Bots Inflate Last Airbender Collector Box Presale to $1,000

Last updated on August 14, 2025

TLA Promo Art – art by Alex Dos Diaz

About a month ago, a Magic player was wondering on Reddit whether or not they should pull the trigger on buying an Avatar collector booster box (CBB) that they had found online at around $550.

Somebody who knows nothing about Magic would perhaps check WotC's official Collecting Avatar: The Last Airbender, do the math (“One TLA collector booster is about $38; a CBB has 12 boosters; so a box should be worth around $450″), and came out thinking why the heck would somebody want to play $100 on top of WotC's suggested retail prices.

And even experienced Magic players would have agreed back then. Final Fantasy CBBs were already going crazy at that time, striking the $1,000 mark, but Final Fantasy was just a very special case – after all, the Universes Beyond crossover has broken pretty much every record in Magic's long history.

“People expecting [Avatar's Magic set] to be FF all over again are going to be in for a rough ride,” wrote u/snookers on that same thread.

“It’s not going to be,” agreed u/abraxius. “I love avatar but I’m not paying these prices.”

But then Spider-Man came out swinging (revealed right in the middle of Edge of Eternities release week…), yelling from New York's rooftops that CBBs and MSRPs are not something that have much connection.

“That would make Spider-Man one of only five Collector boxes worth over $1,000,” reported Tim just last week, as your friendly neighborhood spider's CBBs did in a couple of weeks what took Cloud's crew a couple of months, “behind Theros Beyond Death, The Lord of the Rings Special Edition, Fallout, and Final Fantasy (plus Bloomburrow with a current average price of $999).”

Well… so much for last week's news: Scratch “five”, because it's now six. Avatar: The Last Airbender collector booster displays opened for presale two days ago – and are already trading at the $1,000 mark.

Avatar x MTG Collector Booster Boxes Hit $1,000

TLA promotional art – illustrated by Toni Infante

This is the section when we usually show you a price graph, looking at a card's or other MTG product's trends.

Avatar's rise to one grand was so abrupt and recent, though, that there's not much of trend to show; just a vertical line:

Source: TCGplayer

There are even a couple of items that, on the very first day, were sold for close to $1,500 – prices went down from that crazy high yesterday, sometimes as low as $900, but still most units were presold at about $990.

And, honestly, even having to type “went down to $900″ feels insane. Two months ago, Final Fantasy looked like a massive home-run for WotC, and as such a complete off-the-charts outlier. And Spidey's CBBs have dropped to around $800, as some of the initial hype has deflated. But with Aang now following in Cloud's footsteps, it seems to be the new normal for Universes Beyond CBBs.

This is (for now…) strictly an Universes Beyond phenomenon, though. You can snatch Edge of Eternities collector boosters for less than $400. 

March of the Machines

Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines  – Illustration by Martina Fackova

If you were wondering if this is organic, fan-driven hype… no, not really. If you tried to buy yesterday at MSRP prices from online platforms like Amazon, which at the time of writing is sold out…

… you fought robots.

“Bots are checking out ATLA products by the thousands,” reported u/Kevun1 on a thread which includes screenshots that scalpers posted on Discord, “and stock is gone within less than a second. Never seen anything like this before for any MTG set.”

“Infuriating, to say the least,” wrote u/MaceTheMindSculptor, noting how crazy it is that Amazon is feeding the bots all day long.

We're in uncharted new territory, so it's perfectly possible that hype will die down – Spider-Man looks a bit of a low-powered MTG set (which doesn't even have Commander precons), and it remains to be seen if Marvel fans are as ardent and hungry for collectibles as Final Fantasy‘s crowd. If Spidey can't keep swinging at $1K, then that price point may start looking outlandish for Avatar, and scalpers and their bots may have less of an incentive to swarm like locusts on a new Magic set the second it launches.

Or maybe this is just Magic's new normal, and $1,000 is just the new MSRP if you want Universes Beyond's shiny stuff. 

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