The 3 million dollar sale for that black lotus was considered a fraudulent sale. It was a new grading company "selling" it to someone else in the company to falsely legitimize their grading service.
The same thing is true of the previous high value Black Lotus. There are three card stores that have sold the same grade 10 Alpha Black lotus to each other 6 times, each time increasing the sale price by 200-500% each time. then 30 months later like clockwork, they sell it to the next store in the triangle and announce the price has increased yet again! getting the two stores names in all the blogs and search results, calls from Daytime TV doing special interest stories for about 6 months... then they wait... and "Sell" it again A sells to B B sells to C C sells back to A. Its unlikely any money has ever changed hands between the stores.
@@catcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatca Really? That doesn't seem like it should be true. If you could shuffle so you get an exact order of cards, you can choose any combination of positions, so you then add several orders of randomisation* to how you're going to distribute the cards and then deal them in that order. That's just a thought experiment though, you made a pretty confident claim of it - guessing you've got a research paper or something you could point us to? *Perfect randomisation is hard, but on the order of 60 cards it's not going to be an issue
@@davidjennings2179 Yes that’s true, but adding randomization is much more annoying to do mechanically with physical cards than randomly sorting a list in a computer, especially if you want it to be fast and visually look like normal shuffling.
You need to give Amy a raise now. Either she doesn't like Magic and you made her go talk to the MTG nerds at the card store. Give her a raise because of the trauma. Or, she _is_ an MTG nerd and you gave her an excuse to go to the card store, which means she is not just broke but actually deeply in debt. Give her a raise before she sells a kidney.
Calling the one ring "not that big of an advantage" is a pretty hot take as it's the most played cards in Modern (with a 43% share of the metagame) and has a pricetag of $100 a pop.
@@amellie2only people that are bad in commander think the ring isn't broken in commander, its an extra teferi's protection copy in any deck that gives you card advantage that is extremely difficult to remove. It's about as good as dockside extortionist another card people who played it tried to argue wasn't broken because they have no clue how to play the game
Yeah, it mostly has avoided being banned due to being the Universes Beyond poster child. WOTC is trying so hard to not ban it because it's tied with another IP and contributed so much to the Lord of the Rings set's sales. It is a broken, problematic card.
People ask me how I ended up getting such a large collection. Was it having owned a game store in the past? Nah. It was starting to play in 1993 and just being a hoarder. If you don't get rid of cards, you'll always be able to build any deck you want! Oh and accidentally be able to buy a house with them or some silliness.
@@jypsridic No, for me it's mostly a more recent spike in a card that used to really, really suck. Not, recent per se, but Lion's Eye Diamond being a prime example.
I'm very curious on the story of the card sale that helped you buy a house! I'm assuming it was multiple cards skyrocketing in value enough to sell for a deposit?
@@Respectable_Username Oh, I didn't literally buy a house with the cards. I mean, I suppose I could have, but I also worked for a living and all that. And, as I've been playing a long time tends to show, I'm also old so, unlike you youth out there, houses were affordable when I bought my first one. Also snow, both ways, uphill and all that. Get off my lawn!
@@sentientwaffle535 it may have been invented in 96 but very few people played it until the early 2000s it was a word of mouth thing and everyone called it elder dragon Highlander
Even the cheapest One Ring printing is $120. The card is likely getting banned in one or more formats come December. That card is nuts not mediocre like you make it sound lol.
After Hasbro acquisition, all this speculation is actually in reverse, until they sell all stock of One Ring containing boosters and print even more absurd BS card, they wont ban One Ring.
@@zwojack7285a home-made substitute for a card, it represents what the card does in every way without actually being it physically. Most are regular printed versions of cards, some people like to make custom artwork for them.
Black Lotus very much can you win you a game; a tournament game at that. In 2019 there was a Vintage Champs top 8 game won by a player who turned black lotus into a 3/3 elk with Oko and swung for game.
I'm surprised there was a vintage tournament that recently. Do they still do these ever? Looking at the decks, it seems like everyone needs a chunk of the power 9 along with powerful cards like force of will, treasure cruise, strip mine, etc. Each deck must cost tens of thousands of dollars. I'm surprised this many people are even willing to play with them.
A note from someone who plays a lot of MTG: Some players invest a lot of money into speculating on card value. The other 99.8% of players think they are loud, whiny idiots that should *stop making death threats* to the company's employees.
Also, I don't know how much of that 99.8% agrees with me (though I do know it's greater than zero), but there are also some of us that would be perfectly fine with everything getting reprinted, even if it means our collections become worth very little. At the same time though, the cards that are currently super valuable would likely hold a lot of that value purely because they're from the early days of Magic. Just as an example, look at Nightmare. The most recent printings (Origins and M15) are worth about 20 cents, but one from Alpha is worth over $1000 USD. The only real difference being how old they are There are formats where if you want to be even slightly competitive, you need to spend thousands of dollars, and that's not something most people can afford. Based on some local talk and an article I found, competitive Standard decks can cost as little $100 and average just under $300, but Modern decks average around $950, Legacy jumps up to an average of nearly $3000, and Vintage costs anywhere from just under $10k all the way up to multiple tens of thousands And before anybody says to "jUsT uSe PrOxIeS iF yOu WaNt To UsE eXpEnSiVe CaRdS", you can't use proxies in sanctioned tournaments #AbolishtheReservedList #ReprintEverything
@@KenishiroMashibaThe loud speculators are the ones who never open packs. They just buy and sit on sealed product or buy singles and wait for the prices to go up. The ones actually opening the products are generally stores or individuals that act just like a store. They don't speculate, they just operate an online or brick and mortar storefront.
Yeah one ring mightve been one of the worst examples cuz it is both "generically good in everything" and also limited via collaboration premium. Pretty much any secret lair would've been a better example of "paying extra just for bling" minus the obvious part that many already expensive stuff is planted alongside foiled out draft chaff
The One Ring is played in quite a few decks in Legacy, not as many as when it came out, but it's a pretty strong card and swings games, the first reason it isn't more played is that almost only fast mana decks (Moon Stompy, Rx Initiative, Grim Monolith Key, etc.) can reasonably play it, as well as a few Control decks; the second reason is also tied to its cost, the format has been warped since Grief and especially Psychic Frog came out...
I was going to say, it didn't really conclude anything either. Just kinda, "hey look at this, neat huh". It was a very surface level look at MTG(finance), need to do a bit more research next time.
I bought a friends entire collection. He set the price at 500. He had several revised dual lands, and on card that at the time, was worth ~300. That card is now worth anywhere from 600-2000.
And if you realized those profits, I applaud you. To squeeze that money out requires first doing the work of cataloguing and pricing out the entire collection, or at least knowing the high value gems by name. Then the _really_ hard part - doing the legwork to actually get fair cash value for the card. I repeat, if you actually did all that, I applaud you.
Meanwhile, in Yu-Gi-Oh, Konami of America has adopted a simple, effective strategy. 1. Design a super powerful new card every competitive deck absolutely has to run 3 of. 2. Make it a shortprint secret rare that is found, on average, once in 30 packs. 3. Now, you are guaranteed to sell 90 packs per competitive player. Assuming 5000 competitive players and a price of $5 per pack, that's a guaranteed $2.25 million in revenue. 4. Of course, most players will buy the card on the secondary market for a price of $130 per card. Lower than the expected $150+overhead because some of the pack filler cards can still be sold for some money.
