I just wanted to get a quick article up for this while I work on more, since it’s pretty big news. Magiccon Chicago is happening this weekend, and Wizards of the Coast have just confirmed that the “allied fetchlands,” which haven’t been in a normal booster printing since Khans of Tarkir in 2014, will appear in this summer’s Modern Horizons 3 release!
For reference, these cards are Bloodstained Mire, Flooded Strand, Polluted Delta, Wooded Foothills, and Windswept Heath, first printed in Onslaught in 2002. Here is how awesome they looked the first time around:
The MH3 printings don’t look nearly as good in most cases, though I will call the normal-art Windswept Heath an improvement and Wooded Foothills a tie. The images are all updated already on Scryfall.
For those of you who aren’t deep in the game, there are also “enemy fetchlands” in the opposed colors that appeared in several sets over the years, most recently Modern Horizons 2 in 2021, which until Lord of the Rings came out last year, was the best-selling Magic: the Gathering product of all time. And the ten “fetchlands” are highly sought by players. They don’t seem powerful at first glance, but they merit inclusion in any deck where they are legal by color and release. The land they “fetch” does not have to be a basic land, and in fact it rarely is; original dual lands and the Ravnica-era “shocklands” are among the various nonbasic lands that have a basic land type and thus can be targeted in this way. The fetchlands also provide for a deck shuffle, which can be abused in conjunction with cards like Brainstorm, Sylvan Library, and so on. And they “thin the deck” of lands so that future draws are more likely to be functional cards, which can be huge for aggro and control strategies alike.
All ten fetchlands have appeared now and then in premium or special printings such as the Zendikar Expeditions and… the Zendikar Rising Expeditions, as well as some of them appearing as judge foils, event incentives, or Secret Lair contents. But the normal rare-level booster printings of these cards are the ones that truly feed demand and move the needle on price. Thankfully, since so much demand is organic, they will still carry some value even under saturation of supply. These are not spec bubbles: players really do want to play these cards in decks. The market value patterns we observed for Modern Horizons 2 are good guideposts here.
In another subject, thank you all who have joined up as paid subscribers lately, it has been a truly wonderful thing to see and it’s helping a lot in terms of making LGSNI sustainable and building toward better and better content. I sometimes get a little message from the subscriber and these help a lot as I look for ways to sculpt and curate the content here. Some recent messages, anonymized for courtesy:
Thank you so much my friend, you nailed it exactly, my objective here at LGSNI is to provide the kind of guidance that will lead to good health and a flourishing business for owners/operators/stakeholders who take a professional approach and strive for a high-integrity, high-quality, no-excuses offering.
Plenty of gamers in that region for sure, and I hope LGSNI is filling in your road map with useful stuff. As they say in heavy industry: Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. That is to say, being deliberate and taking the time you need to build a solid position, is going to end up saving you time overall, because it’s a whole lot better than having to do it over.
Haha nice. That’s definitely the outcome to aim for. There’s really no shortcut to making the business worth more; it has to be built up one day at a time, one transaction at a time, one prudent distributor order or over-the-counter buy at a time. If your processes are sound, the snowball effect will have you looking back every few months and marveling at how far you’ve come. So here at LGSNI, sound processes are of stressed importance.
That last subscriber mentioned the business valuation article as one that really hit the spot for them. Other articles I have heard called out as being worth their weight in gold, besides the product ordering analyses, have been last week’s primer on how to deal with a drastically underperforming release; January’s look at buying processes to cover your exposure; and especially last fall’s look at hard money methods.
Are these articles reflective of an overall poor health of the industry? I don’t really think so, even though we definitely did see a lot of turbulence in 2023. The reason those articles make such a big difference is because when a store is facing a difficult scenario, that’s when good guidance makes the most difference. To put it another way, I think my early paid-exclusive articles on million-card singles scale and key metrics are probably more valuable in the abstract, and stand to gain the reader more profit (or savings) operationally, but those are the things you read when you’re doing okay, and stretching toward the next rung of the ladder, not when your ladder is wobbly and you’re trying to hold your balance.
So please stay tuned for lots more, including my first forays into “smaller” paid-exclusive articles that will contain useful inventory resources and process materials that you can just adapt to your usage rather than brewing your own from scratch. I will of course keep up the free content as well. Have a great weekend!