My Reality Fracture prerelease pool is sitting in a sandwich bag on my desk with a sticky note on it that says “sell?”, with a question mark, which I wrote last Saturday night and have been staring at ever since. Six rares, two mythics, a handful of uncommons I might put in a Commander deck someday. The question on the sticky note is the one everybody with a fresh pile asks around release week: when do you sell cards from a new MTG set, now or after things settle?
I went back through every release-week price I’ve written down this year and checked it against today. For cards you aren’t going to play, the answer is now. Release week beat every later date I could find, and it wasn’t close for most of them.
What holding actually cost
This is the raw list. First number is what the card cost within a few days of its set’s release, second is what it costs this morning.
The Hobbit, released August 14, prices from August 16:
- Smaug the Magnificent: $27.24, now $18.31
- Bilbo, Thief in the Night: $18.67, now $7.64
- The Arkenstone // Seek the Heart: $11.45, now $8.37
- Gleaming Splendor: $34.01, now $32.93
Marvel Super Heroes, released June 26, prices from June 29:
- The Mind Stone: around $64, now $42.15
- The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: around $7, now $2.68
- Monica Rambeau: $1.68, now $1.44
- Captain America, Super-Soldier: around $2.50, now $3.07
Eight cards, and one of them is higher today. It’s Captain America. He gained about fifty cents, which after shipping and fees is a rounding error that costs you money to collect.
Bilbo is the one I keep looking at. If you pulled him at a Hobbit prerelease and listed him that first weekend, you got something close to nineteen dollars. If you did the reasonable-sounding thing and waited for the market to “settle,” you’re now holding a seven dollar card. The market settled. It settled on you.
Lorwyn is the case against me, sort of
Lorwyn Eclipsed is the set that made me doubt all of this, because its good cards went back up. Chronicle of Victory was around $30 in release week in January, bottomed out near $19.05 in April, and it’s $21.99 today. Hexing Squelcher did the same climb out of its April low. I wrote a whole post about how singles bottom out around week twelve and then rise, and that’s true, and I stand by it.
But look at the actual numbers again. Chronicle climbed back for five months and it’s still about eight dollars short of where it opened. The recovery is real if you’re a buyer, since you’re buying at nineteen and watching it tick up. If you’re a seller who waited, the recovery is just the market slowly giving back part of what it took from you. I don’t have a single card this year worth more than a few dollars that dipped after release and then climbed all the way back past its release-week number. Maybe one exists. I haven’t found it.
The exception I’d actually take seriously is Standard. A card that becomes a real Standard staple can outrun its release price, and I know this because I’ve been on the wrong side of it. I sold a Dominaria United Sheoldred, the Apocalypse the Monday after release for about sixty bucks, felt extremely clever for roughly two weeks, and then watched her go past a hundred. So if something in your pool starts showing up in every Standard list by week three, maybe don’t sell that one. Although, honestly, how would you know by this Friday? You wouldn’t. I didn’t.
Reality Fracture already did half its falling
Reality Fracture is weird, and it’s the one place I’m genuinely unsure about this whole argument. Most sets do their big drop in release week, once boxes get opened. This set did a lot of its dropping before anybody opened anything. I wrote last week that Reality Fracture prices fell by half before the set came out, and that was only four days ago.
Four days. Here’s where those cards are this morning:
- Stingcaster Mage: $27.19 on September 26, $13.00 now
- Chandra, Chill of Compliance: $19.53, now $9.61
- Hexhaven Invigorator: $43.08, now $33.97
- Emrakul, the Exigent Doom: $39.36, now $32.63
- The Theorist, Jace Beleren: $29.32, now $32.70
So I was ready to argue that maybe the preorder crash ate the usual release-week drop, and the prices you see this week are closer to a floor than normal. The Theorist going up would back that up. Then Stingcaster Mage and Chandra both halved again in the time it took me to finish two blog posts, and that argument sort of fell apart on me. I think the drop is still happening. I think it’s just happening earlier and in two waves instead of one.
The set doesn’t even officially release until Friday, October 2.
Okay, a tangent, because Stingcaster reminded me. At the Throne of Eldraine prerelease I opened Oko, Thief of Crowns, put him in my sealed deck, and won exactly one game with him. A guy at the next table offered me forty dollars cash for it right there, between rounds, and I said no because I “wanted to see what he’d do.” What he did was get banned in basically every format he was legal in. I never sold it. It’s in a binder, worth about $5.44. It’s fine.
The shortage wrinkle
There’s one situation where I’d hold on purpose for a few weeks, and it’s already on the calendar.
When The Hobbit’s Play Boosters showed up late in August, stores were short on product for a few weeks and prices went up instead of down. Gleaming Splendor went from $34.01 to $53.25 during that squeeze. Then the delayed boxes arrived, got opened, and it slid right back to where it started. The window lasted about three weeks. If you’d sold into the middle of it, you’d have done better than release week by almost twenty dollars on one card.
Reality Fracture has the same setup. Some of its Play Boosters are stuck on ships thanks to the Panama Canal drought, and October is going to be short in some regions. I called the last shortage wrong, so, grain of salt. But if the pattern repeats, there might be a stretch in mid-October where the cards that actually get played tick up for a bit before the late boxes land.
The catch is that I can’t tell you which cards. Gleaming Splendor spiked because people were playing it. Bilbo didn’t spike during the Hobbit shortage because nobody was. If your pull is a flashy mythic that nobody’s actually putting in decks, the shortage probably won’t save it.
What I’m actually doing with the sandwich bag
So yeah. Here’s the plan, roughly. Anything I’d genuinely put in a deck in the next few months, I keep, because if I sell it now I’m just rebuying it in December, and even if the price is lower by then I’ve paid fees twice. Anything I have no plan for goes up this weekend. Not next weekend, this one. And then there’s the two or three rares worth like a dollar fifty each, which, I don’t know, it’s not worth the stamp. They go in the trade binder and I stop thinking about them.
For the pile I’m listing, the rough cutoff I use is somewhere around five dollars. Below that, the fees and shipping eat so much of the sale that it barely matters when you sell. Above it, a week of delay can cost more than the fees. Where you sell matters too, and a buylist this week will pay a lot less than a TCGplayer listing, but a buylist this week might still beat a TCGplayer listing in November for the cards that are sliding hardest.
The other thing I’m doing, which took about four minutes, is scanning the whole pool into Eldwyn before any of it leaves the house. Partly so I know what I sold. Mostly so that in December I have the release-week price sitting next to whatever it’s worth then, because the only reason I could write any of this is that I happened to write numbers down in August and June. If I’d been doing it on purpose I’d have a lot more than eight cards.
Anyway, the sticky note still says “sell?” I should probably take the question mark off.