...You realize a Secret appearing 1 in 30 packs would actually be MORE common than usual, right? A current main booster set has 10 Secret Rares, and you pull a Secret Rare 1 in 12 packs. So any given Secret would be a 1/120.
Konami of America doesn't really do design work, beside the odd TCG premiering archetype. They more or less look what bubbles up as meta relevant in the OCG (Japanese version of the game; different ban/limited list, I think almost all cards are released ~6 months earlier there) and gives those rarity upgrades.
Unlike MtG Yu-Gi-Oh has an incredibly aggressive reprint policy where within a calendar year of a card's release it will be reprinted at least once or multiple times
7:09 Jeweled Lotus isn't going back up because it's playable in other formats. That DOES happen, but unfortunately, you chose the only banned card that's (quite literally) only playable in commander (and TECHNICALLY one legacy deck that no one has ever actually played in a tournament). It's still 60 dollars because of 3 reasons: 1. The backlash made some people think it would get unbanned 2. The volume is tiny, because the card is stone unplayable everywhere but commander, so the price hasn't dropped a ton 3. Some people use it as a proxy for black lotus (Long story, but it is technically playable in commander in 1 deck)
It's interesting being on the other side of a story for once where you see all the mistakes a hyped outsider makes when covering a topic. For example: The Commander's Quaters isn't about MTG finance, it's about commander (the mtg format) related things. Mostly news, decks and strategies. And if we're talking mtg finance big shots then Alpha Investments is a big one. Also the one ring is powerful and currently ~46% of modern decks run it, so no it is not just a collectible because of the limited numbered versions. Also on the topic of 'not making another black lotus', no they are doing the opposite. Dockside extortionist, jeweled lotus and the one ring are designed to be powerful and partially to gain value. There is active discussion in the mtg community about wizards using 'reprint equity' to drive interest for products because chase cards are printed in limited forms in their products. Dockside extortionist is one such card where the banning felt bad to players because it was a pricey card that was pricey because it wasn't reprinted.
tOR is also played in most commander decks because they can all run it. It's a bit broken but my favorite part of the game is card draw. Sit down with 100 cards, I'd like to see a few. The ring helps with that. A lot lol.
As a player of Magic the Gathering, this is a pretty good quick introduction to the market! I think the key thing here is to highlight that the prices only get so high because the game itself if really well made and designed. If people stop playing because the game is bad, the card prices would obviously tank because no one's playing anymore. There are also many formats like Pauper that you can play well in with only cheap cards, because they revolve around playing only the cards that have been printed into the ground with hundreds of thousands of copies out there.
Step 1 research cards worth having for a nice set of decks for you and your friends to play. Step 2 print off unofficial cards for home use only. No artwork. Stated unofficial on the back. All the fun, minimal expense. No profit intended.
You don't even have to print the good cards. I have a set of 10 decks made entirely of cards that are less than $2 and we have fun all the same, every week. And I still get to build decks around a fun restriction
That’s lame. Part of the fun was collecting actual cards. Not just stating I have this card now. I had a big collection in the late 90’s that disappeared after I moved out of my parents place(thanks bro) if I had those cards still I could buy a house easily with them.
You what we did in the 90s when we wanted to build decks, but even back then some cards were coocoo-expensive: We took some land cards, went to the local copy shop and had them print the desired card (usually borrowed from someone or even then pulled from the internet) in the exact size needed and then commented to glue the printed "card" on the land (the back side was original, so no telling what card was what). Ta-da: Backsinde original MAGIC card, front, the needed card. Rinse and repeat.
amy should have done some deep digging in that 25 cent bin. i used to scavenge those for deals, and i found an italian copy of hazezon tamar (worth maybe around 100ish, more if it had been english) i can't wait for there to be a challenge on jet lag where you have to play magic the gathering
Dude, that Black Lotus sale was an auction house scam. The card isn't actually worth that much, but auction houses do fake, overexaggerated rarity marks, that _only they can verify,_ and artificially inflate the price, usually by selling to somebody connected to the auction house. They did the same thing with baseball cards and they tried doing it with video games, like selling a "Mint in box Grade 1 SSS Rank" copy of NES Mario Bros. You know, one of the most commonly sold games of all time, for $2,000,000. They do it to generate fake hype for something that could previously be bought cheaply, then the sale makes the news, so they sell shed loads of gear at a higher price. It's been covered loads of times before.
"Mario Bros." and "Super Mario Bros." are different games. The expensive sale of "Super Mario Bros." is legitimate. It is from a test market before the NES was sold nationwide. It was sold separately from the NES (not a pack in title). All the games sold in that test market had a different style box compared to the general release NES games. The sealed test market box is what makes that copy of Super Mario Bros. valuable.
3:18 Packs usually sell for $4, they raised the price in 2013 with I think Theros. They've since moved away from one booster pack to multiple types of booster packs, but draft boosters are usually a bit more than $4. 4:14 Thank your editor.
The price of boosters has been gradually going up and has never gone down after. He might have meant the prices of some cards were pushed down because of reprinting, but there are always new expensive cards that get made.
They're (mostly) back to one type of pack. And surprise, they kept the more expensive packs price! A decade ago I could buy a booster box (36 packs) for $120 Canadian, the new boxes are almost double that.
The whole part about WOTC printing and maintaining pack prices at $3..... umm.... what? The price of packs has gradually increased over the years. New set packs cost about $4-5 a piece, and there's special collector packs that go for around $30. Back in like 2016 sure, you could get new packs for $3. But today its close to double that. Also WOTC recently removed MSRP for a lot of their products, meaning stores have to kinda guess how much to sell it for.
Yeah, think you got scammed by WotC on this one! (Did they contact you for the free PR? Asking for a friend.) Are there people paying money for cards? Absolutely! Will it kill the game? Well, figuring OG Magic the Gathering is 30 years old and this has been going on since the beginning, umm...shouldn't it have already happened? As others have said, if you are playing for fun, you don't need the actual cards; just get a plastic sleeve protector, throw a random cheapo card in there, and then write the fancy card text on a piece of paper placed on the face up side. As for "professional" players, well, that's part of the deal. Of course, that's also why the original Magic tournaments would shuffle in banned card lists every so often. This new Commander version was a way to give folks another way to play but sounds like greed killed that - greed enabled, it should be added, not by the third-party card sellers but Wizards of the Coast themselves!
As a former tournament player who's placed (though not, alas, won) in nationals, I can tell you unequivocally, without a doubt, The One Ring is a FANTASTIC card. As in, I'd run that in literally any deck I built, including my Type I deck (and I DO have the Power Nine - which includes a Lotus). Thank gods I don't play anymore; a wife and kid is _almost_ as expensive as that hobby was at pro levels.
I played MtG quite a lot with friends. It's a fun game, we even expanded it to 5vs5 team matches where you not only had to think of cards, but team strategies, diplomacy, and negotiation.
