quote:

Originally posted by Rucker:
In 1993, a friend of mine came back to Dallas and mentioned a game that he had seen for sale in California. He thought I might like it. “It’s like Dungeons and Dragons crossed with collectible baseball cards,” he said.

Intrigued, I found a shop about a half mile from my house that was selling the game. It was called Magic: The Gathering. MTG was the first collectible card game on the market. Players bought ‘starter decks’ and ‘booster packs’ and tried to assemble a deck that would beat their opponent in the game. As there were 302 different cards in the original game, there were a lot of possible strategies for building your game deck. And as certain cards changed the rules or allowed you to suspend a rule for that card, the system rewarded creativity and originality.

Cards were either ‘common’, ‘uncommon’ or ‘rare’. That spoke to how many of them had been printed. And the rares were truly rare.

I got hooked on the game. Particularly because the first and second printings (Alpha and Beta, respectively), had black-bordered cards that would never be reprinted with the same borders. So that hinted at true collectability to me – not like the collectable items that sometimes proclaim ‘COLLECTIBLE!’ do in recent years – while manufacturing zillions of the item. So I spent a bit of money on starter decks – and a lot on booster packs (which promised as least one rare card per pack). I think I had about $700 spent on cards between the Alpha and Beta printings and the first expansion set of cards (called Arabian Nights).

I decided to collect a full set of the original cards – all 302. So, I traded a few cards at the local game shop and managed to complete a full set. At that time (1993-94), a full set of cards was worth about $100. But it was fun to have a complete set.

After the first expansion set was printed, the game became wildly popular and the company producing it (Wizards of the Coast), started printing so many cards in so many expansions, that I believed the true collectability of the cards in the new sets was lost.

I got a bit bored with the game and put everything away for 14 years. Then one of our daughters started college and we were running a bit low on cash reserves, so I looked to see what the set of 302 original cards was worth. This was in 2007 – and I found out that my set was worth around $14k. Ridiculously happy, my wife and I sold the set to a local card shop and paid for a year of my daughter’s college. Somewhere in there I threw all the remaining cards – the ones that were duplicates that I had purchased while trying to get a full set of cards, as well as a lot of cards from the first expansion set – into boxes and stored them away in the closet.

Fast forward to two months ago. On a whim, I decided to see what those remaining cards were worth. What I found made me fall over. Twice.

The cards had shot up in value as MTG has gotten even more popular over the years. Especially the first 3 printings (Alpha, Beta and Arabian Nights). As an example, a Black Lotus card (rare) in mint condition from the first printing can be worth more than $76k. One card. Many, many cards are worth hundreds of dollars. There are even companies that sell fractional shares of single cards as investments. Really.

I ended up selling about half of my cards to a game shop in Utah. Some of my cards were worth $5k or more. Some were only worth $10. But it totaled up to more than $112k. And I still have a bunch of cards that have value in them. I’ll be selling them over the next few months. As an aside, my wife and I are building a large covered back patio onto our house. We’ll be telling guests that we paid for all of it with cardboard.

God has been really, really good to us. And blessed us unbelievably through a game stuffed into the back of our closet for years. Just wanted to share a fun story.

quote:

Originally posted by jhe888:
Wow, you were truly lucky on that. Good for you. How much would your original deck of 302 be worth now?