From the Vault

There's no time like the present to dig up the past! It's time for another Retrospective Review. In this part of our journey through Magic's history, I'm poring over discontinued Magic: the Gathering products to determine what went wrong with the product, be it concept or execution! Last week, I discussed Duel Decks and how the concept inevitably gave way to an expanding audience. This week, it's one of the other flagship products with a decade's worth of releases under its belt: From the Vault!

Let's spin some tumblers, dust the key entry for fingerprints, jingle our lockpicking set, and crack open this entry!

What's the Product?

Starting in August 2008, From the Vault was a small box containing (usually) 15 cards. These cards were all linked under a single, shared theme of some sort and were packaged together for MSRP $34.99. The product initially launched to celebrate the game's history, as it coincided with Magic: the Gathering hitting 15 years. Wow! If only they had released an interesting, compelling product for the 30th Anniversary!

Ahem.

These products would offer alternate artwork for a few cards in the product, but the most singularly unique offering was the foiling. These were instantly recognizable foils, thicker and shinier than any other foiling that Wizards of the Coast had to offer.

So, a limited release pack of reprints bundled around a specific theme! Let's dive into the specifics.

What Releases Were There?

As mentioned previously, From the Vault had ten releases of varying levels of success. I want to outline the data available here to get a better sense of what happened with the product. For Duel Decks, I did mention the overall reprint value, but it was important to note that the actual fun of the product had a real impact and could outweigh the reprint value. Magic is a game, after all, and is meant to be played. With this product, however, actual reprint value is fairly well-correlated with a product's general desirability. I'll talk about that more later.

The main thing to note is that I will be including the product's "sealed" value (from TCG Player's market price) as well as the value of the cards inside (aggregated via Scryfall set lists), both of which are being pulled in July 2023 and may be subject to change. This should bear out some interesting conclusions!

From the Vault: Dragons

In August 2008, Magic: the Gathering celebrated 15 years with 15 cards surrounding its most singularly iconic creature type: Dragons! There are 13 Dragon creature cards, the ever-iconic Dragonstorm, and Form of the Dragon, with Sarkhan-based artwork! Six cards in total had new artwork here, the highlight undoubtedly being Nicol Bolas, no longer confined to a library.

Sealed Value: $200

Singles Value: $129

I'll not gonna lie to you: I wish I owned this one.

From the Vault: Exiled

In August 2009, From the Vault: Exiled gave players the chance at owning some of the game's most powerful cards; so powerful, each and every one of them had been banned or restricted in at least one format. This is probably one of the most interesting versions of the product in that the cards really do feel like they belonged in a vault and were being shown off. A whopping eight cards in the set had new art, Berserk and Channel going on to be the primary arts for their cards.

Sealed Value: $400

Singles Value: $440

From the Vault: Relics

Hitting store shelves in 2010, this product contained Wizards of the Coast's favorite card type: artifacts! From the Vault: Relics has the honor of holding the highest overall price of all the products in the line-up. Nine cards in the set would have alternate art here. The alternate art reprint here with the highest staying power and, perhaps, highest recognizability in the entire game would be Sol Ring, which showed up here a year before Commander 2011. 

Sealed Value: $970

Singles Value: $942

From the Vault: Legends

Talk about product synergy! From the Vault: Legends released August 2011, a mere two months after the original Commander product in June of that year. This product contained 15 legendary creatures, seven of which had alternate artwork. The break-out star here would be Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker, whose FtV: Legends artwork has been used four more times to date!

Sealed Value: $150

Singles Value: $194

From the Vault: Realms

Everybody loves land cards! 2012's iteration of the product showed off unique and iconic lands from Magic's history, seven of which came with new artwork. Amazing lands at work here, though very few of them were actually used for mana-fixing. Controversial decision here included putting Dryad Arbor in a frame that very closely resembled a basic Forest, which meant opponents were liable to attack into it without realizing.

Sealed Value: $173

Singles Value: $242

From the Vault: Twenty

Five years after the product premiered, Magic turned 20 and mixed up how the product worked as a special event! Twenty cards were included here, all of which were a key part of a tournament-winning deck in the past twenty years at the time. The guidebook even discussed the decks! Truly a museum-piece, this product, but buyers were far more interested in getting a copy of Jace, the Mind Sculptor.

Sealed Value: $90

Singles Value: $119

From the Vault: Annihilation

This one brought together a slew of spells that would either immediately, or inevitably, destroy most of the board. My personal favorite card in the set would be the Wrath of God, featuring Heliod bringing destruction to Theros's version of Atlantis. Ultimately, this was the lowest-valued and least-wanted in the line of products, still available for barely above the original MSRP. Interestingly, it had two cards in it worth quite a bit at the time: Rolling Earthquake was over $100, and Burning of Xinye was around $75. However, Portal cards had such supply issues that any reprint inevitably ends up being worth far less than its initial price, especially when the cards aren't as playable.

Special note about this product was the exceedingly high disappointment that it lacked Damnation, a card with a multi-year saga of players demanding its reprint while Wizards struggled to find the right spot. This was back then, when reprinting cards was... a lot more difficult.

Sealed Value: $40

Singles Value: $43

From the Vault: Angels

In ye olde 2015, I scrounged together $35 and went down to my local game store and picked up my copy of this set, the only other From the Vault to be themed around an iconic creature type. What a delight! Only five cards here had brand-new art, although it also brought in art for Tariel, Reckoner of Souls and Serra Angel that had been previously only available on nonlegal, oversized cards.

