Unless you are sitting on a hoard of gofy and dark confidant, yeah they do. I say they downgrade gofy to rare and print him into oblivion.

Nebuchadnezzar to my knowledge never was one of the more expensive rares. Unfortunately I have to go by anecdotal evidence on this one, as memory serves people always refer to Ernham Djinn and the Elder Dragons when talking about cards that saw the biggest drop. Looking at current prices makes little sense as so much else has since impacted prices. (Also, there are 27x as many Nebuchadnezzar’s from Chronicles, so I’m actually somewhat surprised to see it being at 10%).

When I was talking about the terrible job thing the main point was that they underestimated how many people they would draw to the format. They would have to be conservative in regard to how much they print, quite likely if Modern popularity had stayed at the level it was before MMA’s announcement we would see a much bigger impact on prices. It makes absolutely no sense to print more than they did without taking on more risk if the popularity factor doesn’t work out as they might hope. I think they did a reasonable job with the information available, the one thing you could perhaps claim is that they should have better estimated the future popularity of Modern, but I ask again, could you have done that better than they could? If not you would have hopefully come to the same conclusions in regard to how much to print. I cannot blame them for this.

RTR brought back 5 cards from Ravnica block, some of which were not in the Ravnica set. 2 cards seeing a reprint out of 306 cards in the Ravnica set just isn’t going to impact sealed product prices much, particularly when those are not the highest value cards and you consider that people usually prefer the originals rather than reprints. Dissension and Guildpact would have both been better, though still you’re talking about very few reprints. Ravnica block is also known for its good limited environment so I would guess that a large part of the sealed product price is caused by people looking to experience that limited format again. MMA on the other hand contains a ton of reprints and as such the only sets close to it are Chronicles, Renaissance, some precons and the Masters Edition sets on MTGO. Your comparison is simply flawed because RTR doesn’t try to do what MMA is trying to do.

I agree with many boxes remaining sealed (I have 2). Keeping that in mind, how can you blame Wizards for not printing enough? If they print considerably more suddenly holding onto the boxes becomes a less exciting prospect and a much larger part of the product gets opened, resulting in a potential flooding of the market.

I think the error has been to try to compare apples and oranges. The reasoning just hasn’t been sound. No amount of examples would have improved that. Are you sure it’s most likely that it’s many of your readers who are the ones who are confused?

No he is right Dave, you a troll.

Disagreed, you are wrong. All to be said here.

Thanks Jason,
I definitely didn’t plan on trying to guess the whole set…that would be a bold and I expect disastrous undertaking. I only wanted to focus on the cards that I felt have a high probability of being in the set based on;

1) They are considered a staple modern card and haven’t been reprinted (Inquisition)
2) They complete an existing cycle (the swords)
3) They fulfill a similar role to something in MM1 (The Praetor Cycle)

I purposefully left fetchlands off because unless MM2 did get a much larger printing than MM1, reprinting them would not satiate the market. I expect fetchlands in a standard legal set or some sort of boxed collector set that can be printed on a march larger scale. I still believe they will reprint on the Onslaught fetches again before reprinting the Zendikar ones as part of the “fun” of legacy is having “perfect mana” which eliminates some deck constraints and allows for more experimentation (up until you play against a finely tuned machine like TES or RUG) and realize that countless hours have gone into the card choices in those decks.

I agree on this with David, I would be amazed if Tarmogoyf does not get reprinted in MM2 if not sooner…It is widely played in the format and has a huge price tag.

I feel like you missed some cards and suggest cards I wouldn’t anticipate – but again, that’s just an opinion based on the value of some cards.

For instance, reprint on Inquisition makes sense, but you didn’t name Simian Spirit Guide – because you don’t anticipate it being a reprint or you weren’t trying to guess the entire set?

I agree with Elesh Norn, and Lily – I don’t agree with Goyf or Bob – but who’s to say?

I was surprised you didn’t name Snapcaster Mage who seems like an obvious choice if you’re suggesting Liliana, as well considering their presence in the same set and importance to the Modern Format.

Overall, I don’t think you could make everyone happy with an article like this no matter what you did.

Thanks for the write.

Pi,
The $60 was something I’d heard when discussing the Chronicles debacle from a friend. I honestly can’t back that up with a specific card (or Scry price guide image), but the point was that the cards did in fact plummet by a large percentage and it’s difficult to say now what some of the originals would be worth if they had NOT been reprinted in Chronicles. A comparison I can see is something like Nebuchadnezzar who’s only printings were Chronicles and Legends and the Chronicles version is 10% of the Legends one (which is still dirt cheap).

When I say “WoTC” did a terrible job regarding dropping the price of modern I did so without trying to imply I would have done a better job, simply they were far to conservative with the print run and seriously under-estimated the # of cards it would take to significantly affect long term prices of the staples.

