charlequin
Banned
But wouldn't it stabilise on the same price? Or is it that Modern infect will rise in price due to not having berserk?
Yeah, Legacy infect should stabilize near or below the old price, with a knock-on effect of Modern Infect getting noticeably pricier.
Let's say Legacy Infect costs $2000 to build (this is at least in the neighborhood.) Of that $2000, the vast majority of the value is in seven cards: Tropical Island, Berserk, Force of Will, Flusterstorm, Inkmoth Nexus, Noble Hierarch, and Misty Rainforest. Of those, there are three whose value is primarily from their place in Infect decks: Berserk, Noble Hierarch, and Inkmoth Nexus.
Now let's say that something totally implausible happens like Berserk being reprinted in a mass-printed set that'll drive its value down to $10. Now all of a sudden, with nothing else changing, the price of that deck is $1640.
Now, let's say the demand to play the deck stays exactly identical. If that's true, people should be theoretically willing to pay exactly the same amount to play it ($2000), so any dealer who sees this can adjust their prices to recapture some of those $360 savings. They can't easily do that with something like Force of Will because it's played in so many different decks. Instead, the best chance is with the cards that have no current supply and are primarily played in Infect -- if Inkmoth Nexus goes up $15 those incoming Legacy Infect players are still gonna buy it because they're only losing $60 of that $360 savings they got out of the Berserk.
Now doing this math I think stuff won't actually spike that much just because Berserk is much less of the value of that deck than I thought -- it looks like most lists only run 2 so there's not that much savings to recapture. But Inkmoth is also due for another spike from not being reprinted.