Foil and Promo Reserved List

So last time we went over the “junk era” Reserved List cards ( Fallen Empires-Urza’s Destiny ) but I glanced over one category: The promos and foils.
In 1998 the first foil reserved list card came out: The Prerelease Lightning Dragon, in Urza’s Saga. While this is hot garbage by today’s standards and not a good performer in the regular set, the foil is a different story…
You see these cards have a much, much lower print run. We don’t know how many, but likely in the 2-10k ballpark for a lot of these 90s and early 2000s era foils and promos.
Either way, given the foil rarity back then of 1:100, we know that something like a foil Metalworker is pretty much 100 times as rare as a normal one.
Here’s an old chart I made to represent relative rarities in MTG:

You’re starting to be in the same range as Beta rares with these. Combine that with being on the reserved list and many of these cards having only one foil printing and you have a recipe for the graphs you’re about to see…

Look at this absolute idiocy over here. Some of the price data for these cards is a little wonky given how stupidly rare they are but yeah, this is pretty insane, with foil Grim Monolith being just 30$ when it came out and now sitting at 3600$. In fact as late as 2009, Scrye reported this card being about 12$ only. Huh? The first data you find from 2010 immediately jumps it to 180$ so clearly something wonky was going on at Scrye. They usually wouldn’t list the foils as singles and just wrote that “foils are worth 2-3x the normal price”.
We can get a better idea of what went on with just the 2010 and newer prices:

Not exactly clear what went on with Second Chance here other than someone bought it out and eventually sold his copies to Rudy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O3enxl2IHU&t=10s&ab_channel=AlphaInvestments

These corrected 2010 prices are much closer together and don’t smash the index as badly, but damn these still did pretty well and they didn’t get dunked on that badly from their 2021 peaks.

Next, Urza’s Destiny, the last set to have Reserved List cards:

So if you start before MTGoldfish prices, you get a pretty orderly trend with the most played cards on top.
But watch what happens with the 2010-current prices only:

First of all, everything demolished the index, except Rofellos, which was always a higher price and is just banned in EDH. I guess people pimping out EDH decks with these foils is a big factor?
Now why is Carnival of Souls at the top? Well that was another buyout… who also sold to Rudy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkpnIke7aKA&t=17s&ab_channel=AlphaInvestments

These price trends now have almost nothing to do with playability or being on the reserved list. As I said at the start, we don’t know how rare these cards are, but it’s probably in the Beta Rares ballpark ( 3-5k copies ). We know from A/B/U that this print run range seems to be low enough that scarcity becomes one of the main drivers of prices.
And that holds true for the non-RL rares of these older sets, with the famous 7th Edition Birds of Paradise being worth 3-4k despite millions of copies of different printings of Birds of Paradise now existing in the world.

Lastly let’s look at the promos:

Yeah these did stupid well on average, largely driven by playability.
Let’s look at a top10 of the foil RL cards overall since 2010:

Foil RL cards have just done gangbusters since 2010, crushing just about everything else, including Alpha.
I’d suspect it’s a similar story for many of the regular foil rares.

CONCLUSION

I’m somewhat bullish on these despite the insane prices. These are truly collectible cards as a whole, they’re gorgeous and they precede the mass scarcity “everything is a super unique serialized promo” era that we now find ourselves in.
These older foils were truly special, for quite a long time and old foil sets are a challenging thing to assemble for collectors, similar to a set like Legends or Arabian Nights would be.

Source/ Method for the MTG data: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/whats-my-card-worth

Other MTG related content:

Data Analysis:

Deconstructing Alpha - What rarities did the best in Alpha?
Deconstructing Beta / Unlimited - What rarities did the best in B/U?

4 Horsemen Deconstructed / Compared
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?

General MTG content:

What’s a fair comparison? - Trying to fairly compare MTG to stocks
Omg should I grade this? - How rare is your card, really?
Magic Post-Covid market bloodbath - Coming off the 2021 cocaine high
Where do I sell my cards? - A flowchart for Timmy
Should I buy this collectible? - Another flowchart for Timmy
Investing in Collectibles - Is it dumb? - Initial look at the suspiciously high ROI of MTG