Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you and sometimes, well... sometimes you summon the bear and the bear eats someone else. I decided this weekend I wanted to summon the bear.

I went into the weekend thinking I was going to want to jam Mardu but Temur was calling to me. Not only was the prospect of potentially ending up with a foil Savage Knuckleblade or Howl of the Horde exciting, I thought ferocious rewarded you for doing something you want to do in Magic slightly more than raid did.

While you want to be attacking, I would rather play a card that rewarded me for having decent creatures rather than one that could see me make some potentially bad trades. While ferocious is a win-more mechanic slightly more than raid is, I figured the creatures in Temur would help me stay out of situations where I was behind, and if you're just using Icy Blast as a Gridlock, a card that won games in RTR Block Limited, you're going to be just fine. Besides, the color combination I prefer in general is going to edge out one I was playing solely to try and spike the prerelease every time.

The DCI reporting software put me at the very last table for deck construction. This meant I was going to be among the last four people to select their clan pack. This meant I was getting the fifth least popular clan. At the Friday midnight event, this ended up being Sultai.

I opened my packs and there was a Sultai deck there, for which I was grateful. My red and white was almost all trash and there was nothing I wanted to splash, so I ended up just being delve.dec.

It turned out fine, I guess. I got a ton of mana fixing in my lands--so much that I didn't run Sultai banner, which I was looking forward to doing because I like a Mind Stone with upside. My foil rare in my clan pack was a Rakshasa Vizier, which won plenty of games due to how much damage you deal then when you attack with it, they don't block and you delve into a Become Immense. Vizier REALLY became immense all night, and while he was a beating in Limited, he is a bit underwhelming in Standard most likely and I wasn't too thrilled about having him as my promo.

As I played more people throughout the night, I came across people with sick promos. I am happy to say I ended up with both promo Hardened Scales that were opened in my shop. I shifted attention away from my disappointing Vizier and toward my shiny, sex-tastic new EDH foils.

It should have occurred to me earlier, but it was occurring to me now that I had multiple foil copies with prerelease stamps on them--where are these promos going to shake out in the card hierarchy?

Card Hierarchy?

I'm glad I pretended a reader asked that, rhetorical device I use to lob myself softballs. As I see it, there is a price hierarchy for Magic cards. If you have a prerelease promo like Emrakul, there will be a hierarchy in pricing.

1. Pack foil
2. Promo foil
3. Regular pack non-foil

While the promo is a foil, its price is below pack foil in the hierarchy. Most times, we see the promo foil much closer in price to the non-foil despite the card being foil. The rationale? Everyone got one for free. They were not as rare as a pack foil rare since foil rares are one or two to a box, giving you roughly a 1-2 in 40 chance of getting a specific rare per $100 spent. Meanwhile each store received hundreds of copies of the promo to distribute to every player in every event.

How will these new prerelease promo cards fit in to our existing hierarchy?

How Rare Are They?

In the very beginning we didn't get prerelease promos. At the Alliances prerelease, I drove four hours from Michigan to Chicago and we got two packs of Homelands and one pack of Alliances and we had to build a 60-card deck. And we were grateful.

Later, one special card was chosen to be distributed as a thank you to every player who participated in the event. Recently, with the advent of the clan packs and guild packs (not to be confused with guildpacts) and all sorts of other wackiness, we were starting to get five promos per set. Sometimes the promos were good cards; most times they were Tier Siege Dragon.

When the M15 prerelease happened, there was much bitching heard all over the internet. Indulgent Tormentor was heads and shoulders better than the other promos, so why would players ever not pick black, all things being equal?

Aaron Forsythe fielded a lot of this bitching on Twitter and did a much better job masking his contempt for the people berating him than I likely would have been able to. Any Wizards employee who interacts with a member of the Magic community on Twitter and manages not to call them the horrible names they're likely thinking, is a saint in my opinion.

Because it's not 100% sure, but it's fairly likely that when neckbeards were on Twitter whining about the M15 promos, he probably knew that Khans would be handled differently. Instead of being able to say, "We solved the issue going forward, so shut up, you basement-dwelling nerds," he had to smile and say, "We're exploring different solutions" or whatever super patient answer he gave, cementing him as a Zen master in my mind.

There is not one clear go-to promo now. You pick the clan you want and you will get a promo chosen at random from the eligible promos in that clan. There are no clans that don't have a shot at a planeswalker or other mythic while others do, so the only consideration is which clan you want to play.

There are now 40 promo cards. You don't have a 1 in 40 chance of getting a specific promo because only clan-specific rares are in the individual clan's packs. That gives you a 1 in 8 chance of getting a specific rare per clan pack, but, realistically, you have a 1 in 40 distribution across the entire store's shipment.

Once we stop looking at the odds of getting something in a tournament and focus on the distribution of the cards worldwide when the event is over, we notice something interesting. Namely, in terms of distribution, these are closer to pack foils than they are promos.

The (Fuzzy) Math

This is going to be a little fuzzy, but we're looking at ratios and proportions right now, not calculating something to two decimal places. And really, there is going to be more variance built in with respect to playability than with respect to distribution, so all I want to accomplish is to figure out where to slot these bad boys in on our hierarchy so we can figure out how to evaluate where they will go long-term.

The information about foil distribution is printed on each booster pack. If memory serves, it's at about 1:67 (for every 67 copies of a card there is one foil) but that information isn't really relevant to us. We already know about how the price of a foil versus a non-foil shakes out, and these promos won't change that. What we are interested in is how many of each promo there will be relative to the pack foils and pack non-foils.

