I think it will help! I was very happy when they announced that masterpieces will no longer be in every set.

Thank you. Glad to have joined the QS community and I look forward to producing quality content!

It used to be as simple as you suggest – the law of supply and demand is a “law” for a reason – but now we have many different layers that affect these prices. We have playpoints, we have treasure chests, we have a $25 redemption tax depressing card prices far more than the old $5 redemption tax, online booster packs are no longer the same as paper booster packs because online booster packs have no Masterpieces. The value of an AKH booster pack is severed from the value of the cards contained inside in a way that a KTK booster pack was not severed from the value of the cards it contained inside.

I think this severance is enabled by the fact that the vast majority of cards are opened through drafting online.

Keep in mind that a redeemed set is precisely a redeemed set – it includes a single copy of every card, including a copy of every mythic. It takes 3.33 boxes, on average, to get 1 of each mythic. One of the major bot dealers on MTGO estimates that between 2,000-3,000 sets are redeemed each week. Thus, for the mythics, which is the most valuable subsection of any given set, this is the equivalent of opening 6,700-10,000 boxes each week.

Stores have made it a practice of redeeming sets from MTGO instead of buying paper boxes. Redeeming sets has been a go-to method for keeping a store’s singles supplies well-stocked once a set stops being drafted. I don’t have a high degree of confidence that this is a major reason why Wizards is curtailing redemption (and possibly trying to end redemption entirely), but it might be a factor.

Thank you for the welcome. It is much appreciated 🙂

The phenomenon you describe was, I think, more important for Constructed players than for Limited players. The major determinant of booster prices back then was the value of the cards contained inside the boosters (buttressed, of course, by redemption). Once playpoints were introduced, and especially once treasure chests were introduced, boosters’ values became tied most closely to the ‘experience of drafting’ than to the value of cards found inside. That is why you see the decline seen in my first chart. This effect is even more pronounced in Amonkhet. Boosters are costing around $3.33 now and the set’s value is roughly $40-$45 online. I should probably write an article examining Amonkhet using the same tools of analysis.

It is hard to discuss any of this without ultimately going back to the Redemption fee change. The old structure would only subsidize drafters at the expense of constructed players if demand for the cards was lower than for the drafting experience itself. Redemption helps prevent that from ever happening. I suspect that the reason booster prices were so low had less to do with Constructed players subsidizing Limited players and more to do with the Redemption fee change depressing card prices online.

I admit that I might be underestimating this effect. It is very very difficult to quantify and almost impossible to get a hard data-driven answer for you.

Glad you enjoyed reading my article. I look forward to writing for you in the future!

I think this article is very interesting, but there is something I don’t understand. Supposedly, price of boosters and EV should move alike, right? If the PP introduction made boosters indeed scarcer, so should be the cards within them, thus resulting in higher prices for the singles as well as the boosters. Your research is saying otherwise, what I am missing?

I was also kind of skeptical of the THS EV, but considering that KTK had fetches and the next blocks had MS, maybe EV in THS is high because there is not such “value hoarder”

I was a little confused by this statement regarding print run size “they might worry that redemption reduces the amount Standard-legal product being bought” only because we have seen massive paper print runs for these sets as well, so it doesn’t seem correct that large “MTGO print runs” hurt the paper market if the paper market itself also had a massive print run.

Thanks for writing your article, it’s always great to read MTGO content.