I personally think cards should be for playing, and am pretty opposed to cards being valuable if that means that playing the actual game becomes prohibitively expensive. Standard decks costing hundreds of dollars is not a good thing.
I personally think cards should be for playing, and am pretty opposed to cards being valuable if that means that playing the actual game becomes prohibitively expensive. Standard decks costing hundreds of dollars is not a good thing.
It's not that black and white. I used to play the game in the mid nineties. The most expensive card I bought back then I paid the equivalent of 5 EUR (the Euro didn't even exist yet) because I needed it for a deck but that card came out before I started playing.
I'm not an investor in MtG cards. But my collection went up in value. Nothing crazy (I don't have any of the "power nines") but with 28 dual lands, the most valuable card from Legends (The Tabernacle At Pendrell Vale) and the most valuable card from Arabian Night (Bazaar of Baghdad) and a few others, I'm sitting easily on 20 K EUR atm.
I didn't do it on purpose: I simply never got rid of my cards, not paying attention to the price. I just like my old cards and they bring me back memories when I look at them.
I'm take it I'm in a third category: nostalgic people who simply like their very own (and very old) cards.
It's the "oh this card is valuable because it's powerful, and has good art, AND everyone else thinks it's monetarily valuable which justifies my nostalgia of it"
It's a weird example of how money messes things up. The "it's good in and my deck and has emotional value" should be enough because scarcity makes it hard for the 13 year old with only spare lunch money to get into EDH.
for the owl collector, who at the time of posting seems to have missed a few.
This is the fundamental scam of the game-piece idea: it kills the secondary market and basically means instead of having the option to recycle your old decks into new ones you have to always pay $50/deck or whatever Hasbro is selling decks for.
I mean, isn't that a collector? I doubt there are more "investors" than "people who thought the card looked cool". A collector might turn into an investor, but people who aren't looking to flip their cards in months time are more likely to be a "collector". So for there card and art quality is key.
If you want my anecdote: I never seriously played YGO but there was a point where I tried to get every single Blue Eyes I could grab. I didn't care about mint condition or even the dozen of rarities. I just wanted to see the different ways Blue eyes was portrayed, even if it was the same exact card with different art.
Meaning if I spend $500 on packs of cards, I should get $500 worth of cards on the secondary market immediately (or even slightly less, like $300 would be reasonable), and then if I hold that for 5 years, it should be like $700. This is how it has been for all of magic's history pre-Throne of Eldraine (nothing particular about that set, but that is the last set that I really see this happening on)