For the most part, the MTG secondary market is fairly straightforward. If a card starts seeing heavy play, or its supply starts running dry, its price will increase. If things go the other way, we typically see price decreases. Bans and unbans are, naturally, catalysts for big spikes and drops, too. There are exceptions, of course, but these are the basic principles that govern things. In 2024, however, the MTG secondary market saw some bizarre new trends that directly contradicted these ideas.
Key cards that would’ve skyrocketed in previous years simply didn’t, and huge bans didn’t have quite the expected effect. These anomalies were the product of numerous factors, but ultimately came down to some truly wild power outliers from recent MTG design. In other words: Wizards has been printing cards so good that they’re warping the rules of the market around them.
The One Ring Holds Strong
- Mana Value: 4
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Type: Legendary Artifact
- Card Text: Indestructible. When The One Ring enters, if you cast it, you gain protection from everything until your next turn. At the beginning of your upkeep, you lose 1 life for each burden counter on The One Ring. Tap: Put a burden counter on The One Ring, then draw a card for each burden counter on The One Ring.
The One Ring is probably the best example of this warping in action. Until 2024, its price behaved normally. It started off around the $60 mark on release, and slowly climbed to its peak of around $150 over time. This followed naturally with the card becoming more of a staple in Modern and Commander. So far, classic MTG finance.
Where things get strange is around August of 2024. The One Ring started to creep down in price, despite showing no signs of slowing down performance-wise. In fact, this was around the time the card was getting into the 50-60% play rate range in Modern. Eventually, it settled at around $60: less than half of what it was worth just one month prior.
The reasoning behind this huge drop-off was, ultimately, the Banned and Restricted update planned for December 16th. Wizards had acknowledged The One Ring as a card on their radar in the past, and its ridiculous numbers made players very confident a ban was coming. As a result, the price tanked. Though this move is logical, it’s still pretty wild. Retailers risking $90 at a time betting against The One Ring isn’t something you’d expect to see en masse.
As a final kicker, this pre-ban anticipation drop actually prevented the usual post-ban drop when The One Ring was banned last Monday. Cards almost always take a dive when this happens, but The One Ring has remained largely stable. In fact, it’s actually gone up slightly. Price movement this bizarre is pretty much unprecedented, and it really speaks to the magnitude of The One Ring’s dominance that it happened here at all.
The Nadu Situation
- Mana Value: 1GU
- Rarity: Rare
- Type: Legendary Creature – Bird Wizard
- Stats: 3/4
- Card Text: Flying. Creatures you control have “Whenever this creature becomes the target of a spell or ability, reveal the top card of your library. If it’s a land card, put it onto the battlefield. Otherwise, put it into your hand. This ability triggers only twice each turn.”
Nadu was the other big example of the weirdness that hit the MTG secondary market in 2024. In a way, it was actually an even more extreme case than The One Ring. During Modern Horizons 3 preview season, players quickly identified Nadu as an incredibly powerful card for Modern and beyond. When release time came around, it lived up to its potential and then some. To put it simply the card was a serious problem in multiple formats, most notably Modern and Commander.
Despite this hype, and the fact that the card actually exceeded it, Nadu went nowhere but down post-release. It came out of the gate around the $20 and a month later it was sitting at $5. This is the total opposite of how the market has behaved in the past. Based on all past precedent, Nadu should’ve been one of the chase cards of Modern Horizons 3. It should’ve been up in the $40-50 range, not languishing down at $5.
So what exactly happened here? Well it’s a similar story to The One Ring, actually. Nadu was so obviously good that players expected it to get emergency-banned pretty much right away. Even when that didn’t happen, no one was really willing to take the risk on Nadu, and its price dwindled. Then, when the ban did finally land in August, the card only had a short journey from $3.50 to $1 left to make. In short, Nadu was such an extreme power outlier that it changed the rules of the MTG finance game. It didn’t spike up pre-ban, and then come crashing down after; it came crashing down in advance.
A New Era For MTG Finance?
Now, one could easily dismiss the above as two extreme outlier examples. It’s not like we’re seeing these kinds of odd patterns with every new release. However, I think there are some interesting insights to be gleaned here about how the MTG secondary market has shifted in 2024.
Both of these cards are examples of players ‘reading the room’ extremely well when it comes to bans. The consensus was that these cards would get banned, and it sealed their financial fates. Bans often blindsided players in the past, and huge price drops followed them. Here, they didn’t come as a surprise at all. Perhaps the MTG community is just getting better at card evaluation over time?
That’s one possible explanation. Another is that, due to the much more open and transparent approach Wizards takes to bans now, they’re much easier to predict. The One Ring was name-checked a few times in the run-up to its banning, for example, and so was Nadu.
It’s also possible that Wizards’ FIRE philosophy, and push for stronger and stronger cards, has finally caught up with them. When cards are so obviously good that players pre-emptively sell out in anticipation of bans, and that proves to be the correct move, something has changed. That said, Nadu, Winged Wisdom was quite the outlier, even in terms of card design, so this may not become a consistent pattern.
Overall, I think the correct answer lies somewhere between the three above. Both Magic and its community have changed in recent years. Designs are more daring, and players are more savvy to their impact. Expect more financial anomalies like these in the near future.
