Category: MTG

A Good Investment

July 15, 2016

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

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

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!

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:

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?

The $13 Gamble

June 14, 2016

I bought this the other day:

It’s one booster from the brand new Magic expansion, and it cost me $13. That’s right, thirteen dollars! This is by far the most I’ve ever paid for a booster, so you’d imagine it would be worth it correct? Every card is a reprint, and the set is known to contain a few highly sought after cards. Let’s see what was inside my pack…

There are the commons, a mixed bunch to be sure. Few of them are playable, even fewer have a spot in any of my decks. Even better/worse: those that do I already own. In fact I already own multiple copies of all of these. So for me, the above cards are essentially worthless.

But what are they actually worth? Let’s use the Star City prices (a popular MTG reseller) and add them all up. Going through their list, 7 of my commons sell for $0.15, two for $0.49 (the mongoose and drake) and one for $0.99 (Kird Ape). That’s a total of $3.02 in commons if bought separately.

These were the uncommons. Again, disappointing in that none are attractive to me (or my decks) and I already own multiple copies of each. In the order of the photograph, the values from Star City of the above three cards is $0.25 + $1.49 + $0.25 which sums to $1.99.

That’s a decent card and is playable, but it’s not flashy or exciting in any way. And you guessed it: I already owned one. Even before checking the price online I knew it would be a ‘dollar rare’. I was wrong: Star City sells it for $0.69. It’s one of the lowest valued rares in the set.

So it’s not looking good: The ‘value’ of the cards in my pack if bought separately is only $5.70. And that’s assuming I even would buy them (which I wouldn’t). Looks like this gamble didn’t pay off so far.

But what about the other two cards?

There they are: a foil common and a soldier token. The Screeching Skaab foil sells for a quarter; the soldier isn’t even listed (but is worth maybe $0.10). So no last-minute save here folks!

My $13 turned into less than $6 of cards I already had. Needless to say I’ll never buy another booster from this set.

Some of you at this point are wondering why I bought it in the first place. Mostly it is because I buy at least one of every MTG booster, but even then the price didn’t discourage me for two reasons:
1) I like supporting my local game store
2) There are some very sought-after and pricey cards in this set. Had I been lucky to pull a foil Wasteland or Force Of Will I would have ended up with a $200+ card that I could have resold to the store or traded for many other packs 🙂

‘Blessed vs Cursed’ Review

March 26, 2016

It’s time for another MTG duel deck review.

The release of this one surprised me, as did the inclusion of preview cards from the next expansion (Shadows Over Innistrad). The decks match ‘blessed’ humans against ‘cursed’ zombies and turned out to be great fun to play against each other.

The blessed deck is white/blue and heavy on creatures with ‘enter the battlefield’ triggers. Some are tailor made to kill zombies, and overall the deck plays quite quickly.

The cursed deck is blue/black, full of graveyard effects (self-mill, playable from, graveyard triggers) and is even faster than the white deck.

I played eight games in total and the final tally was a draw at 4 wins each! Almost every game was quick and few were easy wins. These are two of the best matched – and most fun to play – duel decks ever.

The pros will talk about the value of the cards as well, including an alternate art Geist (from the original Innistrad) as well as some notable rates. But what I found most charming was that while each deck contains Islands, the card art is unique to the decks they are in, so there are three pairs of the same islands in both cursed and blessed forms:

It’s a nice touch, and another plus in this overall great pair of decks. Highly recommended.

Robot Claw