Commander was originally called EDH, or Elder Dragon Highlander and wasn’t a sanctioned format for most of its existence. So I have no idea how an official rules body could be that old. Commander didn’t become a sanctioned format until the 20teens. Also, Type 2/Standard and Commander aren’t the only formats played in sanctioned competitions. I’m most familiar with hands-on MTG played at local gaming shops, but these are all the formats I remember off the top of my head from playing. In addition to the two previously mentioned… there’s also Modern, Limited/Sealed Deck (played at pre-release events), Booster Draft (also common at pre-release events and some shops hold special nights where this is all they do but you don’t earn points for this format though it is sanctioned with rules), Type 1/Vintage (Black Lotus is a staple card for this format), Pauper, Legacy, Conspiracy, Two Headed Giant, & Planechase. Planechase is unique because it uses special plane cards put out by WotC but it also doesn’t earn points like drafting and it’s a group format more like Commander/EDH. In a similar vein, there’s an unsanctioned format called Cube Draft which is played as a group and has really unique rules. All players pull from the same giant deck in the middle. It’s really fun… but an effective Cube costs as much as a down payment on a house. There are also other unsanctioned formats that use cards otherwise banned in other formats. Also, just because a card is banned in one format, doesn’t mean it’s banned in other formats, sanctioned or not. I guess what I’m trying to say is there is an economy for all cards. Those willing to spend on individual cards are more likely to also have decks just because they have fun gimmicks or because they like to play an unsanctioned/casual format with their friends.
0:52 is kinda wrong. MTG is played with at least 60 cards, the maximum number of cards is not fixed (outside of commander). 60 is just minimum amount of cards and it's usually not beneficial to go above it
We had a pretty fun way to avoid all these issues with my group of friends back in the day. Buy each a few boosters(around 5 most of the time). You open one, take the card you want then pass it to your left. You then pick a pile of cards from your previous sessions (land cards excluded), shuffle and draw 20 cards. You then draw 15 land cards at random from a separate pile. You have 15 minutes to build a deck. You have a vague idea of what your opponents might play because you saw 75% of the cards during the drafting rounds. You still collect cards at the end of the day but each session is fresh and (kinda) balanced
The card shops in my area usually do draft tournaments on release day for new sets, which can be a fun way to grab new cards. Unfortunately it doesn't avoid the problems the way your system does, since the contents of the new set are public before the release. You can still have fun with a quickie deck, but some (too many) obsessive folks are walking in with a plan of exactly the kind of cards that work together to build the best decks.
@@johnladuke6475 Oh yeah I remember attending those! I think I was very fortunate to have enough mtg playing friends during high school/uni, we mostly played each other
Minor correction. The rules committee, an independent body that governed a fan made format that has become the most popular format of the game, disbanded after about 14 years of service. That is the length of time that the format has existed. The game has been out for 30 years. I might be off a little bit on the years, I think it came out in 2010. So it might actually be 16 or 12 years. But most definitely not 30.
I've got tons of 4th edition cards I inherited from my dad and none of them are worth anything lol, about the most valuable thing I ended up with was a Tempest Ancient Tomb lol
Welcome to the MTG YT community, HAI! Over there on the left, you'll see Spice8Rack, he's a bit of a rambly goblin. Over here on the right, you'll see The Professor. He likes to try to break accessories, and rates them highly if he fails. Over in the breakroom you can see the lads from Game Knights. They're always deck-building, and like to hog the printer for custom tokens. Up in the basement you'll find 8thPlaceDave and his wife, we think they make tiktoks? Down in the attic, we have Rhystic Study. They like to thematically analyze the lore like weirdos, although they sometimes recap it in a digestable format which is nice. And lastly, we have the LoadingReadyRun crew currently using the conference room. They seem to be playing something called Beejlander? Ope, nevermind - that's a pack wars tournament, but Beej was there so it was confusing. Any questions?
Hey, small correction, the Enduring Innocence card that beat the player on the right up at 0:52 has lifelink, so the player on the left should have gained life, and they didn't. This bothered me slightly, have a nice day.
Pokémon has a pretty good system, they make all cards in low rarity forms, and then have super rare “full art” forms of the card that are made for collectors, so that both groups can be happy.
draft packs sealed are a much saver investment than day trading on singles. The value of a pack needed to run a draft from that expansion goes up very consistently, historically. My brother has invested in these, as draft is his favorite format and worse case he can host drafts with the if he doesn't resell them.
Is my sound messed up or should a certain someone rather be in bed with a hot tea instead of shipping out another great piece to us greedy content gremlins hungry for ever more?! :*
Remember MT GOX, the crypto exchange that famously got hacked a while back? Yeah, that stands for MTG online exchange. Was an MTG stock market before it was a crypto stock market before it lost literal millions of dollars worth of other people's crypto, IIRC
I will now share my favorite commander deck in hopes its value will go up. The commander is Abdel Adrian, Gorion's Ward with the Far traveler background. In short I use Abodel to mass exile my stuff then use far traveler to make him leave the field. This makes the stuff he exiled come back resulting in enter the battlefield triggers to happen on mass. Also as part of Abodel's effect I also get solider tokens to use as meat shields and (Hopefully) zerg rush my foes. I like to run with vehicle cards to allow me to tap my commander so far traveler can work as well as an unusually high amount of board wipes since this deck is surprisingly resilient to that thing.
Back in early 2000s I went on a trip for an anime convention that is also where the biggest MTG event happened. One guy that I knew from said events took his entire MTG card collection to sell, because he finally came to the realization that his addiction to it was ruining his life. xD He sold it all through the week of the event... boxes and boxes full of cards. For not a whole ton of money too... don't think he had any super rare cards, and the market for it wasn't as developed as it is nowadays. But you know, I think it was a smart choice. When it comes to stuff like that, we already tend to think "I should've held out more, look at how much money I could've made". But we don't think about the negative consequences of keeping at it, nor what it'd take to get into speculative market stuff.
Wizards doesn't really have control over the cost of old cards like that. Reprinting black lotus today wouldn't affect the value of the old ones much because it's not a playable card in and popular formats (it's much too strong for a 0 cost card). The main reason it's value is tied to Magic at all is that while it's banned in everything, it is probably the most iconic card ever printed.
Another fun fact, WoTC can’t legally acknowledge the card values on the secondary market due to concerns that they could become legally liable for selling a product that involves gambling since buying a sealed product could get you worthless cards or cards worth much more than the value of the sealed pack.
The one ring is absolutely cracked. I stole one with my commander deck and before it was removed I drew four cards, which is just absurd card advantage. Then it also acted as a removal magnet protecting the rest of my board That's just my experience with it, then there's how it's broken modern wide open
It's not accidental. It's by design, in a small part by wotc, and in a big part by speculators who also made retro games and comic into speculative market.
“Expecting new game formats would raise the price [of jeweled lotus] one day” Uhhhhhhhhh yes Jeweled Lotus the famously format-agnostic card. (For non-MTG players, Jeweled Lotus makes mana that can only be spent to cast your commander, a special card slot exclusive to the commander format (and technically oathbreaker but thats unofficial and not well known). Theres *technically* one other use for it, but its so niche that since its now banned in commander the card practically is worthless.
