Aang's MTG Journey

Back in late April, Reddit user Sad-Researcher8335 reached out to inform me that the Grandmaster Checklist tool was missing a card. Unbeknownst to me, a new Appa promo had quietly become available the previous month through Sam's Club, a US members-only warehouse retailer.

"Surely not", I thought. Another one-off Avatar promo, released in the middle of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles UB hype cycle? The product image seemed to show a normal copy of Appa, Aang's Companion from the TLE set. Scryfall didn't have an entry for it, and I couldn't find any listings for an Appa promo on either Cardmarket or eBay. What I did find on eBay were listings for the product itself: a "Battle Box" blister pack containing four Play Boosters, four Jumpstart Boosters, and the promo card in question. Sure enough, it was a new printing, similar in style to the Walmart Aang I imported back in January.

I guess Sam's Club is trying to move these booster packs off their shelves by repackaging them in bulk and throwing in a promo to sweeten the deal. Judging by the online discourse, this wasn't seen to be a very good deal back in March, which is possibly why this product flew under the radar. The general consensus around the promo was that it was the "wrong Appa"—players would've been more interested if it was a reprint of Appa, Steadfast Guardian instead.

In the absence of any individual listings, I bit the bullet and paid the scalper's price for the Battle Box itself. Just when I thought I was out…

The box arrived a few weeks later. Inserting the new promo required only a small reshuffle of the binder. I cracked the Play Boosters immediately, expecting very little. From the four packs, I pulled a single non-foil uncommon I was missing. Not a total waste, but I understand why Sam's Club is struggling to sell these—a TLE source material card is probably the most I could've hoped for.

My odds on the Jumpstart packs weren't much better. Since my box opening, I've been sitting on exactly 50% of the 46 possible Jumpstart themes, so each additional pack opened is a 50/50 chance of pulling all duplicates. Not wanting the sealed product to go to waste, I figured it was as good an excuse as any to actually play a game of Jumpstart.

I met up with a friend yesterday to open two packs each, resulting in two instant 40-card decks. I pulled a Shrines / Musicians red and multicoloured deck, while he ended up with a mono-black Bounty Hunter / Nightmares deck.

I went 0–2, even after swapping decks for the second game. I'm starting to think I might just be bad at this game. At least my tin of new Beadle & Grimm's accessories got an outing and saw some play.

In the end, only one of the four packs was a theme I needed. Alongside the front card, I ended up acquiring only three new TLE non-foils.

Overall, the Sam's Club Battle Box was not the wisest of purchases. I managed to lock in the missing promo and play a game of sealed, but pricewise the cost of import just made a bad deal worse. I should have just waited for the card to become available as a single. This was also my first time opening US booster packs, and it's true what they say: the print quality really isn't great. One of the cards actually had a dinged corner. Wonder if it had something to do with the repackaging process.

Suffice it to say, the Grandmaster Checklist has now been updated to include Sam's Club Appa, if you're using it to track your own collection. The tracked total now stands at 1,712 cards.

It's been a while since my last progress update. Mostly I have been busy letting my finances recover and watching prerelease cards gradually roll in. I'm only missing 4 out of 80 now, all of which have been ordered and should hopefully be on the way.

With the PTLA set effectively closed, my mind has started drifting towards other subsets. I've made my first foray into art cards with two small, targeted purchases. I suspect this will be the hardest subset to complete, mainly because of the Gold Signature versions. The subset that's been bugging me the most, however, is actually the tokens.

As I mentioned previously, the only token I was still missing was a second foil copy of TTLA #22 // TTLE #1 (Treasure // Aang, Awoken Avatar). To save on shipping, I nabbed one while ordering my first ever Gold Sig art card. They both landed today.

With the final Treasure token slotted, I now have a copy of every TTLA and TTLE card, in all treatments. Or do I?

