It’s been a rough week, right? All of the announcements that kept firing all week kept us on our toes while many people were preparing for the biennial pilgrimage to Las Vegas. I was one of those people and had a great week but now it’s time to process what happened while I was gone. This week I want to take a look at the new product announcements and what that means for your wallet.

Let’s start with this chronological ordering of product announcements. It may look at bit misleading because there are likely to be more products announced between Rivals of Ixalan and Core Set 2019 but we can’t worry about those right now!

Merfolk vs Goblins

Explorers of Ixalan

Well, I wish I could speak more about this subject but there is just basically no information available for what this supplementary product actually is. It seems like it’s a new multiplayer centric sealed product much like Archenemy and Planechase. If it includes some new legendary creatures that are good for Commander it could be a very popular product but there is just not enough information right now to make any meaningful observations about it.

From the Vault: Transform

Unstable

The newest “un” set will be very interesting to watch. The previous un-sets, despite their popularity, don’t actually have valuable cards in them with the exception of the basic lands. Full art basic lands are not really special anymore, so unless they find some way to make them special (maybe dig up some art better than John Avon drawing a city of butts) they are unlikely to carry a lot of the value of the set. We have already seen that cards that are “useless” outside of a certain context have pretty negative effects on a set. For example, the Conspiracy sets which have many cards that only do something during a draft are worth a lot less than usual. This means that cards that are sought after (like Leovold, Emissary of Trest) become very expensive to make up for this. I’m interested to see what kinds of cards they can include in this booster set that can make it sell. I’m not convinced there will be any.

The Rest

Masters 25 being released early next year probably rules out an Eternal Masters 2018 or new Modern Masters set. I’m not sure how many Masters sets we can have before people get burned out but we will see if there are enough exciting cards that can be included to get people excited about a $10 booster set. Return to Dominaria and M19 are also things that people may be theoretically excited about but we have no idea what waits for us in those sets. Truth be told, there’s not a lot to talk about here yet. I’ll revisit when we have more information.

Looking far into the future is hard to predict, but I think this product lineup can give us a pretty clear understanding of the path forward and what reprints we can expect. Next article I will take a look at the last set of Masterpieces (for the foreseeable future) in Hour of Devastation and the trend of masterpieces as a whole.