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Of Masters and Masterpieces

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Three hundred and thirty five dollars. That's what a lot of people got out of the Ultimate Masters announcement. Understandably a lot of people are very upset. How is the most expensive booster box ever printed supposed to bring the cost of cards down? I know it doesn't seem very intuitive but I feel like Wizards of the Coast is using some important lessons learned with this product that will make it a lot better than you are expecting.

To better understand what factors are at work here, let's take a short look at the history of Masters sets and Masterpieces. The first set was just called Modern Masters and it was the first entry in a long list of reprint sets. This set tried a lot to be a good draft format as well as including quality reprints throughout all rarities. The biggest difference between Modern Masters and future Masters sets was the MSRP. It was actually only $6.99 instead of the $9.99 that every set after had. While the price of a booster pack was supposed to be $7, I never saw one for that little. Most stores had marked up the price of booster packs to between $10 and $15 at various points of its lifetime. Product was immensely hard to come by and selling it for MSRP meant that people could buy the product and open it and make more money than they spent. Obviously that doesn't make a whole lot of sense because your LGS would just sell out immediately to a few people willing to do the work to resell it. The issue that caused this was the high value cards were mostly at common, uncommon, and rare. Contrary to later sets, the mythic rares were actually quite bad. Only 6 of the 15 mythics are worth more than $10 right now and 3 of them are worth less than $5. There are 20 commons or uncommons and even a few tokens printed in that set worth more than the least valuable mythic in the set (Ryusei, the Falling Star). The overall consensus was it was a good first try. Mythics needed to be better because opening Tarmogoyf vs opening Ryusei was too big of a feel bad. Packs needed to be more expensive so that there was a realistic expectation to be able to purchase them at MSRP. More product needed to be printed since it was so quickly purchased and many of the cards didn't budge in price.

Ryusei, the Falling Star
Tarmogoyf

Modern Masters 2015 had some more issues. Almost all of the mythics were quite good this time and they decided to pick specific parts of a cycle instead of reprinting the whole thing where it wasn't necessary. Here you had Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite and Primeval Titan without their other counterparts. Comet Storm was the only real outlier but it was really good in draft so it hurt less when you would win your draft pod with it. The largest problem with the set was with how many draft-only rares were included. A lot of the value was centered at mythic level which meant that the average value inside of a box may have been close the MSRP (which meant stores weren't incentivized to mark it up) but small amount of box openings were often feast or famine. Open a foil tarmogoyf and you've paid off two boxes. Open Tezzeret, Comet Storm, and Primeval Titan as your mythics and your box was not likely to be worth it. A lot of the higher value commons and uncommons and medium level rares were not included meaning players were often disappointed with busting boxes.

Mana Drain
Modern Masters 2017 fixed that a little bit more. There were more high value rares (Damnation, fetchlands, Goblin Guide, Blood Moon, Cyclonic Rift) and more consistent higher value uncommons (Inquisition of Kozilek, Serum Visions, Path to Exile) to help even out box prices more. Given that there were 5 fetches above $30 and you're likely to get 1 or two in each box it helped the median value be closer to the mean value of a box. MM17 boxes were plentiful around MSRP and it was basically a good balance for players, stores, and Wizards of the Coast. Future Masters sets have had problems revolving around reprinting cards that were expensive because they were rare and not because they were desirable. The premier mythic from Iconic Masters was supposed to be the incredibly old and rare card from Legends, Mana Drain. Right now it's only the second most expensive card in the set behind Horizon Canopy. Similarly, Masters 25 was supposed to be headlined by the extremely expensive Portal creature, Imperial Recruiter. That card was over $100 before it was reprinted but can be found for about $25. There wasn't actually that much demand for Imperial Recruiter at the old price, they were just impossible to find. Masters sets print runs although small for a Standard set, were increasing the supply of rarer cards like Imperial Recruiter by many times the original print run. This time, I think they got it closer to Modern Masters and less like Iconic Masters.

Masterpieces are a touchy subject as well. They were "great" for the price of Standard cards, kind of. The average cost of a Zendikar Expedition was factored into the EV of a box which drove the prices of all of the other cards down tremendously. Gideon, Ally of Zendikar was one of the cheapest and most widely played planeswalkers of all time because stores and players would open cases of product chasing Masterpieces. The problem became if the set is such low value for the rest of the packs that people quickly became disinterested in opening small amounts. You had less people impulse buying a pack because almost every single rare and mythic was worth less than the price you paid. You almost only ever made your money back by opening a Masterpiece and every other time it was pretty miserable. It was just like Modern Masters 2015 packs. Fast forward through a few sets of Masterpieces - Kaladesh is more stable but more of the Masterpieces are reasonably priced since they're not all lands but stand out cards like Chandra still command an impressive price tag. Amonkhet Invocations are horribly received due to their art style and incoherence. Many of them are worth less than some of the best rares and mythics in the sets. Opening bad Masterpieces is once again analogous to Modern Masters bad mythics.

Snapcaster Mage
And now we are in present time, we have a Masters set that is colliding with the best new premium card distribution model, Masterpieces. What does it all mean? Well part of the increase in the MSRP of the box is to cover the Box topper. The box toppers will likely vary in price incredibly. Some of the least expensive ones will likely be $30-40 while the most expensive could be $200-300. On average, I expect them to be around $100 to cover the cost of the MSRP increase. What this means is you basically have two chances to "make it big." Booster boxes in general are not very good for the risk adverse. They're essentially lottery tickets and you should never expect to get what you paid for out of them. That being said, the box toppers help to mitigate some of that variance because you can get a very good box topper and a very bad box and still be all right. If you look at your 4 possible scenarios as : good box, good topper; good box, bad topper; bad box, good topper; bad box, bad topper, you are more likely to be happy with your purchase than not. Without knowing the whole set and prices for all of the cards it is difficult to say what the percentage of each outcome is but if you assume it is roughly equal then on average people will be happy. The only thing that people are not happy about is the MSRP increase. The increase in MSRP sucks for sure but to the average purchaser is a wash with the promo. It does, however, do something else. It strongly discourages stores from charging more than MSRP for the product, especially if it's not a sealed booster box. The second thing that this does is allow the sets to be a little juicer because a lot of the value will be absorbed by the best promos. Boxes that include a Karn, Liliana, Snapcaster Mage, or Eldrazi promo are pretty close to free, meaning the rest of the cards can be sold for much less for a player or store to break even.

To summarize, I think the MSRP increase looks bad on paper but the addition of the box topper helps to limit the number of bad boxes and will help to absorb a lot of the MSRP increase such that this Masters set should have similar or better impacts on the price of cards than previous masters sets. Their ability to put more high demand and exciting rares, uncommons, and commons into the set sets the stage for a fantastic set to open and a great set for players looking for reprints.

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