A few days ago, I found out about Beadle & Grimm's Avatar: The Last Airbender Deluxe Bundle, an officially licenced MTG accessory kit produced in collaboration with Ultimate Guard. Only a thousand of these bundles were produced, all of which seem to have sold out last year. My interest was piqued when I noticed the contents of the token set included in this bundle:

• An Aang, Swift Savior metal life counter (1-40, 2.5" diameter)

• 5 +1/+1 counters (+5/+5 on the other side) designed as White Lotus Pai Sho tiles

• 5 spindown dice with bending symbols (d20, 2xd10, 2×d6)

• 7 aluminum token cards (Ally, Clue, Copy, Food, Soldier, Spirit, Treasure)

• All in an embossed tin featuring Avatar Aang.

Did I read that right? Official third party tokens produced for the Avatar UB set? They had to be mine.

Not to be outdone, I found a standalone listing for the token set from a local eBay seller and bought it immediately. As you can probably tell from the above image, the tin arrived today.

I won't try to make the argument that these are proper to the MTG set. These are metallic gameplay pieces, not WotC-produced playing cards. Nevertheless, I can't help but find a section for them in my binder: sleeved in Dragon Shields and carefully tucked away on the back page to avoid any damage to cardboard. The weight is obviously different, but they're not much thicker than cardstock—a perfect fit.

I'm not super pleased with the print quality on these tokens, honestly. The art has a couple print lines and imperfections, and the reverse is just plain aluminium. I had read online that Beadle & Grimm's were notorious for quality control issues, so it wasn't much of a surprise. The other items included in the tin look fantastic. A shame I'm not planning another play session where they might see some use!

In any case, I can now well and truly close the book on tokens.

The eagle-eyed among you may have also noticed that one of the cards pictured above is auf Deutsch. No, I'm not suddenly starting to collect every card in every language—this is for a small side project I've been working on. I have a separate post planned for when the rest have landed.

Someone beat me to it.

Two weeks ago on April 5, Reddit user zellybelly1 posted a photo album (external link) showing off a 100% complete grandmaster set of Avatar UB cards. It took them 4 months and approx. $15,000 USD to obtain every card.

Luckily, this project is not a race. I'm hoping my own collection will come in at a much lower total cost given my slower rate of acquisition. Honestly, I'm relieved to see someone else pull it off—it means this set is completable.

More importantly, their binder has become a reference point for my own collection. Going through the photos carefully, something immediately stood out: the absence of 15 non-foil TLE cards I had originally included in my total. My figure of 1,726 was wrong! There are in fact only 1,711 extant cards in this set once you remove the following non-foils from the list:

• 210: Aang, Air Nomad
• 211: Aang's Defense
• 214: Appa, Aang's Companion
• 218: Sledding Otter-Penguin
• 219: Sokka, Wolf Cove's Protector
• 220: Tundra Wall
• 221: Wolf Cove Villager
• 234: Capital Guard
• 238: Fire Nation Soldier
• 239: Fire Nation's Conquest
• 240: Iroh, Firebending Instructor
• 244: Warship Scout
• 245: Zhao, the Seething Flame
• 246: Zuko, Avatar Hunter
• 247: Zuko's Offense

Scryfall does document this, in fairness, though it's easy to miss unless you already suspect something is off:

"The non-tutorial printings of some cards from the Avatar Beginner Box's tutorial decks were only available in Collector's Boosters, making them foil-only."

This is similar to what we had seen previously with Earthbending Student, with the only difference being that Earthbending Student never got a tutorial card equivalent in non-foil.

I have updated the Grandmaster Checklist tool to exclude these non-existent cards. This lower, truer total brings me to a clean 60% completion. I'll speak to some of my recent pickups in a separate post.

Scattered prerelease singles continue to gradually make their way to me from around the world. At 63 out of 80, the binder pages are really starting to fill out. Unfortunately, at this stage of the hunt the concept of shipping consolidation has gone out the window—the orders I'm placing now are for individual missing singles.

Alas, this scattershot approach comes with its own set of risks beyond just the price of postage. I have finally had my first instance of a seller listing a card as a stamped prerelease promo, and sending the regular foil version instead.

