State of the Market: Uprising One Month Later

Hey everyone! Welcome to the final installment of this series where we examine the market value of the notable singles in several cases of Uprising over the course of its first month in the US market. If you missed parts one and two, you can revisit those by following the links.

My initial prediction was that, while EV seemed to be quite good out of the gate, we could expect box prices to drop over the following weeks- although initial prices were so high at the case level, it seemed likely the set would remain a strong addition to the game from a financial perspective even as prices fell.

If you remember last installment, we had some interesting results where, while most cards lost value, the market consolidated around the top Legendaries (Crown of Providence and Flamescale Furnace), their disproportionate representation in these specific boxes, as compared to other Legendaries, held up average case prices and actually increased many of them at the two week check in.

This month we’ll be observing something of a return to expectations (prices moving downward in the wake of a set’s release). Still, things are never simple, and we’ve got a new wrinkle in pricing that’s worth looking at– but more on that in a few moments.

Before we dive into the boxes, I want to note that, once again, the methodology we’re using mirrors the same explanation from last month, with the exception of price data being taken from TCGPlayer on 8/3/22. Remember, we’ll be using these criteria to break cases and boxes into the categories of good, fair, or bad to help get an idea of how the opening experience might go for a person who is opening between one box and one case. Previous check-ins led me to declare that opening Uprising at the case level was a very reasonable gamble to take. Let’s see if that still holds true.  As with last month, if you’ve been following along, you can skim over the next couple of sections until you see the box breakdowns.

Below I outline the approach I’m taking here and the assumptions I’m making.

I’m going to break boxes into three arbitrary categories so that they’re easier to parse.

The principle I’m ordering these around is that we open boxes of cards as opposed to buying singles because it’s fun to gamble. However, we can differentiate between good and bad gambles.

In the realm of Flesh and Blood, I think the average person probably buys between one box and one case, with some clear outliers at the top who open many cases. I’m particularly interested in the average experience, however, because the game’s success is strongly tied to having a large player base.

As noted, there isn’t an empirical definition of what constitutes a reasonable gamble, but I’m going to say that I think boxes should be worth about 66% of what you pay for them to be considered OK. A box below that value is a bad box, and a box that is worth more than you paid for it is a good box.

With our $80 MAP, that means that:

1. boxes below $53 are bad,
2. boxes from $53-80 are fair, and
3. boxes that are $81 or more are good.

If we extrapolate that to cases, on the case level:

1. cases below $211 are bad,
2. cases between $211-320 are fair, and
3. cases above $320 are good.

As noted, last month’s prices actually went up at the case level, so let’s see if the good news keeps on rolling. (Spoiler: don’t get your hopes up.)

Case 1 did about what we’d expect. It started out as a Fair case in part one of this series, was carried up to Good status in part two more or less entirely by Flamescale Furnace’s spike, and has since dropped back down to Fair as Furnace’s price moved back down. This downward adjustment represents the biggest single change we see in this case, which now clocks in at $292, a little below our MAP of $320. But, overall, it remains an entirely reasonable EV.

Perhaps you can spot a little weirdness in terms of upward movement in Invoke Ouvia’s price, which had been trending down. This change begins to establish a pattern that will continue through the others cases (we’ll talk about it at length in Case 2).

Finally, a notable trend that we can see continuing from last installment of this series is that non-foil Majestics continue to move down in price almost across the board (with generics remaining the standouts). Because these cards already represented a narrow portion of overall case value, their decline has a relatively minor impact on the case price in terms of raw value.

I’ve been calling Box 7 perhaps the single worst box of FAB I’ve ever opened, and with this month’s changes it has now entered into truly, comically horrible status as it slips below $10. Honestly, at about $9, even if it had been free, I’m not sure if it was would have been worth the time it took to sort the contents prior to donating my bulk. I’m being kind of glib here, but I want to reiterate what I’ve noted in past installments: while a box like this represents a humorous oddity in the context of a case that is this valuable, if you imagine a person who only bought one sealed box to open, something like this creates an astonishingly bad experience for them.

At the case level, we get $625.25 in value, a dip of a little under $25 from last month, but still plenty of value to put this one very deep into the Good category. Part of this success is owed to Crown of Providence’s continued upward movement as it proves itself to be a standout inclusion in competitive decks. However, as I hinted above, something else is at play here: it’s the CF Marvel Dragons! All of the Majestic Marvels shot up in price since our last article in this series, as well as several of the Rare Marvels.

So, did I underestimate these? I tend to think not. If we look at the sales data for these on TCGPlayer (look at the actual sales – the “Price History” graphs display some odd behavior that doesn’t sync up with the actual sales they’re reporting for some of these, like Dominia), we can see that they all shot up very sharply between July 25 and 26. So what happened there? Did Dromai win a bunch of big events on the 25th that shook up the perceived value of these cards and lead to the price hikes?

Nope.

What happened here is pretty clearly a coordinated buyout of these cards. (This is a topic I’ve talked about before, but you can now see it in action in the wild.)

