Today we continue with our look at the new rarities discussed last time. If you haven't read that article yet, it can be found here.

Set Breakdown, Continued

Theros Beyond Death

We'll start with the extended art options, as these were again only available in the Collector Boosters. According to our breakdown, we have 54 extended art rares and mythics that could be pulled in the nonfoil slot. Unfortunately, I don't have any pull data from Theros Beyond Death, but if we assume the standard 1/8 probability of the extended art card being a mythic instead of a rare then with the 12 packs in a Collector Booster box, you could expect 1.5 extended art mythics, which equates to around a 30% probability of getting any specific one.

The Collector Booster packs had a second slot that could house a foil extended art rare or mythic, but that slot also could contain a standard foil rare or mythic, so the odds of getting any specific extended art card drop accordingly.

The second slot is the only slot possible for foil extended art cards. While I couldn't find any large scale pull data, from watching a few Collector Booster box openings it seems like somewhere around 1/4 of the time the foil slot was an extended art.

If the foil extended art cards are about 1 in 4 packs of Collector Boosters only and there are a total of 54 options, then you would expect to have to open 18 boxes of Collector Boosters to get 1 of each. Given the MSRP of those boxes, that is a lot of money, which again makes me think that the extended art foils may be undervalued currently.

If we look at just the mythic options for Theros Beyond Death, we get an average foil multiplier of 2.3 between regular version and extended art and 2.69 between extended art and extended art foil. What is most interesting is that Nyxbloom Ancient has the lowest overall multiplier between regular versions and extended art foils of just 3.93x, which given its high demand in Commander seems criminally low.

If we look at the borderless cards from Theros Beyond Death, it seems to be typical with the first few sets these are limited to the planeswalkers of the set. Unfortunately, the planeswalkers of Theros Beyond Death are, put frankly, underwhelming. The market price for the three planeswalkers is abysmal; including the borderless variants. As of 8/5/20 they are;

• Ashiok, Nightmare Muse- $4.29
• Calix, Destiny's Hand- $2.11
• Elspeth, Sun's Nemesis- $2.06

These are basically bulk mythic status, so the fact that all 3 of the sets planeswalkers have hit these lows says a lot about the value of the set overall. If your box doesn't include Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath then you're likely in the red. Now luckily, this set hasn't quite gotten as bad as Dragon's Maze, as there are still a few $10+ mythics in it, but most of the value is tied up in Uro.

However, this lack of value could actually be good for speculators. If you choose a card out of this set, especially one of the special rare variants that ends up blowing up in the future, it's likely to have a higher price ceiling because of how low so many of the other cards are. This is not a set where cracking collector's packs comes out super profitable.

Core 2021

Again the extended art cards are limited to Collector Boosters only. Yet again, we have a guaranteed extended art rare or mythic and 2 potential foil extended arts. Though, when we look back at the pull rate data from last week we see that the Ikoria Collector Boosters tended to have a foil extended art rare around 27% of the time.

The good news is the Ikoria Collector Booster only had 1 slot for these to show up in, while the Core 2021 has 2 slots, so we could expect to see significantly more foil extended art rare/mythics from Core 2021 Boosters. What makes this more interesting is when we do another price comparison and multiplier table for the Core 2021 options.

Looking at this table we get similar results to Theros Beyond Death with an average of a 1.8x multiplier for extended art vs regular art and an average of 2.25x of extended art foil vs extended art.

The other interesting change found in Core 2021 was the increase in the borderless options, instead of only featuring planeswalkers; Core 2021 included three other Commander cards. In fact, these cards were what actually inspired me to dig into this topic. The prices for these seemed criminally low compared to "rarer" rares.

Looking back at the tables showing the pull rates for these cards, we see that a draft booster box tended to have around a 6% pull rate for a foil mythic borderless card and an 11% pull rate for a foil rare borderless card. For nonfoils, we saw around a 38% chance for a mythic borderless and a 91.5% for a rare borderless. What this says to me is that there will likely be A LOT of the rare borderless cards in supply as one typically gets 1 per box. This seems to be reflected in their very low prices. What gets a bit more interesting is the foil borderless as the multiplier is noticeably lower than the probability comparison would suggest.

After all, if we divide the probabilities we would expect about 6 nonfoil mythic borderless cards to be opened for every foil one, of course, that is strictly from draft boosters. The data from the Collector Boosters has a lot more foil borderless cards with one expecting between 2 and 3 foil mythic borderless and 6 and 7 foil rare borderless per Collector Booster box. I believe that the reason the multiplier is currently so low is because we've had a massive glut of supply enter the market. People cracked Collector Boosters and started putting more cards into circulation, but once the Collector Boosters dry up, I expect the prices to rise.

Conclusion

I currently believe that some of the cheaper borderless foils from Core 2021 may be decent pickups. I myself have picked up about 6 foil Cultivate as it looks gorgeous in foil and prior to the Core 2021 reprint I have successfully sold 20-30x other versions of the card for $1-$2 each over the past 2 years. I bring that up because it is a ubiquitous card in Commander decks that play green and core sets tend not to sell as well and thus supply tends to be lower in the longer term.

To make matters even more interesting we had both Jumpstart and Double Masters release shortly after Core 2021 so many players are forced to ration their Magic expenses across multiple product lines, thus I expect even less Core 2021 supply than usual.