Sealed Value: $12o

Singles Value: $99

From the Vault: Lore

I remember the announcement for From the Vault: Lore and its incredibly... confusing execution. It claimed to be iconic moments or features from Magic story through the years. This product was released 2016, during one of the first big pushes for Vorthos engagement with the Gatewatch Arc, but FtV: Lore carried essentially no cards related to the ongoing storyline at the time and were essentially random picks from various story moments. Cute inclusion here would definitely be the Marit Lage token, formerly only a Coldsnap promo, which made this one of two From the Vaults to technically have 16 cards.

Sealed Value: $43

Singles Value: $76

From the Vault: Transform

In the product's final outing in 2017, From the Vault: Transform did a few quirky things. It also technically has 16 cards if one counts the melded Brisela, Voice of Nightmares separately. More notably, it's the only one to have a strictly mechanical throughline rather than flavor: double-faced cards. As a result, it's the From the Vault with the most cards released most closely to its release. Eleven of the cards came out in 2015 or 2016, with Magic Origins's sparking planeswalker cards or the Shadows over Innistrad block. Only three cards received alternate art, but that required six new pieces! Huntmaster of the Fells got the biggest glow-up thanks to the impeccable Magali Villeneuve, but the other pieces were no slouches!

From the Vault: Transform wasn't exactly a send-up to Magic history or a thematic museum piece, but it used the format to another excellent use: reprint these desirable cards that would otherwise be impossible to reprint quickly and satisfactorily. Being double-faced means they'd have challenges finding spots in the upcoming years. Indeed, only Delver of Secrets snuck into a booster product between this product and the latest massive double-faced card reprint flood in Secret Lair: From Cute to Brute. One or two other cards managed some form of reprint, but nothing significant. This was a truly unique confluence of events.

Sealed Value: $80

Singles Value: $138

Special note is that From Cute to Brute seems to have impacted the price here in a way that most other From the Vault products never experienced. I believe eleven cards from this set are also in the latest Secret Lair deck? Fascinating.

What Happened?

Whew! That's a lengthy history to go through; fitting for such a historically minded product. With all of that out of the way, let's talk about the product and why it inevitably went away.

Obviously, there's the issue of the price. It had the MSRP of $34.99, but that was rarely what players paid for it, as these were exclusively available in local game stores and were therefore subject to wild price swings. There was no competing with big box stores for customers: you go to the LGS or you don't get it. I'm in favor of supporting local game stores, but the disparity between MSRP and what those stores charged was frequently salt-inducing. I do believe that the venom occasionally aimed at stores over this would have been at least one factor in WotC doing away with posting the MSRP for products. Sure, players could still find out with proper digging, but it wouldn't exactly be in your face that a store doubled or tripled the price of a given product. More embarrassing would be the products like Annihilation that sat on shelves for months after.

As with the Duel Deck line of products, its core concept was wearing thin. Both of these products had a pretty strict definition. The Duel Decks meant to show off some big, weighty conflict, while From the Vault hoped to bring the feeling of dusting off some strange tome and rediscovering ancient spells. However, the wells they pulled from had started to dry up. Unless they switched up the structure, these historical museum pieces were going to feel less and less cohesive or thematically impactful as time went on.

Then there's the size of the product. A person buys a set of fifteen cards; are they going to use all of them? Or just the best two or three and then put the rest in a binder? I love my copy of FtV: Angels, but I've only put five of them in decks. As a set, the product may be too expensive for a person who just wants one or two cards from it.

In summary: an over-packed, under-printed product with a thinning core concept. Lasting a decade shows how much Magic needed to grow at the time that it started.

Lock It Up! We're Done Here

Inevitably, this product got replaced by Signature Spellbooks and Commander Collection (both of which noticeably had fewer cards than From the Vault). However, I think the wider player base would consider Secret Lairs to be the genuine replacement for what this product meant to them: a cool selection of weird reprints with specially tailored art. Secret Lair products don't have to conform to a specific theme, each one having a completely different impetus for being. Their time-sale method means Wizards can get weird with it and not worry about having to include the right number of reprints to make sure it's worth selling without resulting in obscene mark-ups. It's not perfect or without controversy, but I'll say that a disappointing Secret Lair mostly means a player forgets about it a few hours after reading the blurb. A disappointing From the Vault would be a toxic conversation for months.

My best evidence here is that Secret Lair did literally pull off the From the Vault objective as part of the Magic 30 with that incredibly cool (but similarly limited-in-number) advent calendar of cards pulled from each of the 30 years of  Magic's history up until that point. Does the Secret Lair line knock it out of the park every time? Nah, but they have the freedom to do that. From the Vault, being an annual event, did not. I've talked about a similar concept with the Commander line, where the pressure on the product let up once it stopped being an annual product. If a deck or set of decks is disappointing, wait three months! Still, I liked the presentation. It felt like a special, rare thing that I had to go find. A unique experience that we don't have as much of.

How did you all feel about this weird product? Did the foiling make it an automatic nope? Did you ever conceive of your own "custom" From the Vault? Tell me about it in the comments, and be sure to request a similarly defunct product you hope to see in a future article!