Drop of Honey is a classic example of what we call a “reserved list buyout”. This is where one investor purchases as many copies of a single card from a no-reprint list of cards in order to increase the price and sell them back for profit. These cards can be as rare as having only 20660 copies ever printed. Drop of honey is one of these such cards. So far throughout Drop of Honey’s history it has experienced two such buyouts. The first one occurred in 2017 after Grand Prix Las-Vegas, a high level Magic the Gathering tournament, and that is the main one we will be exploring today.
In 2017, during GP Las Vegas, a deck colloquially known “Lands” placed 4th and 9th. This deck aims to use powerful lands from Magic’s history in order to overpower opponents through pure power. As one player, Jody Keith put ii when asked what his best card one “ Drop of Honey is a close second”.Immediately after the tournament results, as Vintage MTG put it “It goes bananas and the whole entire room sell out of Drop of Honey”. The price jumped from $70 to $400 in just a month. This was a 571% increase in just a month. As u/Sansia put it on the MTG Finance subreddit, “I’ve been tracking this one pretty closely because I wanted to pick up a second for my sideboard. After I snagged the second I’ve been watching them just because it’s interesting. The card was $200-300 for a while after GP Vegas and the market for the card from major vendors has been steadily picked over. Every time it appears on one of the major sites, it sells out basically immediately if it’s in decent condition. Every time the price gets bumped up a bit more. The most recent one that I saw was an NM from CFB for $500 that sold within a day or two. I believe that is what pushed the price up to the most recent level”. Now, this may all seem well and good, but then we look at the card Porphyry Nodes which does the exact same thing as Drop of Honey just for a slightly different cost. This card is 5 dollars today, while Drop of Honey is 800. Why is this?
Optimization is a key part of high-level tournaments, and Drop of Honey’s cost makes it slightly more optimized than Porphyry Nodes. Not only this but high-level collectors who want one of every card from the set drop of honey came from, Arabian Nights, need to purchase one of these expensive and useful cards. This forces the price to go up and supply to be taken from the market and into private collections.
All in all, Drop of Honey is a limited print run card that saw some play and has collectors value which forces the price of it to skyrocket.