Not a lot of commander players really give a plop, proxying (the practice of printing or scribbling expensive cards) is widely accepted (or at least tolerated)
Never expected this in an HAI video! Fun! It’s important to remember, though, that the vast majority of Magic players don’t spend that much, and especially the recent bans were only a big issue for serious whales. Also, ban decisions are usually focused on power level than price. Powerful cards are usually expensive, but lots of expensive cards aren’t powerful at all and will never get banned. Wizards isn’t even supposed to acknowledge the secondary market at all in their decisions since doing so would mean admitting that their game is basically gambling🙃
I started playing Magic when Beta was out and I enjoyed the hell out of the game. I sold most of my high value cards, made a bunch of $$$, and kept a bunch of cards to be used only for playing and not collecting. I enjoyed that much more because i knew WoTC would start to ban and control the "collectible" cards and market. I didnt want to be lured into spending a ton of money for a card and then have the rug swept under from me. I am so glad. Still, i love the game as long as its for fun. I like playing all common/uncommon cards with friends. It's about strategy, luck, and fun :). Who would have thought MTG would become a stock market??
I pulled a foil Mutavault during draft in high school, got wrecked game one, and traded it to my teacher for a ton of card packs. Price tanked not long after. This was the peak of my MTG career.
1:00 - player on the left's life total was unchanged even though they were attacking with a creature with lifelink. Unwatchable! Just kidding; but amazing work bringing light about such a niche topic!
The reason it became a stock market is because finance bros ruin everything. Because who's stupid enough to use a children's card game as an investment tool? That's asinine. I say that as a long time magic player. Your cards are not worth anything and if you think that they are and your banking on them for your retirement, you need to get your brain examined for worms or something.
I played the old Star Wars card game and while I still have them, only two will I ever consider actual investment items. Of course, I got both signed at a convention so that pulled it out of the card realm and into the autograph arena. (I have a Lando signed by Billy Dee Williams and an R2-D2 signed by Kenny Baker; I could have gotten a Warwick Davis autograph too but his Wicket card hadn't been released yet the year he was at my local convention.)
The people stupid enough to make it into investment are idiot content creators, especially ones who are feeling light on their content release schedule or drama. Social media has made hobbies worse.
man. im so glad i play pokemon tcg. as much as the cards have a reputation for insane prices for the rare classics, the price of cards that are actually legal in the "standard" format (ptcg rotates cards out of regulation after theyve been legal for a while) really dont break the bank. the most ive ever spent on a single card was $25 (prime catcher, if youre curious. bought it the day the set dropped cuz i desperately wanted it for my chien pao deck... ive pulled 2 since then. oops.)
MTG rotates on a similar schedule for standard, but it's more erratic. They tend to make the standard format a mix of reprints of classic stuff, some tweaked versions of classics, and a whole load of stuff dedicated to a game mechanic that they'll only use for one rotation.
@@johnladuke6475 i think pokemon rotates yearly, with cards from any given regulation category generally sticking around for 2 years (ex: currently cards labelled regulation F, G, and H are all legal, with regulation F cards rotating out in april. regulation E cards rotated out of legality early this year)
Hey! A video Im actually an expert in! WotC and its players need to start treating it like the game it is, not stocks. Not only is it better for the game as a whole, as this video demonstrates, its got to be the most volatile market possible.
As somebody who knows almost nothing about MTG, I approve of Amy's picks! TBH if I were to start playing, I'd probably pick a starter set based primarily on which has the coolest art 😛
Ha i have a few jeweled lotus cards 😂 i got into magic for like 2 drops then moved on so i didnt keep up with the bans or value, i did pull a few sheoldred the apocalypse in the different versions by dumb luck, i think they've held well
I once built a land destruction deck. Early on in the game i would be able to destroy any land my opponents laid down, making them basically a vegetable that i could destroy with simple creatures. It was very effective, but nobody wanted to play with me any more.
I fell down the MTG card value rabbit hole recently on TH-cam. The most insane thing to me is people finding, buying and opening sealed boxes of really really really old cards, and it’s such a lucrative market that it’s a common scam target where people re-seal boxes of vintage cards. Which then caused there to become people who are experts in the card ordering of these vintage boxes, so that when you open them you can verify the cards are in the correct order to know it’s not a scam box where the valuable cards are swapped out.
Which isn't just an issue for old cards, or even unique to Magic. An unscrupulous card shop could do just that with a whole truckload of brand new cards before they ever hit the street, harvesting all the value and replacing it with junk. However considering the astronomical prices for some old MTG cards, I'm not surprised that someone would have researched the exact order that cards would appear in a 30-plus year old pack.
Rules Committee of 30 years? Crazy to think Olivia Gobert Hicks was part of the RC at the ripe old age of 9-ish. Crazier still was that commander didn't even exist 30 years ago.
There was that time at Gen Con 2023 when a couple guys heisted a pallet of Magic cards from the loading dock of the convention center. They even took the pallet jack. Of course they were seen on camera and then on the camera outside their nearby hotel. I know they were arrested but never found out their final fate.
Oh, you should try it now, it's _much, much_ worse. All the trauma in your memory was just child's play. You have too much money and sanity but not enough pretty cardboard rectangles, right?
I wish the tournament gameplay was as high stakes as the market itself. Give me a tournament that goes back to the days of playing for ante, but cranks it up to 11 - invite only, Vintage, no proxies (of course) - but your entire DECK is your wager to enter the tournament. You lose, you leave your deck and sideboard behind. The winner of the tournament keeps all decks. Have the deck have a minimum resale value on the market to be eligible for the event (so you can't just find some inexpensive deck that happens to work against the meta) so the winner of the tournament creates a multimillionaire overnight. (All shuffling and cutting is done by judges. A tournament of this caliber will have a judge at every table.)
whats really hilarious about this, is that wotc determined the resale economy would destroy the game and not the ridiculous release rate and market saturation caused by their own products ensuring both player burnout and lack of player funds to purchase said products
The 3 million dollar sale for that black lotus was considered a fraudulent sale. It was a new grading company "selling" it to someone else in the company to falsely legitimize their grading service.
So what you're saying is it's basically art?
@@Leyrann It even has the same issues if you try stealing art and selling it.
Ah, right out of the NFT techbro's playbook.
That would never happen in a real stock market, of course
The same thing is true of the previous high value Black Lotus.
There are three card stores that have sold the same grade 10 Alpha Black lotus to each other 6 times, each time increasing the sale price by 200-500% each time. then 30 months later like clockwork, they sell it to the next store in the triangle and announce the price has increased yet again! getting the two stores names in all the blogs and search results, calls from Daytime TV doing special interest stories for about 6 months... then they wait... and "Sell" it again A sells to B B sells to C C sells back to A.
Its unlikely any money has ever changed hands between the stores.
I imagine Sam sounds like he does because he has been yelling at Ben and Adam. Not in a negative sense, just "Look at that!"
no he is just entering puberty. he is becoming a big boy.
@@sirBrouwerBearded Sam when?
@@fndjfgsdk that might take some time he just started puberty
AI generated sam
Does anyone actually know why he does sound different? Like if he's just sick then I hope he gets better, but it's actually kinda distracting.
