State of the Market: Uprising Revisited

We’re picking back up with the series that I started a couple weeks ago. If you’re jumping in now, the idea is to take a few cases of Uprising, price out the valuable cards, and then check up on them every two weeks for a month. We’re hoping to learn a few things from this.

First, we want to know if buying sealed Uprising product is a fair or even good value for the consumer. Everfest and (to a lesser degree) Tales of Aria sealed product often yielded pretty poor value, and we want to know if the FAB 2.0 initiative has corrected that at all.

Additionally, we want to see if pricing trends around a set’s release are still operating like they were before FAB 2.0. The old trend was, broadly speaking, prices start high across the board, fall off for the vast majority of cards, and a few cards exceed expectations and see increases.

Below, I’ve listed the methodology I used to price cards and the criteria I’m using to determine if a case or box is considered good, fair, or bad. These are a straight copy/paste from the last update with the exception of the Note at the end, so if you’ve been following along, you can skim down to that section.

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.

I’ll be listing prices the same way we did them last time: as tables of individual boxes split into groupings by case. The first price is what these were at two weeks ago, and the second price is the value as I write this (7/20/22). I also got information for an additional case that we’re adding this month for one more data point. If you’ll remember from last month, we saw that EV was very solid to quite good at the case level, but oscillated wildly from awful to kind of amazing at the level of the individual box. I noted that we might see continued movement towards the poles, with boxes moving out of the fair category and into the bad category. I also predicted a general decline across the prices of most singles. Did either of these things come to pass? Let’s find out!

So, this is going to be a trend here, but I did not expect this. Due mostly to a jump in RF Flamescale Furnace’s price, this case has gone from Fair to Good with a total value of $344.75. Since last month, most CF Cs, CF Marvels, and EA variants have dropped in price, as we’d expect, but this case lucked out because the RF versions of Flamescale Furnace (and Crown of Providence) have both gone up as the meta has begun to figure out Uprising and play demand for these two specific Ls has risen. There has been slight movement at Majestic, overall trending down, but there haven’t been any cards that dramatically changed.

After Case 1, it should come as no surprise to see that Case 2, having copies of both ascendant RF Legendaries, has performed well, despite the expected drops in CF Cs and CF Marvels. This puts it at the absurdly good value of $649. There’s really not much to say here that wasn’t also true of Case 1, although we are starting to see a trend where the worst of the bad boxes continue to decline as time goes on. We’re getting dangerously close to Box 7 slipping below $10. Again, you’d be entirely unreasonable to ever complain about opening this as a case, but if you just opened one box, and that box happened to be Box 7, you’d have a pretty solid reason for being upset.

Alright, we’ve got some new stuff to talk about here!

While CF Marvels have mostly been trending downward, Invoke Yendurai had a pretty significant uptick. This is a good example of how there are usually a couple cards that people don’t evaluate correctly out of the gate, and Yendurai appears to be one such case. Now, as I’ll get to later, it could (and likely will) move down again in the future along with the rest of the Marvels.

The really notable price change in this case is the CF Crown of Providence, which shot up spectacularly. With Case 1, I talked about how we saw the Legendaries that are getting play go up in RF. Well, the exact same effect can be seen here with their CF versions. However, what’s worth calling out is that this does not seem to be an across-the-board adjustment by the market to the new lower pull rate of CF Ls. As with the RFs, the other Legendaries saw the value of their CF versions decline over the past couple weeks.

When all is said and done, this good case got even better, going up to $605. Now let’s throw one new case in the mix and see if we see a similar distribution of 2-3 good boxes, 0-1 fair boxes, and 1-2 bad boxes.

(Please note: since case 4 is a new addition, it only has one set of pricing data.)

That looks a lot like two good boxes, one fair box, and one bad box. Nailed it! At $546.25, we’ve got another very good case.

The most interesting thing to me is that CF Crown of Providence is so valuable that Box 11 managed to beat Box 13, which had both a CF Legendary (and one of the better ones at that) as well as an RF Fabled.

