Thanks. But what if one of my reasons for avoiding MTG is completionism?
I read once that a complete, NM playset of every MTG card ever released costs somewhere around $3 million USD. Obviously that’s way out of reach for almost anyone, and so almost no MTG players have such a collection. One reason this FR set intrigues me—apart from my love of FR—would be that if I limited myself to “D&D-themed MTG cards” then a full playset might be within reach financially.
I realize we don’t have full details yet, but I just want an estimate—how much would a full playset of one of this year’s MTG sets cost (or, more accurately, would it have cost at or around the time of release)? I honestly do not know anything about this; are we talking $100? $300? $1000?
If you’re just straight-up buying the cards from the secondary market, it would be very difficult to make an estimate, as prices are set by complex secondary market factors like how in-demand a card is for competitive play, how rare it is, how much of the product has been opened, if the card has been printed in other sets before... It would certainly be very expensive to buy a complete playset of every card in a set this way, as “chase rares” can easily go up to $20, $40, $60, even $80 a piece while they’re in standard, and a play set of a card is 4 copies. You’d definitely be looking at well over a thousand dollars.
If you’re buying sealed product and hoping to open enough to get a play set of everything, that’s easier to estimate with a little maths. Going off the highest rarity category, mythic rare, a set typically has around 15 unique cards at that rarity. You need 4 copies of a card for a playset, that’s 60 mythics you’d need. There’s a 1 in 8 chance of a mythic being in a booster, so 60 mythics x 8 boosters, that’s 480. With 36 boosters in a box, that’s 13.33 boxes to pull 60 mythics, at $95 a box. So that’s $1,263.
And that’s all assuming 100% even distribution among the mythics you pull. Due to variation you would likely end up with more than 4 copies of some mythics and less than 4 of others. Of course, you’d have plenty of extra copies of everything at lower rarities than that, so you could easily trade for what you’re missing, or just sell your extra copies and buy your missing stuff off the secondary market. That’s probably the best way to go if you’re serious about trying to obtain a full playset of every card in a set. I’d actually recommend getting fewer than 13 boxes to begin with because you’d likely get enough value in extras to trade for what you still need before hitting that many boxes. Maybe start with like 6 and go from there.