Finally a thing AI can't beat humans at: cheating at shuffling.
Boston Dynamics: "For now."
Its actually way easier to design shuffling machines that produce predetermined shuffle of cards than a machine that shuffles in a fair way.
@@catcatcatcatcatcatcatcatcatca Really? That doesn't seem like it should be true. If you could shuffle so you get an exact order of cards, you can choose any combination of positions, so you then add several orders of randomisation* to how you're going to distribute the cards and then deal them in that order.
That's just a thought experiment though, you made a pretty confident claim of it - guessing you've got a research paper or something you could point us to?
*Perfect randomisation is hard, but on the order of 60 cards it's not going to be an issue
@@davidjennings2179 Yes that’s true, but adding randomization is much more annoying to do mechanically with physical cards than randomly sorting a list in a computer, especially if you want it to be fast and visually look like normal shuffling.
@@terdragontra8900 Purely mechanical, I can see that, I was imagining something electronic so some logic board could do the randomisation
You need to give Amy a raise now. Either she doesn't like Magic and you made her go talk to the MTG nerds at the card store. Give her a raise because of the trauma. Or, she _is_ an MTG nerd and you gave her an excuse to go to the card store, which means she is not just broke but actually deeply in debt. Give her a raise before she sells a kidney.
Plus she'll have scared the cavedwellers inside the store.
"Aaargh! A g...g...g...GIRL!"
Calling the one ring "not that big of an advantage" is a pretty hot take as it's the most played cards in Modern (with a 43% share of the metagame) and has a pricetag of $100 a pop.
there's an asterisk on screen saying in commander and noting that its good in modern
@@amellie2only people that are bad in commander think the ring isn't broken in commander, its an extra teferi's protection copy in any deck that gives you card advantage that is extremely difficult to remove.
It's about as good as dockside extortionist another card people who played it tried to argue wasn't broken because they have no clue how to play the game
The one ring is busted in commander too
The One Ring is also showing up more in Legacy in a tier 1 deck as well. (Moon stompy/mono red prison)
Yeah, it mostly has avoided being banned due to being the Universes Beyond poster child. WOTC is trying so hard to not ban it because it's tied with another IP and contributed so much to the Lord of the Rings set's sales. It is a broken, problematic card.
People ask me how I ended up getting such a large collection. Was it having owned a game store in the past? Nah. It was starting to play in 1993 and just being a hoarder. If you don't get rid of cards, you'll always be able to build any deck you want! Oh and accidentally be able to buy a house with them or some silliness.
have you had the experience of playing a friend in a casual game only to have them point and say "You know that card is worth like 500 dollars right?"
@@jypsridic No, for me it's mostly a more recent spike in a card that used to really, really suck. Not, recent per se, but Lion's Eye Diamond being a prime example.
I'm very curious on the story of the card sale that helped you buy a house! I'm assuming it was multiple cards skyrocketing in value enough to sell for a deposit?
Yeah my collection is worth more than the rest of my net worth, people are like "why don't you sell it"
@@Respectable_Username Oh, I didn't literally buy a house with the cards. I mean, I suppose I could have, but I also worked for a living and all that. And, as I've been playing a long time tends to show, I'm also old so, unlike you youth out there, houses were affordable when I bought my first one. Also snow, both ways, uphill and all that. Get off my lawn!
Small correction, the Commander RC isn't 30 years old, the game itself is. Commander is about that old, but the RC is only ~18 years old
Me reading the comments to find this correction before I comment myself. 😊
Commander Is not almost 30 years old
It was early 2000s for commander
Wikipedia tells me '1996' for the recorded date, but that does sound fishy. Commander is, if I would hazard a guess, *maybe* 20 years old
@@sentientwaffle535 it may have been invented in 96 but very few people played it until the early 2000s it was a word of mouth thing and everyone called it elder dragon Highlander
Even the cheapest One Ring printing is $120. The card is likely getting banned in one or more formats come December. That card is nuts not mediocre like you make it sound lol.
It’s going for 60 for the promo version right now, 95 at its peak like a month ago
TL;CE If they ban The One Ring, or print it Universes Within, it'll look bad on them with regard to Universes Beyond. They're scared to.
After Hasbro acquisition, all this speculation is actually in reverse, until they sell all stock of One Ring containing boosters and print even more absurd BS card, they wont ban One Ring.
As an avid MTG and commander player : Just Proxy the expensive stuff, nobody cares. Cardboard was never meant to be this expensive.
proxy?
@@zwojack7285proxy is just taking a blank or cheap card and sharpie-ing the name and effects of an expensive or missing card for deck
@@zwojack7285Print them out yourself
@@zwojack7285a home-made substitute for a card, it represents what the card does in every way without actually being it physically.
Most are regular printed versions of cards, some people like to make custom artwork for them.
@@zwojack7285think quality copies
Black Lotus very much can you win you a game; a tournament game at that. In 2019 there was a Vintage Champs top 8 game won by a player who turned black lotus into a 3/3 elk with Oko and swung for game.
That's probably the funniest way to win with a Black Lotus
Oko is truly a menace.
I remember the summer of oko, twas funny as hell
@@accountid9681”the summer of oko” bro he lasted 5 minutes lol
I'm surprised there was a vintage tournament that recently. Do they still do these ever? Looking at the decks, it seems like everyone needs a chunk of the power 9 along with powerful cards like force of will, treasure cruise, strip mine, etc. Each deck must cost tens of thousands of dollars. I'm surprised this many people are even willing to play with them.
A note from someone who plays a lot of MTG:
Some players invest a lot of money into speculating on card value. The other 99.8% of players think they are loud, whiny idiots that should *stop making death threats* to the company's employees.
Also, I don't know how much of that 99.8% agrees with me (though I do know it's greater than zero), but there are also some of us that would be perfectly fine with everything getting reprinted, even if it means our collections become worth very little. At the same time though, the cards that are currently super valuable would likely hold a lot of that value purely because they're from the early days of Magic. Just as an example, look at Nightmare. The most recent printings (Origins and M15) are worth about 20 cents, but one from Alpha is worth over $1000 USD. The only real difference being how old they are
There are formats where if you want to be even slightly competitive, you need to spend thousands of dollars, and that's not something most people can afford. Based on some local talk and an article I found, competitive Standard decks can cost as little $100 and average just under $300, but Modern decks average around $950, Legacy jumps up to an average of nearly $3000, and Vintage costs anywhere from just under $10k all the way up to multiple tens of thousands
And before anybody says to "jUsT uSe PrOxIeS iF yOu WaNt To UsE eXpEnSiVe CaRdS", you can't use proxies in sanctioned tournaments
#AbolishtheReservedList #ReprintEverything
You clearly don't play that much if you think .2% of players are loud, whiny idiots. Smfh
You do realise you couldn’t play the game without the speculators who buy packs so you can buy singles you need ?
@@KenishiroMashibaThe loud speculators are the ones who never open packs. They just buy and sit on sealed product or buy singles and wait for the prices to go up. The ones actually opening the products are generally stores or individuals that act just like a store. They don't speculate, they just operate an online or brick and mortar storefront.
