It's not $16 a pack, it's $13/pack. I'm sure the price is at or near UMA's price.
As for the list of cards, none of those are surprising sans the Urza Lands, though those have needed a reprint for a really long time now. If I had to guess what the rares/mythics would be, all of them would be on the list except for Karn Liberated, as we just gt him in UMA. None of those are real surprises and could easily be a fan's guess. Now if the list had P3K cards like Capture of Jingzhou or Zodiac Dragon, or something like Grim Tutor or Goblin Settler and they're all in the set, then I could see concern over the leak. But all of those cards are cards anybody would expect to see in a Masters set.
What Wizards did up until just a short while ago was say that the value of a card is 1/15 of a pack, and they're designed only for limited, and the reason cards are mythic/rare or uncommon vs. just common is they're better cards for the game. What players do after the fact is on them, and games of Limited can be won without any rares or mythics. Recently, however, with Collector's Boosters, they're very much blurring the lines of the gambling line. When you start actually implying value of cards beyond games of Limited, you're playing a very dangerous game. When the first Modern Masters was sold, the argument for $7 packs was there's a foil in every pack, as supposed to 1/6 or whatever the odds were, which increases the cost of packs. Fine and fair. However, once they started significantly raising the price beyond those logistics concerns, you're getting into gambling territory. And like an addictive drug, they saw how well they sold. And as long as there's enough value in those packs, they'll sell for whatever price Wizards puts, even though there's no way the price for Wizards to make a $4 is any different from the price of a $13 pack. And even Mystery Booster has a foil in every pack, which kills the argument for why Modern Masters 1 was $7/pack.
With all the extras Wizards is doing lately, if someone really wanted to I think a case could be made that what Wizards is doing is selling a lottery ticket type of gambling product. It might be not go far, but it would be a bad look for Wizards.
Amazon has some prices up, and it's roughly the same as UMA pricing. $300/box, $35 for 3 boosters, $15 for 1 booster. Remember, this comes with 2 rares per pack, 2 foils with a good possibility of 1 foil rare and a non-zero chance of 2 foil rares per pack. And don't forget boxes come with 2 boxtoppers.
The big question we have is the quality of rares. UMA got away with it because of how good the rares are, and even ignoring the boxtopper many boxes were getting above MSRP on each box. Adding in the boxtopper brought some real value to the situation. UMA was an amazing set and will age extremely well.
When you really think about it, 2 rares makes each pack half the MSRP, ie MM1 level. However, MM1 was so good because there are some real hits in the uncommon and even common slot, though you could argue the extra foil slot may make up for that a little. Unfortunately, there are so many rares. How many of them are going to be absolute junk? UMA had very few "bad" rares. I can list off a dozen really good rares right off the top of my head. Very few were actually bulk. But with 100+ rares, you know a good amount of them are going to be bulk. This makes me extremely nervous. It seems like they're setting us up to have major dud boxes.
So far they've only shown us mythics. And with 40 there's a good chance 15-20 will be garbage. Things look good, but things could go south very quickly once we get into full spoiler season.
The only time I'd want to see this kind of setup, 40 mythics and 100+ rares, is if they ever decided to do a VMA style set in paper, ie Reserve Masters. Have a crap ton of rares, a bunch of mythics, and a bonus section for the power 9, which would be like an alternate art slot that we see in Standard. At least there all the bulk chaff would be justified. Sure, 20 of my packs had junk, but I found a dual land in one of my slots to justify everything. I don't see that kind of value here unless a huge chunk of rares are $10+, but I don't see that happening.
I'm just glad the release is a month and a half away, ie spoilers a month away. Compare that to EMA where iirc they spoiled the set like 3-4 months before release. We won't have too much longer to wait on this. It'll be spoiler season for like a month, with M21 starting early to mid June, then Jumpstart, then 2XM right after, back to back to back.
This is likely to be UMA pricing, if not more, which makes sense given the double aspect.
Mythic slot looks to be really good so far. Super disappointed that there are no fetchlands. Hopefully all 10 will be in Commander Legends and that set’s pricing won’t be dumb.
Now the mythic slot looks good, but how will the rare slot look with regards to value? Hopefully there’s some good stuff in the rare slot.
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It's not $16 a pack, it's $13/pack. I'm sure the price is at or near UMA's price.
As for the list of cards, none of those are surprising sans the Urza Lands, though those have needed a reprint for a really long time now. If I had to guess what the rares/mythics would be, all of them would be on the list except for Karn Liberated, as we just gt him in UMA. None of those are real surprises and could easily be a fan's guess. Now if the list had P3K cards like Capture of Jingzhou or Zodiac Dragon, or something like Grim Tutor or Goblin Settler and they're all in the set, then I could see concern over the leak. But all of those cards are cards anybody would expect to see in a Masters set.
With all the extras Wizards is doing lately, if someone really wanted to I think a case could be made that what Wizards is doing is selling a lottery ticket type of gambling product. It might be not go far, but it would be a bad look for Wizards.
The big question we have is the quality of rares. UMA got away with it because of how good the rares are, and even ignoring the boxtopper many boxes were getting above MSRP on each box. Adding in the boxtopper brought some real value to the situation. UMA was an amazing set and will age extremely well.
When you really think about it, 2 rares makes each pack half the MSRP, ie MM1 level. However, MM1 was so good because there are some real hits in the uncommon and even common slot, though you could argue the extra foil slot may make up for that a little. Unfortunately, there are so many rares. How many of them are going to be absolute junk? UMA had very few "bad" rares. I can list off a dozen really good rares right off the top of my head. Very few were actually bulk. But with 100+ rares, you know a good amount of them are going to be bulk. This makes me extremely nervous. It seems like they're setting us up to have major dud boxes.
So far they've only shown us mythics. And with 40 there's a good chance 15-20 will be garbage. Things look good, but things could go south very quickly once we get into full spoiler season.
The only time I'd want to see this kind of setup, 40 mythics and 100+ rares, is if they ever decided to do a VMA style set in paper, ie Reserve Masters. Have a crap ton of rares, a bunch of mythics, and a bonus section for the power 9, which would be like an alternate art slot that we see in Standard. At least there all the bulk chaff would be justified. Sure, 20 of my packs had junk, but I found a dual land in one of my slots to justify everything. I don't see that kind of value here unless a huge chunk of rares are $10+, but I don't see that happening.
I'm just glad the release is a month and a half away, ie spoilers a month away. Compare that to EMA where iirc they spoiled the set like 3-4 months before release. We won't have too much longer to wait on this. It'll be spoiler season for like a month, with M21 starting early to mid June, then Jumpstart, then 2XM right after, back to back to back.
This is likely to be UMA pricing, if not more, which makes sense given the double aspect.
Mythic slot looks to be really good so far. Super disappointed that there are no fetchlands. Hopefully all 10 will be in Commander Legends and that set’s pricing won’t be dumb.
Now the mythic slot looks good, but how will the rare slot look with regards to value? Hopefully there’s some good stuff in the rare slot.