(Short version: About $825 as of August 2021)

I've been doing some light number crunching to figure out how much the cube has actually cost with all the bells and whistles. My interest was peaked by the "Owned Cost" widget on the cube's overview page, and by checking out prices for a sealed booster box of original Innistrad. Here are my results.

The "Owned Cost" statistic was relatively accurate at about $450. However, it only counts the cards in the cube list, and as discussed in previous posts I bought a complete 6th common set so I could swap cards out of the cube as desired. It also doesn't take into account my buying mistakes, lands, sleeves, reusable booster packs, and a storage solution.

The playable cards themselves amounted to 918 cards, plus 64 checklist cards for every dual-faced card. I bought roughly 300 original Innistrad lands (at least twenty of each of three artworks for a total of sixty lands per color). I also made a mistake with my original TCGPlayer order and got a bunch of cards from newer sets. I was initially going to let it slide, but some of them were printed at different rarities and it made sorting after a draft a nightmare. So aside from some very expensive mythics and rares, I reordered those cards so everything would be from the Innistrad set.

I ordered Dragonshield and KMC Perfect Fit sleeves for everything, almost 1,300 cards, as well as Burger Tokens 22S deck boxes. Finally, I housed it all in a Gamegenic Dungeon, with a BCW 800 count box holding the lands and extra commons.

The sleeves alone cost about $190, with the deck boxes adding another $75. The Gamegenic Dungeon was $60, so our grand total for protection, packs, and storage comes to roughly $325. I'd estimate that my card order bungling added about $50 in additional expenses, so we'll round up the card cost to $500. I may be underestimating some numbers, but this cube, with all the bells and whistles, comes out to about $825. The crazy bit is that a sealed booster box of Innistrad is about $810 as of August 2021, so building a completely premium, all-out cube that can be drafted forever can be had for the same price as one authentic original Innistrad flashback draft.

It's also important to point out that these costs can be drastically reduced, even if you still want this particular cube's experience! Proxying just Lilliana, Snapcaster, and Parallel Lives will chop off almost $180 off the set cost, and adding in Balefire Dragon with a couple of the other rares and mythics can drop the price even further. Buying cheaper sleeves in bulk and not double-sleeving brings more savings, as well as buying bulk lands or having your friends bring their own. You don't need the checklist cards at all, or resealable deck-boxes; flipping the cards in their sleeves and team bags (or even Ziploc baggies) work just as well. As for storage, a big BCW card box costs just a couple of bucks and will do the trick nicely.

Finally, the most drastic option of all! If this cube is too big and bulky and expensive even with all those cost saving steps, there are many other Innistrad cubes on CubeCobra alone that offer basically the same experience with fewer cards and smaller storage requirements. There's something for everyone out there, so happy cubing!