@@cord5355 you mean, the loudest of them all (rudy of alpha investment) do not open packs ?
That asterisk at 4:14 does a lot of work for the One Ring ngl
the one ring is a huge advantage in most formats it's legal in other than legacy or vintage.(and vintage has black lotus legal)
The one ring is still heavily played in vintage
Yeah one ring mightve been one of the worst examples cuz it is both "generically good in everything" and also limited via collaboration premium.
Pretty much any secret lair would've been a better example of "paying extra just for bling" minus the obvious part that many already expensive stuff is planted alongside foiled out draft chaff
The One Ring is played in quite a few decks in Legacy, not as many as when it came out, but it's a pretty strong card and swings games, the first reason it isn't more played is that almost only fast mana decks (Moon Stompy, Rx Initiative, Grim Monolith Key, etc.) can reasonably play it, as well as a few Control decks; the second reason is also tied to its cost, the format has been warped since Grief and especially Psychic Frog came out...
oh god, this video is going to take up a big part of the mistakes video for this year
When the asterisk doesn't fully explain, and the immediate next thing also requires an asterisk that isn't there...
It really is, this video is kinda bad
I was going to say, it didn't really conclude anything either. Just kinda, "hey look at this, neat huh".
It was a very surface level look at MTG(finance), need to do a bit more research next time.
@@omenofthephoenix Is "hey look at this, neat huh" not the entire point of this channel
No kidding, while it way enjoyable so many things were incorrect or just poorly explained
Half as Interesting: “This card game became a stock market!”
MTG Players: “Always has been”
I bought a friends entire collection. He set the price at 500. He had several revised dual lands, and on card that at the time, was worth ~300. That card is now worth anywhere from 600-2000.
And if you realized those profits, I applaud you. To squeeze that money out requires first doing the work of cataloguing and pricing out the entire collection, or at least knowing the high value gems by name. Then the _really_ hard part - doing the legwork to actually get fair cash value for the card. I repeat, if you actually did all that, I applaud you.
Meanwhile, in Yu-Gi-Oh, Konami of America has adopted a simple, effective strategy.
1. Design a super powerful new card every competitive deck absolutely has to run 3 of.
2. Make it a shortprint secret rare that is found, on average, once in 30 packs.
3. Now, you are guaranteed to sell 90 packs per competitive player. Assuming 5000 competitive players and a price of $5 per pack, that's a guaranteed $2.25 million in revenue.
4. Of course, most players will buy the card on the secondary market for a price of $130 per card. Lower than the expected $150+overhead because some of the pack filler cards can still be sold for some money.
5. Ban the card, but only after it already made the format unplayable for a year and there's a new busted archetype that they want to push
...You realize a Secret appearing 1 in 30 packs would actually be MORE common than usual, right? A current main booster set has 10 Secret Rares, and you pull a Secret Rare 1 in 12 packs. So any given Secret would be a 1/120.
Konami of America doesn't really do design work, beside the odd TCG premiering archetype. They more or less look what bubbles up as meta relevant in the OCG (Japanese version of the game; different ban/limited list, I think almost all cards are released ~6 months earlier there) and gives those rarity upgrades.
Unlike MtG Yu-Gi-Oh has an incredibly aggressive reprint policy where within a calendar year of a card's release it will be reprinted at least once or multiple times
@@ericgerald2886 This
7:09
Jeweled Lotus isn't going back up because it's playable in other formats. That DOES happen, but unfortunately, you chose the only banned card that's (quite literally) only playable in commander (and TECHNICALLY one legacy deck that no one has ever actually played in a tournament).
It's still 60 dollars because of 3 reasons:
1. The backlash made some people think it would get unbanned
2. The volume is tiny, because the card is stone unplayable everywhere but commander, so the price hasn't dropped a ton
3. Some people use it as a proxy for black lotus (Long story, but it is technically playable in commander in 1 deck)
Yea, I don't think the jank jeweled lotus doubling cube deck is enough to justify its price. People are speculating on a CEDH split.
i am very sorry but 7:44 oh no he turned into a bird
Sounds like he’s sick
It's interesting being on the other side of a story for once where you see all the mistakes a hyped outsider makes when covering a topic.
For example: The Commander's Quaters isn't about MTG finance, it's about commander (the mtg format) related things. Mostly news, decks and strategies. And if we're talking mtg finance big shots then Alpha Investments is a big one.
Also the one ring is powerful and currently ~46% of modern decks run it, so no it is not just a collectible because of the limited numbered versions.
Also on the topic of 'not making another black lotus', no they are doing the opposite. Dockside extortionist, jeweled lotus and the one ring are designed to be powerful and partially to gain value. There is active discussion in the mtg community about wizards using 'reprint equity' to drive interest for products because chase cards are printed in limited forms in their products. Dockside extortionist is one such card where the banning felt bad to players because it was a pricey card that was pricey because it wasn't reprinted.
tOR is also played in most commander decks because they can all run it. It's a bit broken but my favorite part of the game is card draw. Sit down with 100 cards, I'd like to see a few. The ring helps with that. A lot lol.
There are a LOT of mistakes here.
Too many for me to go over.
A lot of mixing information from the 90s with info from the 2020s.
As a player of Magic the Gathering, this is a pretty good quick introduction to the market! I think the key thing here is to highlight that the prices only get so high because the game itself if really well made and designed. If people stop playing because the game is bad, the card prices would obviously tank because no one's playing anymore. There are also many formats like Pauper that you can play well in with only cheap cards, because they revolve around playing only the cards that have been printed into the ground with hundreds of thousands of copies out there.
Step 1 research cards worth having for a nice set of decks for you and your friends to play.
Step 2 print off unofficial cards for home use only. No artwork. Stated unofficial on the back.
All the fun, minimal expense. No profit intended.
You don't even have to print the good cards. I have a set of 10 decks made entirely of cards that are less than $2 and we have fun all the same, every week. And I still get to build decks around a fun restriction
You don't even need to do no artwork and unofficial on the back. Just let people know and its totally fine for casual
That’s lame. Part of the fun was collecting actual cards. Not just stating I have this card now. I had a big collection in the late 90’s that disappeared after I moved out of my parents place(thanks bro) if I had those cards still I could buy a house easily with them.
You what we did in the 90s when we wanted to build decks, but even back then some cards were coocoo-expensive:
We took some land cards, went to the local copy shop and had them print the desired card (usually borrowed from someone or even then pulled from the internet) in the exact size needed and then commented to glue the printed "card" on the land (the back side was original, so no telling what card was what).
Ta-da: Backsinde original MAGIC card, front, the needed card.
Rinse and repeat.
amy should have done some deep digging in that 25 cent bin. i used to scavenge those for deals, and i found an italian copy of hazezon tamar (worth maybe around 100ish, more if it had been english)
i can't wait for there to be a challenge on jet lag where you have to play magic the gathering
Hai is lowkey the most versatile channel I know. They cover my favorite game ever mtg as well as covering stuff like ports in Idaho.
Dude, that Black Lotus sale was an auction house scam. The card isn't actually worth that much, but auction houses do fake, overexaggerated rarity marks, that _only they can verify,_ and artificially inflate the price, usually by selling to somebody connected to the auction house.
