With the Phyrexia: All Will Be One prerelease passed, it’s safe to say that most MTG players who got a taste of the set are excited. In typical fashion, everyone is posting unique pulls and crazy decks they used to take down their respective events. In terms of value, there were a lot of foil Elesh Norns to be had, but the most expensive thing that players were pulling from their prerelease packs wasn’t even a piece of cardboard. It was, instead… a spindown die? The Phyrexian Spindown has been causing mass secondary market and prerelease chaos.
Phyrexian Spindown Die
The Phyrexian Spindown die is a promotional item announced as a sort of ‘chase’ cosmetic that can be opened as part of your prerelease kit. Instead of the typical numerals that we expect when seeing an MTG prerelease spindown dice, we are instead met with the Phyrexian translation of these numbers.
The most shocking thing about this bizarre chase inclusion is its secondary market value. Multiple sources cite players selling off their Phyrexian dice the night of the prerelease for an easy $50 in cash. While this seems like the high-end of prices this cosmetic has sold for, eBay completed listings indicate that the die sells for between $30 and $50 rather consistently. Considering that most spindown dice only go for about $5-10 according to eBay (and those are the ones that actually sell), this is a massive increase in price. This one dice will more than pay for your prerelease kit. All the cards past that point are pure profit.
As this is a chase cosmetic, there is some scarcity with opening these Phyrexian dice. According to most sources, approximately one in every 15 prerelease kits had access to this surprisingly valuable collectible. That said, across the many posts about various packaging outliers referring to this item, it seems that this ratio may not be consistent across the board:
“Not sure if they were just pulled quietly, but no one at my store announced one in thirty opened packs.”
mkul316
“I’ve been chatting with a dice collector. Apparently he knows the owner of a large LGS who hasn’t seen a single one of these.”
II_Confused
Most of the sample sizes shared by players discussing this were in the neighborhood of 30-60 players over the course of the Phyrexia: All Will be One prerelease weekend. In the likely case that a 1/15 ratio is accurate, not seeing one in thirty prerelease packs is unlikely but a very real possibility. From my personal prerelease attendance, I saw 4-5 dice across about 55 players.
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$100 Phyrexian Click-Wheel Life Counter?
As lucrative as these dice have been financially, the most expensive cosmetic collectible from Phyrexia: All Will Be One may not be the $50 dice. We recently talked about the new Phyrexian Click-Wheel Life Counter available as a promotion at select stores. Players can access these collectibles by either purchasing a Compleat Bundle or spending $80 at a store while stock lasts.
This promotion is connected to the Compleat Bundle, which does not release until the beginning of March. This could mean that a lot more of these life counters could be made available shortly, driving down the price a bit. For now, however, these life counters are selling for an astounding $75-$100, according to recently completed sales on eBay.
This isn’t the first time that the click-wheel life counter has appeared in MTG. Originally a part of the Commander Anthology series, these life counters were meant as a sturdy way for Commander players to keep track of their hefty 40 life, something common spindown life counters are not equipped to do easily.
Commander players loved these so much that they quickly gained a secondary market value of their own. Those currently have a market average of about $25 at TCGplayer. If you want to read more about these click-wheel life counters, we wrote about them in more detail.
Double the Dice!
If you thought one $50 Phyrexian die was worth your time at a prerelease weekend, how about two? Redditor purecan posted this peculiar but rather favorable error highlighting two Phyrexian dice in one prerelease kit. According to replies on this thread, it seems like this error is not particularly common, but there is an opportunity for some to open multiple of these.
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