Modern RL - Winning Singles

So last time we just deconstructed the RL by set in the more modern era: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/junkrl
By now you should be familiar with the “Rudy Bump” after 2016, where people started speculating heavily in any and all reserved list cards:

I won’t waste my time with the singles from these 3 earlier sets. Yes if you’ve somehow timed these perfectly you could have made money but for their entire almost 30 year existence, these sets did nothing interesting and I wouldn’t hold any of these singles going forward. If you think you can time the market and do a quick flip on these, go nuts.
The first set with actual playable RL cards is Alliances:

Short story: Don’t hold this. These sets have huge print runs and the cards aren’t that played so the price drops are brutal when speculators realize nobody has any urgent need of a beat-up Lake of the Dead and there’s hundreds of copies floating around online at all times.

With Mirage you’d think it gets interesting though:

So here we find the first actual staple card after Revised. It was 4-5$ for a long time and then rapidly shot up as it became a staple in all sorts of broken decks. It has a huge print run but also huge demand. Let’s just see how it did in the post-Scrye era though:

So first of all, this isn’t all the RL cards, only the most played/expensive ones ( both currently and historically ). Mirage has dozens of unplayable RL cards that all did very badly in their existence. Now you notice here the HUGE price retrace of the junkier RL cards and the more stable curve of LED and Dreadnought, which are the two actually played ( and most expensive ) cards.
Like I’ve said before, the transaction costs of the cheaper cards are not well represented in a graph like this. A 2$ transaction cost on a 10$ card is 20% but on LED it’s just 0.5%. Notice also the huge dips that represent the downside risk of these cheaper cards, which can easily lose 90% of their actual value ( market price vs buylist price ) which is not a risk with cards like LED or Dual Lands.

Winner: Lion’s Eye Diamond.

Now the next two sets, Visions and Weatherlight:

Basically all junk except for possibly Null Rod, but you’d be speculating heavily on that card seeing increased play in the future for its price to rise. That’s the problem with cards after 1993 in general; too many copies means a lot of people need to be interested in those cards for the price to go up. Not a lot of people need to be interested in a sealed box of Beta for the price to triple. In fact just a handful of rich guys need to exist for that to happen, even if the game is completely dead.
If the game dies, Null Rod and LED die along with it…

Also once again these are just the BEST RL cards from these 2 sets. It was never wise to hold onto anything else and going forward is the same story. Most of the junkier RL that went up to 1-5$ is back down to bulk. Whoever bought a stack of Urborg Stalker or whatever crap for 3$ lost 90% of their money and it ain’t coming back is my guess.

Moving on…

Only two real cards here: Intuition and Earthcraft, both pretty broken combo engines. Should you buy these though? Well keep this graph in mind and look at Stronghold:

While the two big cards of this set did about as well as the two in Tempest, look at the difference in how large the retracing was for the price. I’m going to start calling this the “speculation tax” which you can see show up in tons and tons of RL cards that spike really high and then completely crash.
But the good ones with organic demand? They are much less affected.

Now exodus:

Again, predictable result: Just two cards, both pretty broken and played historically and both doing very well. Caveat for Recurring Nightmare which I believe is banned in EDH. If you want to speculate on more modern RL, start buying those up in case they get unbanned because they’d 4-5x in value pretty fast.

Onto Urza block:

Huge EDH-driven spike for the top 3 here. Note also that Tolarian Academy and Yawgmoth’s will are banned/restricted in multiple formats ( including EDH for Academy ) which means they have huge upside potential if they get unbanned, which I would guess is not very likely.

Now the other 2 sets:

Grim Monolith is the clear winner of these 2 sets and notice the smaller retrace as well after the current “crash”.

Finally let’s do a top10 for all these sets:

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to the reasons for why this is the top10, but at least I don’t think these are very surprising and they certainly have completely and utterly destroyed the index in this time period… However if we look at the first 10 years of this:

Oof, kind of rough! Just 5 of these beat the Index in that time period. Remember, this wasn’t the case for A/B/U: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/abulastlook

CONCLUSION

While many of these did really well, almost all of the growth is in the later years ( 2010 ) meaning a solid 10-15 years of flat to negative growth for this category of MTG cards, almost without exception. These cards are even higher risk than Revised Dual Lands as none of these post-revised RL cards are as versatile and played, they all fit into some niche strategy/deck.
I think it’s much easier for this category of card to have a price trend that looks like the 2000-2010 era and not the 2000-2023 or 2010-2023 era… Once again: Supply is everything and while we don’t know the exact print runs after 1994, it’s very likely all of these RL cards have between 250-500k copies in circulation, if not more. That’s absolutely not rare, at all.

I’d stay away from this stuff. A large part of the value of these cards came from EDH rising in popularity along with people flocking to MTG as an investment in 2016. It took both of those factors combined to create this growth. The odds of this happening again are basically zero.

Source/ Method for the MTG data: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/whats-my-card-worth

Other MTG related content:

Data Analysis:

Deconstructing Alpha - What rarities did the best in Alpha?
Deconstructing Beta / Unlimited - What rarities did the best in B/U?

4 Horsemen Deconstructed / Compared
Final Look at A/B/U - Best categories from each set compared to each other
Comparing A/B/U - Which set did the best as a whole?

General MTG content:

What’s a fair comparison? - Trying to fairly compare MTG to stocks
Omg should I grade this? - How rare is your card, really?
Magic Post-Covid market bloodbath - Coming off the 2021 cocaine high
Where do I sell my cards? - A flowchart for Timmy
Should I buy this collectible? - Another flowchart for Timmy
Investing in Collectibles - Is it dumb? - Initial look at the suspiciously high ROI of MTG