They did the same thing with baseball cards and they tried doing it with video games, like selling a "Mint in box Grade 1 SSS Rank" copy of NES Mario Bros. You know, one of the most commonly sold games of all time, for $2,000,000. They do it to generate fake hype for something that could previously be bought cheaply, then the sale makes the news, so they sell shed loads of gear at a higher price. It's been covered loads of times before.
"Mario Bros." and "Super Mario Bros." are different games. The expensive sale of "Super Mario Bros." is legitimate. It is from a test market before the NES was sold nationwide. It was sold separately from the NES (not a pack in title). All the games sold in that test market had a different style box compared to the general release NES games. The sealed test market box is what makes that copy of Super Mario Bros. valuable.
@GoatTheGoat
You really think a single video game is worth millions of dollars?? They aren't even worth $70!
@@DeathInTheSnow No, Not millions. The game in question actually sold for $140,000. Which is reasonable given how rare it is.
I'm dying at the face tattoos on smeagol post malone XD
Did you get a cold? Hope you get better!
You can blame the Wendover guy for making him sick.
Its not a stock market, its a card stock market (because the cards are made of card stock lol)
3:18 Packs usually sell for $4, they raised the price in 2013 with I think Theros. They've since moved away from one booster pack to multiple types of booster packs, but draft boosters are usually a bit more than $4.
4:14 Thank your editor.
The price of boosters has been gradually going up and has never gone down after. He might have meant the prices of some cards were pushed down because of reprinting, but there are always new expensive cards that get made.
@@jasons5916 There is a cheaper type of booster they plan to come out with soon that is only commons and uncommons. (a bit of a scam imo)
They're (mostly) back to one type of pack. And surprise, they kept the more expensive packs price! A decade ago I could buy a booster box (36 packs) for $120 Canadian, the new boxes are almost double that.
Amy's foil land for $0.25 is a fantastic choice
(foil lands help you cheat if you shuffle with top scratches facing you)
The whole part about WOTC printing and maintaining pack prices at $3..... umm.... what? The price of packs has gradually increased over the years. New set packs cost about $4-5 a piece, and there's special collector packs that go for around $30. Back in like 2016 sure, you could get new packs for $3. But today its close to double that. Also WOTC recently removed MSRP for a lot of their products, meaning stores have to kinda guess how much to sell it for.
Yeah, think you got scammed by WotC on this one! (Did they contact you for the free PR? Asking for a friend.) Are there people paying money for cards? Absolutely! Will it kill the game? Well, figuring OG Magic the Gathering is 30 years old and this has been going on since the beginning, umm...shouldn't it have already happened? As others have said, if you are playing for fun, you don't need the actual cards; just get a plastic sleeve protector, throw a random cheapo card in there, and then write the fancy card text on a piece of paper placed on the face up side.
As for "professional" players, well, that's part of the deal. Of course, that's also why the original Magic tournaments would shuffle in banned card lists every so often. This new Commander version was a way to give folks another way to play but sounds like greed killed that - greed enabled, it should be added, not by the third-party card sellers but Wizards of the Coast themselves!
As a former tournament player who's placed (though not, alas, won) in nationals, I can tell you unequivocally, without a doubt, The One Ring is a FANTASTIC card. As in, I'd run that in literally any deck I built, including my Type I deck (and I DO have the Power Nine - which includes a Lotus).
Thank gods I don't play anymore; a wife and kid is _almost_ as expensive as that hobby was at pro levels.
I played MtG quite a lot with friends. It's a fun game, we even expanded it to 5vs5 team matches where you not only had to think of cards, but team strategies, diplomacy, and negotiation.
5v5 sounds wild. I've played in 2v2 games, but having _that_ many players would really amplify effects.
Commander was originally called EDH, or Elder Dragon Highlander and wasn’t a sanctioned format for most of its existence. So I have no idea how an official rules body could be that old. Commander didn’t become a sanctioned format until the 20teens. Also, Type 2/Standard and Commander aren’t the only formats played in sanctioned competitions. I’m most familiar with hands-on MTG played at local gaming shops, but these are all the formats I remember off the top of my head from playing. In addition to the two previously mentioned… there’s also Modern, Limited/Sealed Deck (played at pre-release events), Booster Draft (also common at pre-release events and some shops hold special nights where this is all they do but you don’t earn points for this format though it is sanctioned with rules), Type 1/Vintage (Black Lotus is a staple card for this format), Pauper, Legacy, Conspiracy, Two Headed Giant, & Planechase. Planechase is unique because it uses special plane cards put out by WotC but it also doesn’t earn points like drafting and it’s a group format more like Commander/EDH. In a similar vein, there’s an unsanctioned format called Cube Draft which is played as a group and has really unique rules. All players pull from the same giant deck in the middle. It’s really fun… but an effective Cube costs as much as a down payment on a house. There are also other unsanctioned formats that use cards otherwise banned in other formats. Also, just because a card is banned in one format, doesn’t mean it’s banned in other formats, sanctioned or not.
I guess what I’m trying to say is there is an economy for all cards. Those willing to spend on individual cards are more likely to also have decks just because they have fun gimmicks or because they like to play an unsanctioned/casual format with their friends.
You forgot the part about how people who actually play the game abhor MTGFinance and people who actively partake in it
0:52 is kinda wrong. MTG is played with at least 60 cards, the maximum number of cards is not fixed (outside of commander). 60 is just minimum amount of cards and it's usually not beneficial to go above it
We had a pretty fun way to avoid all these issues with my group of friends back in the day.
Buy each a few boosters(around 5 most of the time). You open one, take the card you want then pass it to your left.
You then pick a pile of cards from your previous sessions (land cards excluded), shuffle and draw 20 cards. You then draw 15 land cards at random from a separate pile. You have 15 minutes to build a deck. You have a vague idea of what your opponents might play because you saw 75% of the cards during the drafting rounds.
You still collect cards at the end of the day but each session is fresh and (kinda) balanced
The card shops in my area usually do draft tournaments on release day for new sets, which can be a fun way to grab new cards. Unfortunately it doesn't avoid the problems the way your system does, since the contents of the new set are public before the release. You can still have fun with a quickie deck, but some (too many) obsessive folks are walking in with a plan of exactly the kind of cards that work together to build the best decks.
@@johnladuke6475 Oh yeah I remember attending those! I think I was very fortunate to have enough mtg playing friends during high school/uni, we mostly played each other
Pikachu! Use Economic Crash!
Actually, the market for Pokemon cards is just as wild.
That Amy set is money.
Minor correction. The rules committee, an independent body that governed a fan made format that has become the most popular format of the game, disbanded after about 14 years of service. That is the length of time that the format has existed. The game has been out for 30 years.
I might be off a little bit on the years, I think it came out in 2010. So it might actually be 16 or 12 years. But most definitely not 30.
12y old me opening a pack of 4thEdition and IceAge "These cards suck"
And YES the Reserved List is bullshyt
@@diazan38winter orb deck slapped though 😂
To be fair, those two sets did, mostly, suck.
