Sorcery has reprinted its card pool exactly once. Beta is a full second printing of the Alpha cards, and TCGplayer lists the two as separate products for every shared name. That gives the market a clean experiment no other comparison on this site can offer: the same card, the same text, two printings — and 943 days of daily prices for both.
The result, at the time of writing: the Alpha printing costs a median 2.19× the Beta printing. Two and a half years ago, the same pairs sat at 3.56×. The premium is real, persistent — and shrinking.
The live tables on this page are recomputed from current prices at every rebuild; the prose quotes the 14 September 2026 snapshot.
The only reprint that exists
Alpha was the Kickstarter-era first printing. Beta is the mass-market edition — the price data below is its own evidence that it is the far more available printing. The two sets share 396 names, and 395 of them have a quote on both sides.
Since Beta, the publisher has not reprinted a single earlier card in a master set. Arthurian Legends, Dragonlord, and Gothic added new cards only — their overlaps with the base sets are zero. The one route to a third printing is a Dust reward promo, which shares 16 names with master sets, seven of them Gothic.
So “what does a reprint do to prices” has exactly one dataset in Sorcery, and this is it.
The premium today
Across 395 shared names with a quote on both sides, the Alpha printing is priced above Beta on all but five. The distribution is not subtle:
- 82% of pairs put Alpha at least 1.5× Beta
- 58% of pairs price Alpha at more than 2× Beta
- The median is 2.19×
The premium tracks rarity almost perfectly, which is the tell for what it is pricing:
- Unique: median 3.13×, 95% of pairs at 1.5× or more
- Elite: median 2.37×
- Exceptional: median 2.19×
- Ordinary: median 1.78×, 68% at 1.5× or more
Every printing is equally legal and equally playable — an Alpha printing of Whirling Blades and a Beta one do the same thing in a game. So the gap is not paying for power. It is paying for scarcity and collecting, and it is widest exactly where collectors concentrate.
At the top, the numbers stop looking like price differences and start looking like different products entirely: Courtesan Thaïs at about $396 against $5 for the Beta printing, Death Dealer at $514 against $18, Ruler of Thul at $213 against $17.
Foils widen everything: across 360 pairs with quotes on both sides, the median foil premium is 8.24×.
The premium is eroding, not collapsing
On the archive’s first day, the median pair stood at 3.56×. Today it is 2.19×. Of the 395 pairs quoted on both ends, 302 narrowed to some degree and 93 widened.
That is what a reprint does over time in a small market: it does not destroy the original’s premium, it slowly arbitrages it. Beta supply is deep and keeps circulating through players; Alpha supply is fixed and keeps disappearing into collections. Both are worth less than in 2024 — Alpha’s non-foil subtotal is down about 7% and Beta’s about 18%, per the retrospective — but the gap between them has still compressed by roughly a third.
Read the other way: anyone who paid the Alpha premium two and a half years ago to hold has watched the cheaper printing catch up, even though the Alpha card itself held its dollar value better than the Beta one. The premium is a bet on Beta staying cheap; Beta has not cooperated fully.
The exceptions and the other printings
Five pairs currently price Beta above Alpha, all by less than 2.5× and all on cheap cards: Whirling Blades ($0.90 against $2.19), Incinerate, Exorcism, Earthquake, and Quarrelsome Kobolds. At these dollar amounts the inversion is closer to noise than signal — a single seller’s listing can decide it. The useful reading is not “Beta is worth more”; it is that the median is not a law, and thin printings deviate from it in both directions.
Then there is the third-printing route: Dust reward cards reuse 16 master-set names, usually with alternate treatments, and carry their own quotes. They are excluded from this study — the Alpha/Beta comparison is the only clean reprint pair — but they exist, and they are another reminder that “the card” and “the printing” are different things on a price guide.
What this means when you buy
- For playing, the Beta printing is the default. The Alpha premium buys scarcity, not function. Check the specific pair before assuming — a handful of cards invert.
- For collecting, the Alpha premium has been sticky but not safe. It has narrowed by roughly a third in two and a half years. Foils carry the widest gaps (8× median) and the thinnest markets.
- Check both printings before any purchase. Every card page here links its other printings with their own quotes, and the buying guide covers which sets to start with.
Current numbers sit in the live panels below; the raw prices behind them are free at the data page.