4 Horsemen Sad Price History
“4 Horsemen” refers to to the first four sets of MTG, before the print runs were massively expanded for Revised and Fallen Empires, marking essentially the cutoff point where cards are no longer rare enough to be collectible.
These are the last sets worth looking at as full sets to try and gauge at what point the number of copies of a card makes it so the price never passes bulk ( < 1$ ).
So first off, the full picture of deconstructed Arabian Nights:
Only thing that did well here: Reserved list. And only recently ( The 2016 Rudy Bump ). You’ll also see that Arabian Nights non-RL did the best out of all of these 4 sets… and that’s sad and I believe largely speculator driven. There’s way more copies of Bird Maiden out there than people who really want a Bird Maiden.
Now Antiquities:
Again only the RL did well here and that’s mainly just two cards: Mishra’s Workshop and Candelabra of Tawnos. Note the little bump in the U1s, largely driven by cards like Strip Mine and Mishra’s Factory ( winter ).
Now onto Legends:
Now you’re starting to see more of a horror story as almost everything non-RL dipped into the negatives for most of MTG’s history. Only thanks to the 2016 Rudy Bump did Legends even catch up to the index.
Now lastly, The Dark:
Look at this just stay negative for almost all of the set’s history, with just the RL and rares barely creeping into the positives after 2016. The Dark is too mass printed for the cards to have value solely due to scarcity.
The main story of the 4 horsemen is really how bad they did in the early days compared to A/B/U. Let’s just look at the 1994-2009 range:
Arabian Nights and Antiquities did okay, mainly off the back of a few large hitters like Bazaar of Bagdad and Mishra’s Workshop. But Legends? Complete bloodbath. In fact Legends as a set was worth the same in 1994 as in 2014! I don’t think anybody knows that.
When you get to The Dark, the set is worth roughly the same today as it was at release. The Dark singles are just not a long-term investible thing. There’s way too many and the RL cards are terrible, unlike some other RL cards that did quite well in their history such as Revised dual lands, Lion’s Eye Diamond and Mox Diamond.
CONCLUSION
First of all understand that there’s only 3 Horsemen. “The Dark” is not part of these. Its rares have a print run of 134 000 copies, dramatically higher than Legends rares which have just 19 300 copies. That’s 7x the print run of Legends and 134x that of Alpha… Secondly, The Dark reserved list cards suck. A lot. While the other 3 sets have some broken heavy hitters like Bazaar, Workshop and Tabernacle… The Dark has…. Preacher…
Almost 100% of the true value of post-1993 Reserved list cards derives from their playability. ( You can see a hint of this when you compare the highest value RL cards to the lowest value RL cards of the same set ).
You also see that something being reserved list is just about all that matters for the 3 horsemen sets. All the rest did poorly. An original printing of Land Tax or Tetravus just isn’t rare and desirable enough for the price to hold. It’s not an Alpha/Beta Shivan Dragon or Serra Angel.
A card like Triskelion, which has moderate play, still has 31 000 copies printed in Antiquities. That’s 30 times more copies than an Alpha rare.
Legends Rares are the lowest printed of these 3 sets btw, with 19 300 copies vs Arabian Nights 20 662 copies of its “rares” ( U2 ). Again still a whopping 20 times less rare than Alpha.
My takeaway here is that 4 Horsemen singles are largely not investible for the longer term. I can’t see any reason why you’d want to own these vs A/B cards. They have 20-30x the print run and they’re mostly unplayable crap.
Just focusing on the playable heavy-hitters is a dangerous trap in my opinion. Tabernacle currently sits at 4000$ on Cardkingdom whereas Rebirth, the cheapest Legends Rare, is.. 7.50$. So you could argue about 3950$ of the Tabernacle’s current price derives strictly from playability. Playability which is completely unpredictable in the future. Why would you want to take that risk?
An btw, Rebirth was listed at 10.75$ in Scrye back in 1995… Going on scarcity alone it’s pretty obvious just 20k copies of a card is more than enough for everyone who wants a copy to get one. Whatever insane thing could happen in the world that would make this go from 7$ to 20$ would probably make any Alpha card 10x in value.
Don’t buy this is what I’m saying. Full disclaimer: I’m making a Legends set lol. I WILL NOT STOP DESPITE THIS.
Source/ Method for the MTG data: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/whats-my-card-worth
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