What do we make of this? Well, buyouts are a tricky thing. While they can temporarily boost prices of singles, they only “stick” if either the card was better than its price reflected from a gameplay perspective or if it’s rarer than its previous price implied. If one of those isn’t true, people participating in the buyout often have some challenges holding the price aloft. Either they fail to maintain discipline and people start selling early, or the rest of the market has more supply than they can absorb, and prices get driven back down as people who weren’t previously looking to sell rush to cash out at the new higher price.

What we’ve seen so far with the Majestic Marvels is a spike followed by a sharp drop back down, but they’ve managed to plateau in the last few days at a new price that is still above where they were when the buyout happened. Will this hold? I’m not sure. We’re only about a week from the initial buyouts, so not enough time to really make a firm call in one direction or the other. The buyouts have definitely buttressed the prices of these cards in the short term, but I’m personally a little leery of declaring these new values as on-target. More product is still entering the marketplace, and I tend to think the Marvels will drop down again over the next month or two.

Anyway, that was a bit of a long tangent, but it’s definitely the most interesting event in the market since the last update in this series.

Case 3 was a lot like case our previous cases, though it lacked a Majestic Marvel dragon to help hold up its price. Also, unlike the price of RF Crown of Providence, the CF version actually declined a little. These factors bring this case to $543.50, down from the $605 it was at last time. This is still an excellent return on the $320 MAP price we’re assuming, and we’d need to see a tremendous amount of devaluation for it to fall out of Good EV status.

One minor note here is that we can see a continued steady decline in the value of the Extended Art variants that has been going on since the set’s release. At the same time, the alt art Rewind, which gained some value last month, has since fallen below its initial price point. I don’t know if we can draw a generalizable lesson from this because it’s not like the card has been tearing it up in competitive play- we don’t really see copies in the Iyslander and Kano decks that have been posted to the FAB homepage in recent weeks. So, at this time, I wouldn’t want to make a claim on how Alt Art Rainbow Foils perform as a type of card.

This one is our outlier case in a couple respects. First, it’s the only case that gained value this month ($546.25 -> $567.25), as well as the only case with a box that changed categorization, with Box 13 dropping from Fair to Bad. Again, the $60 upward spike in CF Invoke Dominia’s price has a very outsized effect on the total EV of the box, and the lasting potential of these prices remains a question for the coming weeks. The other changes we see here follow the trends discussed in the other cases.

One obvious factor in prices over the past few days has been the Stubby Hammerers ban in CC, which puts downward pressure on the prices of cards used primarily or exclusively by Fai. For the time being, Fai seems to remain a competitively viable hero, but his dominance has been somewhat tempered, and prices are responding to that. As the competitive meta continues to evolve over the coming weeks, it’ll be worth keeping an eye on Iyslander and Dromai, as either of them claiming a more signficiant chunk of the meta could help lift prices for some of their associated cards.

At the end of this month of tracking, we finish with 16 boxes opened, of which 8 were Good, 2 were Fair, and 6 were Bad. With all of the Good boxes landing well over the MAP price of $80, and our cases clocking in at 3 Good and 1 Fair, Uprising still looks like a solid gamble at the case level. By the same token, it also remains true that individual sealed boxes have a strong potential to be either quite good or quite bad, with that middle Fair category seeing minimal representation.

As I’ve said in past installments of this series, I do think that these particular cases are a bit above average because of the disproportionate representation of the best vs worst Legendaries in the set. Yet even if we were to swap the top Legendaries for the counterparts on the bottom, the overall values of these cases would still be Good. They just wouldn’t be at the nearly double MAP values we see on a couple of them.

Taking all of this into consideration, I continue to regard Uprising as a perfectly fine set to open at the case level, with a legitimate chance to hit it big and a downside risk that usually means that, even if you miss, you’re not taking a huge beating financially.

As we look forward, I think we’re likely still in a period of decline for Uprising singles prices. The EV continues to be fairly high relative to box cost, and more product continues to filter into the market, which should have the overall effect of lowering case/box EV. I still think the Marvels are the most likely candidates for decline, especially with the recent buyouts pushing prices up. People like the CF dragons (and rightfully so- they do look cool), but unless Dromai firmly breaks into tier 1 competitive status, I feel like these remain the most likely place for the set to shed value in the coming weeks and months.

For anyone still looking to buy singles for play, at this stage, many of the NF Majestics are getting quite low, so there isn’t a huge argument for not just grabbing the ones you need. Even if they were to lose a little value, there simply isn’t much further down they could go, and you’ll get to play with them in the meantime. We might also note that there is a strong incentive to identify any top competitive Legendaries at set release. Crown of Providence is seeing signficiant play across decks and its price has risen accordingly for all versions of the card. Once again, it seems that strong generics have some of the best potential as chase cards.

Thus concludes our little experiment. I hope it was interesting for the rest of you; I know I certainly found it useful to take a close look at individual box prices over the course of a month. I’ll return with a normal Market update in the coming weeks, so I hope to see you then.