When Should You Buy Your Fetch Lands?

Modern Horizons 3 reprinted the rest, but is it time to buy?

Modern Horizons 3 has been out for almost exactly a month, and prices have begun to settle down. While Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury, and a few other breakout cards have soared in price, most other cards have already lost much of their pre-order hype value. This includes plenty of exciting Commander cards like Emrakul, the World Anew, Six, and Warren Soultrader, as well as top competitive cards like the five Allied Fetch Lands.

Market Price: $26.20

While the ship has already sailed on the set’s first round of big hits, like Phlage and Nadu, Winged Wisdom, there are still dozens of incredible cards in Modern Horizons 3 that are quite a bit cheaper now than they were the last time we looked at them. Many of them are (currently) in a race to the bottom, as demand struggles to catch up with the influx of new products swarming the market. This happens every time a set is released, of course, but it’s a lot more interesting when it happens to a set with a card quality as high as Modern Horizons 3. There are oodles of Legacy, Modern, and Commander staples in Modern Horizons 3, and a lot of them are readily and cheaply available right now. Does that mean it’s time to buy? Let’s take a look, together.

The Case for Buying Modern Horizons 3 Staples

Market Price: $10.70

Market Price: $22.57

The case for buying into Modern Horizons 3 right now is simple. Thousands of boxes have been cracked over the past few weeks, and there are bricks of each card available for sale on the TCGplayer marketplace. Many of these cards have seen a race to the bottom since Modern Horizons 3 hit shelves, and quite a few are cheaper now than anyone thought they could ever get. This includes top reprints like the Medallion cycle. Take a look at their combined price chart since the start of 2024:

These cards are essential for Mono-Color Commander decks and were selling between $10 and $13 throughout most of the year. This is down from the $20-$30 range a year ago before Commander Masters hit shelves. Now, they’re averaging right around $3 each. That’s less than the price of a normal booster pack, much less a Modern Horizons 3 Play Booster. That seems like a solid deal for Commander staples that haven’t been reprinted outside of a premium Masters product.

The Case Against Buying Modern Horizons 3 Staples

Market Price: $12.74

Market Price: $29.04

The case against buying into Modern Horizons 3 right now is also pretty easy to understand. It basically boils down to the fact that Modern Horizons 2 product was readily available at or below “MSRP” for several years, meaning that the available supply of staples kept growing long after the set’s hype cycle ended. There are still plenty of cards in that set that still haven’t recovered.

For an example, here’s Sterling Grove. Sterling Grove is currently in 78,218 Commander lists on EDHREC at the time of publication, compared to 71,273 for Sapphire Medallion. Both cards are staples, but you’d have to give the slight edge to Sterling Grove. Here’s its price chart from the start of 2021 through mid-July of that year, about a month after Modern Horizons 3 had hit shelves:

Similar-looking chart, right? Both dropped from the $10-$15 range down to the low single digits, with Sterling Grove selling for just above $2 a month after Modern Horizons 2 hit the shelves. It seems like a pretty easy buy in the same category as the Medallions, right? Well, let’s take a look at Sterling Grove’s price tag since then:

While this chart may look swingy due to the scale of the Y-axis, it’s actually a whole bunch of nothing. Sterling Grove has been as low as $1 and as high as $3.80 since it was reprinted, but it never jumped above $4 again, much less returned to its previous $10+ heights. You wouldn’t have lost out buying Sterling Grove for $2, but if you had napped a stack of them to speculate on, you’d still be waiting to cash out at a profit. 

…But It’s Never That Simple

Let’s take a look at another Modern Horizons 2 card. Here’s the price chart for a certain Mythic Rare through the first month of that set’s release. Do you know what card it is?

This chart belongs to Fury, perhaps the most powerful of the Evoke Elemental cycle. Fury was a sub-$4 card on release weekend and was still kicking around the $7 range afterward. I couldn’t blame anyone for looking at this chart and assuming we were in for months, if not years, of Fury kicking around in the sub-$10 range. 

