Over time, Wizards has gotten more and more comfortable reserving the best cards in a set for its Collector Boosters. Just look at Bloomburrow and Duskmourn, with their exclusive Anime and Japan Showcase cards. Turns out this trend isn’t going anywhere with Innistrad Remastered, which has some of the most dazzling Collector Booster exclusives we’ve seen yet.
While the set looks like a love letter to Innistrad all the way down, this is most evident in the special treatments reserved for Magic’s most premium packs. This is bad news for cash-strapped Innistrad fans, but great news for the secondary market. These cards will almost certainly be holding their value, I’ll tell you that for nothing.
Movie Poster Cards
Perhaps the most exciting among the Innistrad Remastered Collector Booster exclusives are the Movie Poster cards. We heard about these a while ago, but yesterday’s preview stream finally gave us a proper look. Long story short: they look absolutely fantastic.
The two cards in this style previewed yesterday were The Meathook Massacre and Emrakul, the Promised End. On the stream Blake Rasmussen referred to them as having a “Secret Lair vibe,” and it’s hard to disagree. Both cards look like they were taken right out of 2021’s Monster Movie Marathon Secret Lair drop, in the best possible way. The art here is stunning, which should add a lot of value to these printings alongside their exclusivity.
Fancy treatments aside, these are solid $40-50 cards, which is exciting in itself. These are cards that have desperately needed a reprint for some time. This new style will be used on a total of 10 cards in the set. It was also confirmed that these will all be rares and mythics, so expect other cards of a similar caliber to these first two.
Unlike the set’s Borderless and Retro Frame treatments, Movie Poster cards can only be found in Collector Boosters. Just how likely are you to pull one in a given pack? Not particularly, it turns out. These cards can appear in up to three of the 15 slots in a given Collector Booster. In each of your two non-foil Booster Fun slots, you have an 8.7% chance to get a Movie Poster card. In your foil Booster Fun slot, the chance is 10%.
Retro Frame Foil Cards
- Mana Value: 4UU
- Rarity: Rare
- Stats: 5/5
- Card Text: Soulbond (You may pair this creature with another unpaired creature when either enters. They remain paired for as long as you control both of them.)
As long as Deadeye Navigator is paired with another creature, each of those creatures has “1U: Exile this creature, then return it to the battlefield under your control.”
This one is a little bit confusing. Innistrad Remastered does have a Retro Frame card in every pack, including Play Boosters. It turns out, however, that none of those cards will come in foil. Foil Retro Frame cards will only appear in Innistrad Remastered Collector Boosters.
This is a departure from Remastered sets in the past. Ravnica Remastered did, admittedly, have a pool of Retro Frame cards you could only get in Collector Boosters. You were able to open foil Retro Frame cards in regular Draft Boosters, however. Retro foils being tied to Collector Boosters only is brand new in this set. I imagine it’ll prove a divisive move, too.
Retro Frame foils have always been very popular among players. The extra flourish of the shooting star across the bottom of the text box makes them feel much more special than modern foils. There’s also the fact that, at least originally, these cards were much rarer than foils are today. Retro foils from the past go for eye-watering prices as a result, even if they’re undesirable cards. Today, these are generally much easier to find. Particularly for sets like Modern Horizons.
Making Retro foils Collector Booster exclusives in Innistrad Remastered may be an attempt to reintroduce some of that lost scarcity. The odds here are quite good, but you can still only get up to three per pack at most. You get one Retro foil basic land in each pack guaranteed. After that, you can get Retro foil commons and uncommons in the foil Booster Fun slot. These drop at a 44.3% and 48.3% rate, respectively. As for rares and mythics, those are in another slot 41.1% and 14.6% of the time, respectively.
Serialized Edgar Markov
- Mana Value: 3RWB
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Stats: 4/4
- Card Text: Eminence — Whenever you cast another Vampire spell, if Edgar Markov is in the command zone or on the battlefield, create a 1/1 black Vampire creature token.
First strike, Haste.
Whenever Edgar Markov attacks, put a +1/+1 counter on each Vampire you control.
Finally, we come to the big daddy himself. There are four different variants of legendary Vampire Commander Edgar Markov available in the set. Three of them can be found in both Play and Collector Boosters. The above version, the Serialized Movie Poster variant, is Collector Booster exclusive, however.
There will only be 500 of these cards printed in total, which should make it highly sought-after and expensive. The Collecting article notes its drop rate in a given Collector Booster as “Less than 1%,” which sounds about right. Serialized drop rates are complicated by their highly limited supply, but basically, you shouldn’t expect to open one of these at all.
While it’s a shame there’s no non-serialized version of this excellent Movie Poster art, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this. The serialized Praetor cards from March of the Machine also had exclusive artwork, for example. In small doses, I think hyper-exclusivity like this is fine. Edgar Markov has another layer of justification for it, too.
This card is actually the first in a brand-new initiative for Magic: Headliner Cards. These are extra-special cards chosen to be the very best thing you can open from a given set. In the case of Innistrad Remastered, I think Edgar Markov was a great choice. He’s an iconic character, and this particular version is very popular in Commander. It will likely be a lot more popular now, once the reprint brings it down from its former $100 price tag.
Value-wise, it’s tough to say where this new Edgar will end up. Looking at Ravnica Remastered for comparison, X/500 Serialized cards can go for anywhere from $200 to $1200, card depending. Given how popular Edgar is, I expect him to land on the higher end.
