MTG Post-Covid Market

Where does the data come from?
Long story short:

This is the general price trend of all higher end/ more collectible magic cards pre and post pandemic. A massive spike in early 2021 and a gradual retrace to a much higher price point that now seems to be holding.

Even if you factor the very high inflation rate of this period, the gains are barely affected. For reference in this period inflation is about 10-12%, meaning for a 100$ card to have remained at the same relative value from summer 2020 to 2023, it would now have to be worth 112$.

So what went up?

Predictably Alpha has continued to outpace the other vintage core sets, including the still very hot Dual Lands which did not take the feared dive from 30A coming out. One caveat here being that the price for higher end vintage cards is starting to become tough to track, especially for NM examples, because there’s just so few on the market at any given time.

With the “4 Horsemen” sets, once again big drops from 2021 but good gains compared to 2020.

Now the modern era Reserved List cards. Much less impressive gains even for the superstars like Mox Diamond and Grim Monolith and disastrous drops for basically all the unplayable janky garbage like Aku Djinn. A large number of these cards have retraced back down to 10-30 cent range on store buylists, meaning their entire gains even from 2015 have pretty much been nullified when you factor inflation.
This is perfectly in line with my other data ( not released yet ) showing that this era of card has just been crap from the day they were printed, enjoying only two or three short bursts of speculator frenzy. I see no long term potential for this category of cards. The only money to be made here is potentially for high grade copies of these cards and even then, good luck.

Basically don’t buy any of those with any hope they’ll go up in value.

The surprise winners of the pandemic…

Old foils have taken a huge dump on the entire market, seeing absolutely phenomenal gains from 2020 and in many instances not even dropping from the 2021 peak. Huh? And that’s a huge chunk of these cards that aren’t the “Old Border” foils. Ravnica, Mirrodin, Kamigawa block… I just couldn’t believe my eyes as I was gathering the data for newer and newer cards that still all had huge increases in price.

While the border style changed dramatically when 8th Edition came out, the print runs didn’t. It’s also easy to forget these cards are already 20 years old.

They also suffer from the same problem as the old border foils: Clouding.

A lot of the cards from this era look very nice ( even pack fresh ) especially in sleeves, but…

Shine the light at a certain angle and now you see surface problems and a bunch of white splotches that are very obvious on the black borders of these cards. I don’t know why it happens but they’re almost always like this, making the true NM examples very rare.

Conclusions…?

The price movement on these old foils is pretty surprising because for most of their history they really didn’t move much and suddenly in 2020-2021 they all went up. You have many of these foils rares that were 1-2$ and are now 15-20$ and it just scales up from there. Even the commons often went from bulk ( 25 cents retail ) to 1-5$.

Unlike the Fallen Empires and Homelands era RL garbage, there’s not hundreds of thousands of copies of these old foils out there. Likely under well 10 000 for the rares. That means their current price point is much more likely to stick.

We now seem to be entering a sort of bottom in MTG prices. Where we go from here, who knows.