The Reprint Cliff: a Magic staple's collector original vs its cheapest playable copy
Players often ask how much cheaper a staple gets once it has been reprinted. We took 34 of Magic's most-reprinted staples and compared each card's original printing to its cheapest printing today, both priced on the same date. The gap is large. It is a gap between printings, not a drop over time: the old printings themselves still carry high prices. Magic does not reprint everything: the Reserved List covers cards Wizards says it will never print again in functionally identical form, so none of them are in this study.
The steepest cliffs
Gap between each card's earliest priced printing and its cheapest printing on the same date, by nonfoil Scryfall USD. Sol Ring, Demonic Tutor and Birds of Paradise were all first printed in Alpha; Alpha had no price in our source for them, so their “original” here is Beta or Unlimited.
Top 14 by drop. The full set of 34 is in the table below.
Same card, a fraction of the price
The original printings are collector pieces. The cheapest reprints play the same, for a small fraction of the price.
Every staple, by the numbers
| Card | Earliest priced | Cheapest | Drop | Prints |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sol Ring | $870 | $1.17 | 99%+ | 92 |
| Llanowar Elves | $177 | $0.29 | 99%+ | 35 |
| Counterspell | $549 | $2.03 | 99%+ | 49 |
| Lightning Bolt | $620 | $0.86 | 99%+ | 43 |
| Swords to Plowshares | $550 | $1.20 | 99%+ | 64 |
| Demonic Tutor | $647 | $15 | 98% | 17 |
| Naturalize | $2.14 | $0.04 | 98% | 21 |
| Wrath of God | $99 | $3.22 | 97% | 23 |
| Fellwar Stone | $21 | $0.69 | 97% | 34 |
| Birds of Paradise | $275 | $10 | 96% | 32 |
| Mind Stone | $2.11 | $0.26 | 88% | 35 |
| Solemn Simulacrum | $1.48 | $0.23 | 84% | 45 |
| Phyrexian Arena | $21 | $3.52 | 83% | 17 |
| Chaos Warp | $1.56 | $0.28 | 82% | 43 |
| Beast Within | $2.07 | $0.48 | 77% | 37 |
| Day of Judgment | $2.23 | $0.57 | 74% | 9 |
| Command Tower | $0.90 | $0.26 | 71% | 86 |
| Eternal Witness | $3.78 | $1.16 | 69% | 20 |
| Brainstorm | $2.28 | $0.73 | 68% | 39 |
| Rampant Growth | $0.68 | $0.25 | 63% | 41 |
| Anguished Unmaking | $2.63 | $1.07 | 59% | 12 |
| Krosan Grip | $1.83 | $0.78 | 57% | 11 |
| Path to Exile | $2.48 | $1.08 | 56% | 45 |
| Acidic Slime | $0.27 | $0.13 | 52% | 22 |
| Arcane Signet | $0.76 | $0.40 | 47% | 69 |
| Cultivate | $0.60 | $0.34 | 43% | 46 |
| Reliquary Tower | $4.72 | $2.72 | 42% | 34 |
| Negate | $0.27 | $0.16 | 41% | 28 |
| Burnished Hart | $0.19 | $0.13 | 32% | 21 |
| Sakura-Tribe Elder | $0.38 | $0.27 | 29% | 25 |
| Farseek | $0.73 | $0.55 | 25% | 29 |
| Kodama's Reach | $1.81 | $1.42 | 22% | 26 |
| Skullclamp | $6.82 | $5.60 | 18% | 23 |
| Cyclonic Rift | $31 | $28 | 9% | 12 |
Of the 36 staples we checked, 2 (Smothering Tithe, Rhystic Study) had no cliff, their original printing is also their cheapest priced copy, and aren't counted above.
Where the cheapest copy comes from
In our data the cheapest printing is most often a recent Commander product, such as Secrets of Strixhaven Commander, Final Fantasy Commander or Lorwyn Eclipsed Commander. We measured where the cheapest copy sits today, not what moved its price. Several cheapest prices are under $0.30, where market prices are thin and often reflect very few sales, so those gaps are rough.
