Welcome back readers! As promised in my article, "To Crack or Not to Crack (Specialty Product)", today I'm breaking down the values of various sealed products. I will use eBay to determine sealed box prices as that's how most of us would sell it.

It's important to look at the rate of return per year, as typically you invest in sealed product for a longer term investment (several years). It's also important to keep in mind that sealed product has many factors that help determine its value. If there is a chase card in the set the product will tend to be more valuable. If the set was fun to draft it will also be more valuable.

For those curious how I determined the Rate of Return Per Year, the equation is:

Rate of Return = ((Current Value / Purchase Price) ^ (1 / # of years)) - 1

Now let's review the data.

It's good to see that for the most part your rate of return for sealed product beats normal inflation (3%). However, given an average inflation of 3% you would have actually lost money had you invested in (Fallen Empires, Homelands, or Prophecy).

It's also important to note that as MSRP data was not available for some of the early sets, I had to take the known pack price and multiply by the number of packs per box. Thus, the "box" price does not include the usual cost reduction for purchasing a full box.

It's interesting that Homelands and Dark Ascension are currently the only sets with negative rates of return (i.e. they are worth less now then the original MSRP price). However, I expect Dark Ascension will go up over time as it was an under-opened set.

What's more impressive is that it appears Wizards was on a roll with creating highly desirable sets as they have all had impressive rates of return from 2005-2010.

This data reflects the current value of the sealed product compared to their previous MSRP. However, one should not look at these recent rates of return and assume they will continue to grow at that rate.

What is far more likely is that with the explosion in the player base the demand for some older product caused prices to spike to the threshold people will pay for out-of-print boxes. Thus, boxes are likely reaching their threshold faster, which also means that as more years pass the price per box will not rise as rapidly as it has recently.

This data indicates that when an obvious multi-format all-star is printed it is wise to purchase boxes of that product and not open them--the price of a current Worldwake box is enough to purchase a playset of the very card that drives the box price up that much (Jace, the Mind Sculptor).

I only did expansion sets because with the exception of the original printings and 7th Edition, core sets tend to have a lot of reprints and fewer valuable cards. Given their aim is to pull new players into the game they are also designed for a less experienced player, thus making them less desirable for retro-drafters.

The data also proves that sets with rare mana-fixing lands tend to gain in value at a higher rate compared to other sets (Onslaught at 11.6% compared to Legions at 7.1%, Zendikar at 36% compared to Alara Reborn at 20.5%).

I didn't look at data on in-print sets (Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash, Dragon's Maze) because these can still be picked up at MSRP. However, it's important to note that Return to Ravnica possess two multi-format all stars (Abrupt Decay, Deathrite Shaman) as well as shocklands, important for mana bases in Modern. If I were to guess which of the current in-print sets would have the highest rate of return it would definitely be Return to Ravnica.

Lastly, when deciding whether to crack your sealed product it's important to include some factors not directly related to rate of return on your investment.

These include, tradeability and liquidity (if you're big on trading you want lots of new stuff to trade to people building new decks); playability (MTG is a game first and foremost and if you don't play with your cards you lose a large portion of the reason to buy them); and of course the overall joy you get from opening packs.