What strikes me as noteworthy is that Blood of the Dracai behaved very differently than the Legendaries. We mostly see CF and RF Legendary prices moving in the same direction (with occasional exceptions), but Blood of the Dracai in CF remained mostly static over the past few weeks, while the RF version dropped off dramatically. Fabled cards have largely remained collector’s pieces over play pieces (yes, we’ve seen some fringe play, but we haven’t had a staple Fabled yet). Given that, it seems like people who want to collect Fabled cards have little interest in the RF versions post-FAB 2.0 changes.

Finally, Box 16 is yet another reminder of how much work Erase Face does relative to other Majestics. If this had been anything else, the box would have been dire as opposed to almost making it to fair status.

While I think the trends mostly adhered to my previous predictions, Crown of Providence and Flamescale Furnace’s price increases have warped the data. As I said last month, it’s sort of just dumb luck that these cases were so lopsided in terms of having the good, as opposed to bad, Legendaries. Even the worst EV Legendary (RF Alluvion Constellas, in this case) still nearly guarantees that its box will be Fair or Good, but the price gap between those Legendaries and the best ones can be $100 in RF and even more in CF.

With these specific cases, the upward momentum of these top Legendaries has offset and exceeded all of the losses from most other cards moving downward. Also of note was how the Majestics are being handled by the market. If you go back to Monarch, and even Tales, you could see Majestics debuting at higher prices. I think this was largely a slow response to the Majestic pull rate changes introduced in Crucible of War, and it has taken the community some time to price Majestics more realistically at launch, but we appear to be at that point now. This means that, out of the gate, Majestics are not significantly over-inflating the EV of boxes in the first weeks of a set’s release, so their drop offs are more understated and account for smaller changes to overall box/case price changes. This is good- it shows that people are learning how to better assess value.

I pretty firmly believe that we’re going to look back on Uprising as a set that delivered good EV at the case level, and I don’t think the next month or two will change that. In short, if you wanted to open a sealed case of Uprising and were waiting to take stock of whether it was a reasonable gamble or not, I would say that we’re at a point where I personally feel pretty comfortable taking that risk. I think the cases represented in this series are a bit above average, but between these and the ones I’ve seen other people open, Uprising seems like it’s generally going to deliver good or fair value on a MAP case.

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t offer up some cautions for people looking to buy singles. There is a flip side to consider once you recognize how good the case EV is for Uprising, and that’s that singles prices are too high. If you as a consumer have good odds of making value on a sealed case, then singles sellers and stores that can purchase product below MAP can make even better value. With sealed cases treating people so well, there is a strong incentive for those groups to break product and sell singles. As this happens, more product will enter the market, and prices will be driven down. For example, if a case costs a store $250 (that’s illustrative, not a precise wholesale price), and the average box is yielding $400 in singles, there’s a decent argument to be made for opening it yourself and selling those singles because you can make more money that way than selling it for $320.

As long as Uprising is in print and readily available, if the EV of a case is high, we should see it moving towards the MAP price of the case. The further above MAP the EV is, the greater the incentive to break the case and sell the singles. Given that, I strongly recommend that people wait several more weeks before buying singles that they don’t need immediately for play. I know that in my case, as much as I love a shiny Illusionist card (I’m really just a magpie in human form, after all), I’m not buying any of the dragon Marvels right now because I expect them to drop off significantly as more product is opened. Current prices simply can’t be sustained long-term unless the supply of Uprising dries up, which doesn’t seem like a concern.

In terms of price drops, I suspect that the dragon Marvels will be the ones we see drop off first because waiting them out is a lot easier than waiting out Legendary prices. The normal versions of the Rare dragons are of negligible cost, and the Majestics are $1-6. You can very cheaply and easily run those version while you wait and get the CFs later, likely saving a tidy amount along the way. Meanwhile, if you want to be competitive and you need a Crown or Furnace for your deck, you’re going to need to commit to an expensive card no matter what. Thus, people who want the CF version will probably be more inclined to just take the hit and get it now as opposed to buying a $140-150 RF and then hoping to upgrade it into a CF down the road.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m excited to see where things are in another couple weeks; see you then!