Last updated on August 28, 2025
Lightning Strike – art by Jo Cordisco
How much are you willing to pay for a product, the contents of which you're not fully aware of? Sure, loot boxes had their time and to some extent are still popular, but are you shelling out almost $300 for a Magic: The Gathering product when you don't even know what cards you're going to get?
Well, that's exactly what's happening with the upcoming Commander Bundle tied to the Avatar: The Last Airbender release towards the tail end of the year. Online retailers are asking an unreasonable price for the product, and the contents that have been revealed don't seem to add up.
What's in the Box!?
The Avatar Commander Bundle is an upcoming product releasing alongside the mainline Avatar: The Last Airbender set this November. It was announced with an MSRP of $109.99, yet popular online retailers currently have it listed in the $200-300 range. Must be something really good in those boxes, right? Maybe a few Commander staples and a pamphlet on how to firebend in real life.
Well, here's what we know about the contents of the bundle so far:
- 9 Play Boosters
- 1 Collector Booster
- Borderless Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, and Swiftfoot Boots with Avatar-themed art.
- 2 out of 10 possible borderless “classic Commander cards”
- 15 Traditional Foil basic lands (5 full-art)
- 15 Non-foil basic lands (5 full-art)
- Avatar-themed Click Wheel life counter
- Storage box
Let's do some quick math here:
- 9 Play boosters * $6.99 = ~$63
- 1 Collector Booster = $38
- Sol Ring/Arcane Signet/Swiftfoot Boots = Probably around $10 total, give or take a few dollars for collectability, alternate art, etc.
- 2 Additional Borderless Commander staples: No way to know right now, but let's just assume each card is worth roughly $10, so another $20 here.
- Basic lands = Mostly worthless, but let's assume around $1 each for the full-art foil lands, so another $5.
- Click Wheel life counter: These can actually end up being worth a bit of money. Let's call it $10 on the speculative low end.
With a good bit of guesstimation in there, the total comes out to roughly $145. That's being generous with the currently unknown Commander staples, as well as some of the other add-ons. Notably, this is roughly $100 in booster packs alone, which seems justified given the MSRP of $110. However, the math ain't mathing when you start looking at the $200-300 range these are being posted for online. Unless the unknown borderless cards are literally things like The One Ring and Demonic Tutors, there's no way this product's worth more than $150 on the high end.
Universes Beyond Strike Again
Toph, the First Metalbender | Illustration by Eilene Cherie
After the Collector booster box fiasco with FIN, the Universes Beyond trend can best be summarized as: “UB make price go up.”
Sets like Spider-Man and Avatar: The Last Airbender have seen absurd price hikes for Collector's boxes, despite nothing being revealed from those sets to make anyone think a $1,000 box of 12 packs is really worth it. Maybe The Soul Stone explains the pricetag for Spider-Man, but Avatar hasn't shown off anything even remotely close to that, and yet here we are with retailers slapping a $200 tag on a Commander-specific product that's ostensibly just a glorified Bundle with a fancy copy of Swiftfoot Boots.
Lorwyn Eclipsed and Secrets of Strixhaven are the first two sets of 2026, both “in-house” Magic IPs with none of this UB madness tacked on. Those will be the breaking point for many players, and give us an indication of whether this abhorrent price-gouging is truly a product of the Universes Beyond label, or if this is just something systemic to Magic as a whole moving forward.
For now, it's pretty clear that the Avatar Commander Bundle isn't worth $200. Maybe it's a byproduct of there being no Commander precons for the next two sets, and retailers trying to capitalize on foamy-mouthed EDH players who aren't getting their usual fix. If you can snag it around the $100 range, it actually seems like a pretty solid deal, but at the very least you might want to wait until the additional “Commander staples” have been revealed.
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4 Comments
10 bucks for a life clicker? Man I wish… my card shops around here charge 40 dollars a pop for the official life clickers easy. Usually it’s more beneficial to buy something that includes them like that special Foundations box they did where it doesnt add too much to the value, I could see in those it making up about 10 bucks of the MSRP in those cases, but by themselves they go for an arm and a leg!
Anyway, thanks for the breakdown, puts a lot in perspective =]
Ah, maybe I was too low on it. I remember the All Will Be One clickers going for quite a bit, 50+ at some point iirc. So yeah, add another $20-30 in there for expected value if you will. Though does it change my opinion about buying the boxes at this price point? Not at all.
Thanks for the input Ashra!
What an aggressively negative article. Someone’s angry about nothing
Well, you are the cooler Timothy.
TBF, we wrote this quite a while ago, at which point this product was being listed for almost 3 times MSRP. As of today it’s actual pretty close to MSRP, which makes it a great product.
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