I bought exactly one Secrets of Strixhaven precon on release day, Silverquill Influence, and the only reason was Land Tax. I used to own a real Legends-era copy of that card, and I traded it away sometime around 2011 for a foil Kird Ape because I was drafting a lot of Legacy Zoo back then and Land Tax was just sitting in a box doing nothing useful. I have thought about that trade more times than is healthy for a grown adult.
So getting a Land Tax back into my hands for $49.99, buried in a five-color enchantment pile, felt like a little bit of closure. Four months on seems like a fair point to check whether that closure was worth anything in dollars, since apparently that’s a thing I need to know now.
This is the same exercise I ran on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Lorwyn Eclipsed a while back. Let the preorder hype drain out, let the reprints settle into whatever they’re actually going to be, then go look at the numbers.
The new cards mostly cratered, and I did not see that coming
On release day I wrote about scanning a booster box and made a point of saying the mythics in this set were priced reasonably for once, which is rare. Emeritus of Woe was sitting around $25. Witherbloom, the Balancer and the plain foil Emeritus of Ideation were both in the $17 to $23 range. That felt like good news at the time. Reasonable release-day pricing usually means a set has some staying power.
It didn’t hold. Emeritus of Woe is $11.25 now. Witherbloom, the Balancer is down to $3.66. The plain Emeritus of Ideation, not the serialized one, has settled at $5.59. Ral Zarek, Guest Lecturer never even got out of the gate and sits at $1.86. Improvisation Capstone is the one exception I can point to, still at $11.11, basically flat since the day I opened one and wrote a whole aside about how much I liked it.
And then there’s Erode, technically the most expensive plain rare in the set at $6.48, which is almost exactly what it was in April. Nobody talks about Erode. It’s not exciting, nobody’s building around it, it’s just a solid removal spell that happened to land at a print rarity that kept its price stable by pure accident of supply. That’s most of what “held value” means in a set like this. Not hype. Just not getting flooded.
Meanwhile the Mystical Archive bonus sheet, the same 63-card reprint gimmick this set reused from the 2021 original, quietly turned into the actual value of the product. Force of Will is $61.40. Vampiric Tutor is $54.66. Jeska’s Will is $45.68. Cyclonic Rift is $32.49. Any one of those outprices every new mythic in the base set on its own. I went deeper on how this new Archive interacts with the 2021 one if you’re curious which old copies took a hit from the reprint and which didn’t, but the short version here is that the bonus sheet is where the money always was, and I somehow still didn’t expect it to run away from the new cards this hard.
So yeah. If you sorted your box on release day into “exciting new mythic” versus “boring old reprint slot,” this set spent four months proving that instinct backwards. I want to say I saw it coming, because it’s basically the same pattern the original Strixhaven Mystical Archive ran in 2021. But I actually said out loud, in April, that the reasonable mythic pricing might mean this set held up differently. It didn’t. Maybe I don’t have this pattern as figured out as I think I do.
Then there’s the one number in this whole set that went the other way entirely. The serialized Emeritus of Ideation, numbered to 500, foil only, flips into Ancestral Recall on the back. On release day I wrote I wouldn’t quote the eBay asking prices because they’d be wrong by the time anyone read the post. Four months later it’s sitting at $2,900. Up, not down, which is close to the opposite of what happens to most chase cards once the hype clears. Fixed supply of 500 forever, and demand for a numbered Ancestral Recall variant only has one direction to go. I wrote a longer piece on why serialized cards behave like a different asset class if you want the mechanism, but this is about as clean an example as you’ll find.
The precons all crashed, just not the ones anyone predicted
Here’s the part that actually surprised me more than the base set.
At release, the five Secrets of Strixhaven Commander decks were getting priced out by finance sites at wildly different totals: Silverquill Influence around $214 in card value, Lorehold Spirit around $189, Prismari Artistry around $165, Quandrix Unlimited around $150, and Witherbloom Pestilence trailing everyone at $134, openly called the runt of the cycle.
Four months later, current values from CommanderEV: Silverquill $91.47, Prismari $80.44, Witherbloom $73.18, Quandrix $71.70, Lorehold $70.11.
Every deck lost more than half its estimated value. That part’s not surprising, reprints into a $49.99 precon always eat their own value, that’s the whole mechanic. What’s interesting is the reshuffle. Lorehold Spirit went from the second-most-valuable deck in the cycle to dead last. Witherbloom Pestilence, the deck nobody wanted, is now sitting third, ahead of both Lorehold and Quandrix.
One site flagged this exact risk back in April, actually, calling Lorehold Spirit “the most likely deck to see post-release corrections” because its value leaned so hard on first-time reprints. Emeria, the Sky Ruin was the headline at around $23. It’s $5.95 now. Bitterthorn, Nissa’s Animus was around $21. It’s $5.81 now. Those are roughly 74% and 72% drops on the two cards that were supposedly carrying the whole deck, and the prediction that flagged them nailed it almost exactly.
Compare that to Land Tax, my whole reason for buying in. It went from about $28 at release to roughly $17 now, a real drop but nowhere near Emeria’s collapse, because Land Tax had already been reprinted a handful of times before this. There wasn’t a scarce price floor left to blow up. Toxic Deluge in the Witherbloom deck did something similar, sliding from about $7.30 to $5.30, a mild 27% instead of a cliff, because a board wipe with steady evergreen demand just doesn’t behave like a card getting its first reprint ever.
That’s the actual lesson buried in all five decks, if there is one. The size of the crash tracks pretty cleanly with how many times a card had already been printed before it landed in this precon. First-time reprints fall off a cliff. Cards with an existing print history barely flinch. I went and looked up my own trade history out of morbid curiosity, wondering if that same 2011-era Kird Ape trade partner ever ended up with a Strixhaven Land Tax of their own, which is a pointless thing to wonder about and I have no way of finding out, but there I was, searching a stranger’s old trade posts on a Tuesday night instead of doing literally anything productive.
What’s actually worth sleeving out of all this
If you’ve got Secrets of Strixhaven product sitting around, the base set singles worth separating from bulk are basically Emeritus of Woe, Improvisation Capstone, and Erode, and none of them are going to make you rich. The Mystical Archive cards are where the real money in a booster box lives, full stop, and if you cracked packs back in April without paying close attention to that slot specifically, it’s worth going back through your pile.
For the precons, I ranked all five for playability back at release, and that ranking still mostly holds up as a “which is fun” guide. It just doesn’t match the value ranking anymore, and I don’t think it’s going to converge back. If you’re holding an unopened Lorehold Spirit hoping it recovers toward its old $189 estimate, I wouldn’t bet on it. First-reprint crashes don’t usually crawl back once the supply’s out there.
I still haven’t decided whether to crack my last unopened Witherbloom deck or just leave it sealed at this point. Sealed old precons sometimes hold a premium of their own separate from the singles inside, which is a whole different can of worms I’m not getting into today. For now it’s sitting on the shelf next to the other four, and every few months I pull the app back up, rescan the box, and see what moved. Four months from now I’d guess Lorehold’s still last and the Mystical Archive money still isn’t going anywhere. But I said that about the mythics too, so who knows.