Link for comparison: I don't know how much 30 years of inflation would actually affect the current pricing, but jumping from $49.99 to $999.99 for almost the same exact product is ridiculous, and seems more like a desperate compromise between appeasing collectors and providing a product than an effective marketing strategy.
Ok, I have to say that's nowhere near the same product in terms of how it's been sold here - this is much, much egregious by comparison than merely increasing the price.
Quote:
"Each set was sold in a collector's box with 363 cards."
...
"It contained 363 cards, including one of each of the 302 different cards of Beta, with multiple land cards making up the difference."
That's what you were paying 50 bucks for back then - a full frigging set.
Here you get
4 randomized booster packs: 60 cards of which 8 are basic lands guaranteed. You might not even get a whiff of power or anything else remarkable. With a single thousand bucks purchase, you'll prolly get few duals
(since the appearance rate of those was doubled) and like a
Kudzu and
Blessing as the rest of your rares
(actually what I got from the simulator).
Here are couple of simulators to get a sense what that 1000$
(1100 with taxes prolly) might get you:
If you wanted a full set of beta with this, you might be spending around, idk, I think I heard the sum of "around 200 000 $" (200 thousand) floating around. Also, it's worth noting that you will technically
never get a full set of beta since 6 cards
(Contract from Below, Darkpact, Demonic Attorney, Earthbind, Weakness, Crusade) have been blacklisted/pulled/removed completely and you won't be getting those from packs
(which were in the original Collector's edition).
So we're talking more like a price jump from
50 $ to around 200 0000 $ or something
(which would be an increase of 399900%) - don't quote me on that though since I haven't double checked the number I might be misremember but since you're pulling this out in packs of 4 boosters the actual sum isn't exactly a known number anyway but rather an average. One of those simulators does allow for "pull until all Rares collected" and that does seem to average around 200k, like $184815 and $206793 so I think it might be roughly correct.
... and we're still talking about nontournament legal proxies here.