Instead, here’s what happened:

Dang! Fury peaked at $50 in late 2023 before being hit with a ban that collapsed its value down to the sub-$5 range. Even though Fury wasn’t in the initial round of price spikes that included cards like Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, it spiked a few months later and kept climbing to the point where Wizards was forced to concede defeat, and hit it with the ban hammer.

Market Price: $23.22

Market Price: $29.46

Market Price: $18.53

Esper Sentinel is another success story. This card didn’t have a massive breakout like Fury, but it quietly saw a lot of play in Commander and demand just kept growing organically. It was at $15 and falling a month after Modern Horizons 2 was released, and it bottomed out around $14 between late July and late September of 2021. It started climbing after that and reached heights of $36 back in February. Anyone who bought it a month after Modern Horizons 2 was released is sitting pretty.

Ignoble Hierarch

Modern Horizons 2, Rare

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Ignoble Hierarch. This was one of the chase cards of Modern Horizons 2, and it bottomed out at $15 on release weekend, climbed back up to $18 in the following days, and was still selling around $15 about a month after set release. Unfortunately, its price chart in the years since looks like this:

Woof. Ignoble Hierarch is under $2 right now, and a reprint in the Modern Horizons 3 Commander subset solidified this card as a near-bulk Rare. Maybe it’ll see some real play someday, but for now, pretty much everyone who has ever bought this card regrets it.

Lessons Learned from Modern Horizons 2

Market Price: $15.74

Market Price: $31.48

Market Price: $23.47

Looking back at Modern Horizons 2, here’s what I can say about the future of Modern Horizons 3 cards:

• First: Do not expect these cards to see an increase in their current price tags simply due to supply running out as time passes. While that can happen over a 2-to-3-year window with some sets, it probably won’t happen here unless Wizards has changed its distribution strategy without telling us. Wizards will continue to print Modern Horizons 3 to demand for years to come, while players and stores alike will continue to keep cracking packs. 
  • Don’t expect a rising tide to lift all boats in this set until 2027, at the earliest. This is also why buying sealed booster boxes and hoarding them is unlikely to work out for you. Why hold a box for several years when you can wait and buy it from a store for the same price in the future?
• Second: Spikes can and will happen. These will come from cards breaking out, like Fury or top Commander staples experiencing a steady stream of demand that outpaces the number of copies being opened, like with Esper Sentinel. 
  Modern Horizons 2 had a far higher percentage of breakout cards than most sets since it had such a high power level, and I expect the same for Modern Horizons 3. There are probably at least a dozen cards in the set that will be $20+ in the future despite being in the low-to-mid-single digits right now. 
• Third: There are likely still some cards in Modern Horizons 3 that will follow the path of Ignoble Hierarch and continue to drop toward bulk despite having high pre-order prices. There’s little in the way of telling these cards apart from the future breakout hits, but here’s a good rule of thumb you can use for now. Avoid buying expensive cards simply because they seem to compare favorably to other good cards from the past. Focus on cards that are actually seeing a bunch of competitive or Commander play, and you should be fine.
• Lastly, don’t forget that making a profit isn’t necessarily our only or primary goal. Remember Sterling Grove from earlier? You definitely weren’t happy if you snagged a stack of these for $2 each in July of 2021 to flip them for a profit, but what if you had bought a few of them for your Commander decks? At this point, you’d have had three full years of getting to use them, and you could still sell them for more or less exactly as much as you’d initially paid. That’s pretty great, right? I’d take that on pretty much all of my Magic purchases if I could.

Is It Time to Buy Your Fetch Lands?

Market Price: $11.40

Market Price: $13.74

Market Price: $16.43

Now that we’ve compared Modern Horizons 3 prices to their Modern Horizons 2 counterparts, it’s time to answer the question from the top of the article. Is it time to buy your Allied Fetch Lands, or should you keep waiting for the price to drop further? 

