The MTG Lord of the Rings holiday release arrived on November 3, and it’s set fire to the price of a few particularly expensive LotR Magic cards. Not in a good way, mind you – one such Magic: The Gathering card saw a 90% decrease in price after the launch.
The card in question is the Surge Foil Henneth Annun version of Reflecting Pool, a land that lets you create mana of any MTG color you could produce with your existing MTG lands. Before November 3, TCGPlayer gave this MTG Lord of the Rings card an estimated price of $137.80 (£112.13). Now, in a post-holiday-release world, that value has dropped to $13.54 (£11.02) as of November 14.
Henneth Annun isn’t the only victim of the holidays, either. The Surge Foil Dol Amroth version of Minamo, School at Water’s Edge was worth $132.62 (£107.86) before November 3, and TCGPlayer now has it down for $77.01 (£62.70). A significantly less dramatic drop, but one that’ll still bring a tear to the eye of any collector of the most expensive Magic cards.
The MTG Lord of the Rings holiday release features 24 all-new cards, but the rest found in its boosters and boxes are reprints. While the non-Surge-Foil editions of these same cards continue to show a healthy price on secondary markets, several Surge Foils have seen a significant drop in price.
At Wargamer, we’re always on the hunt for Magic: The Gathering price changes. Not all of them are bad news, either – check out the recent price spikes to Urabrask’s Forge and a Doctor Who dinosaur. We can also tell you more about what’s coming up in the MTG release schedule, as well as all the key details about MTG Arena codes and MTG Arena decks.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed the price drops to non-Surge-foil versions of the cards mentioned. As of November 20, this has been updated.