The Strixhaven Commander precon I wanted to buy was already gone when I walked into my LGS on Saturday morning. Five days after release. I’d seen the line on the original buyer’s guide post (Silverquill is the value play, expect it to sell out first) and felt clever enough about that read that I forgot to actually act on it.
The kid behind the counter said they’d had three Silverquill on Friday morning and they were gone by closing. Lorehold Spirit went the same way. Witherbloom and Prismari were “ask me Tuesday.” The only deck still on the shelf was Quandrix Unlimited, which is the deck Polygon already published a piece on titled “Most MTG Strixhaven decks are sold out, but Quandrix Unlimited is still in stock,” because of course they did.
So that’s where we are. Set out April 24, today is April 29, and the supply picture for the five Secrets of Strixhaven Commander decks is already starkly uneven. SCG flagged production issues in early April that were going to impact availability in North America. They weren’t kidding.
The current shelf situation, deck by deck
I called five LGSes within driving distance and checked TCGPlayer, Amazon, Card Kingdom, and a few of the discounted online retailers I’d been watching. Rough picture as of this morning.
Lorehold Spirit and Silverquill Influence are the hardest to find. Lorehold is genuinely surprising to me. I would have bet on Silverquill going first because of Land Tax, and on Lorehold being the slow-mover because of the planeswalker commander gimmick. Apparently I underestimated how many Boros graveyard players exist. Both decks are listed on TCGPlayer in the $80-95 range from third-party sellers, which is a $30-45 markup over the $49.99 MSRP.
Witherbloom Pestilence and Prismari Artistry are technically findable but you’re paying. Most LGS preorder lists are closed. Online, the reliable retailers are sold out or shipping with delays. TCGPlayer prices on these are sitting around $60-70 for a sealed copy from a marketplace seller.
Quandrix Unlimited is the one still sitting at MSRP on Amazon. It’s the deck Polygon went out of their way to recommend, partly because they had to write something nice about the only one anyone could buy. There’s a real argument for it on its own merits. Zimone, Infinite Analyst is a much more interactive engine than Rootha, and the deck has Unbound Flourishing ($4.54 in the new printing, though older copies still hold around $12), Three Visits at $5.25, and Ozolith, the Shattered Spire at $5.19 baked in. Not a bad pile.
But it’s also the one nobody’s panic-buying, which tells you something about what the market thinks of it.
What scarcity actually does to precon value
Here’s where I want to think about this differently than the original buyer’s guide did. That post was written when all five decks were preorderable, and the central question was reprint math: which deck has the most paper value packed into $49.99. By that math, Silverquill won and Quandrix lost.
Five days after release, the picture has reorganized itself. The reprints inside the precons aren’t worth the same as they were a week ago, because the precons themselves are flooding the market with new copies of those reprints. Land Tax is the cleanest example. Older printings (Battlebond, Commander Masters, Wilds of Eldraine Enchanting Tales) are still holding around $25-31. The brand-new Secrets of Strixhaven Commander printing is sitting at $13.63. Same card, different frame, half the price.
Normal reprint behavior. But it changes what you’re actually buying when you spend $49.99 on Silverquill Influence today. You’re not getting a $24 Land Tax inside a precon anymore. You’re getting a $13 Land Tax inside a precon. The reprint math still works in Silverquill’s favor (the rest of the reprint pile is real), but the headline number got smaller.
So is chasing the sold-out ones worth it
If you wanted Silverquill at MSRP and missed the window, you’re now looking at $80-90 from a marketplace seller. The reprint value of the deck at current single prices, even with the new SOC Land Tax printing factored in, is still in the $55-65 range depending on which singles you’d actually use. Buying the sealed deck at $90 means paying a small premium over the singles to get the precon experience: the precon-exclusive printings of Killian, Decisive Mentor at $2.80, the foil tokens, the deckbox, the satisfaction of opening a sealed product.
Whether that’s worth $30-40 over MSRP depends entirely on whether you wanted the deck for the deck. If you just wanted Land Tax, buy the single. If you wanted the deckbuilding experience and the precon-exclusive legendaries, the math gets fuzzier.
I went back and forth on this all weekend, honestly. There’s a version of me that buys Silverquill secondhand at $85 just to have it. There’s another version that buys Quandrix at MSRP from Amazon, breaks it for Unbound Flourishing and Three Visits to slot into my existing Simic deck, and calls it a draw. The second version is making the better financial decision and the first version is the one who actually likes opening Magic products. I don’t know which one I’ll be when I open my browser tonight.
A tangent about precon shortages in general
This isn’t the first time a Commander precon has gone scarce in the first week. Tarkir: Dragonstorm had its Mardu deck go quiet for about ten days before Wizards quietly authorized a second wave through retailer channels. The original 2013 Commander cycle had the Mind Seize deck (the True-Name Nemesis one) go sideways into collector chaos because of one card and it never really came back to MSRP for casual buyers. The pattern repeats and the shortages are usually transient. I bought a copy of the 2018 Subjective Reality precon for $55 the week it released and watched it sit at $45 for the next two years.
So a five-day shortage isn’t necessarily a Buy Now situation. Wizards may quietly authorize a second printing wave in three months. The set already had production issues, which makes a follow-up wave at least plausible.
But sometimes the shortage holds. Hard to call from inside the first week.
What this means for tracking your collection
The piece of this that’s actually useful for the collector side of things: when a new product floods the market with reprints, your existing copies of those cards may shift in value, and your decisions about whether to buy or sell singles change with them. If you’ve got three older Land Tax printings in a binder, a Battlebond foil, an Enchanting Tales borderless, a Fourth Edition oldframe, those are three separate cards in a finance sense, and the new SOC printing affects them differently. The Fourth Edition is somewhat insulated by collectibility. The Battlebond foil is more exposed. The Enchanting Tales borderless is somewhere in the middle.
Hard to track if you’ve got a physical binder and a vague sense of “yeah I think this is around $20.” When I scan my Land Tax copies into my collection list, the printing matters more than the card name does. Three printings, three different price floors, all moving independently.
Practical takeaways for the rest of this week
If you wanted Lorehold or Silverquill: probably worth waiting two weeks rather than paying $30 over MSRP. Wizards’ historical behavior on production-issue precons has favored a follow-up wave, and a quiet restock in late May would not be surprising.
If you wanted Witherbloom or Prismari: check your LGS midweek. The first wave of preorder pickups settles by Monday or Tuesday and unsold preorders sometimes get returned to the shelf. Witherbloom in particular is the deck I’d recommend to any new Commander player anyway, and Dina, Essence Brewer at $6.12 is a fun, interactive commander that does what it says on the box.
If you wanted Quandrix: just buy it. It’s the only one not under supply pressure, the singles list is real, and Zimone is a more cohesive engine than I gave her credit for in the original post. I’m walking back my Quandrix dismissal a little. Zimone-as-engine actually does what it says on the tin once you have a couple of X-spells in play.
So: one to wait on, one to buy, three to monitor. About what you’d expect for the first week of a precon cycle with production issues, except this time the deck I’d already named the value play is the one that vanished first. If you want the wider context on the rest of the Strixhaven product lineup (boxes, bundles, Codex), the product guide post still holds up; the supply story has just gotten more complicated than I thought it would by week one.