There are 53 non-mythic rares and 15 mythic rares in Khans of Tarkir and 40 of them are "eligible" for insertion as promos. Clan-specific cards only are considered. No fetchlands, no planeswalkers. Some clans have one mythic (the khan) some have two (the khan and a bulk mythic, although Temur had access to See the Unwritten). Temur was the way to go financially, but you can't always get what you want.

Still, while you only had access to your pool for playing, a savvy trader considers anything opened in his area a potentially gettable card. With the chase cards in the set (the planeswalkers and fetches) ineligible for insertion as promo cards, we're looking at maybe one or two breakout cards. The rest of the rares are likely to end up looking a lot like a foil stamped Siege Dragon.

40 total promos means our math is very simple--you have a 1 in 40 chance of each one. With five promos in M15, a Khans of Tarkir promo is 8 times as rare. With 1 in previous sets, a Khans of Tarkir promo is 40 times as rare. While we shouldn't pat ourselves on the back too hard for our foil Pearl Lake Ancient being 40 times as rare as a promo Wurmcoil Engine, this is still going to matter.

1 in 40? What is this number very close to? I know! It's very close to 1 in 36. 1 in 36 is roughly the distribution of foil rares in sealed product. Since there is roughly one or two foil rares per box (and roughly one foil mythic for every seven  foil rares), the distribution of foil promos looks pretty similar to the distribution of non-promo rares. Per $100 spent, you're looking at either roughly three prerelease packs or one booster box--the proportions aren't bad.

If you pay $80 for boxes like I do and consider a prerelease entry about $40 the numbers are even closer. That's not exactly fair because most places only charge $30ish, but it's not fuzzing the numbers too terribly. You have a 2 in 40 chance of those rares for $80 spent on prereleases and about a 2 in 36 chance at the same foil rares (minus the ones that aren't eligible) with $80 worth of sealed boosters.

It's not exactly on the nose, but it's closer than it's ever been.

Other Factors

Some things throw this off a bit. First and foremost, we have the rares and mythics that are not eligible. There are 68 cards in those slots in booster boxes and 40 cards in those slots in the prerelease packs. You're going to see some of the foil promo cards much more frequently if you buy two clan packs versus buying a booster box.

Even if we pretend it's Schrödinger's clan pack and don't determine its identity but merely think about the proportional distribution (meaning it could be any of the 40 eligible cards rather than one of the specific 8 in a given clan box) we'll still see more of them because there are more eligible foil rares and mythics in sealed boosters. That's just a mitigating factor, but it doesn't really change the fact that these promos are closer in distribution to foil rares than any promo in the past.

Another factor in the opposite direction is that we're done with clan packs. Some stores may keep some sealed and sell them in the future, but this was a popular prerelease. My LGS had its best week in the history of the store due to this set. So, the clan packs are gone. The total supply of prerelease stamped foil rares and mythics is released already.

And while before stores would get a whole slew of the promos to pass out, now they are getting them in direct proportion to the total number of tournament entries because the promos come in the tournament packs, not loose like before. This means they printed way fewer of the promos because they're not being given out like candy. Booster boxes are going to continue to produce copies of the set foil rares and mythics.

Another factor needs to be mentioned as well. I know it's a bag of dicks, but Magic Online is still a thing. As long as it's profitable to do so (even with the $15 redemption fee), MODO redemption is still going to inject additional foil copies. These are printed (or soon will be) and are (or soon will be) sitting boxed up and ready to be distributed to MODO redeemers. The finite supply of stamped foils is exhausted while we are just getting started introducing set foils.

Some people don't like how "common" the old prerelease promos were, or didn't like the stamp or didn't like the alternate art. All of a sudden, two of those factors are non-factors. The prerelease promos are 40 times as rare as the promos from older sets. 40 times as rare. That's a lot rarer. Not only that, they don't have alternate art. Not wanting to commission 40 additional pieces of art, WotC preferred to haphazardly just smash a foil stamp on regular foil copies.

This basically leaves people who don't like the date stamped on there. I'm willing to bet there are an equal number of people who consider the stamp a selling point rather than a liability. I just made that up, but it doesn't really matter. We're talking about value based on rarity, not someone's sensibilities.

Hierarchy Revisited

1. Pack foil
2. Promo foil
3. Regular pack non-foil

Our old hierarchy of prices based on scarcity and other factors looked like this. So where are we jamming in the foil, prerelease-stamped cards? After looking at the various factors, I think it's actually going to look like this going forward:

1. Prerelease promo
2. Pack foil
3. Regular pack non-foil

I think we have an unprecedented scarcity of individual foil rares and mythics with the prerelease stamp. I think they are going to be closer in price to the foil than they are to the non-foil, which is something people aren't ready for.

You should be able to trade for the promos at non-foil prices if people continue to assume that they will be closer in price to the non-foil the way promos traditionally have in the past. It will take some time for the prices to shake out, but in the mean time, I think you're safe aggressively trading for these because I believe they will stabilize higher than promos have traditionally. The very playable cards like See the Unwritten, Hardened Scales and the khans will be even better.

I think the promo stamp has the potential to be a selling point and I am all about picking these up. I don't see them stabilizing close to the non-foil price like traditional promos, and that bet could make a lot of us a lot of money in the next few weeks if you agree with me.