I (Don't) Want My MTG
Back when I was a Sophomore in High School, my incredibly astute power of observation noticed a couple friends playing a card game after finishing some work in our Russian class. They asked if I wanted to try it, and I shrugged and assented, because hey, why not?
A Short History
I had no idea what I was doing. After the draw phase, I ended up with various cards and a Royal Assassin, which you can use to destroy a tapped creature. Upon reading the text, my first question was, “Does anyone have a tapped creature?” Not knowing anything about creature cards, instants, sorceries, and any game mechanics at all, it seemed like a reasonable question. But I loved the art on the cards, the concept of the game, and the thrill of the rare win. Thus I started playing Magic: The Gathering around mid-1994.
It became a constant lunchtime event. After school too, until it was dark out. I only lived half a mile away at the beginning, so it was easy to walk home. Even after we moved and I had to take a city bus to and from school, I managed to make it work. I was in it for the love of the game, and hanging out with my friends. My decks weren’t exactly much to boast about, but they did the job, and the infrequent low-stakes tournaments were a way to see how far they could take me.
In one particular game, it was the last game of the night and I was winning decisively. My Green/White lifegain ramp deck was doing its job well; I was at over 40 life, had a Circle of Protection from both colors my opponent was playing, and I only needed one more turn to deal lethal damage with my board. There was no way I could lose. This is when I learned about Drain Power, which steals your opponent’s land-based mana for your own uses, and the card my opponent literally topdecked on his turn. He also happened to have a Disintegrate to do X damage in his hand.
As a lifegain ramp Green/White deck and at the end of the game, essentially all of my lands were on the table, as were his. Both of those mana sources combined were just enough for lethal damage, and since Drain Power stole my mana, I couldn’t use my Circle of Protection: Red to prevent the damage. It was over, and I was completely powerless to stop it. We’d accumulated a crowd by the end and everyone was in shock at what just happened—it was a complete reversal in a single turn at exactly the last possible stage.
I could have saved myself with something as simple as a Sol Ring or a Basalt Monolith as sources of non-land mana. I learned from this game and always included one or two of those in all of my decks from that point on. And it went on like that until I left college, at which point I stashed my cards back in their box as a keepsake for all the memories. And hey, maybe some time in the future they’d be worth something and I could sell them.
Little did I know how wrong I was.
Inventory Management
I always knew M:TG was still popular, but never really much cared—my time with that game was over and I haven’t played a single game in over 20 years. Wizards of the Coast had sold out to Hasbro, and I just wasn’t interested in whatever the Corporate Overlords turned it into since then.
Jen and I were at Oberweis and a small group was actually playing Commander format nearby. On our way out, I asked what they were playing, meaning which sets. After clarifying the last time I played was “around the time they added Slivers” (Tempest), they understood what I meant and named a few of the sets whey were using. I had a good chuckle to myself as we left, but it got me thinking.
The bulk of my collection is now about 30 years old. Surely, surely it has increased in value through the sheer passage of time, no? I became curious if I owned any cards that happened to be either incredibly rare, in high demand, or just simply enough of a curious oddity to be worth something.
So I spent a lot of time using my phone to scan all of my cards into the MTG Dragon Shield Card Manager. Thankfully I only had 3-4 decks I hadn’t bothered to dismantle, and I always fastidiously kept the remainder of my collection in strict alphabetical order. By the end, I’d become a pro at recognizing which of my cards were Revised versus Fourth edition, the names of all the sets, and so on.
It started to dawn on me through the process that not only were my cards not worth much, they were almost universally worth less than most newer sets. By the time I was done, my most valuable card was a single paltry Demonic Tutor, worth a grand total of about $50 assuming it was in pristine condition, fresh out of the pack, nary sullied by a single mote of dust and immediately placed into a protective sleeve by a virginal princess using the power of wind to avoid physical contact.
Eventually I obtained sleeves for cards that lived in my decks, but my cards are heavily played. None are creased or otherwise damaged, but they’re definitely not in mint condition unless I never used them, and those cards were unused for a reason. Yet it’s not the condition of my cards that made them worthless, but the actions of Wizards of the Coast themselves.
On Overproduction
Magic: The Gathering is often hailed as the first collectible card game, launched way back in August of 1993 with the Alpha set. It snowballed quickly from there, with the Beta set in October of 1993, and Unlimited in December of 1993. That’s one edition roughly every two months during the game’s launch. They managed to wait four whole months before printing Revised in April of 1994.
The untold story here is the size of the various production runs. The initial unprecedented success of those early sets was taken as a signal to print like crazy. How crazy? A blogger did some digging from various sources and suggests these numbers for the core sets at the time:
| Set | Date | Cards Printed (millions) |
|---|---|---|
| Alpha | 1993-08-05 | 2.5 |
| Beta | 1993-10-04 | 7.5 |
| Unlimited | 1993-12-01 | 35 |
| Revised | 1994-04-11 | 200-300 |
| Fourth | 1995-04 | 500-900 |
And these for the expansions:
| Set | Date | Cards Printed (millions) |
|---|---|---|
| Arabian Nights | 1993-12-17 | 5 |
| Antiquities | 1994-03-04 | 15 |
| Legends | 1994-06-10 | 35 |
| The Dark | 1994-08-08 | 75 |
| Fallen Empires | 1994-11-15 | 340 |
| Ice Age | 1995-06 | 500 |
| Chronicles | 1995-07 | 180 |
| Homelands | 1995-10-14 | 200-220 |
Do you see what happened in during the lifecycle of the Revised set from mid 1994 to 1995? The expansions took a little longer to ramp up, but by Fallen Empires, it was clear Wizards thought the game’s popularity was on an exponential curve.
These older cards from way back in 1994-1995 were all printed at such unimaginable scales that they’re essentially in unlimited supply even today after 30+ years of attrition. Just based on that alone, only cards prior to Revised are really worth anything due to the limited print runs. As a point of comparison, cards from the 30th anniversary set are worth quite a bit due to the limited run and the cost of $1000 for the box set containing 60 cards. As a result, cards celebrating the game are worth an order of magnitude more than the older ones, because they didn’t print literally hundreds of millions of them.
Collecting Magic cards is a fool’s gambit. They’re meant to be used in games, and were printed with that understanding. A card may break that mold occasionally, but unless you have a wealth of Alphas and Betas lying around, these cards are most often sold in bulk by the pound. You can buy 1000 cards on eBay for less than $35, and those bulk items contain a guaranteed number of rare, foil, and other cards. My entire collection would amount to two of those $35 sets.
In the end, I’m considering just pulling any card over $1 in estimated value and bulking the rest. The card tracker says that’s only about 150 from my 2000-ish cards, which is much easier to store in a closet. Maybe I’ll even frame a couple for posterity.
Until Tomorrow