MTG Dominaria Post-Mortem, Remastered!
Throwback Thursday presents an article from March 24, 2018
Today we continue our look back at the Magic: the Gathering release post-mortem articles from The Backstage Pass! In some cases the hindsight on this stuff is fairly significant. In other cases, not so much. In other cases, it’s a howl of laughter. Please feel free to amuse yourself at my expense as you read this.
So, I didn’t actually write a Dominaria post-mortem in 2018. I had gotten off track from the post-mortem articles during the 2017 store move, and didn’t really return to form until Guilds of Ravnica. Here on LGSNI, I’ve been repurposing past articles from the time period as post-mortem Remasters, and it’s working great for the most part. However, I really just never wrote anything consequential about Rivals of Ixalan or Core Set 2019, so those two are getting skipped. I did write about the sellout of Dominaria, so that was remasterable, if slightly sparse. I guess Rivals and M19 just didn’t make much of an impression on release. It took a few years before people started noticing how much Commander value was in RIX, and boxes finally began climbing the aftermarket ranks.
As always, original in normal text and my new annotations in italics.
Here we go!
The weekend brought with it the prerelease for Magic's newest expansion, Dominaria, a throwback to the game's original setting with plenty of retro flavor and reasonable card power levels.
Yeah, it was a success.
Just about everything related to this release worked as intended. Players were enthusiastic and the typical YouTube Pundits(Tm) weren't sh!tting all over the set yet, so turnout was at its highest level in two years. In fact, our relatively large allocation sold out entirely. A good time was had by many. If Ixalan hadn't fallen right in the lap of our store move, we'd likely have been allocated even more and sold those out too. Our Sunday events were less than 12 players each because that's all the product we had left.
Wizards of the Coast tried a pilot program by which stores could sell booster boxes, up to a quantity limit (60 boxes for our store), during the prerelease. To make matters better, each box came with a store-exclusive promo foil card not found in booster packs. The promo card, Firesong and Sunspeaker, looked well-tailored for the new Brawl format, a Standard-ized version of Commander. Many local stores raced to the bottom as usual on price, looking this gift horse right in the mouth, but we held firm at our everyday price and sold out anyway. [Firesong and Sunspeaker ended up being an underpowered nothingburger, but oh boy did the exclusive promo thing ever become a playability issue one set later with M19’s Nexus of Fate. Oh, and Brawl didn’t go anywhere (and still has not). Brawl was one of Wizards’s attempts to solve the sustainability problem in Commander. The answer in the end is almost certainly going to be something resembling “ban the Reserved List” but I don’t blame them for trying everything else first before invoking that nuclear option.]
I liked in particular that the early box offering helped local game stores as a direct leg up against the mass market and online dumpers alike. Mass doesn't discount (usually), but they break the street date with regularity. The optics are awful: local game stores look like chumps while players naturally buy early packs from Wal-Mart and Target when they can get them, because the new shiny is very compelling. The Pokemon Company ships a week early to local game stores that hold prereleases, and that helps address the street date breakage. Rather than copying that, Wizards tried something in line with their existing programming, and it proved out. [The next step after buy-a-box promo cards was letting WPN stores sell the set in its entirety on prerelease weekend, which has been even more of a success. So much so that it was copied whole by Ravensburger and Asmodee for Lorcana and Star Wars Unlimited, respectively.]
We'll be waiting eagerly to see what Wizards does in July with the Core Set 2019. There are some internecine releases: Battleborn Battlebond in early June, a Conspiracy-esque ancillary booster release geared toward Two-Headed-Giant gameplay, as well as Commander Anthology II: This Set Had Better Include The Breed Lethality Deck, the Global Series set, From the Vaults: Jace, and probably another I'm overlooking at the moment. Plus an Unstable reprint due in any week now. [Commander Anthology II did in fact include the Breed Lethality deck, lol. Global Series was stillborn, the Signature Series didn’t catch on in either of its permutations, and Battlebond was outstanding and I wish we could have had more.]
Magic: the Gathering isn't the only thing going on right now. But I've written at length about how I think diversification underperformed back when Magic was so hot that we'd have been better off committing deeply to it and not worrying about everything else. I have real business going on in the other games and categories, so I'm not going to move away from those in favor of Magic, but I'm definitely going to be increasing stock depth for Magic moving into the summer. Magic is about to have a dominant run, and Domin-aria started it. I'm banking on that being the case. [In the years that followed began the Great Narrowing of DSG, where I sold off our comic business, discontinued tabletop minis, migrated away from board games, downsized after a fire, dropped RPGs, and finally sold off video games in spring 2023, leading to a brief time when the only things DSG carried were Magic and Pokemon. We re-added D&D to qualify for Lorcana, brought in One Piece, and that was how things stood at the time we sold the whole thing in December.]
After Core 2019, we get Commander 2018, which is sure to be another hit [it was], and sometime in June we'll learn what's coming later after that. Gen Con will be the grand finale of Magic's 25th Anniversary celebration -- the sky is the limit as to what they might do, and I really hope they don't undershoot the mark like Iconic Masters and Masters 25 did. [They did; nothing consequential happened in August 2018.] We're long overdue for a Collector's Edition 25, a.k.a. "Reserved List But Not Tournament Legal: The Set." Or if you prefer, Proxy Party 25. Whatever. Print it. Kitchen table players everywhere will take out second mortgages to buy it out. [This finally happened in 2022 for Magic 30 and they fumbled it really badly. I still remain of the belief that non-tournament-legal Reserved List reprints are needed in perpetuity, in tandem with a Reserved List ban in every format except Vintage, and perhaps Legacy.] In the fall? In Keeping Secrets of Silent Ravnica 3 is my guess. [I nailed it! The fall Standard set was Guilds of Ravnica!]
If you like tapping mana and playing spells and turning creatures sideways, 2018 is looking more and more like your year.
[And now a few quick notes on Dominaria’s content, since most of my remarks at the time had to do with its immediate market impact.]
Consistent with the trend at the time, Dominaria featured a bunch of Standard-relevant stuff that defined the singles market early on, such as History of Benalia, Goblin Chainwhirler, and Steel Leaf Champion, but those are all bulk now and the only consequential value from the set today are its Commander playables.
A Chinese-market leak spoiled part of the set for internet denizens of the time, and we found out about home runs such as “Mouse Community,” which of course turned out to be a translation of Rat Colony, which at the time of this writing is a four-dollar common, so that’s something.
With Ixalan reprinting the allied checklands, it made sense for Dominaria to be the first standard booster set reprint of Innistrad 2011’s enemy checklands, and so it happened. They aren’t especially valuable dual lands, but they play well, and they cooperate with typed duals such as shocklands, biomes, and original ABUR dual lands, which means they’ll always have some Commander relevance.
So much of Dominaria’s relevancy has already been reprinted, with Mox Amber being the most recent card to run away with value and then get a standard-booster appearance that brought things right back under control. Since it was a Brothers’ War retro artifact, it even has a serialized version that outvalues the original pack foil, which is a factor that hasn’t really solidly defined its behavior yet even now after a half-dozen or so serialized sets, so collectors are watching closely. Among those Dominaria playables that haven’t been back yet, Cabal Stronghold projects well for a simple return, and it’s not too bad yet on cost.
Just before Dominaria United came out in late 2022, I pulled a bunch of 2018’s Dominaria out of storage and we had Friday Night Magic drafts with it. Players had an absolute blast. In terms of limited environments, this set had one of the better ones. That suggests a future ruggedness to the value of booster boxes, even though it was before the Booster Fun era so there aren’t really jackpot shots possible. I think this set will age well compared to expectations.