In yesterday's Hotlist email I projected the price of Double Masters Collector boxes would hit $400 by the end of August.
Let's dig a little into the specifics of that hypothesis...
First, lets compare Double Masters 2022 to its predecessor, Double Masters. The OG Double Masters set came out on August 7, 2020. Today, the TCG Market price on Draft Boxes is $631.46. And VIP Packs are $181.63 per pack.
The sets both include bombs and spicy versions of cards that are sought out by collectors and folks looking to bling out their decks. They both have modern and commander staples and they were both short-printed to keep demand high. Both sets have 332 cards. The OG set had box toppers, but the new Double Masters has textured foil chase cards.
Let's assume for simplicity that these sets are equal. Arguments could be made on both sides about one set being "better than the other," but I believe that's an argument of inches not yards. Both sets are fire.
So...assuming they are roughly equal, what causes one draft box to be $369.99 and the other to be $631.46?
The answer...
Time. Well, that and box toppers...but that doesn't change the broader point. :)
When Double Masters 2022 came out in early July all stores received inventory at the same time. Coming off of Commander Legends: The Battle for Baldur's Gate stores were starving for cash and needed to flip 2X2 as quickly as possible to make ends meet. They raced to the bottom on TCGPlayer and the box prices fell to the floor. It's a natural economic movement when high demand items are in the hands of folks that "need the money." And smart buyers gobbled them up.
We were in a buyers market.
In my studies of Magic pricing we normally see a R+30 curve on new releases, meaning that prices are the lowest from release day to 30 days after. Then you normally start to see the box prices and singles prices tick up. Supply floods the market and it takes a period of time to normalize. 30 days is roughly that standard normalization period.
With 2X2 that curve started to move within 10 days of release. Rudy posted a video explaining that the available inventory on TCG Player was selling out faster than dealers were adding more...so he projected that the price would hit $350/$400 a box within weeks. And Rudy has the ability to move markets, just ask the MTGFinance threads on Reddit.
Although Rudy's analysis (in this instance) was solid I think he mis-considered the supply side a bit. Rudy sold through his entire allocation ASAP. He took the cash and has no product left to sell. Can't blame him, but other large suppliers took a different strategy. We, for one, predicted that these boxes would normalize over time. So we didn't race to the bottom. We didn't dump all of our boxes immediately for quick cash. Our goal is always to offer the best price we can while keeping well stocked for our customers. It is and always will be a balancing act.
Just yesterday I got an email from on of our distributors offering 2X2 Collector Boxes, limit 4. This distributor likely has hundreds of LGS stores in the US and if each of those claims their 4 boxes we would expect to see a mini flood of boxes back on the market. Sure enough, last night there were boxes available for sale on TCGPlayer back under $320 (likely from dealers that got their limit-4 and flipped them quickly). Those dried up within hours. And this morning we're back to $330+.
At Moonshot, we work with most of the Magic distributors. We're a WPN Premium Store with a large online and in-store customer base. We buy and sell a lot of Magic. After the four bonus boxes we received, I'm not expecting any more sealed 2X2 product. Supply is fixed. As boxes get purchased on the open market we should expect prices to tick up. And I'd bet that before the end of August both Collector and Draft boxes will be north of $400 a box. And I'd take the over on $600 Collector boxes within 2 years.
Onward!
-Jayson