Last Airbender Collector Boxes Experience Spider-Man Ripple Effect

Last updated on October 14, 2025

Lightning Strike | illus. Jo Cordisco

What goes up must certainly, eventually come down. That's the old adage, right? It's a bit of a lie when you're talking about Magic: The Gathering cards in general, but it's definitely the case with Avatar: The Last Airbender Collector boosters. To be fair, they became heavily inflated for no justifiable reason, so they're really just falling back to the realm of mortals where they belong.

Back Down to Earth

As Chad Kroeger once said, look at this photograph:

Source: TCGplayer

Every time I do, it makes me laugh. Though it's pretty clear anyone who stockpiled Avatar Collector boxes a month ago won't be making that nickel back. That's the type of graph you see with contagious diseases being contained, and hopefully the disease that is $1,000 Collector boxes has been cured indefinitely. Avatar boxes hit the 1k mark and beyond, hovered around $800 for a good while, and have nosedived down to the $500-600 mark over the last few weeks.

What The Heck Happened?

Amazing Spider-Man | Illus. Thanh Tuan

Spider-Man, that's what happened. Everyone's favorite neighborhood hack got collectors in a tizzy and caused a frenzy when it comes to Collector boxes.

Technically, you could blame Final Fantasy for starting the trend, since those boxes hit the $1,000 mark well before these more recent ones, and that spiraled into people thinking Universes Beyond sets were pure gold. Not so with Spider-Man, which people learned the hard way. Unless you opened like a god or spiked the multi-thousand-dollar version of The Soul Stone, you were never making your money back on a $1,000 box of Marvel's Spider-Man.

So Final Fantasy makes it to the moon, Spider-Man tries to do the same, but flounders and plummets back down to earth. People are thinking Avatar might be more of a Spider-Man situation, not a Final Fantasy one. In theory, Avatar is closer to Final Fantasy on this spectrum, since it's a normal, large set and based on an immensely popular franchise. Spider-Man turned people off with its smaller set size and lack of truly remarkable cards. Spider-Man as a property is popular enough, sure, but has proven itself as a poor fit for Magic.

But it's clear that the FOMO buying that caused these UB sets to spike so high in price has reversed into a sort of “fear of whoops I spent too much on a normal Collector booster box” (FOWISTMOANCBB, if you will), and prices are dropping back down into the stratosphere. They haven't quite landed on solid ground where they should be–$600 is still unreasonable based on anything that's been revealed from Avatar so far–but they're better off than they were a month ago.

Official Avatar spoiler season hasn't quite kicked off yet, but it should be clear that this isn't some super juiced Modern Horizons-style set. It's very flavor-forward with a bunch of top-down designs, and the mechanics like airbending and firebending don't lend themselves well to highly competitive play, at least not in the early previews we've seen. Returning mechanics like lesson, shrines, and allies are all fun and exciting, but they don't scream “$1,000 please!” quite like a flock of serialized golden chocobos do.

Hopefully the super expensive Collector booster box trend is over, which seems to be a uniquely Universes Beyond problem, but next year will confirm whether this is the case or not. Sets like Ninja Turtles and Star Trek very likely behave themselves, but juggernauts like The Hobbit and Marvel Super Heroes have the potential to strike this trend right back up. Meanwhile, the rest of the world can be content with their (hopefully) paltry $300-400 Lorwyn Eclipsed and Secrets of Strixhaven boxes.