Not to be confused with RoI, which is Return on Investment, or REI, which sells plaid things and Nalgene bottles to people for outdoor adventures, Rise of the Eldrazi is also not "roe", which is apparently horrid little edible fish eggs. Whatever you may call it, RoE is here and there are a few big-time money rares shaking up the EV this time around. I like to do one of these articles for each set, and I love doing them for a big set. First, a bit about my methodology.

The Spreadsheet

I've got a pretty hacked-together little spreadsheet that does most of the math for me. It's not really a master's tool yet, but I plan to really clean it up and eventually give it out to people so they can do their own variations. Here's the gist.

Set a threshold. You want to weed out the cards that won't have a significant impact on your values because they will be hard to sell at "retail" prices. In other words, your $1 rare isn't actually worth a buck because no one will buy it. I like to set ≈$4.00 for my rare threshold, and ≈$1.50 for your Uncommon threshold. If you can trade a card at its value or higher to get the cards that sell well, it's as good as selling the card itself. You can probably train a spreadsheet to weed them out for you as well.

Then do a weighted average of all the rares in the set weighted 7/8th and mythics in the set weighted at 1/8th. This accounts for the 1-in-8 chance for a rare to be replaced by a Mythic. Items below your threshold should be counted as either 0, for a more conservative estimate, or some small amount like .10 to account for dealer bulk rates. For the uncommons, average the ones above threshold with the rest as zeroes. Then multiply by 3. You'll come up with a number, usually around 3. I've seen it drop below 2, and I've seen it hit 4+ depending on the data and the threshold. This number represents the monetary value of the individual cards in a single pack. Compare this to your cost per pack (usually around 2.75 a pack or less, if you buy by the box or more.) The bigger the disparity, the higher the expected value of opening the packs.

There is more advanced math that can be done to determine how variable the set is, but I'm not interested in that level of precision. Any mathematicians that are into it should go for it, and even write me with their findings. I am just not quite so academically inclined!

You can usually assume that a few high-dollar Planeswalkers will be more variant than a cycle of 10 dual lands that each get about 10-15 bucks. Once we have that data crunched, we know about how much money we can make on a few boxes worth of cards and can figure out if it's worth opening packs or just trading. Let's put this method to work on Rise of the Eldrazi.

A Bunch of Numbers

53/15/60 - Quantity, Rares/Mythics/Uncommons.

$1.87 - The California Police code for homicide, and the average value per RoE pack.

11 - The number of Mythics over $3

9 - The number of Rares over $2

8'( - Not actually a number. Your face, if you're cracking Rise packs.

7.3¢ - How much value Wall of Omens adds to each pack of Rise.

27.5¢ - How much value Gideon Jura adds to each pack of Rise.

I won't post the spreadsheet here, since it's not a polished work, but hopefully those numbers give you an idea what we're working with. There are 53 rares in the set, as well as 15 mythics and 60 uncommons. 11 of the 15 mythic rares in this set are worth a real amount of money, compared to only 9 of the 55 rares. This is awful. 8'( is the face you should make if you just open packs for cards. The EV is so low that you're in the negatives by far. The last two numbers are there to give you an idea how much a huge mythic effects a pack's value. Even though he's only appearing X times, just the chance that he's in a given pack is worth about 1/8th of the set's entire value. That's magnified even more in the case of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, where the set was smaller and he was worth considerably more.

We are being conservative here, which is usually good business, because it's much easier to react to success than failure. Let's be a little less stingy and add in a few more uncommons and commons. I'm adding in a handful of uncommons worth around 45 cents or more. Our prices are based on a composite Ebay average from the Magic Traders website (magictraders.com), so they represent actual records of transactions that occurred. I use this because it is most able to give me accurate readings on what I could sell a card for if I needed to. Dealer prices are based on many factors, but the open market price is the most honest one to use.

Adding in about 3 bucks worth of uncommons and about 80 cents worth of commons, we see the EV jump up to a mind-altering $2.01. This is hardly exciting stuff. If Wall of Omens becomes a Bloodbraid/Path type uncommon, the set's value per pack goes up to an insipid $2.14. Clearly, the issue is with the rares.

Having so many underpriced rares is horrible for the game, and it is exacerbated by the completely insane price of mythic rares. I've talked a lot about this, but I hope this data helps prove it. At this price, it's about break-even for dealers to crack boxes en-masse. Players paying "retail" for boxes (not to be confused with MSRP), are probably in the red about 15-20 bucks at least. It looks bad for acquisition when a new player wants to play in a PTQ, but the best deck costs more than he spent college. Unless he got a full ride, in which case, he has no excuse for not having the money.

As someone who sells a lot of cards, I really don't like sitting on tons of lame rares while a few choice mythics fly out of the case 3 times a day. It means I'm able to say "yes" to fewer customers in my store, and saying "yes" in this business usually means a small profit will occur. If you have Rise packs, don't just open them. In the long run, you won't get your money's worth, and you'll have a lot more fun drafting and learning more about Magic. If you've got any questions on my EV method, or would like to share your own, leave a comment. Remember, my method is not meant to produce perfect accuracy, but it should be accurate within 10 cents or so. That's close enough for me, so further accuracy would not be a profitable use of my time. Until next time, always do the math!