These things happen. I'm sure most MTG players do not pay as much attention to card treatments as I do. That said, the foil version of this card is only worth 10c, so I requested a refund.

The seller refunded the article value promptly, but not the €1.55 spent on postage.

I chose not to pursue the difference. The cost of postage exceeds the value of the card itself, and I was, in fact, missing the regular foil version anyway. The seller was gracious enough to let me keep it.

Hopefully this is an isolated case, but it highlights the underlying problem with trying to collect prerelease cards: I am reliant on sellers noticing the 2025 stamp and listing their singles accurately. At scale, that dependency introduces friction, and occasional errors become inevitable.

I've already ordered a replacement using the refund amount. Time to wait and see if the next one arrives as described

The previous post is a tough act to follow when it comes to card acquisitions.

My hunt for all 80 prerelease cards continues apace. Today's postal delivery brings me to 48 out of 80 with a lightly played copy of Fire Lord Zuko.

One of my more interesting recent pickups was a foil copy of Earthbending Student. What is so interesting about a TLE uncommon, you might ask? Strangely, this card only comes in foil. Apparently the non-foil version was originally announced as part of the Beginner Box spoilers, but it cannot be found in Beginner Boxes or in Jumpstart Boosters. This card only exists inside Collector Boosters, where it is one of many possible TLE foil uncommons. As a result, its effective pull rate is lower than most mythics, and the prices on the secondary market reflect this.

I also got an opportunity to use my new checklist tool today. I popped into my LGS to check if they had any new singles for sale, and I'm glad to report I did not accidentally buy any duplicates this time. Instead, I picked up an extended art non-foil version of The Cabbage Merchant (TLE; not to be confused with Unlucky Cabbage Merchant TLA). The current price of this card is pretty shocking, but it seems to be seeing a lot of play in Commander decks.

Overall, I've been making some steady progress. Glad for the opportunity to slow the pace a little and give the collection time to breathe (and my wallet time to recover).

When I pulled a 2025-stamped Avatar Aang promo at my home prerelease event last November, my friend warned me against trying to collect the set. He had given up on physical cards years ago, switching to MTG Arena and having not looked back. He had shown me the price of launch-week listings for the Avatar UB headliner card: a borderless raised foil version of the same card. I blinked, at the time not knowing exactly what I was looking at or why it was required. I would later come to realise this was my first and final warning against collecting this MTG set.

The Raised Foil Avatar Aang is a true grail. Found in less than 1% of English-language Collector Boosters, this double-faced card was illustrated by the original show's co-creator, Bryan Konietzko. It is card #363 of 394 in the TLA set. There is only one treatment: the patterned Raised Foil. However, the card itself comes in various other printings: the base card, #207 (non-foil, traditional foil, and the aforementioned prerelease stamp foil); and the "Booster Fun" variant #308 (non-foil and traditional foil; part of the "Book 3 Scene" series). From a player's point of view, the Raised Foil is therefore purely aesthetic. If you want to play with this card in your MTG deck, you can, and for a low cost. However, for a collector, this is one of six treatments; one of three TLA card numbers. It is the structural keystone that makes the TLA set completable.

If I truly wanted to collect every card in this set, then my collection wasn't just incomplete in the absence of the Raised Foil—it was contingent upon securing one. I had to capture the Avatar.

This may seem like a hostile design philosophy from WotC. It is. However, it is bounded in a way that other recent Universes Beyond sets have not been. The most infamous example is the serialised 1 of 1 version of The One Ring card from The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth set, sold to Post Malone for $2.64M USD back in 2023. A less egregious but more recent example is the golden Traveling Chocobo cards from the FINAL FANTASY set, which are also serialised, this time limited to 77. You can check out the Golden Chocobo Tracker app (external link) to see some of the insane prices that some of these go for. In comparison, the Avatar set has zero serialised cards, and only five CB chasers: the four textless Neon Inks, and the Raised Foil.

