All Hail King Pokémon
inputmag.com
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Someone gave me a free Ponyta, which I traded against other cards, growing my collection without buying any pack. One day I was with only three cards remaining but managed to trade again them for a bigger collection. My brother did the same, also with a free starting Ponyta. A year or so later, I bough two packs of the Fossils extension. A guy stole my whole collection in junior high school and I wasn’t able to bring it back. I still hate him to this day.
If you wanted a starting point, Scryfall is a useful tool for looking up cards (though they're missing pricing data for some early cards, presumably due to scarcity of transaction data). Here's something to get you started (cards printed before 2000, sorted by price, displayed as a price list): https://scryfall.com/search?q=unique%3Aprints+sort%3Ausd+dat...
IMO you'd get a lot of mileage from the "Reserved List" or "Vintage Staples" but site is decent for a general price lookup as well.
Feel free to shoot follow-up questions. There are a few cards that went from trash to treasure since you've been out of the game. Lion's Eye Diamond probably the most extreme example, but basically anything on the Reserved List has gone insane in the past few years.
I've got an old collection from the early 90s as mentioned in my comment further up.
Are my black bordered cards indeed Beta?
I'm going through this list you shared for the Beta edition cards and some of these prices are ridiculous.
I'm pretty sure I'm misinterpreting something.
I played these cards to death and didn't really care for their condition aside from just sticking them in plastic sleeves.
Anyway this was a fun little trip down memory lane.
Maybe they'll be worth something in another 20 years?
https://old.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/bsvg6h/an_updated... is the best way for you to answer "what set is this Magic card from?"
Modern dual lands come with restrictions/penalties for taking advantage of their dualness (time delays, damage, choosing which version to use when played, etc) and they are often some of the most valuable cards in a set.
https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Dual_land
And they are literally what their type lines say. So you basically get two lands with a basic type for the price of one (i.e. one card, or one land drop; card and tempo advantage, 2-in-1). Their only limitation is that they are not basic lands so they are subject to the restriction of number of copies per deck (4, in most formats).
Every dual land created subsequently has some kind of drawback or limitation (other than the number of copies restriction): "Enters the battlefield tapped", paying some amount of life or taking damage, sacrificing a permanent, discarding a card (I think), printed as bouble-faced card, and so on.
I still have my collection from the 90s, which I obsessed over as a kid.
I just used the fellow HN user's link in this thread to check the value of some of my cards.
Turns out my black and white vampire angel deck is worth a chunk of change!
And at the time I remember being teased for using outdated Beta cards because I was too poor to buy newer packs.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane ^_^
A lot of it will come down to the value of your time. You can sell directly yourself but deal with headaches and scammers, or you can sell to someone like Rudy for what will likely be ~50% of prices you'll see online. Part of that is that most of your cards will probably be considered in "played" condition, either light or heavy.
Ancestral Recall may be more powerful but it requires blue mana, which may be an issue in a non-blue deck, of course you can use a Black Lotus for that...
> Ancestral Recall may be more powerful but it requires blue mana, which may be an issue in a non-blue deck, of course you can use a Black Lotus for that...
It's true that everyone wants it with no exceptions. That's not good enough to make it the most expensive card, though; that's due to prestige.
If you look at the decklists for a recent Vintage event (here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mtgo-standings... ), you can see the top 16 decks play 16 Black Lotuses, just 11 Ancestral Recalls... and 16 Mishra's Workshops, which accounts for 80% of the decks that aren't playing Ancestral Recall.
There's no such thing as a "non-blue deck" in Vintage. Even the Mishra's Workshop decks can easily generate blue mana. (The Bazaar of Baghdad deck in 15th place can't, but its whole strategy revolves around not needing to generate mana at all.)
- The deck's plan is to attack for damage. It will do this by getting creatures onto the field without paying for them.
- There are 9 cards in the deck which require mana to play: the 4 Deathrite Shamans, the 4 Sticher's Suppliers, and the 1 Swords to Plowshares. The Shamans can produce mana and the Suppliers serve the important role of getting cards into the graveyard. But mostly, this deck seeks to avoid playing mana-producing lands, and therefore also won't play cards that cost mana.
