From €300 to €8,000: using The Hobbit as an example, I work out what each tier of a set costs and show how I fill the gaps cheaply on Cardmarket.
After my Hobbit box the next question was obvious: what does it cost to really own this set completely? The answer depends on what “complete” means to you. Modern Magic sets no longer have one single card list. They have several tiers, and each costs a multiple of the previous one. All numbers come from my collection in TCG-Completist and are trend prices at the time of recording, a few weeks after release.
The Hobbit has collector numbers 1 to 321. From a normal Play Booster you can only pull cards 1 to 238. Everything after that, such as special frames, borderless versions and foil variants, exists only in Collector Boosters. Some cards even exist only as foil. And then there is the side set “The Hobbit Eternal”, which has no boosters of its own at all: those cards come only from Collector Boosters or as box toppers, one per box.
Starting point: one opened Play Booster box for €140. What is still missing then costs roughly:
For comparison: a Collector Booster box with 12 packs was €500 to €600, a single Collector pack around €35. Anyone trying to reach tiers 3 and 4 through Collector Boosters spends a lot of money on a lot of duplicates.
I collect the regular set of 280 cards. I take foils and Eternal cards when they come my way, but I don't chase them. That is the most important takeaway: decide which tier is your goal before you buy. If you collect “the set” without defining it, you end up with a list you can never pay for.
In TCG-Completist you can set a collection goal per set, for example only a range of numbers. Progress and remaining cost then refer to your goal, not to all 321 cards.
I don't buy the missing cards one by one. I do it like this:
New sets are most expensive in their first weeks. Many sellers charge a lot for hyped cards exactly when everyone wants them. So I only buy cards under €1 right away. My first order was €10.25; in total I ordered 31 cards for about €21 this way. All pricier cards stay on the wants list, and I set a price alert on the trend price in TCG-Completist: when a card drops below my limit, I get notified and buy.
How to keep shipping costs under control with many small orders is explained in detail in Cardmarket: saving on shipping.
Honestly: I would not recommend this set to anyone as a way into collecting. The base list is affordable, but everything beyond it is hardly reachable for a normal collector. If you like the set, deliberately limit yourself to one tier, get the base list from a box and buy the rest with patience and price alerts. The general trade-off between boosters and singles is covered in Buy singles or open boosters?
