Speculation: The Case for Boring Base-Art Legends

Demo article. RiftboundStocks is an unofficial fan project; this piece, its author and the market activity it describes are illustrative and not real analysis.

I keep a public record of the calls in this column that went wrong, and the pattern in that record is embarrassingly consistent: the losers are the scarce, illiquid, exciting cards and the survivors are the boring ones. So this month's piece is about the most boring cards on the board. There are five Legends in the tracked catalogue that exist as plain Rares, with no star and no alternate frame, and I think they are structurally more interesting than their expensive counterparts.

The five

Rare-rarity Legends

Card	Market	7d
Relentless StormOGN 249/298	US$29.70	+9.3%
Emperor of the SandsSFD 197/221	US$29.10	+12.2%
Herald of the ArcaneOGN 265/298	US$28.93	-20.8%
Green FatherUNL 195/219	US$22.62	-15.6%
Grand DuelistSFD 205/221	US$21.28	+9.5%

Four of the five have a Showcase counterpart somewhere in the catalogue, and in every case the Showcase trades at a multiple of the Rare. Green Father is the extreme example: the Unleashed Showcase at 233/219 sits at roughly eight times the Rare at 195/219. Relentless Storm shows a smaller multiple, Herald of the Arcane a smaller one still. Grand Duelist has no Showcase counterpart tracked at all, which makes it the odd one out and the one I am least confident about.

Green Father

Unleashed · 195/219

RareCalm

Market

US$22.62

Low

US$19.96

Foil

US$72.30

7d

-15.6%

Buy →

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Why boring is the point

A Rare Legend has three properties that a Showcase does not. It is liquid, so you can exit at something close to the quoted price rather than waiting weeks for the one buyer. It is condition-tolerant, because the price is low enough that a soft corner costs proportionally less. And it is the printing that gets bought when someone wants the card rather than the object, which is a larger and steadier population of buyers than the collector bid at the top.

The counterargument is straightforward and I want to state it fairly. Rares are the printings most likely to be reprinted, and a reprint into a supplemental product would flatten these prices without touching the Showcase versions at all. The Origins line has already demonstrated that the same character can appear at multiple rarities and collector numbers, so this is not a theoretical risk. If you think a reprint wave is coming, the entire thesis here is wrong.

The same characters, two rarities

Card	Market	7d
Green FatherUNL 195/219	US$22.62	-15.6%
Green FatherUNL 233/219	US$182.48	+6.6%
Relentless StormOGN 249/298	US$29.70	+9.3%
Relentless StormOGN 300/298	US$48.77	-26.0%
Herald of the ArcaneOGN 265/298	US$28.93	-20.8%
Herald of the ArcaneOGN 308/298	US$24.76	-15.2%

My position, stated with the hedging it deserves: I would rather own three Rare Legends than a third of a Showcase one, and I would rather own either than a card whose entire case is that very few exist. That is a preference about liquidity and about how badly I handle being wrong, not a prediction that these five will outperform. If you need a number to be excited about, this is not the column for you, and that has always been the point of it.

The cards I have lost money on were all interesting. The cards I have quietly done fine on were all things nobody wanted to write eight hundred words about.