What Are Headliner Cards in Magic, and Are They Valuable?

Illustration by Donato Giancola

New approaches to the special cards in a set come and go, and they all have their own positives and negatives. The latest approach introduced with Innistrad Remastered is Magic’s Headliner Program, and it brings some newish ideas to the most chase cards in a set.

Is it groundbreaking, or an iteration on what’s come before? Is it likely to stick or be another flavor of the month? And just what is the Headliner program? That’s what we’re looking at today.

What Is the Headliner Program in MTG?

Edgar Markov | Illustration by Volkan Baga

The Headliner Program is Wizards’ new idea to provide each set with chase cards to look out for. The idea is that each set will have a specific card that will be the card that you want to pull and will have chase variants to look for. This isn’t to say that there won’t be variants of other cards in the set, so you can still expect to see lots of Booster Fun across all rarities, but there’ll be one card in particular that will have specific printings, most likely with serialized versions.

The idea was spawned from Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, and The One Ring and its many variants in that set. You can’t deny it caused a lot of buzz. Personally, I think this is a great idea, as in the past there have been criticisms that too many cards in a single set have been serialized. This way, there’s one particular card for booster box breakers looking for the rarest and most expensive Magic cards.

List of Headliner Cards

Edgar Markov – Innistrad Remastered

The Aetherspark – Aetherdrift

Sothera, the Supervoid – Edge of Eternities

Are Headliner Cards Always Serialized?

As we’ve only had a real look at one Headliner card at time or writing, it’s difficult to say whether they’ll always be serialized. I think they will be, however, as this makes for a fantastic pull that people will want to get on camera, or to make for that story about that time they saw their buddy open one. Plus, if the best versions of the cards are serialized, you know exactly how many are in existence!

Notably, you can still open normal, non-serialized versions of the cards.

What Are the Chances of Opening a Headliner Card?

Finding the Headliner card won’t be super difficult, but finding the most highly sought version of it is another story. If we assume that each set will have serialized versions as 1/500, the odds will be that less than 1% of Collector boosters will have one. In the LOTR set, there were an estimated 3.3 million Collector boosters printed. Although this is likely one of the more printed sets, this gives each pack a 0.015% chance of holding one of these cards…. You’ve gotta be very lucky!

What Booster Packs Have Headliners?

All packs are likely to have at least the base version of the Headliner cards, as it’ll almost always be a card in the main set. However, the most highly sought versions of these cards, like serialized cards, will likely only ever be found in Collector boosters, as they’re the expensive ones that WotC wants you to buy!

Are Headliner Cards Valuable?

It’ll be surprising if the serialized versions of Headliner cards aren’t the most expensive cards no matter which set they’re printed in. While we don’t have any real data on the value of Headliners, we can look at other serialized cards that have come before. These can actually be found for under $100 on eBay, but this is because in some sets, like Ravnica Remastered, they were arguably overdone, and there were some dubious inclusions.

With the Headliner program, there’ll likely only be one card that’s serialized, and it’s going to be an impressive, sought after card if WotC's doing their job properly. Expect it to be some number of hundreds of dollars, if not even in the thousands!

Final Thoughts

Headliner Scarlett | Illustration by Heonhwa Choe

Overall, I think this is a good move. While I’m not personally a collector of the shiny things, having a single focus for crackers to focus on is a sensible idea and gives a specific target for people to get hyped about. If you enjoy a bit of a gamble with a Collector booster, this should excite you.

But does it? Do you think it adds excitement, or does it remove value? It does make it more difficult to find a serialized card, which some people will surely not like. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below or over on the Draftsim Discord!

Good luck finding your Headliner!