With this framing in mind, I started to seriously consider whether or not to purchase this card in early January. The market was thin. The sales history showed a few sporadic transactions, with a steep drop in value since the initial launch hype. Most listings remained clustered at anchor prices which no longer reflected the market reality. With such a large gap between prices and completed sales, I began to do something which is seemingly not the norm for Cardmarket—I began to message sellers privately to negotiate. Despite watching the listings for a long while, I was a bit nervous about how this would come across. I certainly didn't want to burn any bridges, and I know of MTG sellers who insta-block buyers who try to haggle on price. However, this card does not operate in a functional TCG economy. In such a niche market, price discovery is done in steps rather than trends, and transactions only happen when both sides decide it's time.

Last week, I was finally in a position to make a serious four-figure offer. It cleared instantly. The final price was in line with the small number of confirmed sales that preceded it. Maybe the floor will drop further. For me, it was the price of closure.

The seller was a professional and a pleasure to deal with. The parcel was in my hands within the week, tracked and insured.

When it landed, it somehow felt smaller than I had imagined it. Obviously it is the same size as every other MTG card, so I'm not sure why I felt that way. Maybe all those hours staring at close-ups made the artwork look busy when viewed at a normal scale. After a quick photoshoot, it went straight into a Dragon Shield and into the binder. No, I didn't double-sleeve it or place it in a toploader. It lives in binder number two now, alongside all the other cards. In actual fact, the binder page it went into is practically empty; #363 sits between the Neon Inks and the long procession of extended art cards in the TLA set. With the grail secured, I can now work on gradually filling the rest of those pockets with confidence.

Funnily enough, the Raised Foil arrived alongside one of the prerelease promos I ordered. A copy of Iroh, Tea Master, sold for 70c plus shipping. Quite the contrast for those two cards to enter the binders on the same day. Both are structurally necessary for completing my collection project, and both will now sit quietly next to each other, wrapped in polypropylene. Two more cards ticked off the list today.

A week ago, I found myself once again browsing the limited selection of singles in my LGS. I have begun to haunt that place in search of Avatar cards—maybe there aren't many being traded in, but it seems like they sell instantly. I can never seem to find any.

As luck would have it, I found two on this occasion. To date, I have been tracking my collection using a printed checklist (external link) put together by Reddit user JonODonovan. This pen-and-paper solution worked pretty well for my long, floor-bound sessions spent sorting stacks of cards and organising three massive binders. It does not lend itself to digitised tracking very well. My solution has been to quickly take photos of these 28 A4 pages any time I'm going anywhere in-person to trade.

As it happens, my latest photos were not up-to-date. Both cards I purchased were duplicates. In a set of 1.7k cards, two dupes is a rounding error at most–but it felt like a gut punch. My system needed to be properly digitised.

My initial solution was, naturally, an Excel spreadsheet. I don't actually have a Microsoft Office subscription, and I didn't necessarily want to use Google Sheets for hosting, so somehow I ended up creating an .ODS file in LibreOffice Calc. This exercise helped me define the list. Following my recent shock discovery of 54 additional art cards I hadn't previously been tracking, the grand total finally came into view: 1,726 cards. That is my goal.

Turns out spreadsheets are not exactly a web-friendly format (outside of Google Sheets), so I ultimately decided to create a static webpage instead. Behold, the Grandmaster Set Checklist. This tool allows you to filter by set code, card number, card name, treatment, and ownership. It lists every Avatar UB card, playable and non-playable, in every extant treatment.

There is no account system; the tool is entirely client-side. Your checklist can be saved locally as a .JSON file to keep track of what cards you own. In fact, this tool can be run completely offline if you want to download the contents of the website from the GitHub repo (external link).

After painstakingly ticking each box in my new tool, I finally landed on a number my A4 sheets had never revealed to me: 982 / 1726 (56.9%). I'm officially past the halfway point. Before today, my collection was vibes-based; the physical collection was quantified in memory and paper notes. Digitalisation has collapsed that ambiguity into a list of 982 discrete, indexed, versioned print objects. It will take me a little while to recalibrate.

