MTG Modern Horizons II Post-Mortem, Remastered!
Throwback Thursday presents compiled notes from June 2021
With Modern Horizons III front and center, the timing is perfect for my Retrospecticus series of articles to hit its predecessor, Modern Horizons II!
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.
On the Backstage Pass, I stopped writing the rigidly formatted post-mortem articles around the time of the store move to Chandler in 2017. But for many sets, I still wrote debriefing articles on their prerelease/release and market outlook and so forth in much the same way the post-mortems had been set up. I decided here on LGSNI to repurpose those articles as post-mortem Remasters as well, so that I can extend the series all the way to the end of the Pass to where LGSNI took over.
Toward the very end of the Pass, I didn’t even have time to write debriefs about every new set! For articles like this one, I’m compiling notes from my store results, social media, impressions at the time, and the benefit of hindsight. So this is actually kind of a brand new article, disguised as a remaster for consistency’s sake. LGSNI started when Phyrexia All Will Be One was current, so that projects to be the final bridge point.
Normally, we do the original in normal text and my new annotations in italics. Since this article is entirely newly written, we’ll stick to normal text.
Here we go!
June 2021 was crazy in so many ways for DSG. Magic’s Modern Horizons II, Pokemon’s Chilling Reign, and even some Yugimans set or other, all arrived simultaneously because of course they did. It was the deepest and most difficult product spend I ever did all at once, into six figures. And the sales rang forth! By mid-month we had the record for highest monthly revenue ever, and the final total still wasn’t beaten until Double Masters 2022 released… even though DSG was closed from June 19th to July 1st 2021 because our building caught on fire!
This remaster article isn’t about DSG’s crazy crypto summer, though, so I’m going to keep the focus on Modern Horizons II, but it’s impossible for me to think about it without remembering the rest of what was going on during that time, so I wanted to give fair reference.
In the initial going, sealed product sales were enormous, so we’ll cover that before the singles progression.
Collector boosters for this set were not cheap. They were the only way to get etched foils, however, which included etched retro-frame fetchlands, as well as etched retro-frame cards from the first Modern Horizons set, symboled for that set for catalog purposes as well. Opinions were divided over whether the best version of a card was going to be the etched foil or traditional foil version. Despite the etching treatment on MH2 being similar to that for Commander Legends, which was well received, to this day the market pricing prefers traditional foil by a modest margin. This factor, and the raw high price, explains why DSG’s large gamble on collector booster box quantity took so long to pay off.
Set and draft boosters and bundles moved somewhat more dependably. This was, I think, the first time the “extra rare/mythic, guaranteed foil per pack, overall yield better than a draft booster box” calculus really set in with the public for set booster boxes. Wizards stated that set and draft booster boxes would remain in print for a year or more, so the urgency didn’t seem as acute, but I found myself restocking them both regularly, especially set booster boxes. It became “the box to buy” for players who had some splurge budget and wanted to play spin-the-wheel.
Modern Horizons II is a great object lesson in how a singles market often shifts after release of a high-profile set, especially one with equity reprints.
The enemy fetchlands were announced well ahead of time and were among the primary pull targets from day one of the prerelease. And we were going from starvation to plenty on this, perhaps too much so. There had not been a real, impactful reprint of Misty Rainforest, Scalding Tarn, or Verdant Catacombs since their original rare pack appearance in 2009’s Zendikar. We had expedition versions that went to the moon, we had a Secret Lair of sorts, but nothing to saturate demand. MH2 saturated demand. At one point in the set’s life cycle, Arid Mesa and Marsh Flats both dropped under ten dollars. Single-digit pricing on fetchlands is a bellwether occurrence. All have recovered meaningfully in the three years since, of course, but for a while there, we were in wild territory. I did like and appreciate how accessible this made the game to newer and more casual players.
The other big gets in advance of the set were the ones everyone saw and assumed would be amazing and essential, and strangely, none of them really held up afterward. Cabal Coffers, Grist, Imperial Recruiter, Mirari’s Wake, Sword of Hearth and Home, Profane Tutor, Sterling Grove, Wonder, and Yavimaya were all in heavy volume out of the gates. All have settled and are eminently accessible now. The underlying problem was that these cards did not feature in the dominant decks that followed the set’s release.
At various speeds, we saw the real hits of the set arise directly out of the metagame, and they remain the top gets from MH2 today. The fetches, of course, but also Endurance, Fury, Grief, Murktide Regent, Ragavan Nimble Pilferer, Solitude, Subtlety, Esper Sentinel, and egads, the execrably-named Urza’s Saga. Some of these have appeared again since (in some cases in MH3!) but all are holding steady at high market values, and crucially, they got there organically. If you aren’t already well-versed in this singles market behavior, learn to watch for it as new high-profile sets release. There’s some hot stuff early on that you should sell as you get it. Then as the metagame develops, the longer-term value will become apparent. Bans can disrupt this process, of course, for any given card, but that’s always a risk.
But there was even more to celebrate in MH2!
An entire rack of Modern Horizons 1 reprints, generally in retro frame with foil and etched versions, brought back highly desired top singles for PvP and Commander formats alike. Everything from heavy hitters Force of Negation, both Swords, The First Sliver, and Urza, to all five enemy Talismen, and much more. These were a meaningful part of the MH2 value base that players didn’t immediately perceive, but noticed in the course of buying and opening boxes, and it spurred them on to buy and open even more, which of course was good for stores.
And as if all that wasn’t enough, MH2 itself had some down-rarity value, though the sheer amount of product opened kind of drove these prices down to chalk through the course of the set’s print run. Counterspell, Dragon’s Rage Channeler, Scurry Oak, Strike it Rich, Timeless Witness, and Tireless Provisioner, among others, all moved meaningful units and made parsing the non-rare stacks worthwhile to a degree.
Enough MH2 was printed that all the booster box types are still… about the same price today as they were in 2022. The set drafts well, so that adds a bit to the cachet of the draft boxes. It feels like buying up MH2 to sell as store stock is unambiguously correct to do right now. Once the aftermarket price climbs another 40%-50%, then you can think about not bothering with it, because reprints and the singles market will make the key pieces from MH2 accessible to players without them having to sniff out these packs specifically.
Per Mark Rosewater, Modern Horizons II was the best-selling product in Magic’s history until Lord of the Rings two years later. There was so much that went right, that the ramifications of MH2’s success reach far beyond its print-run-era sales. A meaningful portion of Modern Horizons III’s success is due to coat-tailing off the voltage of its predecessor. It solidified Wizards’s decision to create sets balanced to be made legal immediately in Modern. It furthered the senescence of the Reserved List cards; we’re tantalizingly close to Commander being realistically able to ban them all and change very little as a format as a result, and thus become 100% supportable in print perpetually. Today’s article is a fun look back at a smash hit set, but I wonder if we still have yet to find out more of MH2’s longer-term impact.
Next up on Throwback Thursday, the colossal crossover that Gen X gamers had been waiting for since at least 1993: Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons!