Sealed MTG in 2025
It’s been about 2 years since I did a price update on how MTG sealed is going: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/sealed2024
We’ve seen mostly 2 years of flat prices in all of sealed/vintage MTG as gambling addiction has swept the world from memecoins to sports betting. Now the fad in TCGs is manufactured scarcity where overpriced new product may or may not contain 5+ figure ultra limited edition cards.
Once again everyone in politics and the media assures us everyone is extremely poor but also doordash is making bank giving taxi rides to your tacos and MTG is getting you to pay 500$ for some remote shot at opening a 20000$ Chocobo lottery ticket that you’ll put into a little plastic box and hopefully at least be smart enough to resell before interest wanes.
So with booming stock markets and stagnant mtg prices, what’s the situation looking like?
Whereas the massive 2020-2021 boom had previously created a few outliers, now at the end of 2025 the market squarely has beaten MTG at least for the holding period of 2015-2025.
Even if you bought in right before the 2020 bubble, the index mostly beats out MTG except for the vintage product. In fact there’s a pretty clear correlation between a product being newer and it not beating out the market.
If you further simplify the data you can see that the post-2012 stuff is not doing great at all now, this stuff is not taking off for the most part. The old “buy product at end of print and sit on it” idea from Rudy/Alpha Investments has turned out to not apply at all to the last 15 years of MTG and is extremely unlikely to apply to new lottery-style product which is all being hoarded and graded as soon as it gets printed.
What’s collectible in MTG is essentially pre-2000 and more or less the 1993-1994 era. That doesn’t mean people will have an interest in this stuff going forward but it’s the only stuff in MTG that is truly organically rare.
Even with 2025 you can see that if you were hoarding this stuff since 1995 you will never get beaten by markets.
However if you entered the market in 2015, right before the first booms, you still didn’t beat the index.
If you bought during the COVID boom you got completely destroyed.
In conclusion…. Markets have returned with a vengeance. I would stay away from anything newer than 2003 and probably best to stick to anything sealed made before The Dark. That’s just about the only possible chance you have to beat markets with MTG which is a pretty unlikely proposition in my opinion given that the nostalgia bump for this has likely come and gone, i.e. people who grew up with the 1990s MTG. Beyond that the product is simply not rare enough for people to struggle getting whatever cards they want when they grow up, i.e. if you grew up in the 2010s you will not struggle to find sealed boxes of 2010 MTG when you are in your 40s. There’s warehouses of this stuff in pristine condition now and forever.
The only chance MTG has is if their IP / game grows by leaps and bounds and this triggers a cultural interest in MTG at large, like there exists for comics. Batman and Superman are still relevant almost 100 years after their creation whereas MTG has no impactful IP or media and now instead of creating and promoting that they are just putting Spider-Man and Ghostbusters on magic cards. That seems to have had zero effect in people’s interest of vintage.
By the way don’t forget that these are raw prices so they don’t factor the tax advantages of investing in markets and they don’t factor the tax/logistical risks of investing in collectibles ( insurance, storage, theft, transaction costs, lack of liquidity etc. ).
For MTG to even compare it needs to have much larger returns than stocks, not just “close” or slightly higher.
I will do this again in 2 years and we’ll see what has happened!
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