Revised
Revised came out in 1994 to meet the growing demand for MTG and as such the print run was massive compared to A/B/U, with estimates of over 100x the Alpha print run ( not even counting foreign variants ).
A card being on the Reserved List and heavily playable is essentially the only thing holding its price up from 1994 onward. You need both components for even some kind of hope at the price increasing. As such from this point onward I only keep track of Reserved List cards.
So let’s just look at the entire price history graph for Revised RL and Duals:
Note: “Revised RL” does not include the Dual Lands.
So, pretty clear picture here: Revised is hot garbage except for Duals, which still beat the Index despite the massive print run. That is a testament to their playability across so many formats and a huge red flag to potential investors. If the popularity of the game or certain formats goes down, then there are going to tank hard because there’s just. So. Many. Out. There.
Now the early prices:
Here we start to notice the “Scrye Dip” phenomenon. Prices start quite high then tank more and more as people adopt the Internet as a buying/selling platform. It took until 2017 for the non-duals RL to get back to their original 1995 Scrye prices. 22 years!
One thing we also notice is how Dual Lands kept up with the index even in this early period, which is perhaps a bit surprising. Still they are so close that the other factors ( risk, taxes, time of transactions etc. ) makes it not worthwhile at all.
Now the latest history:
Now Duals skyrocket ( thanks Rudy ) as massive FOMO grips the market and people start hoarding these cards for speculative purposes. And woah, RL catches up as well?
Well that’s mainly due to two cards: Wheel of Fortune and Copy Artifact… Let’s remove them and see….
Yep back in the shitter. Remember: Playability is king for post-1993 cards. As we’ve seen, even some 1993 cards have too many copies.
CONCLUSION
Revised dual lands did surprisingly well overall. Still they’re about in the bottom 3rd when compared to A/B/U. They did as well as Beta/Unlimited P9 ( without Lotus ) but at a much lower entry point. However they did the worse out of all duals, with A/B/U all beating the revised versions.
Still I’d be wary of Dual Lands for the longer term since they derive most of their value from playability. It doesn’t take that many buyers to keep Alpha prices propped up but it takes quite a massive player base to keep revised duals up.
And don’t have any hopes for your Farmsteads and Rocs of Kher Ridges, treat that stuff as just regular rares. Being on the reserved list makes zero difference for this type of card. Don’t be a bag-holding Timmy.
Source/ Method for the MTG data: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/whats-my-card-worth
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Final Look at A/B/U - Best categories from each set compared to each other
Comparing A/B/U - Which set did the best as a whole?
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