There’s a battered Ultra Pro 4-pocket binder on my shelf that I hadn’t opened in years. It’s just goblins. Every Goblin Lackey, Goblin Recruiter, Sharpshooter, and Matron I ever traded into, plus a few foils I picked up around the time Modern Horizons 2 dropped because someone at my LGS owed me $25.
Tuesday I pulled it down.
Wizards announced a new Secret Lair Commander deck on May 6: Goblin Storm, helmed by Zada, Hedron Grinder, releasing May 18. The full decklist hit before the announcement banner cooled. After I read through it I wanted to know what was about to happen to the cards in that binder.
The short version: less than I expected. The reprint sheet looks scary at a glance. Most of it isn’t.
The reprint that actually matters
Goblin Lackey is the only card in this deck that genuinely shifts the goblin tribal market. Original Urza’s Saga copies sit at around $28. The various Secret Lair printings from 2019 and 2023 hover anywhere from $22 to $37 depending on art. None of the printings are cheap.
When Goblin Storm hits May 18, that floor drops. How far depends on print volume. Secret Lair preorders are open for a multi-week window, so unlike a fixed-print Masters set the supply is technically uncapped. But the deck isn’t a bonus sheet either. People who buy one are probably playing the deck, not splitting it for singles. So the singles market gets a slug of new copies, not a flood.
If I had to bet, Lackey settles at $15-18 by midsummer. Players will still pay it. Bulk pricing is not on the table.
The other reprint that nudges the market is Ruby Medallion, currently around $11.74 at Modern Horizons 3. A Secret Lair printing pulls that closer to $7-8. Useful for any mono-red Commander, very useful for storm decks specifically, and a reprint here is the first in over a year.
Then it gets boring fast.
Why most of the deck doesn’t matter
Skirk Prospector is in this deck. Skirk Prospector is also $0.21 in Dominaria Remastered. A Secret Lair reprint of a 21-cent card is invisible. Same with Goblin Matron at $0.30. Same with Mana Geyser at $0.12, Goblin Bushwhacker at bulk, Krenko at around $2-5 depending on printing.
Past in Flames sits in the $1.69-2.06 range. The reprint shaves a quarter, maybe.
Skullclamp’s been reprinted, what, six times in the last three years? Every Commander product. It’s the “yes, again” card at this point. Sol Ring’s the same story, you know how it goes.
The deck has 26 creatures and most of them are already accessible. Wizards wants Goblin Storm to be a functional precon you can play out of the box. The new cards in the deck (the ones not yet on Scryfall as I write this) include a Searslicer Goblin and a Spreading Insurrection that look intriguing on first read. The Lackey reprint is the headline; the rest is filler that someone running the precon would want anyway.
The cards Wizards didn’t reprint
The interesting binder check goes the other direction. What’s missing from Goblin Storm, and what hasn’t been reprinted in a hot minute, is where the actual speculation lives.
Goblin Sharpshooter is at $27.50 from Commander 2013. It’s not in this deck. It hasn’t seen a meaningful reprint since around 2018. The card is jank, I know, but it’s a tribal staple in any list that wants to assassinate one creature per turn for free. If Goblin Storm attracts new players to the tribe, Sharpshooter is one of the cards they’re going to hunt for.
Goblin Welder at $18.94 is the same story. Welder isn’t strictly tribal, more of a Vintage/Legacy artifact-toolbox card, but it’s a goblin and it’s not in this preconstructed. Last meaningful reprint was Commander Anthology Volume II, which was 2018.
Muxus, Goblin Grandee at $13.68 from Jumpstart. Moggcatcher at $13.42 (foils nearly $99) from Nemesis. Goblin Engineer at $9.35 from Modern Horizons.
I went through the deck twice expecting one of these to be in it. Surely Muxus, right? It’s a fairly recent printing, it does goblin things, it’s expensive, exactly the kind of card a “Storm” goblin precon should hand out. But no. Not in there.
So that’s the speculation list. Not because Wizards is signaling a future reprint for any of them (that’s a guess at best), but because new tribal players from this deck will go shopping and these are the cards still on the wall.
I should temper that. Goblin Sharpshooter’s price hasn’t moved in two years. Welder’s been hovering around $18 since the last small reprint. These cards are stable, not trending. A precon doesn’t generally cause spikes by itself; it causes them only if the deck attracts a noticeable number of new tribal builders. And Zada-led storm decks aren’t exactly the wide-appeal commander that pulls casual players in. The buy-in for a fast goblin storm list is non-trivial and the pilot has to know what they’re doing.
So maybe nothing happens. Maybe Sharpshooter stays at $27.50 for another six months and Welder stays at $18 and the Goblin Lackey reprint just clears out one of the more annoying chase cards in goblin tribal without disturbing anything else. That would be a clean outcome and entirely plausible.
On Zada being a $0.12 commander
A footnote that I think is funny. Zada, Hedron Grinder, the headlining commander of an entire Secret Lair Commander deck, is currently $0.12 at Commander Masters. Twelve cents. The deck’s namesake is bulk. I love this. It says something nice about how Wizards picks Secret Lair commanders. They pick on flavor and gameplay angle rather than which legend is currently spiking. The whole “make red a real combo color” pitch around Zada has been waiting for a precon for years and the card itself doesn’t care that it’s worth less than the toploader you’d put it in.
Compare to the Lutri unban, where the card itself was the story. Here the commander is, in price terms, almost incidental.
What I’m actually doing with my binder
Pricing the binder took me about half an hour the morning after the announcement. I have enough goblin foils and old printings that doing it by hand was going to mean three different tabs open and a lot of right-clicking. So I scanned the binder and ran the totals through the collection-pricing workflow I use whenever a reprint announcement makes me anxious.
Total expected depreciation from this Secret Lair on my specific binder: about $18, almost all of it from the Goblin Lackeys and one Ruby Medallion. Not a catastrophe.
I pulled two things into the rare binder afterward. The Goblin Sharpshooter from C13 and the Moggcatcher I forgot I had. I don’t think they’re spiking (see above), but if anything happens I want them somewhere I’ll notice.
I sleeved a Goblin Welder, too. That was a memory thing, not a finance thing. I once gave one to a guy at a Premodern night because he needed it for his deck and I told him I didn’t expect it back, and three weeks later he turned up with two. Anyway, it’s sleeved now.
Pre-order or wait
Goblin Storm is $30 at Wizards’ direct price. Singles value if you split it sits somewhere around $45-55 depending on where Lackey and Ruby Medallion settle, plus the new cards which won’t have prices until they hit the market. For someone who actually wants to play Zada storm in Commander, that’s a deal. The deck is functional and the new spells include at least three that look interesting at a casual glance.
For someone splitting it for singles: maybe. The math is slightly above water but Secret Lair shipping windows are slow and the Lackey price is actively in motion. By the time the deck is in hand and listed, the market may already have absorbed most of the upside.
I pre-ordered one. The reasons were that I had a goblin binder, an empty spot on the Commander shelf, and Zada is the kind of weird, on-brand commander I’d never brew myself but happily play if someone handed me a list. The singles math wasn’t really part of it.
That binder’s open on my desk right now. I should put it away.