Retrospective Reviews - Signature Spellbooks

There's no time like the present to dig up the past, so it's time for another Retrospective Review! While I wait and see on last entry's experiment, I wanted to bring up one of the most recent defunct products: Signature Spellbooks... plus a second product. See if you can guess it! Consider that the bonus card of the Secret Lair that is this article. 

Initially released in 2018, this product would only last three entries before being "discontinued." There are some interesting twists and turns after that which I'm excited to get into, so let's hop in the quarry and break open these hidden gems to see which ones should stay hidden after all!

What's the Product?

Signature Spellbook was a collection of eight non-foil cards with one foil version of the eight included at random, all of them themed around a singular planeswalker. It was one of the last product lines released with a known MSRP ($19.99) and was exclusive to local game stores. Below is a quick review of the card inclusions for each of the three collections.

Signature Spellbook: Jace (2018)

1. Jace Beleren
2. Blue Elemental Blast
3. Brainstorm
4. Counterspell
5. Gifts Ungiven
6. Mystical Tutor
7. Negate
8. Threads of Disloyalty

At the time of release, Signature Spellbook: Jace carried almost $18 in value without considering the random foil. The cheapest foil would bring it up to a little over $21, or... less than the value of the entire product after tax. Of the eight cards, only four were worth more than $2. These days, Mystical Tutor is the only non-foil card worth significantly more than a dollar. A sealed copy of the product is still only just above MSRP, at around $24. Jace-lovers, grab one... or just buy the singles.

As far as use-case goes, almost all of these cards see play. I happily sleeve up Negate in most blue Commander decks. I think Threads of Disloyalty is the only card that doesn't see much play anywhere. It was an odd pick.

This release set the overall tone for the product. The cards included not only had new art, but also a special border singularly associated with the character featured. It was an easy pickup for Jace fans, and honestly, a lot of Vorthoses were just excited for a product more focused on the lore side of things. 

Signature Spellbook: Gideon (2019)

1. Gideon Jura
2. Path to Exile
3. Rest in Peace
4. Worship
5. Martyr's Bond
6. Blackblade Reforged
7. Shielded by Faith
8. True Conviction

Signature Spellbook: Gideon would be a tearjerker packed with value. This was the best of the trilogy, and it timed perfectly with the conclusion of a major story arc and synchronized with the death of Gideon. The product acted as a glorious send-off. Not only that, but at the time of release, the product was worth almost $33 without the bonus foil. (The minimum it could be was $36, while a Spellbook with a foil Path to Exile would hit $50).

The modern outlook of it is... odd, to say the least. As of 2024, True Conviction and Shielded by Faith are the money cards at about $3 each. Can't believe we've seen the day that those two cards are worth more than Path to Exile, but here we are. Interestingly, a sealed copy is going for well below MSRP even now, several years post-release. 

As for playability, most of the cards see some play, albeit not as ubiquitous as the picks in the previous entry. There was certainly more of a pull towards flavor over how many cards were going in decks.

Signature Spellbook: Chandra (2020)

1. Chandra, Torch of Defiance
2. Pyroblast
3. Fiery Confluence
4. Rite of Flame
5. Past in Flames
6. Young Pyromancer
7. Cathartic Reunion
8. Pyromancer Ascension

This one had a weird discrepancy in prices. Before its release, the cards inside it would have collectively cost over $30. On release day, however, the specific cards inside it were selling for a collective $10. Foils couldn't save the value here. It made cards accessible, but it also made certain cards feel less valuable. Hard balance there, which may have resulted in our second product, which we're almost ready for.

From a non-financial perspective, I still don't fully know what's going on. It's interesting that Chandra, Torch of Defiance got the nod here instead of Chandra Nalaar, breaking the pattern of original printings of the character in favor of a much more desirable version. However, the collection was missing a real supreme format all-star or auto-include. There were useful cards, but most of them adhered to a specific strategy or had comparatively limited usage, which ham-stringed the product.

One final note is that we actually saw this frame treatment come back in M21. In fact, each of the five planeswalkers in that set got a special frame treatment which alluded to the possibility of plenty of Signature Spellbooks! I'll say, I wish we had gotten a Signature Spellbook: Garruk!

What Went Wrong?

Signature Spellbooks were a product intended to follow up on the legacy of From the Vault. It was half the size and half the price. I recall that the intention here was to make sure that the theme could come through more intensely. The 15th or even 11th card of a given From the Vault could start to feel sketchy, but all of the Signature Spellbook picks helped convey the story and life of the character. 

This had an interesting shakeout. At the time of release, some of these cards would be worth way more or less than their non-Spellbook counterparts. This could be chalked up to a confluence of different factors. Did the original have a lot of other reprints? Did it have a modern-border version. In what formats did it actually see play? 

Eventually, the cards dropped in value, which made buying the entire collection feel worthless. 

...or could it be something else? You see, there was a blue, white, and red collection of eight cards released before the series ended... Or was there?

Retrospective Reviews: Commander Collection

There's no time like the present to dig up the past! That's right, it's a double whammy of a Retrospective Review! Let's talk about the weird, "hidden" cycle of From the Vault's not-so-glorious return! 

