Foilio Study · Open data · Magic

The MTG Reserved List is famous for being expensive. Most of it isn't.

The Reserved List — 567 Magic cards Wizards has promised never to functionally reprint — is synonymous with thousand-euro dual lands and the Power Nine. So we priced every one of them. The reality is lopsided: 58% of the list trades under €5, the median reserved card is about €3.07, and only 19 cards (3%) clear €500. The mystique lives in a tiny elite; the rest is near-bulk.

Computed 2026-06-19 from Cardmarket EUR price (cheapest paper printing per card), via the open Scryfall API. Reference estimates, not sold records — free to cite with a link to this page.

What the Reserved List actually costs

Every reserved card sorted into a price band (cheapest paper printing, Cardmarket EUR). The shape is the story: a huge cheap base, a thin expensive tip.

567 unique reserved cards. Bars scaled to the largest band. The €500+ band is just 19 cards.

What the numbers say

• Scarcity isn't value. Every card here is equally “never reprinted,” yet 58% trade under €5. The no-reprint promise protects supply, but price still follows demand — and most reserved cards are obscure old cards nobody's chasing.
• The value is in a handful of icons. Black Lotus and the rest of the Power Nine, the original dual lands (Underground Sea, Volcanic Island…), and oddities like Mishra's Workshop, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale and Library of Alexandria carry the list. The 10 priciest names hold at least ~49% of its Cardmarket value, the top 50 at least ~83% — and the true figure is higher, because those marquee cards are under-priced on thin EU listings.
• It's the same shape as Pokémon. A tiny elite holds most of the value while the long tail is near-bulk — exactly the lopsidedness we measured in Pokémon set value concentration. Concentration looks to be a property of trading-card markets, not any one game — we put that to the test across three games in the cross-game study.

How we computed this (and what we didn't)

1. We pulled every Reserved List card from the open Scryfall API (is:reserved game:paper).
2. For each card we took the cheapest paper printing's Cardmarket EUR price — the floor cost to own that reserved card — and binned the list by price.
3. What we did not publish: precise euro values or a ranking for the marquee vintage cards. Their Cardmarket EU listings are thin and lag the US market (Black Lotus, for instance, prices far higher in USD), so a euro figure there would be misleading. The distribution and the “most of it is cheap” finding are robust; the concentration share is a conservative floor.
4. It's reproducible — the script is in our repo.

Questions