Hey guys ever since kind of coming back into Magic and looking at various prices I realized how much inflation has occurred. You would think that having Collector’s and Set boosters would make things cheaper, but alas it did not. While the singles are cheaper box prices seem to be on the uptrend.
Now I’m only looking at the draft boosters so I won’t delve into the other special boosters just yet. They probably deserve a in depth look at.
On release Core 2019 was going for around 80 to 90 dollars a box, but currently the price has risen to 125 USD per box.
Now if we look at Core 2021 current prices are at 110 USD per box. You might be asking what’s the big deal? Well Core 2021 has collector’s boosters which should have pushed down the prices of the regular boosters but in fact the opposite has happened.
What we are seeing is an appreciation of prices much faster than before. Why is this happening? Without real numbers we can only guess the print numbers for the boxes but I think the numbers are actually the same.
Instead of adding more boxes into the market, WOTC just made some of them into Collector’s, Set, etc. That or people are buying more magic product than ever. I tend to think it’s just WOTC making less product. Instead of just printing just one product they just split the printings into different ones. Same amount overall but just different boosters.
And since Core sets are gone (again), let’s talk about the non core set core set 2020. Currently it’s at 150 USD per box. Which is pretty insane for a new core set to be at. And the reason why is that it was never designed to be a core set in the first place. Like they had to ban cards in that set because they were too powerful. I think this box should be in the 200s since this was before the Collector’s and a ton of players opened this one.
Take a look at Magic Origins it is still at 160 USD which is only 10 bucks more than a box of Core 2020. While it’s not as great as Core 2020 it’s still kind of scarce.
Anyway that’s just a few examples I’m sure you can find more, like the Ixalan block. Going forward this looks like the new normal. I feel like Magic is getting back to the old ways. I don’t see flat prices going forward for the new sets. RTR was at 90s forever until now. Overall card games are coming back. It seems that Kitchen Magic players are the real movers of product. Opening boxes with your friends seems like the way to go now since not many players have a local game store to go to. In a odd way the game stores were the reason box prices stayed so low. Many of them kept ordering more so it created a larger supply than demand. Now it’s reversed since stores aren’t ordering as much but demand is still the same if not higher.
This pandemic kind of brought Magic back to the old days. Back in the 90s there wasn’t many Local game stores and if they were they weren’t ordering tons of product. And a lot of times you were playing Magic at someone’s house. Digital games still can’t replace that feeling of opening packs and playing at a friends place. We still had MTGO back then and it barely did anything to the physical presence of the game.
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