Commander Collections were eight cards themed around a single color, tied specifically to being valuable in the Commander format. There were six cards of that color, plus Sol Ring and Command Tower, in a nifty treatment tied to the color. Wizards of the Coast sent them exclusively to local game stores. They were not originally given any sort of MSRP, but market prices on release seemed to be around $80 or $90... for the non-foil version. That's right, there were two versions released. Instead of giving a random foil in the one product, players could buy a fully premium version. These ran around $250 or so. 

That wasn't the only difference. Commander Collections were doled out in much more limited supply, and premium versions were only available to WPN Premium stores. They made the product feel higher value, but were they? Let's check.

Commander Collection: Green (2020)

1. Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury
2. Seedborn Muse
3. Bane of Progress
4. Worldly Tutor
5. Sylvan Library
6. Omnath, Locus of Mana
7. Sol Ring
8. Command Tower

Commander Collection: Green was announced as part of the Year of Commander, and it set a new standard for these little collections. All of the cards were found regularly in decks, or wished for if they weren't. Sylvan Library was a $50 card when the green collection came out. It and the $30 Omnath, Locus of Mana basically paid for the pack before it released. The singles right out of the box totaled up to $100, but as everyone knows, release meant the cards entered a brief financial freefall. Nowadays, the collection is only worth $55, which is what even a boxed set is selling for, unless you want foils: around $85 instead.

Commander Collection: Black (2021)

1. Liliana, Heretical Healer
2. Phyrexian Arena
3. Toxic Deluge
4. Ophiomancer
5. Toxic Deluge
6. Reanimate
7. Command Tower
8. Sol Ring

At the time of release, the mono-black inclusions themselves were all worth over $10 each. Even so, it only barely hopped over the value fence, being worth about $86 of singles, or just $6 more than what most stores were selling it for. These were some desirable cards! They would have been exciting rares. In fact, they had been! Toxic Deluge had just been reprinted in Double Masters just five months prior. It was still $20, but not for long. 

These days, Reanimate and Toxic Deluge are the only cards in the bunch still commanding a $10 price tag. The rest are around $3 or less. A set of singles will run you $40; the regular box is $35. The premium version doesn't even sell for as much as the regular did on release: $65 in most places.

So at the time, these cards felt like massive value, and they were widely playable. The inclusion of Command Tower is understandable for a Commander-themed product, but also strange since the products were ostensibly mono-colored. But why the pivot? These were dropped faster than Signature Spellbooks!

What Was the Response?

Lukewarm to all of them. The theming of Signature Spellbooks was tight, and they held interest in that respect. If you liked the character, you'd pick one up. If you didn't like the character, it was a matter of value, and these didn't have it.

As for Commander Collection, the cards had value, but the price hike and the much looser theming meant that people only bought them if they wanted all (or almost all) of the cards or just really liked the artwork. 

Hm.

Wait a minute.

That sounds like... a Secret Lair.

To glance back at From the Vault, a problem with buying a preconstructed set of cards that aren't themselves a deck is that a lot of the players want to, well, play with the cards. There are collectors too, and that's an intrinsic part of the experience, but playing is more important. If most people don't want to play the card, it's going to be a harder sell. That means the theme needs to be fairly tight to make sure a single player is going to want to play most of them, but also somehow not so tight that only one kind of player wants it. 

I don't know how often Wizards of the Coast managed to thread that needle properly. All of the products in this line, save for Signature Spellbook: Jace (which was the first in the series), can be bought brand new for well below their launch price. The attempt to make them affordable just made them too bland, and the attempt to make them premium left them too pricey. No winning.

I think we're just in a new era of Magic card prices. Wizards is printing a lot of cardboard every year, and it's not just that reprints are hitting. It used to be that your premium white removal was Swords to Plowshares or Path to Exile, with nothing else coming close. Those still rule the roost, but there are ten other effects in white that can exile a creature for a reasonable rate and can either do more or present options in such a way as to make them worth considering over the usual top picks. Why pay $5-10 for the absolute best version of a card in a casual format when you can grab three reasonable substitutes or narrower options for a dollar? 

I don't want to get bogged down in the economics of it, but I will also note that any time a card gets reprinted in a product with a fixed price point, the card's value is going to adjust in accordance with that price point (along with the other cards available). This is why we're never getting true fetchlands in a normal Commander release, and it's why these products always struggle. They seem desirable at first, but then their big pieces collapse in value, and then people go back to buying singles as opposed to the wholesale product. 

This problem is basically fixed with Secret Lairs. Now only players who want the cards or the unique arts buy them. Occasionally, there's a financial doorstopper, like the Phyrexian Praetors Secret Lair, and it crunches the value of the original cards due to people buying a dozen boxes to flip later. But for the most part, Secret Lairs allow the market to absorb the influx of new cards.

Outside of weird new iterations, like the Lord of the Rings Panorama boxes, I don't expect to see Wizards release any more "small collections of cards" products. And even then, the recent Doctor Who set of cards which came out later also came out as a Secret Lair instead. There's experimentation going on, and I'll be excited to see what shakes out!

Your Signature, Please!

That's a wrap! What a set. More than anything, I think these solidified the death of the From the Vault model. Trying it out, pivoting, and then cancelling it entirely all over again seems like a sure sign that these are never coming back. What do you all think? Could these frame treatments come back in Secret Lairs? Who's glad we finally got a token for Ophiomancer? Who wishes we'd gotten the full set of mono-colored themed Sol Rings and Command Towers?