Most MTG players have a pet deck – a deck that may not be the most competitively relevant deck in the world, but a deck that they personally love. For most players, running into this style of deck is a when, not an if.
Following this idea, my personal pet decks are Twiddle-style decks. Things like Lotus Field combo in Pioneer and the new breakout Twiddle deck in Modern. That’s why when I ran into the new MTG anime art for Omniscience, I immediately wanted a nonfoil version of the card for Lotus Field combo. The art looked great!
That said, I didn’t end up getting the Omniscience for myself. The reason? It turns out that prices on the new anime art cards are incredibly bloated. Buying an Enchanted Tales Omniscience, for example, only costs about $7. The anime art for Omniscience, however, is much more expensive than that, and this is not the only card where this is happening. MTG players are going nuts for anime artwork!
MTG Anime Art is Expensive
Looking at Omniscience is a good demonstration of what the overall trend seems to be with Enchanted Tales Anime artworks. A normal Enchanted Tales Omniscience with no bells or whistles costs $7. A foil version of the normal artwork costs about $11.
If you want the Omniscience artwork pictured above (I don’t blame you, it’s gorgeous), the current asking price is about $23, almost three times the price of a normal Enchanted Tales Omniscience. While this is already a lot, recent sales are pointing more towards $30.
A foil copy of the anime art pictured above gets yet another price boost, jumping to $60! That’s almost nine times the price of a normal Omniscience!
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Rhystic Study
Rhystic Study shows a similar trend, but the price jumps are expedited somewhat because the base version of the card is expensive. Rhystic Study is considered one of the best enchantments in Commander, making the demand for it rather high.
A normal iteration of Rhystic Study from the Enchanted Tales is $30. A foil version of that card is $60 at the moment. The anime art seen above for Rhystic Study is even more, retailing for $70! Foils of the art above go for $160 or more! Even with the card’s strength, this is a huge price to pay!
Other Examples
The trend continues across far too many cards to be deniable in any way. Doubling Season‘s base variant costs about $40 while the foil costs $43. The anime art costs $50 in nonfoil and $80+ in foil. Smothering Tithe’s base version from the Enchanted Tales costs $15. Foils cost $20. The anime art for this Commander staple costs $75 and is trending upwards heavily. Foils cost $160 or more!
Will These Trends Stay Longterm?
The most shocking part about these anime cards being so expensive is that they’re available in Draft and Set Boosters for Wilds of Eldraine. This story would be significantly different if anime art cards were only available in Collector Booster packs, but you can find anime art cards just about anywhere.
Notably, Jumpstart 2022 was the first real MTG set we’ve seen with anime art alternatives available and, at initial release, the relationship between anime art cards and their other variants was mostly the same. Do keep in mind, however, that the chances of opening an anime card in a pack of Jumpstart 2022 was guaranteed. That is far from the case for Wilds of Eldraine.
Balan, Wandering Knight is perhaps an example of how the first anime art trend went. Upon the initial release, the Jumpstart 2022 copy of Balan Wandering Knight pictured above had a massive premium of $43 according to TCGplayer market averages. The card has since declined rather rapidly over the past nine months and is worth around $16. This is still far more expensive than the cheapest version of Balan, which is a Commander Masters reprint not even worth a dollar. Notably, the release of Commander Masters did cause the above card’s price to drop, but only about $5 to its current value.
When Balan was worth $43, the cheapest available copy of Balan at the time was about $4.50.
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Additional Examples
Coldsteel Heart from Jumpstart 2022 shows a rather similar trend. The card spiked to $16 shortly after release and quickly declined to $9 over the course of a month. The card is now worth about $3 which is still more than twice the value of any other nonfoil copy of Coldsteel Heart.
The point is, while these cards retained their premiums, after the demand for these anime art cards died down, so did the price of these cards. This can be seen across anime art cards from Jumpstart 2022. Here are some more examples to cement the point.
Blood Artist’s Jumpstart 2022 anime iteration started at $6 and dropped to $1 over the course of a month. That said, the card is spiking back up to about $3.
Tree of Perdition from Jumpstart 2022 started out at $22, more than twice the price of the original nonfoil Tree of Perdition from Eldritch Moon at that time. The Jumpstart 2022 version of the Tree is now worth about $5.50.
That said, should a card with an anime treatment become part of an existing trend, demand for that card is likely to go up, and since the supply of most anime art cards right now aren’t the best, the price will go up more than other variants. Preordain and Spellstutter Sprite from Jumpstart 2022 are good examples of this.
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More ‘Waiting to See’
We don’t have very much information on how anime artwork exclusives for MTG behave yet because there simply isn’t a lot of anime artwork releases from booster box sets currently available. From the limited information we have, however, the current premiums for anime art cards in Wilds of Eldraine may not last.
Thanks to the Multiverse Legends bonus sheet from March of the Machine and Strixhaven, we know that these main set bonus sheets are capable of curbing prices immensely, which is awesome for accessibility. This has already been seen with some of the normal variants of Enchanted Tales cards.
If initial demand is sated for the anime art cards seen on the Enchanted Tales Bonus Sheet, we may see a similar decline in price to Jumpstart 2022. These anime art cards can be opened in Draft and Set Boosters, so there is potential for a heavy quantity of these cards to hit the market.
That said, according to Wizards of the Coast’s Collecting Wilds of Eldraine article, your chances of opening an anime borderless Enchanted Tales card in your pack is small. To be precise, “in 2.8% (1.1% rare/1.7% mythic rare) of boosters, that dedicated slot will have an anime borderless card.” Set Boosters will have two slots where the anime borderless cards can be found. Confetti Foils have the same odds of appearing in Collector Booster packs only.
It is also important to keep in mind that not every Enchanted Tales card has an anime borderless treatment. Only 15 Mythic Rares and 5 Rare cards have this – meaning that if you hit the anime borderless treatment, the card pool is much smaller.
If these pack opening odds are enough to starve supply on the market so that demand doesn’t truly catch up, these anime art cards may continue being worth a large premium. If demand is sated and these cards start becoming an excess, premiums will decrease. The cards should, regardless, keep some level of premium over other treatments.
My personal opinion is that the current premiums we’re seeing will not last forever. Whether the anime borderless Enchanted Tales cards will drop heavily in value like the Jumpstart 2022 ones did is yet to be seen, but in terms of the Jumpstart 2022 timeline, we are in the spike week for these anime cards. The prices for these cards, in my opinion, are more likely to drop than not, but anything could happen.
The big factor is whether these pack opening odds, and the fact that many of these cards are massive Commander staples will change the script or not, and chances are that the ladder will have an impact. I still plan on buying an MTG anime Omniscience at some point. I’m just going to wait and see if the card goes down a bit.
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