Luckily, we can directly compare the five Allied Fetch Lands in Modern Horizons 3 to the five Enemy Fetch Lands in Modern Horizons 2. Here’s a combined chart of those five lands from the release of Modern Horizons 2 through today:

Market Price: $21.68

Market Price: $27.65

Market Price: $26.10

As you can see, these cards sold for an average of $30 each on release weekend, saw a sharp price increase right after and then began dropping. The price continued to decrease for years, bottoming out at around $12 each last October, nearly two full years after Modern Horizons 3 hit shelves. They’ve climbed a bit since then, though, rallying above $17 by the time Modern Horizons 3 was released. They’re really on the move now, though, as you can see when we zoom in on the part of the chart featuring price movement from the start of April 2024 through today:

Why are these cards finally rallying? I’d imagine it’s a confluence of three related effects. First, we know that Modern Horizons 2 is officially out of print, replaced by Modern Horizons 3. That means no more Enemy Fetch Lands entering the marketplace until the next time Wizards reprints them. Second, people are focused on Fetch Lands right now due to the reprinting of the Allied Fetches in Modern Horizons 3, which has led to an uptick of people deciding to finish out their playsets and shoring up the holes in their collection. Lastly, the Modern metagame just shifted in a pretty major way, driving people to pick up new decks. Many of these decks require Fetch Lands to function properly, so demand is finally outstripping supply.

Despite this recent rally, however, the Enemy Fetches will have to climb an average of about $8 each to return to their release day price tags. In the meantime, anyone who snapped up their Enemy Fetch Lands right when Modern Horizons 2 was released is still in the hole.

Will the Allied Fetch Lands suffer a similar fate? Well, let’s take a look at their price chart so far:

Market Price: $11.58

Market Price: $11.34 

While this looks like the same sort of gradual decline that the Enemy Fetch Lands suffered, there is one key difference: overall price. While the Enemy Fetch Lands were still selling in the $30-ish each range soon after Modern Horizons 2 was released, this cycle has an average price tag right around $11. This is a cheaper average than the Enemy Fetch Lands ever reached, even at their lowest point. There isn’t much further for them to drop.

Have these Fetch Lands ever been cheaper than $11 each? Well, let’s take the chart back to the release of their last major reprint in Khans of Tarkir and see if we can find out.

Market Price: $11.79

Market Price: $13.97

Market Price: $11.64

This chart goes back to September 2014, almost a decade ago. We can see that these Fetch Lands did actually bottom out just over $10 in the spring of 2015, before rebounding due to high Standard demand. They made it as high as the $40+ range during the bull market in Summer 2021 before slowly dropping off as the market cooled and a reprint loomed. Even still, these five cards are less than $1 away from their lowest price tag of the decade. Could these five lands hit a new low? It’s possible, even likely, at this point. But there’s only so low they can drop, and we’ve never seen a world where Fetch Lands are readily available for less than $7-$8. Heck, that was their absolute bottom when Zendikar rotated out of Standard back in the early 2010s, and inflation-adjusted gains alone would put that number in the $10-$12 range today. 

With this in mind, I don’t see a world where these five cards keep dropping in price over the next two years like the enemy-colored Fetch Lands in Modern Horizons 2. In fact, I wouldn’t let the summer end without filling out my collection. Worst case, they drop a few bucks, then stabilize in the $8-$12 range over the next few years, allowing you to play any deck requiring Fetch Lands in the meantime. Best case, there’s a market correction and they go back around $15-$20 by the end of the year. You won’t lose more than a few bucks at worst, and you’ll gain a ton of deckbuilding flexibility in the process.

Does that mean you should speculate on Allied Fetch Lands right now? No. These cards probably won’t see meaningful gains for years to come and you’d be much better off using your money on higher velocity specs. But if you’re in the market for personal use, I’d buy in before the weather starts to turn. That way, you won’t have to worry about Fetch Lands again for a long, long time.