Three hundred and thirty five dollars. That's what a lot of people got out of the Ultimate Masters announcement. Understandably a lot of people are very upset. How is the most expensive booster box ever printed supposed to bring the cost of cards down? I know it doesn't seem very intuitive but I feel like Wizards of the Coast is using some important lessons learned with this product that will make it a lot better than you are expecting.

To better understand what factors are at work here, let's take a short look at the history of Masters sets and Masterpieces. The first set was just called Modern Masters and it was the first entry in a long list of reprint sets. This set tried a lot to be a good draft format as well as including quality reprints throughout all rarities. The biggest difference between Modern Masters and future Masters sets was the MSRP. It was actually only $6.99 instead of the $9.99 that every set after had. While the price of a booster pack was supposed to be $7, I never saw one for that little. Most stores had marked up the price of booster packs to between $10 and $15 at various points of its lifetime. Product was immensely hard to come by and selling it for MSRP meant that people could buy the product and open it and make more money than they spent. Obviously that doesn't make a whole lot of sense because your LGS would just sell out immediately to a few people willing to do the work to resell it. The issue that caused this was the high value cards were mostly at common, uncommon, and rare. Contrary to later sets, the mythic rares were actually quite bad. Only 6 of the 15 mythics are worth more than $10 right now and 3 of them are worth less than $5. There are 20 commons or uncommons and even a few tokens printed in that set worth more than the least valuable mythic in the set (Ryusei, the Falling Star). The overall consensus was it was a good first try. Mythics needed to be better because opening Tarmogoyf vs opening Ryusei was too big of a feel bad. Packs needed to be more expensive so that there was a realistic expectation to be able to purchase them at MSRP. More product needed to be printed since it was so quickly purchased and many of the cards didn't budge in price.

Modern Masters 2015 had some more issues. Almost all of the mythics were quite good this time and they decided to pick specific parts of a cycle instead of reprinting the whole thing where it wasn't necessary. Here you had Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite and Primeval Titan without their other counterparts. Comet Storm was the only real outlier but it was really good in draft so it hurt less when you would win your draft pod with it. The largest problem with the set was with how many draft-only rares were included. A lot of the value was centered at mythic level which meant that the average value inside of a box may have been close the MSRP (which meant stores weren't incentivized to mark it up) but small amount of box openings were often feast or famine. Open a foil tarmogoyf and you've paid off two boxes. Open Tezzeret, Comet Storm, and Primeval Titan as your mythics and your box was not likely to be worth it. A lot of the higher value commons and uncommons and medium level rares were not included meaning players were often disappointed with busting boxes.

Masterpieces are a touchy subject as well. They were "great" for the price of Standard cards, kind of. The average cost of a Zendikar Expedition was factored into the EV of a box which drove the prices of all of the other cards down tremendously. Gideon, Ally of Zendikar was one of the cheapest and most widely played planeswalkers of all time because stores and players would open cases of product chasing Masterpieces. The problem became if the set is such low value for the rest of the packs that people quickly became disinterested in opening small amounts. You had less people impulse buying a pack because almost every single rare and mythic was worth less than the price you paid. You almost only ever made your money back by opening a Masterpiece and every other time it was pretty miserable. It was just like Modern Masters 2015 packs. Fast forward through a few sets of Masterpieces - Kaladesh is more stable but more of the Masterpieces are reasonably priced since they're not all lands but stand out cards like Chandra still command an impressive price tag. Amonkhet Invocations are horribly received due to their art style and incoherence. Many of them are worth less than some of the best rares and mythics in the sets. Opening bad Masterpieces is once again analogous to Modern Masters bad mythics.

To summarize, I think the MSRP increase looks bad on paper but the addition of the box topper helps to limit the number of bad boxes and will help to absorb a lot of the MSRP increase such that this Masters set should have similar or better impacts on the price of cards than previous masters sets. Their ability to put more high demand and exciting rares, uncommons, and commons into the set sets the stage for a fantastic set to open and a great set for players looking for reprints.