My Esper Sentinel has been in the same deck since 2021, a Brago blink list that it has no real business being in. I bought it for about $12 the summer Modern Horizons 2 came out because it seemed like a cute tax effect, and it’s been sitting in the top-left slot of that deck box ever since, quietly turning into the most expensive card I own that I never think about. Scryfall has it at $62.32 today.
Today is also the day Wizards reprints it. Secret Lair Odds and Ends, the Esper Commander deck led by Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign, went on sale at 9 a.m. Pacific this morning for $149.99. The order window stays open for 24 hours, until 8:59 a.m. on Tuesday, and anything you order in that window is guaranteed. A limited number of decks ship right away. Every other order ships in July 2027 in North America and August 2027 in the EU and UK.
That last sentence is the one I keep rereading.
What’s actually getting reprinted
The deck is 100 cards. Twelve are foils with new art by Ricardo Cavolo, twelve are foil basics from the matching Oddlands Chaos Vault drop, and 76 are non-foil reprints with the planeswalker stamp. I went through the list card by card and priced every one against its cheapest current printing, and most of the deck is what you’d expect from a $150 precon: a Talisman, a pile of checklands, Arcane Signet, Fabled Passage, a dozen blue and white creatures under a dollar. Psychic Battle is in here, which I love, and it’s $1.06.
Here’s everything that’s worth more than a few dollars, with its cheapest non-foil copy on Scryfall right now:
| Card | In the deck as | Cheapest copy today |
|---|---|---|
| Esper Sentinel | new-art foil | $62.32 (MH2) |
| Sensei’s Divining Top | new-art foil | $35.40 (MB2) |
| Void Winnower | new-art foil | $21.33 (BFZ) |
| Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth | stamped | $17.05 (M3C) |
| Toxrill, the Corrosive | stamped | $17.22 (VOW) |
| Misleading Signpost | new-art foil | $14.04 (WOC) |
| Smuggler’s Share | stamped | $10.66 (NCC) |
| Breach the Multiverse | new-art foil | $9.69 (MOM) |
| Venser’s Journal | stamped | $9.14 (C21) |
| Virtue of Persistence | new-art foil | $7.10 (WOE) |
Add it up and the headline cards come to around $200, and Esper Sentinel alone is almost a third of that. Every preview article I read this week did the same sum and called the deck a steal. Fine. For a player who wants the deck, it probably is.
The more useful question for a collector is which of these cards the reprint actually touches, and the answer is: fewer than that table suggests. Top has been printed in Eternal Masters, Double Masters 2022, Mystery Booster 2, From the Vault, and three times in the Zeta Set this month. One more copy barely registers. Yavimaya already has a Secret Lair version from July at $18.36. Toxrill has one from 2025 at $19.99. Void Winnower has a Secret Lair version from 2022 at $30.83, which is more than the original. These cards have been through this before and came out roughly where they started.
That leaves two cards.
Esper Sentinel has never been in a Commander product
This is the one to care about. Esper Sentinel has been printed in Modern Horizons 2, the MH2 retro-frame timeshifts in 2024, and The List. That’s it. No precon, no Secret Lair, no Masters set. It’s one of the best white cards in Commander (a one-mana artifact creature that draws you a card whenever an opponent casts their first noncreature spell of the turn, unless they pay up) and all the paper copies still come from a 2021 draft set.
So the Odds and Ends copy is the first real new supply in years. It’s also one copy per deck, in foil, with Cavolo’s art, which spills out of the frame and over the text box like the rest of his cards. How much supply that turns out to be depends on how many decks Wizards sells in 24 hours, and I don’t know that number. Nobody outside Wizards does. The 24-hour window is effectively print-to-order, so the run is exactly as big as demand, and demand for a $150 deck with a $62 card in it is going to be high.
What I do know is that the price didn’t flinch when the deck leaked. When wrongly shipped copies went out in August, the finance newsletters had Esper Sentinel at around $58. It’s $62.32 now. The market has known about this reprint for over a month and priced it in as roughly nothing, and I think part of the reason is the ship date.
