A set can go from positive EV to negative EV in less than a week, sometimes even overnight. Timing is everything when it comes to making a profit by opening boxes, as prices drop quickly once a new set starts being opened. While opening booster boxes is a ton of fun and sealed product is essentially for drafting, if your goal is to put together a specific Standard deck or simply grow your collection, there is much less variance if you simply buy the individual cards you need rather than hoping to beat the odds and open them from a booster box. Of course, not everyone is interested in selling cards, so we'll also talk about the expected value without taking into account fees and shipping, although here, it's worth mentioning once again that if your goal is to build a Standard collection, it's usually smarter (from a financial perspective) to wait a month or two for prices to decrease as supply enters the market and then just purchase singles rather than buying a box. This is why the prices listed in the charts in this article are lower than the MTGGoldfish price: I'm making deductions that take into account the "hidden" costs of selling the cards. For this, I mostly use the TCG market price (minus 15% for fees and shipping), which is basically the price of completed listings on the TCG Marketplace and shows the actual prices that cards have sold for, and not just what people are asking for their cards. As such, in calculating the value of the cards in the set, I'm trying to use the number that I realistically think I can get for the card tomorrow (this is important because new sets tend to decrease in value quickly). Instead, we get things like eBay minus fees and shipping or buylist prices. But unfortunately, these numbers do not mean much to me for a couple of reasons: First, I (and most of you) can't get StarCityGames or TCGplayer mid prices when I sell my cards (wouldn't that be nice?). Most EV calculations use retail sell prices-things like TCGplayer mid or the prices that vendors like StarCityGames or ChannelFireball ask for a card. Of course, since we are working with averages, no individual box is guaranteed to hit the expected value number-you could run well and get more value or run poorly and get less-but the number should be pretty accurate over the course of hundreds or thousands of boxes. Then, we add everything together, which gives us the total expected value for the box. We calculate the odds of opening each individual card in a box (which are the multipliers you'll see throughout the article), which in turn allows us to calculate how much value the potential of opening each card adds to a booster box. Expected value basically refers to the amount of value (in US dollars) you can expect to open from a booster box, on average. So, don't let this EV calculation be the only factor in your decision of whether to buy a box.Īt this point, most of you probably know how this works, but for those of you who don't, here's a quick breakdown. When it comes right down to it, Magic is a game-there is value in having fun, and EV calculation can't take into account this non-monetary value. All of these, and many more, are fine reasons to purchase a booster box, even a low-EV booster box. Others pick up boxes to grow their collection (although this is usually an inefficient way of going about it) or to draft with their friends. For some people, it's tradition for others, they enjoy the lottery-like thrill of hoping to open a high-value foil mythic. Like usual, one important warning before digging into the numbers: there are a lot of reasons why people buy booster boxes. How does stuffing 36 planeswalkers into a set impact the value of a box? Let's find out! These differences aside, our plan for today is simple: we're going to break down the numbers on War of the Spark and see just how much value you should expect to open from your box. On the other hand, being a week late means that we can't really compare War of the Spark to past sets too effectively since we won't really have an apples-to-apples comparison. In some ways, this is good news: an extra week means that War of the Spark prices have had more time to adjust, making the EV likely to be accurate for a somewhat longer period of time. Normally, we have our traditional expected-value article on prerelease weekend, but thanks to the Magic gods scheduling a Mythic Championship on the same weekend as the prerelease for War of the Spark, we're a week late this set.
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