. Eternal Masters Winter Orb is $22.63 against $14.90 for the shiny new one. And this isn’t even Winter Orb’s first Secret Lair. There was one in April 2024 that’s now $11.80 non-foil, so this is the third modern printing in two and a half years, and the 2016 copy shrugged off all of them. That fits what I’ve seen across other Secret Lair reprints: a Secret Lair foil sells to people who want that art, and the normal copy keeps selling to people who want to sleeve it up and actually cast it.
The War of the Spark Narset is $1.21, so there was nothing to protect there. Same for Worst Fears, which is in this drop for vibes, I think. It’s a 2014 sorcery that’s mostly been a Mystery Booster filler card since.
What I’d actually do this week
If you own originals of any of the So Salty cards, do nothing. Seriously, the March run was the test, and the originals passed. Don’t panic-sell an Eternal Masters Orb because a convention booth has foils.
If you’re heading to NYCC, the box is still worth buying at $39.99 if you’d keep the cards. As a flip it’s a lot thinner than it was in March, because you’re paying with your Saturday and competing against everyone who bought at PAX and every convention stop since. Scrawling Crawler alone covers most of the cost, but that’s one card’s market doing all the work, and it’s a card that just got another cheap reprint.
And when the 2026 salt results come out, I wouldn’t treat the list as a buy signal. The cards that will climb the salt rankings this year are going to be whatever the Universes Beyond legends are doing to people’s pods (last year’s new-card top five was Vivi, Storm, Deadpool, Ugin, and the Soul Stone), and how those cards are priced will come down to how many decks they end up in. The deck count on EDHREC is the number I’d look at before buying anything off that list.
I’d still like someone to explain the Portal Second Age Armageddon to me, though.