Method & sources
- For each card we pulled every printing with its nonfoil USD price via the open Scryfall API (
unique=prints), excluding printings with no price. - Original = the earliest-released printing that has a price in our source, which is not always the first printing (Alpha copies are often unpriced); cheapest = the lowest-priced printing today; drop = (original − cheapest) ÷ original. We report the median across 34 cards.
- The five steepest read “99%+”; the underlying figures are 99.x% (e.g. Sol Ring 99.9%), we never display a literal 100%.
- This metric blends an original printing's current collector price with the reprint-driven floor, so it isn't a controlled measure of reprint impact alone. Original printing's current price vs the cheapest reprint, per nonfoil Scryfall USD. Valued 2026-06-26.
- Reference estimates, not sold records; vintage (Alpha/Beta/Unlimited) prices are thin and noisier; foils excluded. TOS-clean aggregate stats, reproducible from the open API, never scraped, never invented.
What this data can't tell you
- What a reprint did to a price. We compare printings on one date; we did not track any card before and after a reprint.
- Anything about the Reserved List. Those cards are never reprinted under Wizards' policy, so this study only covers cards that can be.
- Condition and grading. A Beta reference price is for an ungraded copy; real Beta copies vary hugely by condition, and graded copies are excluded.
- Foils and special treatments. We used nonfoil prices only; a borderless or foil reprint can cost far more than the cheapest copy.
- A typical Magic card. These 34 staples were picked because they are reprinted a lot.
Collect Magic for years and see something we missed? Tell us.
FAQ
Does reprinting a Magic card lower its value?
This study can't answer that directly. It compares prices of different printings on one date, not a card's price before and after a reprint. What it shows: across 34 often-reprinted staples, the median card's cheapest printing trades about 70% below its original printing, and for 10 of them (29%) the gap is 90%+. An Alpha or Beta copy is a different collectible from a 2025 Commander reprint, so most of that gap is collectors paying for the old printing, not a crash.
What's the biggest reprint cliff?
Sol Ring: a Beta copy (its earliest printing with a price in our source; the card was first printed in Alpha) carries a $870 reference price, while its cheapest recent reprint is $1.17, the same card for play purposes. Counterspell, Lightning Bolt, Swords to Plowshares and Llanowar Elves show a similar gap between their Alpha/Beta printings and today's cheapest reprints.
So is reprinting always bad for a card's price?
We can't say from this data. Of the 36 staples we checked, 2 (Smothering Tithe, Rhystic Study) had no gap at all: their original printing is also their cheapest priced copy. Old printings in our data still carry high prices, so this is not evidence that reprints lowered them. The metric compares an original printing's current price to the cheapest printing's current price, so it mixes the collector premium for old printings with whatever effect reprints have; we did not separate the two. Note also that Reserved List cards cannot appear here at all: Wizards' official reprint policy says they will never be printed again in functionally identical form.
Where does the data come from, and is it reliable?
Every printing's nonfoil USD price via the open Scryfall API; "original" is each card's earliest printing that has a price (for a few cards, such as Wrath of God, that is Unlimited rather than Alpha, because the earlier printing had no price), "cheapest" is the lowest-priced printing. Original printing's current price vs the cheapest reprint, per nonfoil Scryfall USD, valued 2026-06-26. These are reference estimates, not sold records; very old (Alpha/Beta/Unlimited) prices are thin and noisier, and foils are excluded. We never scrape and never invent a number, the figures are reproducible from the open API.
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Source: <a href="https://foilio.net/studies/mtg-reprint-cliff?utm_source=share&utm_medium=study_embed&utm_campaign=viral">The Reprint Cliff: a Magic staple's collector original vs its cheapest playable copy, Foilio</a> · data CC BY 4.0
</p>Foilio (2026-06-26). The Reprint Cliff: a Magic staple's collector original vs its cheapest playable copy. Retrieved from https://foilio.net/studies/mtg-reprint-cliffThe big picture, across every game we measure: The Chase Multiple · The Price Census · The Promo Premium · The Foil Premium