The other card is Misleading Signpost, which I didn’t expect. It’s a $14.04 artifact from the Wilds of Eldraine Commander decks that redirects a spell and draws you a card, and until this month that deck was its only printing (the extended-art version, number 47, is $15.68). Now it’s getting three reprints in about six weeks. There’s this new-art foil, a copy in the Foundations Commander decks on October 2, and a stamped one that Scryfall has in its November batch for Mystery Booster Commander Edition. Only the first of those is waiting until 2027. If you have a Signpost you don’t play, I’d look at it before Sentinel.
Ten months is a long time for a price to wait
So yeah. July 2027. You order the deck today, you get charged, and then you wait through Reality Fracture, the Star Trek set, whatever lands in spring, and most of summer. Wizards says a limited quantity ships right away, and those copies will hit TCGplayer within a couple of weeks, sure. But the bulk of the reprint, the actual flood of new Esper Sentinels, is going to show up all at once, next July, a year after anyone last thought about this deck.
We’ve seen this shape before. Goblin Storm went up in May at $149.99 and sold out in 34 minutes, and when I wrote about it I guessed Goblin Lackey would drop from around $28 to $15-18 by midsummer. I was wrong. The Urza’s Saga Lackey is $26.65 today, basically where it started. The new Goblin Storm copy settled at $11.30, a separate lower price sitting next to the old one instead of dragging it down. Ruby Medallion, which I thought would fall to $7-8, went up, from $11.74 to $14.38. And that deck shipped straight away, so every copy hit the market inside a few weeks.
I’ve gone back and forth on what the delay means. My first instinct was that it’s good news if you hold these cards: the reprint arrives slowly, there’s no single day where everyone lists their deck singles at once, and the price has almost a year to find its feet. Then I thought about it from the other side. Anyone who wanted an Esper Sentinel and ordered this deck today has just left the singles market for ten months. Those people aren’t buying MH2 copies next spring, because they already paid for one. The buyers go away now; the new cards arrive in July. That doesn’t sound good for holders at all. It sounds like a slow leak followed by a second hit.
I honestly don’t know which way it breaks. I lean toward the slow leak mattering more than the flood, because the second hit lands on a card that already had a year to settle.
There’s a thing I do every time a Secret Lair deck drops, which is look at what I own in the list and decide nothing. I did it with Goblin Storm and decided nothing, and I did it with the Miku deck and also decided nothing. This time I actually opened the collection and filtered for the deck’s cards, and it turned out I own two Tops, not one. The second one was in a trade binder I set up in 2022 and stopped carrying to the store. I don’t remember trading for it. I’m going to assume it was the time I traded a friend’s kid a foil Mystical Archive Swords to Plowshares and some chaff for “whatever’s in that pocket” at a prerelease and walked away without looking. Which I think happened at Strixhaven, the first one. Not proud of it.
What I’d do with the cards you already have
For most of the deck, nothing. Top, Toxrill, Yavimaya and Void Winnower have all eaten reprints this size before, and the stamped reprints in these Secret Lair decks tend to sell at about the same price as the originals anyway (I went through that in the planeswalker stamp post yesterday).
The Esper Sentinel in the Brago deck I’m going to leave where it is, because it’s in a deck I actually play and because the price has had a month of leak news to fall and hasn’t. If it were sitting in a binder, I’d be tempted to sell it before next summer, when the July copies land. That’s the one move this deck makes worth thinking about. A $62 card with a single printing that people play in a lot of decks is the classic reprint-trap shape, and the only unusual thing here is that the trap has a calendar date on it.
If you ordered the deck today and want to track what’s in it, the new foils are on Scryfall already under SLD 2121 through 2132, with no prices yet. The 76 stamped cards will show up under The List’s PLST code whenever Scryfall adds them. I’d log the deck when it arrives and not before, since a 2027 delivery date is a long time to have a phantom $200 in your collection total.