Published on January 24th, 2025
Good morning and happy Friday! Today we discuss the best possible pack money wise you can theoretically pull from the new Innistrad Remastered set Magic released today.
Background
As we scale up our trading card business, we ran into a problem. We would buy a particular set, and the value of the cards received would be less than what we paid. Many sets would require you to buy a lot of a set to get some good cards to balance out. This was acute with Pokémon Scarlet and Violet 151 and led to us to abandon buying Pokémon cards until recently. If you only could buy a small amount, that’s problematic if your packs were a bust.
We started branching out into Lorcana, Magic, and Star Wars: Unlimited to see if other trading card games had better balance per booster box. The best tcg we have found is Magic, the billion dollar business owned by Hasbro. Bloomburrow was a great set for us. That led us to buy Foundations and two Play booster boxes for Innistrad Remastered. I wondered going through the tcgplayer price guide, what’s the best pack we could pull as opposed to the median pack? Here’s our first attempt.
Pack contents
The best pack will have four rares or higher, which happens in less than 1% of packs. We will focus on Play boosters, not Collector boosters for this piece.
Play Boosters are balanced for Limited play, perfect to open just for fun, and contain at least one foil card and one Retro frame card.
Contents:
• 14 Magic: The Gathering cards per booster
• Each Play Booster may contain these cards: INR 1–480
• 1–4 cards of rarity Rare or higher (2: 26%; 3: 3%; 4: <1%)
• 3–6 Uncommon cards
• 6–9 Common cards
• 1 Land card
– Magic description for Innistrad Remastered
Most valuable rare+, non-retro, non-foil
At the top of the list is Edgar Markov, with a market value of $65.05.
Next up is the scary looking Emrakul.
Sorin’s art is amazing. I’d buy it for the art alone. The market value here is $21.46.
Most valuable retro card
No surprise, Edgar Markov is #1 again for retro frame cards.
The value of this retro frame card is $45.34. As a Magic non-player, I find it fascinating a harder to get retro frame is not as desirable as a regular card. I am guessing it has to do with legibility while playing and perhaps the wider border marking the card. You don’t see that with Pokémon or Lorcana cards.
Most valuable foil card
Surprisingly, the foil cards are harder to get and sometimes they are less valuable than non-foil cards. That’s not the case today. Edgar Markov #328 above has a whopping market value of $164.16 today.
I suppose it’s possible to get all three Edgar Markov’s in a pack as a normal, showcase foil, and retro. Quite a score if you did.
Most valuable uncommon non-foil
The art here is vivid and fully detailed. Since there can be only one foil and one retro in our super pack, Laboratory Maniac retro frame #359 is the most valuable uncommon at $6.03. Technically, it wouldn’t be the most expensive non-foil, non-retro frame uncommon. That would go to Blood Artist Showcase at $5.68.
Most valuable common non-foil
Delver of Secrets #457 is the most valuable, non-foil retro frame common at $4.90. Abundant Growth Borderless is the most valuable non-foil, non retrom frame common at $3.66.
Conclusion
Adding up the most expensive cards, I get about $320. 😂 That includes Edgar Showcase foil, two other Edgar’s, one as normal, one as our retro frame, Emrakul, Meathook Massacre, Sorin, Blood Artist Showcase, and Abundant Growth Borderless. I’m sure someone will tell me this ideal pack is not physically possible. It’s nice to dream.
Our cards arrive on Monday! We’ll compare how much we paid, current market value, and update after a month how much we recovered in total sales. Thanks for reading!
Sincerely yours,
smilingdad
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