On 8 February 2024 this site logged its first Sorcery prices: 808 quoted products, Alpha and Beta only. Nine hundred and forty-three archive days later, the record covers 1,105 distinct card names and every set the game has printed.
Read end to end, the archive says something more specific than “cards went up”:
- The base sets’ singles are worth less. Among Alpha and Beta finishes quoted on both the first archive day and the latest one, the typical card is down about a third, and nearly four in five are down at all.
- Alpha sealed did the opposite. The Alpha booster box and the original Four Elementals deck box have roughly doubled since early 2024, while the Beta booster box has sat almost still.
- Every set released after Beta has spent its recorded life drifting down from launch prices. The Arthurian Legends and Gothic printings present at the start of their tracking are down 42% and 47% respectively.
The charts and tables on this page are recomputed from the archive every time the site rebuilds, so their figures are current. The prose was written from the 14 September 2026 snapshot.
What the archive actually is
The method decides what the numbers can say. Every archived day records TCGplayer reported market values — a sales-derived measure, not a seller’s asking price. A missing quote is excluded rather than counted as zero, and nothing here is a completion cost for a full set. Full detail lives in the price methodology; the raw files are free to download from the data page.
That definition matters for the comparisons below, because every one of them is like for like: the same printings, summed on both dates. Comparing “whatever was quoted” on two dates would mostly measure changes in coverage, not changes in price. The like-for-like tables at the foot of this piece show the sample behind each figure.
The base sets: singles down, sealed up
Alpha and Beta are the only sets with the full two-and-a-half-year history, which makes them the only place the archive can answer a long-run question.
Of the 587 Alpha and Beta finishes worth $5 or more and quoted on both the first and latest archive day, the median is down 35%. Just 130 ended higher; 457 ended lower. The subtotals disagree with the median in an informative way:
- Alpha non-foil subtotal, like for like: −7%
- Beta non-foil subtotal, like for like: −18%
- Alpha foil subtotal, like for like: +7.5%
- Beta foil subtotal, like for like: −44%
Alpha’s subtotal held because its expensive cards held. The typical Alpha card still fell by a third — the median describes the binder, while the subtotal describes the top of it. Beta’s foil subtotal collapsed hardest: Beta is the printing players open, so its foils are the most substitutable, and their premium over non-foil narrowed toward nothing.
Sealed moved the other way. Where the base-set singles market is fed by players, the base-set sealed market is fed by collectors, and two and a half years in, the collector side is winning:
- Alpha booster box: roughly $1,127 to $1,895, up about 68%
- Four Elementals deck box (Alpha printing): about $438 to $867, up 98%
- Alpha booster box case: about $5,870 to $11,450, up 95%
- Beta booster box: about $184 to $189, up 2%
The last line is the one to sit with. The Alpha box nearly doubled while the Beta box — same game, same cards in different printings, far larger print run — did nothing. Scarcity, not play value, is what the sealed market has spent two and a half years pricing.
Every new set deflates after launch
For a set released after Beta, the archive can only describe the part of its life it has seen. It has seen enough to make one consistent point.
Arthurian Legends was first tracked on 5 October 2024. Of its printings quoted then and now, the non-foil subtotal is down 42%. Gothic was first tracked on 5 December 2025 — eight days after release — and the matching figure is down 47%.
These are not the same phenomenon as the Beta foil slide. Launch pricing is built on scarcity and impatience: preorders clear at whatever the first buyers pay, supply arrives over the following months, and prices settle lower. Nine months after release, a set’s singles are usually near the cheapest they will ever be — the exact pattern the buying guide already recommends planning around.
One caveat: Dragonlord has only 13 cards and too few like-for-like quotes at this point for its percentage to mean anything, so this page leaves it out rather than pretending otherwise.
The cards that went the other way
Aggregates hide the exceptions, and the archive is at its most interesting at the extremes. The largest dollar gains since day one are Alpha foils:
- Ruler of Thul (foil) — about $895 to $2,601, the biggest dollar move in the archive
- Avatar of Water (foil) — about $1,135 to $2,500
- Ruby Core (foil) — about $1,195 to $1,545
- Sorcerer (foil) — about $82 to $400
On the other side, Beta foil printings that were expensive in early 2024 lost most of it: Sneak Thief fell from about $58 to $4, Gilded Aegis from $115 to $11, Lava Salamander from $22 to $2. These are thin markets — a handful of quotes can move a printing that trades rarely, in either direction. Treat a single sharp move as a story to verify on a card page’s full chart, not as a trend.
What this means when you buy
- For playing, base-set singles are the value. Alpha’s premium is paid for scarcity; the same gameplay is available in Beta for a fraction.
- For collecting, sealed Alpha is the market that has actually appreciated — and it costs accordingly now.
- For anything new, patience has paid. The first month’s prices are the worst prices; a set’s singles tend to be cheaper months later.
- Check the specific card, not the trend. Almost every rule here has a Ruler of Thul.
The current numbers are in the tables below and on the monthly market reports; the most expensive cards list and each card’s own page chart round out the picture.