Star Trek Magic autographs arrive with no published odds

Magic: The Gathering | Star Trek reaches stores Friday with the first actor autographs Magic has ever put in packs. Wizards printed a percentage for nearly every slot in a Collector Booster, down to the art card, but the seven signed headliners only get a line saying they turn up in "an extremely low quantity of Collector Boosters."

The signers include William Shatner on Kirk, Patrick Stewart on Picard and Kate Mulgrew on Janeway. Wizards says there are fewer than 250 copies of each card, fewer than 1,750 in all, spread across Collector Boosters in every language.

Wizards has never published how many Collector Boosters it prints, for this set or any other. The closest anyone has come is Lord of the Rings, where Wizards put a ceiling on the odds of pulling The One Ring and MTGPrice worked back from it to a run of 3.3 million Collector Boosters. If Star Trek's run is that size, that puts one signed card in about every 157 boxes, under a 1% chance per box. At the roughly 6 million MTGPrice estimates for Reality Fracture, it's one in 288. At either run the real odds are longer, because Wizards only promises fewer than 250 of each.

Several of the first pulls are already listed on eBay. Draftsim counted Picard and Kirk asks around $30,000 on Tuesday and said none of the signed cards had sold at those prices. Every dollar of those asks above $600 is a bet on the Magic card and its count rather than the ink, because the same actors' Topps and Rittenhouse autographs sell for about $10 to $600.

The other side has a real case. Stewart died Oct. 28 at 86, months after he signed his Picard cards. A first-ever Magic autograph with his name on it could sell near its ask and stay there. But a Picard that went up for auction came down after it missed its reserve, according to Draftsim.

I'd give it a week and let the first real sales set the price before paying anyone's ask. One Collector Booster box sold for $447 this week, under its $456 MSRP. At that price I'd buy a box to chase the Dr. Beverly Crusher and Seven of Nine showcase foils, with the signature as a long shot. Arena's Star Trek Sealed event ships a physical box for seven wins through Nov. 22, Wizards says, another way to buy the same long shot.