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This week, copies of Leovold, Emissary of Trest started disappearing off the internet. The card was just above $10, and is currently in the $20+ range.
The card is undoubtedly powerful in Commander, and is arguably fringe Legacy playable. With all of the summer releases, it's looking like supply of the mythic rare only available in Conspiracy: Take the Crown has been kept relatively low.
I'm curious to see where the price of Leovold goes from here. Notably, Conspiracy: Take the Crown packs will be in print for some time, though it's unclear how many packs are still being opened. With cards spiking and a lot of sought after cards in the set, you can definitely expect sealed product to be farmed if the EV is there.
When it comes to cards that are played as Commanders, it's important to remember that it can be quite difficult to move off a large supply of a given card. There's really not much of a reason for anybody to own multiple copies, and that makes the demand much easier to satisfy. Notably, foils have something like a 5x multiplier currently, so the card is definitely making waves.
Leovold is most certainly not a buy at the new price, and what I'm more interested in is tracking the EV of Conspiracy: Take the Crown product.
Vintage brewers also feel it has potential.
The copies I had on TCGPlayer were purchased by a store/dealer, so this smells like a buyout, rather than organic demand. That having been said, if people stop opening Conspiracy 2, the new price may stick. I’m looking at the EV of a box of Conspiracy on Dawnglare though and it looks like things may reach a tipping point soon.
We noted this price spike at my shop too, but it hasn’t increased sales as of yet.
I don’t think this changes sealed product by much; One thing to remember is that EV is not just a function of the average box value; it’s a function of sample size. A single Mythic Rare will show up in about 1 in 3 boxes. You’ll get between 1 and 2 of a Mythic -per case-. So, while the value of this card may spike, the fact of the matter is that only about 1 in 120 packs are actually affected due to the frequency.
The approximate $12 spike in price distributed among all those cards increases the raw (non probabilistic) EV of a pack by 10 cents. That also does not account for the fact that increases in the price of one card in a set are “drawn” from the rest of the set, so the EV shouldn’t even change at all, or by such a small margin as to be irrelevant.
The issue is that most of the packs you open won’t contain a Leovold, so their EV won’t change. Probabilistically, increased sample sizes mean that you’re one sample closer to opening Leovold. But to invoke this level of probability, you need to open enough product to smooth out variance. That would put the number into the 600 to 800 pack range, minimum. At that rate, you’re looking at -maybe- a 5% increase in your net overall EV (assuming that the rest of the set doesn’t contract in price in micro-increments across each card).