Category: MTG

Kaladesh

September 28, 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

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 🙂

Robot Claw