Archive for the ‘MTG’ Category

Selling Cards Again

Saturday, November 14th, 2020

Sort of a sequel post this time. After making unexpected money selling the Pokémon cards a few weeks ago, I decided to do the same with some of my Magic The Gathering cards. Specifically I thought it was time to sell any doubles I never used, as well as anything that had ‘value’ since all they were doing was sitting in a box.

If I could get a few hundred out of selling some extra magic cards, why not do it?

So I spent several hours sorting through my collection and extracting the cards that I doubted I would ever play. The vast majority of there had never seen play, so parting with them was easy. (I did a pass of the few decks I don’t intend ever breaking down first, to make sure the above weren’t useful in the decks.)

I priced the cards on the website I was selling as I went along, and didn’t bother selling anything that I would get less than $0.50 for. As I continued I became astonished by how much I could sell certain cards for, like the land in the above picture which I’ve owned for over a decade and never once put in a deck.

I ended up packing up about 140 cards and sending them off to one of the internets foremost MTG sites to sell them. The exact amount I would be paid would depend on card condition, but 99% of the cards were unplayed so I wasn’t worried about them ripping me off.

This cheque arrived yesterday:

An average payment of over $7 per card! Not bad for items that were literally in a box unused, especially when I was initially optimistic about getting about $250! This represents many years of my average magic spending, so given I still have the bulk of my cards (admittedly not valuable ones) you can almost say the collection has paid for itself 🙂

California Style

Thursday, August 8th, 2019

I’m having a good time on this lazy vacation! We abandoned the idea of a road trip and are freewheeling it day-by-day.

There’s been lots of shopping:

A bit of gaming:

Some fine dining:

Lots of driving:

And the evenings always end with this:

We’ve now opened and played full drafts of two sets. Tomorrow we’ll start making decks from Bernard’s now-sizable collection and move on to playing them 🙂

Quick Plays

Friday, May 5th, 2017

Some of my recent posts have been too long so let’s keep this one short!

These are the two Planeswalker decks released with the new set Amonkhet. Each of them includes a few exclusive cards (including unique versions of the Planeswalkers) and a couple of boosters. The idea is you use the boosters to tune the deck, but I played as-is.

The decks are simplistic, big on creatures and games tended to turn into beatdowns. That said both decks were fun enough, although Liliana beat Gideon in every one of four games. Her deck seems to utilize the new mechanics better as well.

A good pair of decks for new players, or to introduce the Amonkhet set, but in my opinion not near as much fun as this next release…

I like duel decks in general. I think the price ($20) is right and the decks usually contain a good mix of unusual cards and are reasonably well matched.

This set though exceeded my expectations. Both decks are very heavy on spells (one has only 13 creatures) and the R/U one in particular is a combo deck that even includes cards with the hilarious ‘storm’ keyword!

They’re not greatly matched (Lovisa lost all but one of five matches) but they’re fun to play, which is what counts surely? I would have very much liked to play both of these with an actual other human player, and it’s been a while I’ve thought that of a duel deck. Recommended.

Kaladesh

Wednesday, September 28th, 2016

I went to the prerelease for the latest MTG set Kaladesh this past weekend. I’ve been to dozens of these over the last eight years and have blogged many so you know the drill.

Kaladesh is an artifact-heavy set that takes place in a sort of ‘Indian steampunk’ world. It’s a wonderful set both in design and the way it plays, with oodles of fun cards that work well with each other.

There were many players (about 40) and there were four rounds of play. As has been the trend the last year or so, the tourney was very casual and you won boosters according to your games won. In the end I won two and placed somewhere in the top third.

My deck was green and white, and when it won did so mostly due to this pair of cards:

 

The artifact is seriously powerful, and generated me tokens every round while pumping up my other creatures. If I got it out with a +1/+1 on a card, I usually won.

The set includes a new vehicle artifact type, but I included none in my deck. They are powerful though, and were difficult to deal with when played against me. The guy that ultimately won the tournament was lucky with his card pool and played a deck based around vehicles.

For me the measure of an MTG card – and an expansion – is in the answer to “do I want to build decks around this”? This is why Kaladesh succeeds, because it has many such cards. These two for instance…

 

That first one seems made for my life gain deck, and the second just cries out to be abused 🙂

So my verdict is: a great set with cards that are fun to play. Doing just that this past weekend may have been the most fun I’ve ever had at a prerelease.

A Good Investment

Friday, July 15th, 2016

Back in 1996, specifically on March 26, I purchased this gameboy game:

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It was the first Yu-Gi-Oh game released in the USA, and was pretty good for it’s time. Here’s some screenshots:

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Obviously the USA version is subtitled, but you get the idea. I played the game, enjoyed it, put it in a box and forgot about it.

Look again at the cover, specifically the blurb at the bottom right: “3 Limited Edition Official Game Cards Insider!” Now I didn’t actually play the card game when I bought this (and never have) so the cards were little more than a curiosity to me. And for at least a decade they remained in the box with the game, unopened and unplayed.

Some years ago I removed them when I collected all the cards I had all over the place and put them into card boxes. Even at the time though I didn’t take moment to consider if any of them had value, although I was remotely aware that some of the cards I had acquired over the years must have been rare if only due to their age.

After this post, something triggered in me and I went and dug up my old Yu-Gi-Oh cards – including not just the three in this game but others that had come in other games or free with magazines – and looked up to see if any of them had value.

That’s when I did a double take!

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That photo shows two of the cards that came with Dark Duel Stories. These were my cards, the exact ones that lived under a bed for almost 20 years. These two cards alone were each ‘worth’ over $100, by which I mean there were dealers on the internet prepared to pay me at least that much for them!

I’ve never actually sold anything of mine, but this was too good to refuse. After a quick chat with the guy that runs my local game store (who declined to buy them himself) I packaged up the three promos and a MTG card that I had pulled from a booster 9 years ago and sent them away to one of the leading secondary market websites. Here’s what I sold:

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And about two weeks later my cheque arrived for an astonishing $460!

Individually, I got $20 for Exodia, $100 for Tarmogoyf, $100 for Dark Magician and an amazing $240 for Blue Eyes White Dragon!

Doing the math, based on the $20 cost of Dark Duel Stories and the $3.50 cost of the Magic booster, this works out to returns of 15.5% (over 20 years) and a whopping 45% (over 9) respectively. I should have bought 100 copies of Dark Duel stories 🙂

I was in denial this sale would go through until I actually received the cheque, because it’s hard to believe there is such value in Yu-Gi-Oh cards. But I have learned that the cards included with the game I purchased 20 years ago are amongst the ‘holy grails’ of collecting, specifically the ‘Blue Eyes’ since it was the first promo card released in the USA and has such a flashy foil effect on it.

I hope it eventually goes to someone that has wanted it for years and loves it. Even if it costs him $500 🙂

Now what should I do with the money?