- Bazaar of Baghdad is the center of the deck; every turn it will allow you to draw two cards (good!) and also discard three cards (great!)
- After that, it's just a matter of getting creatures into play. Basking Rootwalla can be played for free whenever you discard it. (Which you can do via the Bazaar.) Bloodghast will come out of your graveyard whenever you play a land. Hollow One can be played for free as long as you've discarded 3 cards. (Luckily, that's the exact amount of discarding provided by the Bazaar.) Hogaak can be played out of your graveyard as long as you have two creatures already in play. And Vengevine, which is probably most of the damage, will come out of your graveyard whenever you play a second creature in one turn. (You have to play them, so Bloodghast won't count, but Basking Rootwalla, Hollow One, and Hogaak all will. If you can play a Deathrite Shaman or a Stitcher's Supplier, those will count too, but this is not a necessary part of the plan.)
- Vengevine has haste, so whenever you do manage to get one out, it can attack immediately. It has been the core threat of various decks in the past.
- If you can get 3 Bloodghasts and 2 Hogaaks into your graveyard, you can recur all of your Vengevines just by playing a land. This deck has a tremendous capacity to bounce back from creature removal. (Graveyard removal will hurt more.)
There's a bonus though: each new physical deck and booster pack that you buy is also redeemable online, so you can buy a deck or two, redeem their codes in the online version, and immediately start playing them there.
Interestingly, unopened packs seem to fetch a fair amount, certainly more than their “expected value”, which aligns with my experience trading loot boxes on Steam.
Yeah it's a phenomenon seen in a few different CCG markets actually. Roughly 2 years after a set's release the Sealed box price and the EV start to drift apart.
If you have an EV of £20 for the contents of a random pack and can buy them for £10, it makes sense to buy as many as you can to open and sell on the contents.
They don't have to be opened, but if the difference is large it would make sense for people whose only interest is in getting a return to buy & open them.
That all packs with price less than their EV get opened makes sense. At the same time, packs with price more than their EV don't really make sense - it's better to just buy singles in that case.
But to me, the comment meant that packs with worth (total value of their contents) less than their EV i.e. underperforming packs were guaranteed to be opened, so the EV of remaining packs would rise, justifying the price increase.
Before the prequels, it was relatively easy to meet many of the Star Wars actors. I met Peter Mayhew and had him sign my Star Wars: CCG Chewbacca card at a comic convention. A lot of people seem to comment on what a nice person he was to meet, and I completely agree. David Prowse was less obviously likeable, but was also interesting to meet.
My boy learned to play MtG to a pretty functional level way faster than these other games, and while I’d never call MtG’s rules simple I still think it has an elegance some of these other games lack, but obviously nostalgia and familiarity colour that.
I personally know multiple people with card collections in excess of $10M. They are using it as a form of investment and it’s been their best performing asset class in the last several years.
While those collections are not of Pokémon cards, I’m sure that there must exist people who see Pokémon cards as an investment too and are similarly wealthy.
All of these collectors are making assumptions based on information other collectors have shared about "how many are known to exist" etc., whereas NFTs are provably scarce and they never get scuffed up.
Please, we all know that for some reason Charizard is not a dragon for some funny reason :)
Probably the #1 question you should pose unsophisticated people.
That is, things that are not edible (food) and do not produce something edible (fire, farming tools, soil), that do not shield you from the elements or help produce such goods that do.
We all possess things that are basically irrational to possess. Many even pay for the opportunity to possess and protect things with no boba fide value.
For me, it’s books and records, in spite of easy access to the library and the internet. For others, it’s clothes, exotic food ingredients, streaming services/TV, season passes, and Pokémon cards.
I used to think like this, judging people by their value functions. But as I’ve gotten older, I increasingly find it unfair to knock people for the irrational things they choose to possess, as long as it brings no unreasonable harm to others (i.e. it’s OK to shame the person who invests their life savings in Pokémon cards, using it as a vehicle for speculation, but I still think it’s wrong to say they have no life).