Jurassic World and Special Guests - Checking In With Lost Caverns of Ixalan
It’s been just over a year now since Magic returned to Ixalan thanks to the release of
Beyond just being an excellent set, however, The Lost Caverns of Ixalan also brought with it two extra bonuses for players and collectors alike: the debut of the Special Guest series, as well as the introduction of Jurassic World insert cards (
Which LCI Booster Boxes Have What
Unlike sets with a traditional insert slot which occupy a slot in the back of any and all packs, such as the
Why do I bring this up? Because it helps to explain the severe discrepancy in price trends between Collector Boxes, Set Boxes, and Draft Boxes of LCI. LCI Collector Boxes were one of the most popular Standard-set releases in recent memory, benefitting substantially from the collectibility bump afforded by players chasing Jurassic World and Special Guest cards (which had comparatively higher drop rates here than in Set Boxes). This was reflected in Collector Boxes rising nearly 47% over the past year, moving to nearly $330 from a floor of $225. Set Boxes, meanwhile, are pretty much flat over that interval, while Draft Boxes are down slightly.
Jurassic World Cards
Zooming in on the Jurassic World cards themselves, an interesting trend has begun to emerge: they’re picking up noticeable, positive price momentum. For those of you keeping track of the MTGStocks Interests page, you may have noticed this yourself over the past couple days -
This doesn’t even include the extra-special Emblem foil versions of these cards, a premium treatment found only in the Collector Boxes of LCI and with incredibly low drop rates. Looking at those, we can find even more cards with dramatic price movements.
This is a tale of two forces at work: supply erosion (that’s the gradual erosion of market stock) and specialty volatility. In terms of your non-Emblem Jurassic World cards, these appear to be moving up in price as LCI begins to leave the readily available shelves of card stores around the world. The set has been out for a long time now, and that means it has both lost its luster to many players and begun its shift to “old stock” for vendors. With Jurassic World cards occupying a weird space as extra hard to find but not so hard as to be classified among the likes of the Masterpiece series, it becomes easy to see why they’d all start to move upwards as LCI leaves shelves.
On the other hand, we have the Emblem foils. LCI Collector Boxes have been long gone from store shelves, meaning that supply erosion has had plenty of time to do its thing. The cheap copies of these cards are (mostly) gone, and with that attrition the market is now left with some wildly priced top-end singles. Not just wildly priced because they are the final few available, but also incredibly volatile because their prices are spread far apart, meaning that all it takes is a single card being bought for the entire market to move upwards.
Special Guests
In terms of the Special Guests included in LCI, we see much of the same dynamics as with the Jurassic World cards. Since these were available in both Set and Collector Boosters, the overall prices for many of the more in-demand Special Guest singles have begun to trickle upwards, while only the least popular remain with stalled prices.
On the volatile end, LCI also brought with it a Cosmium treatment (colloquially called “neon foil”) for two cards in the set, one Special Guest, one main-set:
Wrap Up
The three booster box types of Lost Caverns of Ixalan have each taken very different turns in the past year. Draft Boxes are down slightly, Set Boxes continue to be stable, and Collector Boxes have skyrocketed. The main set’s singles are all holding steady, aiding in the fortification of each box’s price, but once you get into the many specialty cards in the set it appears that LCI has benefitted more than most sets from its roster of unique, rarer includes. Mana Crypt may have been banned, but that hasn’t stopped the rest of the Special Guests from keeping their prices moving forward. Similarly, keep an eye out for those Jurassic World cards - who knows which will be the next to spike.
Further Reading:
Harvey McGuinness is a student at Johns Hopkins University who has been playing Magic since the release of Return to Ravnica. After spending a few years in the Legacy arena bouncing between Miracles and other blue-white control shells, he now spends his time enjoying Magic through CEDH games and understanding the finance perspective. He also writes for the Commander's Herald.