When I compared RtR to Ravnica what I was alluding to was the fact that Ravnica’s chase cards were Dark Confidant and shocklands. RtR brought the shocklands back but did NOT cause old boxes of Ravnica to drop in value despite the fact that one of the main draws to the set are the shocklands, perhaps Dissension/Guildpact would have been better comparisons because they don’t really have other chase rares (other than Infernal Tutor maybe), yet Guildpact boxes still go for $250-300 and Dissension is $300-325, yet the only cards above $10 (save Infernal Tutor) are the shocklands…which you can get equivalents (not art…but functionality) in current RTR block packs/boxes. I do understand and accept that the # of boxes of these older sets that are un-opened continues to drop and from a collector stand point means they should only ever go up in value…but if the demand came from people wanting the cards out of the boxes, then you’d expect a price drop when the main money cards to the set were reprinted.

The 5x-10x larger print run was a bit of an exaggeration on the “conservativeness” of the MM1 print run. Mainly because from my perspective I was able to buy MM1 packs/boxes for exactly 2-3 days when they first came out for close to MSRP. Even above MSRP most stores were all sold out from their allotment (at least in our area) because the store owners could/would have sold packs for 2x MSRP or more as the demand existed. I simply extrapolated that idea out that if the print run was considerably larger I still believe the demand would have existed but the window to obtain packs/boxes would be greater. It also didn’t help that so many kept the boxes they did get (myself included) sealed awaiting the eventual and expected price increase we’re seeing now.

Lastly, I regret not citing more concrete examples in this article, instead using more amorphous concepts/references when clearly it confused a lot of people. I consider this a lesson learned and an error I won’t repeat.

You think they would not make room for 5 Zendikar Fetches, yet the dragon cycle at Mythic exists. I think the 3 spots for lands in MMA should not be considered a good indicator in this case if they were even willing to do that. I think a set of Fetches in there is far from guaranteed, but I don’t think your reasoning for them not being in there is sound.

The fact that card prices rose after the printing indicates it’s like any other set. Many cards went down first then recovered as Wizards was successful at promoting Modern. It may indicate that they didn’t print too much MMA, but it doesn’t lead to any conclusions regarding how much MMA2 they could print.

When Chronicles was released the most expensive reprinted cards were $30-$35 according to many quotes I’ve read over the years. Where did you get the $60 number? Also wondering where you got the $0.5 number, I can’t think of any card Chronicles crashed that was anywhere near that when I started playing in ’97 (Elder Dragons and Erhnam Djinn are usually cited as the cards that saw the biggest drop, they were a couple of dollars each when I started).

I believe Wizards’ goal for MMA was likely twofold: making more copies of the reprinted cards available and drawing attention to the format. They succeeded in both, but were more succesful in regard to the latter. What do you think prices would be like if they managed to draw as much attention to Modern without printing MMA? If they did a terrible job at anything it would be predicting their own succes in regard to Modern, something that would be really difficult, certainly not something you or I could have done.

It feels wrong that a set 5-10x as large as MMA would only make a 15% change, but these things are really hard to predict and your guess is as good as mine.

Who has a concern that MMA2 boxes would drop MMA box prices? Why would RTR and RAV make a good comparison for this situation? MMA sets are much more likely to contain the same cards given that they are mostly reprint based. Still don’t think it should be a concern, the comparison just doesn’t make sense to me.

Now, what that means for MMA2 is that unless you see an equitable amount of growth in the Modern player base, any reprint will in fact drop prices significantly because you don’t have the same underlying growth rate. While there are more Modern player in general, it’s more of a stable base than it was when MMA came out. THAT fact is why you saw Goyf and Bob and CLique increase in price despite the reprint.

I also have a theory (and I’m not alone here) about MM2 that would not only shake up Modern as a format, but also drive sales hype even more for folks who started in the last few years. It’s going a little deep, but bear with me. Introducing non-Modern Legal cards from Magic history. Ofcourse, the cards would then be Modern Legal. It seems like a good way to add cards that Modern could benefit from, without unleashing them on Standard. Sort of like how they shoved cards like Scavenging Ooze, Tidehollow Strix, and TNN to Legacy. Thinking along the lines of Pernicious Deed, Sulfuric Vortex, Misdirection, Goblin Piledriver…

I think the biggest issue is getting the cards into players, easing liquidity of the available cards in the market. During GP Vegas the stores were aggressive in absorbing the cards, but as a result they artificially created a floor on prices for cards like Tarmogoyf. They bought at 120. They will not release any of them into the market till its profitable, which pegs its price higher then it started.

I would have agreed, but I believe that WoTC’s love of finishing cycles means that it’s more likely the finish the Sword cycle and to fit an additional 3 colorless mythics in there would basically finish the mythic slots out.

I didn’t say it would be only a small budge in prices, what I said was that it wouldn’t tank the prices of the staples. I mentioned Kira to show that the reprinting did tank some cards pretty hard. However, if you think printing 2-3-or even 4x as much MM2 is going to drop Tarmogoyf or Dark Confidant by 50%, then I disagree wholeheartedly with you.

I disagree 100% regarding reprinting of Bob/Tarmogoyf. Their current prices (especially goyf) are potentially major barriers to new players trying to enter the modern format (as are the zendikar fetchlands). If you notice I actually believe making it a draft set was pointless due to the fact that it was very difficult to actually draft (as boxes/packs sold out very quickly) and WoTC is wasting time/effort into trying to turn the modern master’s series into draft sets when such limited print runs prevent them from actually being draftable.

I do feel MMA2 could get away with a larger print run, but not more than 1.5x – 2x that of MMA.