Shocklands and the Ramifications of Staple Reprints in Magic

Hello, readers! Today’s Modern Times article is a very special one: it’s all about the Shocklands. In light of Ravnica Remastered’s newest batch of accessible Shockland reprints, what are the financial ramifications (or implications) of a third round of “normal” reprints for our Shocklands? 

There’s a lot to dig into: the prices of original Shocks retaining a considerable amount of value relative to reprints, and the convergence of reprint prices being the most interesting characteristics in the data, among others. Let’s dig into the history, the data, and “some” economic theory, too. 

A Brief History of Shocklands 

Shocklands have a storied past in the annals of Magic history. Originally printed across three sets (Ravnica: City of Guilds, Guildpact, and Dissension) in the Ravnica block from late 2005 through early 2006, these ten lands found their way into Magic: Godless Shrine, Breeding Pool, Blood Crypt, Sacred Foundry, Watery Grave, Overgrown Tomb, Steam Vents, Hallowed Fountain, Stomping Ground, and Temple Garden.

$21.79$21.99

$17.94$16.99

All ten of these lands represent the first time since the original dual lands of Alpha/Beta/Unlimited/Revised that nonbasic lands possessed two basic land types explicitly (there have since been others), making them fetchable, and more than satisfactory for fixing the mana bases in every format they were legal in not called Legacy or Vintage. The only drawback: you need to pay two life points (hence the “Shock” in Shockland) for these lands to enter into play untapped–a small price to pay, especially as the game evolved to treat life as a resource as much as a target. 

Needless to say, these lands were not just a flash in the pan, and have persisted as format staples for all multicolored land bases in the game’s most-played constructed formats: Commander, Modern, and Pioneer. As one might imagine, such high demand across many constructed formats has left these key game pieces historically as some of the most expensive components needed for building any competitive deck, especially in Modern and Pioneer. Having said that, Wizards of the Coast has made many strides to provide regular (emphasis on “regular,” rather than premium reprintings, such as Zendikar Expeditions) reprintings of these cards, starting with the Return to Ravnica block (Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash, and Dragon's Maze), the unofficial Guilds of Ravnica “block” (unofficial in the sense that the block release structure no longer existed), and once more this past month in Ravnica Remastered. 

The big overarching question in all of this is simple: have these reprints lowered the prices of the average Shockland? The answer is “yes,” but with some interesting caveats in the data, and those caveats are the most interesting point of discussion! Two puzzles, so to speak, that one would observe in the data are that reprints definitely pull down the average card price over time, but the “spread” between original printings and their subsequent reprints are still huge for cards with large relative print runs such as modern-era Shocklands. Furthermore, reprints of any one Shockland have seemingly converged in price across all Shocks. 

These puzzles are interesting for two reasons: if original printings even from 2005/2006 still hold strong relative value, there’s perhaps some financial benefits to be reaped by investing in original printings in this modern era, even in light of reprints; secondly, if each subsequent reprint converges in price, is there a financial benefit–on the margin, that is–to speculating on new, but still in-demand, reprints? The Shocks are the perfect case study to address these puzzles, so let’s turn to the data!

The Data

As an economist, it feels like 50-75% of what I do day-to-day is visualize, analyze, and model data. Visualizing data, in particular, epitomizes the saying that “a picture tells a thousand words.” Looking at the four major waves of Shocklands printings, we can see some pretty interesting dynamics at play:

 

Firstly, the originals always retain more value than their subsequent reprints. Secondly, reprints may serve to lower the average price over time, but any given reprint, at face value, is not meaningfully different from any other generic reprint (of course, premium reprints like Zendikar Expeditions are a different story entirely). We can cut this data even more by looking at the average and standard deviation of each Shockland across all its main block releases:

As we can see, the average of the average price across blocks for any given Shockland is unsurprisingly skewed towards the value of the original printings. However, the volatility of any given Shockland’s price (as measured by its standard deviation) can be dramatic card-to-card. For example, Hallowed Fountain is comparatively a less expensive Shockland on average, but its volatility is quite large, driven mainly by the gap between its original price and the average price of just its reprints–$13.23. So what factors might be driving these data characteristics? 

