Hello everyone and welcome back to my daily series of financial articles about Born of the Gods. Only a couple of new cards were spoiled overnight, but I’m going to add a new feature to the end of the article: set value! This is a tool to figure out the running total on the value of cards in this set. I’ll explain more below.
How I review:
Starting Price: The first price we assign to this card as a preorder.
Current Price: The current price of the card by the time this article goes live.
Future Price – Short Term: The price I believe this card will be at before Magic Online redemptions go live for Born of the Gods.
Future Price – Medium Term: The price I believe this card will be at by the time the next set (Journey into Nyx) comes out.
Future Price – Long Term: The price I believe this card will be at a year from now when the next winter set is released (name unknown still).
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Starting Price: $4 Current Price: $3 Future Price (Short Term): $2 Future Price (Medium Term): $2 Future Price (Long Term): $3 |
Champion of Stray Souls costs too much (both to play and to activate) to see real tournament play. However, this is the type of Commander card that will be a staple in any black deck that runs creatures. I don’t think Champion of Stray Souls will rise in value while Theros block is in print because the supply will be there to meet demand. I think this is the type of card that three or four years down the road will have a much higher value if the growth of the game continues unabated. I also think there’s plenty of time between now and then to buy into this card if you’re looking at a long-term investment. Now’s not that time.
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Starting Price: $2 Current Price: $2 Future Price (Short Term): $1 Future Price (Medium Term): $1 Future Price (Long Term): $1 |
Compares poorly to Mizzium Mortars if you’re looking to just remove a creature. It’s nice that Wizards added the “planeswalker” clause, but four mana for five damage that doesn’t hit a player is not what red removal is all about. I miss the days when Prophetic Bolt was tournament legal.
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Starting Price:$2 Current Price: $2 Future Price (Short Term): $1 Future Price (Medium Term): $1 Future Price (Long Term): $1 |
My gut is telling me that Fated Intervention is not going to work out as a Constructed card and won’t have enough casual appeal to drive the price up. My mind is telling me that this card is surprisingly versatile as a token generator (compare to Beast Attack or Grizzly Fate, which saw fringe play during the time Odyssey was in Standard). W/G tokens could still be a thing (remember Selesnya?), and this curves great between Armada Wurm and Advent of the Wurm. This is the rare recommendation where I’m expecting it to go down in value but think that it’s worth picking up a playset because it has a chance to be played a lot if the metagame falls just right.
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Starting Price: $1 Current Price: $1 Future Price (Short Term): $0.50 Future Price (Medium Term): $0.50 Future Price (Long Term): $0.75 |
The closest comps to this card are Grimoire Thief ($2) and Jester’s Scepter ($1). This is worse than both of those and is in a set that is going to see a lot more printing than Coldsnap or Morningtide. Bulk rare.
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Starting Price: $1 Current Price: $1 Future Price (Short Term): $0.50 Future Price (Medium Term): $0.75 Future Price (Long Term): $1 |
The release foil. Big enough and untargetable enough to draw casual interest at the high end of the bulk range a year from now. Not big enough to draw interest as is before the supply of Born of the Gods plus the release foil dry up from the market. Compare to Tidal Kraken, which has hovered in the $1-$1.50 range (printed in Mercadian Masques, Eighth Edition, and Ninth Edition).
Updates
Flame-Wreathed Phoenix – Up to $10. Not going to fight eBay on this one. They are finishing a solid $40-$50 a playset right now. I’m still on the low end of the market on this one, but we sold quite a large number of these in one day.
Mogis, God of Slaughter – Up to $13. All of the Gods rose before set release last time, and the majority of them dropped significantly after they didn’t see much play in Standard. Erebos is the sole one that rose in value, and Thassa hasn’t had quite as much of a drop off in value as the other Gods. I really think Mogis is due to halve in value within a month of set release.
Pain Seer – Up to $12. This was also revealed as the full-art foil Top 8 Game Day promo. I still am not a believer in Pain Seer. I will note that if I’m wrong on this card and it’s an all-star that the Game Day promo will be very valuable ($30+).
Pack Value
A Magic booster pack has an MSRP of $3.99. (We’ll call it $4 for sake of argument.) It’s not often that I’ve seen anyone selling a new in-print booster box for $143.64. (Note: It happened with Zendikar when hidden treasures were revealed.)
What I want to do is keep a running total of the value of a booster pack of Born of the Gods based on the cards spoiled so far. Here’s the formula I’m going to use to determine value:
There are 35 rares and 10 mythics in Born of the Gods. Each rare appears twice for a single mythic, so theoretically a perfect 80 packs would have two of each rare and one of each mythic.
To determine the value of a booster pack, I’m going to start with the following formula:
(2R + 1M) / 80
That isn’t enough of a picture though. In fairness, $0.50 to $1 bulk rares don’t really amount to “real” value if you’re looking to trade with other players. So I’m omitting the value of any rare that is below $2 (rounded from $1.99) and any mythic that is below $4 (rounded from $3.99).
In addition, there are occasionally commons and uncommons that have an extreme value. I’ll define that as commons that start at $1 ($0.99) and uncommons that start at $2 ($1.99). If you’re opening 80 packs of cards, you end up with 800 commons and 240 uncommons. There are 165 total cards in Born of the Gods—45 of these are rares/mythics, leaving 120 cards left. This is likely to either be 80 commons/40 uncommons or 60 commons/60 uncommons. Either way, no commons/uncommons of value have been spoiled yet, so we’ll leave this out of the formula for the time being, but I reserve the right to revisit C/U if any get spoiled that are in the above price ranges.
So far fourteen out of 35 Born of the God rares have been spoiled. Seven of them fall in the “bulk” range (Arbiter of the Ideal, Eater of Hope, Forgestoker Dragon, Mindreaver, Nessian Wilds Ravager, Silent Sentinel, and Tromokratis). Here are the remaining seven rares:
Fated Conflagration: $2
Fated Intervention: $2
Hero of Iroas: $2
Pain Seer: $12
Temple of Enlightenment: $5
Temple of Malice: $5
Temple of Plenty: $5
Total Rare Value: $33
There have been five out of ten mythics spoiled thus far. One falls in the “bulk” Range (Champion of Stray Souls). Here are the others:
Ephara, God of the Polis: $10
Flame-Wreathed Phoenix: $10
Kiora, the Crashing Wave: $30
Mogis, God of Slaughter: $13
Total Mythic Value: $63
So plugging this into the formula, we get the following:
2R ($66) + 1M ($63) = $129
$129 / 80 = $1.61 value per pack, or $58.05 per box
Please keep in mind that half the mythics still need to be spoiled (including three Gods, all of which will start at $10 each unless they are god awful) and about a full two-third of rares still need to be revealed, so this value is a good starting point to revisit daily as the spoiler season goes forward!
See you all tomorrow!
- Ben Bleiweiss
- General Manager, StarCityGames.com