Anyway, I won't be picking up duplicates next time I spontaneously decide to flip through a trade binder.

I have previously discussed art cards a couple times on this blog. I obtained the full set of twelve ATLE art cards when I opened two Scene Boxes at Christmas, and I acquired a few from the ATLA set last month when I cracked far too many Collector Boosters. What I did not realise at the time was the true scope of this set.

Art cards are non-playable collectibles, usually included as a possible pull in Collector Booster packs. They are enumerated on the back, with 54 cards in the ATLA series. What I have just discovered is that the ATLA cards actually come in two versions: the regular art card, and a rarer "Gold Signature" treatment. Similar to a prerelease stamp, these Gold Signature versions feature the artist's signature imprinted in gold. In circumstances where I guess the artist didn't provide their signature, a golden Planeswalker symbol is stamped on the card instead. These two versions don't seem to be properly documented on Scryfall; it currently only has scans of the Gold Signature cards.

This doubles the total number of ATLA cards in the grandmaster set, bringing the total number of art cards to 120. Just when I thought I had finalised my binder layout, I have had to reorganise it slightly to make room for these additional empty pockets. I compressed the prerelease section, leaving plenty of room at the back of the third binder in case I come across any more surprises.

In other news, I'm now on 38 out of 80 prerelease promos. With Wan Shi Tong now under my belt, I believe I have obtained all the most expensive mythics. I've begun the process of slowly hunting down and ordering the rest. The first two prerelease lands have been slotted, so I might focus on tying down the rest of those next. Gonna have to wait till payday though.

I opened a Commander Bundle just over a month ago, primarily to obtain five of the thirteen TLE promo cards exclusive to this product.

About a week ago, I pressed buy on the ten other singles via Cardmarket's Shopping Wizard. They have been slowly filtering in from different sellers, with the final two landing today. Between the postage, their rarity, and the fact that these cards are all reprints of playable Commander staples, this is possibly the most expensive binder page in my collection.

Speaking of expense, I also secured a prerelease-stamped copy of Badgermole Cub. This card is seeing a lot of play, so I expected it to be one of the most challenging prerelease cards to acquire.

I actually got the Cub at a decent price. It was seriously well protected in transit: rather than the usual piece of protective cardboard, it came inside a perfect-fit inner sleeve, inside an outer sleeve, inside a toploader, inside a sealed plastic wrapper. Felt like opening a sealed product rather than a secondhand playing card.

I should note that this wasn't even the most expensive prerelease card I purchased this month. I really struggled to find any reasonably priced listings for the stamped Wan Shi Tong, Librarian. I tried negotiating with a few unreasonable sellers and got nowhere. Eventually, a copy turned up at market value and I managed to jump on it. It should be arriving in the post any day now—watch this space.

For the feast day of Saint Valentine this year, I found myself inside HMV.

The outlet was running a cute "blind date" promotion where you could buy a mystery DVD or Blu-ray, covered in wrapping paper and sold at a discount. I picked one up for later: Horror / Brothers / Deep South.

While we were there, I was treated to a romantic Collector Booster, gifted to me by my Valentine. My wife has been very supportive of this project, and in fact I may have gotten her hooked on cracking CBs in search of the Avatar.

Alas, Cupid was not kind. After opening a full box of CBs and skimming the bulk foils from two others, the return on investment from any single pack is now very low for my collection. I already have most of the easier pulls from these packs, so it's a gamble each time whether I hit something new. I got a few new cards, but the big pulls were unfortunately duplicates. Is this finally the end of sealed?

Fittingly, the mystery Blu-ray was also a duplicate: 2025's Sinners, which we already own in 4K UHD. Unusual enough these days to buy physical media, never mind buying it twice! It is an excellent movie though.

Anyway, we found something else to watch. Lessons learned when it comes to blindly buying mystery products on the high street.