Driving Factors

Transitory Dips

Reprints need not always have a long-run effect on prices. Take for example Breeding Pool from Dissension:

Note that around Return to Ravnica’s release, Breeding Pool drops in price from $30 to as low as $15 before slowly ticking back up around Battle for Zendikar. The price then peaks again at around $23 around Dominaria, only to fall right as Guilds of Ravnica is announced, to around $20, only to continually rise up until around May of 2022, and fall once more. However, even around Ravnica Remastered’s announcement and release, the downward trend in price actually slowed, and looks to be stabilizing and bottoming-out. 

Why? It’s possible that for these original printings, the transitory value (short-run) is maybe influenced by reprints, but not tied to it in the long-run. After all, if reprints are objectively cheaper, you can freely substitute Return to Ravnica copies of Breeding Pool into your decks. And yet, the price always seems to stabilize (sometimes over longer periods than others). These transitory dips may influence price volatility (as we see in the data), but don’t seem to have a major influence on the long-run value of these original Shocklands. 

Popularity

It would be an understatement to say that the Shocklands are “popular.” They are format staples across all formats they are legal in, with the exception maybe of Legacy and Vintage, wherein the original dual lands take the crown. That being said, capturing popularity is relatively difficult, however, there are ways to do so. One way utilized by MTGDecks.net is to index cards by format by their frequency of play in publicly available deck lists over a two-year period relative to the most popular card. In our context, it would appear Watery Grave is the most popular Shockland in Commander.

Based on this popularity index of Shocklands in Commander–the most popular format–we can calculate some correlations between Shockland popularity across the board and the mean Shockland price across all sets, across all reprints, and the spread between the original print and the average reprint price. These numbers are 0.18, 0.08, and 0.40, respectively. 

Effectively, popularity is weakly and positively correlated to the mean price of the Shocklands themselves, but moderately and positively correlated to the premium between the originals and the reprints. This is actually a sensible result. It would make sense that if you play Commander and only need one copy of a given Shockland for your deck, that you can perhaps afford to spend a little bit more above the lowest available price for that nice original printing. But if you play competitively in non-singleton formats, you’re likely simply buying the most affordable versions of the card available to complete your playsets. Given that the print runs of the Guilds of Ravnica “block” and Ravnica Remastered set are enormous by 2005 (Ravnica) and 2012 (Return to Ravnica) standards, it’s unsurprising that an already saturated market isn’t moving a ton with a wave of new reprints–unless supply creates its own demand.

Say’s Law

Say’s Law is an older theory that posits supply creates its own demand. How is this applied to our reprint puzzles? Simple, it’s generally well established (especially) in Modern that land bases are the bane of players’ wallets. Anecdotally, I can attest that many players I’ve met and played with are hesitant to jump formats from Commander to Modern (or even Pioneer) because the up-front costs of the mana bases are excruciating by comparison to the main deck for many top-tier decks in the format (although, one would have to include the costs of Fetchlands and Boseiju, Who Endures in this calculation as well). 

$19.49$23.99

$27.30$29.99

If, however, players observe that availability of cards for otherwise expensive land bases are increasing, then perhaps those players, otherwise uninterested in the market for Modern or Pioneer staples, will now choose to enter the market, thereby creating new demand out of relatively thin air. This in turn mitigates some of the price decreases we would expect from an increase in supply via reprinting. 

Final Thoughts

While there is no one “right” theory about the convergence of reprint prices relative to originals, I would like to think some combination of transitory dips, raw popularity, and the implications of Say’s Law explain the price dynamics of the Shocklands fairly well, and in an intuitive manner. 

I will stress that this isn’t a rigorous study, per se, but it's an extensive enough look at the data to recommend some financial tips. Firstly, for staples like the Shocklands, subsequent reprints don’t move the dial on the price of original printings much. Thus, in an era of print-to-demand, there’s an argument to be made that investing in original printings of these gems might have some financial value. Secondly, again, for staples like the Shocklands, reprints tend to converge with one another in value, thus the next time you see a wave a Shockland reprints, expect the long-run value of those reprints to be aligned with previous versions, except the original. As such, exercise caution when looking at preorder prices when reprints already exist, as it’s likely the preorder prices will converge to the average value of existing reprints at some point.

This was a longer article with a fair bit to digest. So if you’ve stuck with me through the end, thank you! With that said, speculate safety and see you all in a couple weeks!

Further Reading:

New Horizons - Ravnica Remastered

Which Version of Lightning Bolt Should You Buy?

Magic: the Gathering Trends in 2023