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Comment by dbg31415 | Hacker News Reader

What's a reasonable price to spend? You would probably spend you $15 to go see a two hour movie... I bet you can get away with spending under $7.50 per hour on M:tG. But it is a very expensive game if you buy all the cards and only play it once.

I still have cards from the 90s, I don't think I've bought anything in 20 years. Still fun game to play on board game night with friends.

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Sealed league. Get a group of people, everyone buys 10 packs for $26, you get to open six of them and you play. Every two weeks you open another pack. Ends up taking 10 weeks and nobody spends more than $26, maybe a little more if you buy card sleeves, iPhone apps to track life, or whatever.

What makes it fun is that you're playing against people with the same size card pool as you. Draft is cheaper ($7.80) but it's over and done in a few hours.

This is how I got in to MtG, and can confirm that its super fun. If you're lucky enough to find a group of friends that will participate, don't let the opportunity pass you by.

MtG is my favorite game too, but honestly to be competitive with your decks, on a yearly basis you need to spend a lot more money than watching all the blockbusters for that year twice :)

> You would probably spend you $15 to go see a two hour movie

I wouldn't.

> spending under $7.50 per hour

That's absurdly expensive.

Is it?

Flying a plane is $500 an hour.

Golfing a good course is $100 an hour.

Waterskiing can be $50 an hour.

Skiing is $20?? An hour.

Recreation is serious stuff in the US.

Flying a plane isn't $500/hr unless you're flying first class, and it's not exactly what I would call entertainment or recreation. I wouldn't do the rest of it, anyways.

The average price of a movie ticket is $8. The average price of the popcorn is also $8.

(Lots of citations with a Google search.)

Yea, I would not see a movie in theaters, and I haven't for years.

The thing is that $15 is peanuts in the MtG world unless you are playing draft.

fyi, your cards from the 90s might be worth thousands of dollars.

I have a bunch of cards from the 90s but haven't played in decades. What's a good way to figure out which ones are valuable? I had a few beta cards, but mostly the series after that (name escapes me).

Also, where's a good place to sell? Online or in-person?

You'll make more money if you take the time to sell them one by one (or 4x sets if you have them). Selling your collection in bulk will make you lose 30-40% but it's less time consuming. Ebay is the place since trading sites will pay you wholesale prices (they have to make a profit retailing your cards).

So I shouldn't shuffle them?

Ha, I don't play with the Alpha stuff as much anymore, most of the cards I play with ate Unlimited and the expansions around that time.

I have a Shivan Dragon signed by Richard Garfield that he told me not to take out of my deck so I still play with that. He told me the value of these cards were in how much I enjoy them...

I do have a deck made entirely out of black border Nether Shadows that someone gave me as a joke during a tour of the WotC office years and years ago... most of them are Alphas.

Thanks for making me think about this. Every time I play my favorite deck I spend $5-10 for entry for a local tournament, which lasts about 4 hours. Adding in the cost of the deck, I'd need to play it for over 200 hours before it becomes cheaper than $7.50 an hour.

Easy. You can spend 50-100$ on a more or less competitive Modern or Standard Deck and have fun with it for years.

You can see actual competitive decks here: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/standard#paper https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/modern#paper

You occasionally get Standard decks in your price range making top 8, but almost never in Modern. It's really stretching it to call the budget Modern decks "competitive".

The bar being set was to "have fun with it," not "to finish top 8 in sanctioned tournaments..."

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