Four-of Everything: Premodern vs Unreserved

Results

  • Premodern four-of estimate: €44,655.37
  • Unreserved four-of estimate: €8,472.33
  • Ratio: Premodern is ~5.27× Unreserved

Scope and rules

  • Card pools: Premodern 5,423 legal cards. Unreserved 2,785 cards.
  • Printings allowed: any printing except gold-bordered. Cardmarket’s Shopping Wizard ignores gold-bordered cards unless you force editions card by card, which is impractical here.
  • Language and condition: English, Excellent or better.
  • Shopping setup: Cardmarket Shopping Wizard configured for sellers in the European Union shipping to Spain.
  • Shipping ignored.
  • Banned cards in Premodern are excluded from pricing. Buying them preemptively can be rational because an unban often raises prices. Including them would increase Premodern’s cost further relative to Unreserved.

Methodology

  • Premodern: I listed the top 10% most expensive legal cards using Scryfall prices. Those cards sum to 80.68% of the total value of the format. I built Cardmarket Want Lists with four copies of each of those cards.
  • Unreserved: I selected cards until reaching 80.67% of the format’s total value. That required the top 18.42% by count. This already shows how much of Premodern’s total value sits in Reserved List staples.

Calculation

  • Articles value from the Cardmarket Shopping Wizard for the want lists above:
    • Premodern: €36,027.95
    • Unreserved: €6,834.63
  • To estimate four of everything, I divided by the slice shares:
    • Premodern: €36,027.95 ÷ 0.8068 = €44,655.37
    • Unreserved: €6,834.63 ÷ 0.8067 = €8,472.33

Why the gap is so large

The card count gap matters, 2,785 vs 5,423, but the price gap is much larger because a big share of Premodern’s value is concentrated in Reserved List staples. Those few cards dominate total spend.

Purchasing efficiency note

This workflow is not the cheapest way to buy, especially for Premodern. Example: one basket has a Gaea’s Cradle around €800 Near Mint, then three more around €1,300 each. At that moment this was the cheapest way the Shopping Wizard found to secure four English copies at Excellent or better. A patient buyer or someone using more platforms could save. Relative to the totals, this effect is small. The main driver of the gap is the Reserved List concentration.

If you only want decks

Most players do not want four of everything. You want the cards for a few decks you enjoy. This study still helps because the same price forces apply at the deck level. Unreserved decks are generally cheaper, although the gap is smaller than the 5.27× whole-collection ratio. Premodern has 5,423 legal cards versus 2,785 in Unreserved, but that does not mean you need around twice as many decks to play Premodern. For examples, see https://mtgoldframe.com/unreserved-deck-prices-cardmarket/, but consider it a small sample.

Conclusion

Even after accounting for the smaller card pool, Premodern’s cost is dominated by Reserved List staples. Under equal assumptions and ignoring shipping, four of everything is about €44.7k in Premodern versus €8.5k in Unreserved.