This week the biggest Magic finance news is the completion of Double Masters 2022 spoilers. Right now a rough estimate of the expected value of a draft booster box shows that, on average, a box will yield over $400 in value, which is great. The bad news is that booster boxes themselves have gotten quite expensive. A week ago you could find boxes for around $250, but now Amazon is sold out and the cheapest boxes on TCGplayer are $360. If you dig around you can possibly still find boxes for around $300 from local game stores and smaller vendors, which seems like a reasonable price considering the amount of value in the set, although all things considered, even though the EV is high, the cost of a box is high enough that cracking packs will still be a big risk. If you look closely at the spreadsheet linked above, you'll see that the average value of rares and mythics is much higher than the median value, which means Double Masters 2022 will be a high variance set. On average, a box offers good value, but any single box will be a crapshoot where if you run poorly and miss on the high end cards, you could certainly end up losing value. Like usual, the safest bet is to pick up the singles you need and let someone else take the risk of cracking boxes.

As far as individual cards, the biggest winner this week was Dragon Tempest, which has benefited from the Dragon theme of Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate. The enchantment is great in any Dragon Commander deck, but it works especially with with Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm (where it works as a finisher in an infinite combo involving Worldgorger Dragon) and with Ancient Gold Dragon (showcase), where a single attack, on average, will make enough Dragon tokens to burn the entire table out of the game. If you need a copy you can save a couple of bucks by looking for the Iconic Masters uncommon printing, but even that is approaching $10. For now you'll likely have to bite the bullet and pay the higher price if you need a copy, but at current prices, Dragon Tempest looks like a juicey reprint target for a future Commander product or Masters set.

Finally, Altar of the Brood is on the rise, in part because of formats like Modern and Pioneer where it occasionally shows up as a win-con in some jankier, lower-tier combo decks and in part because of Commander where it is a fairly popular upgrade to Captain N'ghathrod decks. While Khans of Tarkir might feel like it just released yesterday, it was actually almost 10 years ago, and Altar of the Brood has never been reprinted. The former bulk rare has climbed up above $10 after gaining 45% this week. The problem with Altar of the Brood is that it's a unique effect - there's nothing else that efficiently mills whenever a permanent enters the battlefield - so if that effect is important to your deck, you pretty much have to pick up a copy of Altar of the Brood rather than searching for a cheaper replacement. Expect the artifact to slowly continue to rise until it's eventually reprinted.