WotC Slows Down on Printing Magic’s Biggest Chase Cards

Last updated on October 10, 2025

Helm of the Host | Illustration by Igor Kieryluk

Serialization is a great way to add collectability to a card game like Magic. As long as people can still get regular, base versions of the cards they want to play with, serialized versions just offer something for the collectors and whales to hunt down, or something that the impulsive Walmart pack-buyer might open up and get excited about.

Serialized cards took off in Magic for a while there, but it looks like they're now slowing to a crawl. Some recent sets haven't included them at all, and a lot of what's available on the secondary market is tapering off.

Serialization in MTG

Wurmcoil Engine | Illustration by Raymond Swanland

The Brothers' War (2022) marked the first full set release to include serialized cards, with each of the 63 Retro Artifact bonus sheet cards receiving 500 serialized versions. In other words, if there was ever a point at which MTG had “too many serialized cards”, it was literally when they first kicked off. From that point forward, WotC has been experimenting with serialization across tons of different sets, including The Doctors from Doctor Who, the bobbleheads from Fallout, all of the bonus sheet cards in March of the Machine, and so on.

However, there's been a noticeable lull in serialization throughout 2025. The Headliner process is still happening for new MTG sets, where one card from each new Standard release gets a special treatment as the chase card of the set, but even some of the more recent ones weren't serialized. Sothera, the Supervoid from Edge of Eternities and The Infinity Stone from Marvel's Spider-Man both received extra-special chase versions, but neither were serialized. However, other sets throughout the year did feature serialized cards, like the golden chocobos from Final Fantasy, Mox Jasper from Tarkir: Dragonstorm, and The Aetherspark from Aetherdrift, which no, you can't scrub from your memory.

It's even been confirmed that Lorwyn Eclipsed will include a serialized Headliner card, Bitterbloom Bearer with 500 versions.

Speaking of the Market…

The Aetherspark | Illustration by Dominik Mayer

An observation made by u/catattackskeyboard on Reddit claims that the total number of serialized cards on TCGplayer has decreased by 40% over the course of the last two months. There are plenty of justifications for why this might be the case, but the fact of the matter is that it's harder to find and buy serialized cards (specifically on TCGplayer) now than it was a few months back, or even back as far as last year.

There are plenty of reasons why serialized stock has decreased, even beyond the fact that WotC's just printing fewer serialized cards:

• Sellers are pulling their cards from TCGplayer (and other online marketplaces) since collector's items like these sell better in more open forums like Facebook groups, auctions, etc.
• As The_Grizzly_B mentions on the Reddit thread, the decrease in serialized cards being printed by WotC means people are becoming more gun-shy about selling the ones they own.
• Collector booster boxes have skyrocketed in price lately. Higher prices means less people buying boxes, and therefore less people opening the serialized cards that are still hiding in sealed product.

It's also worth noting that collector-driven cards like these don't circulate the same way a normal chase rare might. One subset of people buying up serialized cards are doing so because they want to own the one-of-a-kind card, and that means they're less likely to resell down the line. These cards often get graded and slabbed with no intention of putting them back on the market, so the total number of cards available should be expected to decrease over time, only bolstered by the introduction of fresh serialized cards in a new product.

This doesn't mean much for non-collectors, but it does make the market for serialized cards a little shaky, and could lead to price spikes across the board for these special pieces of cardboard. And there's no certainty in the matter either: WotC could just as easily release another Final Fantasy-like set with a huge batch of serialized cards and flood the market out of nowhere. Imagine if Marvel Super Heroes next year has a serialized version of every hero and villain that gets printed in the set! Something like that could happen just as easily as seeing a few more sets next year that just skip serialization altogether. Based on the numbers from 2025, it's just a guessing game right now.