I've got tons of 4th edition cards I inherited from my dad and none of them are worth anything lol, about the most valuable thing I ended up with was a Tempest Ancient Tomb lol
@@mishkamcivor409 well I feel old now
Welcome to the MTG YT community, HAI! Over there on the left, you'll see Spice8Rack, he's a bit of a rambly goblin. Over here on the right, you'll see The Professor. He likes to try to break accessories, and rates them highly if he fails. Over in the breakroom you can see the lads from Game Knights. They're always deck-building, and like to hog the printer for custom tokens. Up in the basement you'll find 8thPlaceDave and his wife, we think they make tiktoks? Down in the attic, we have Rhystic Study. They like to thematically analyze the lore like weirdos, although they sometimes recap it in a digestable format which is nice. And lastly, we have the LoadingReadyRun crew currently using the conference room. They seem to be playing something called Beejlander? Ope, nevermind - that's a pack wars tournament, but Beej was there so it was confusing.
Any questions?
Hey, small correction, the Enduring Innocence card that beat the player on the right up at 0:52 has lifelink, so the player on the left should have gained life, and they didn't.
This bothered me slightly, have a nice day.
Pokémon has a pretty good system, they make all cards in low rarity forms, and then have super rare “full art” forms of the card that are made for collectors, so that both groups can be happy.
Ha! jokes on all my exes who called me a loser for collecting Magic!
I'm basically a stock bro!
That weird moment when 2 of your different youtube algorithms meet
draft packs sealed are a much saver investment than day trading on singles. The value of a pack needed to run a draft from that expansion goes up very consistently, historically. My brother has invested in these, as draft is his favorite format and worse case he can host drafts with the if he doesn't resell them.
As a card shop owner, this is really cool to see you guys cover it.
Nothing fills me with more dread for the stock market than the stock footage at 0:22 where the traders are running Windows Vista…
6:10 is some incredible b-roll
Is my sound messed up or should a certain someone rather be in bed with a hot tea instead of shipping out another great piece to us greedy content gremlins hungry for ever more?! :*
4:57 "uncommon, but not rare card" and yet Internet Dweeb has a rare expansion symbol 🤔
"Promising auras" I love it Amy
Remember MT GOX, the crypto exchange that famously got hacked a while back? Yeah, that stands for MTG online exchange. Was an MTG stock market before it was a crypto stock market before it lost literal millions of dollars worth of other people's crypto, IIRC
3:45 Sam's attacking the vintage players hard lol.
Yeah I'm not used to such a low effort shit post without facts from half as interesting. It's pretty embarrassing.
I will now share my favorite commander deck in hopes its value will go up.
The commander is Abdel Adrian, Gorion's Ward with the Far traveler background.
In short I use Abodel to mass exile my stuff then use far traveler to make him leave the field. This makes the stuff he exiled come back resulting in enter the battlefield triggers to happen on mass. Also as part of Abodel's effect I also get solider tokens to use as meat shields and (Hopefully) zerg rush my foes. I like to run with vehicle cards to allow me to tap my commander so far traveler can work as well as an unusually high amount of board wipes since this deck is surprisingly resilient to that thing.
2:29 Great way to make your point with that visual (end etymological) contrast.
Back in early 2000s I went on a trip for an anime convention that is also where the biggest MTG event happened. One guy that I knew from said events took his entire MTG card collection to sell, because he finally came to the realization that his addiction to it was ruining his life. xD He sold it all through the week of the event... boxes and boxes full of cards. For not a whole ton of money too... don't think he had any super rare cards, and the market for it wasn't as developed as it is nowadays.
But you know, I think it was a smart choice. When it comes to stuff like that, we already tend to think "I should've held out more, look at how much money I could've made". But we don't think about the negative consequences of keeping at it, nor what it'd take to get into speculative market stuff.
Wizards doesn't really have control over the cost of old cards like that. Reprinting black lotus today wouldn't affect the value of the old ones much because it's not a playable card in and popular formats (it's much too strong for a 0 cost card). The main reason it's value is tied to Magic at all is that while it's banned in everything, it is probably the most iconic card ever printed.
Another fun fact, WoTC can’t legally acknowledge the card values on the secondary market due to concerns that they could become legally liable for selling a product that involves gambling since buying a sealed product could get you worthless cards or cards worth much more than the value of the sealed pack.
The one ring is absolutely cracked. I stole one with my commander deck and before it was removed I drew four cards, which is just absurd card advantage. Then it also acted as a removal magnet protecting the rest of my board
That's just my experience with it, then there's how it's broken modern wide open
earliest i've ever been to a HAI vid lpl
I appreciate the fact that Sam still voiced the video despite his voice is dying.
6:21 Where is that plane landing?
Tokyo
It's not accidental. It's by design, in a small part by wotc, and in a big part by speculators who also made retro games and comic into speculative market.
“Expecting new game formats would raise the price [of jeweled lotus] one day”
Uhhhhhhhhh yes Jeweled Lotus the famously format-agnostic card.
(For non-MTG players, Jeweled Lotus makes mana that can only be spent to cast your commander, a special card slot exclusive to the commander format (and technically oathbreaker but thats unofficial and not well known). Theres *technically* one other use for it, but its so niche that since its now banned in commander the card practically is worthless.
Oathbreaker technically also has a commander
0:56 20 life if normal. 40 if commander. You can also stack poison counters until the enemy has 10 or more, or they forfeit
As someone who's watched your channel first the better part of a decade, I'm sad you've given into the AI trend
? If you mean his voice I think he’s just sick? Or is there something else
Ah, yes, truly the card with the most untapped potential in all of Magic:
A basic Mountain.
Not a lot of commander players really give a plop, proxying (the practice of printing or scribbling expensive cards) is widely accepted (or at least tolerated)
4:22 bro went from being SkyDoesMinecraft's roommate to OWNING THE ONE RING
0:39 Wait, Duel Monsters is easier? As a duelist, it's a win!
Never expected this in an HAI video! Fun!
It’s important to remember, though, that the vast majority of Magic players don’t spend that much, and especially the recent bans were only a big issue for serious whales. Also, ban decisions are usually focused on power level than price. Powerful cards are usually expensive, but lots of expensive cards aren’t powerful at all and will never get banned. Wizards isn’t even supposed to acknowledge the secondary market at all in their decisions since doing so would mean admitting that their game is basically gambling🙃
spat my drink when he said the one ring wasnt broken
The foil land was probably the best purchase, at least in terms of potential value.
I feel so humbled and privileged to be an MTG Nerd and see a HAI video about Magic
I started playing Magic when Beta was out and I enjoyed the hell out of the game. I sold most of my high value cards, made a bunch of $$$, and kept a bunch of cards to be used only for playing and not collecting. I enjoyed that much more because i knew WoTC would start to ban and control the "collectible" cards and market. I didnt want to be lured into spending a ton of money for a card and then have the rug swept under from me. I am so glad. Still, i love the game as long as its for fun. I like playing all common/uncommon cards with friends. It's about strategy, luck, and fun :). Who would have thought MTG would become a stock market??
I pulled a foil Mutavault during draft in high school, got wrecked game one, and traded it to my teacher for a ton of card packs. Price tanked not long after. This was the peak of my MTG career.
1:00 - player on the left's life total was unchanged even though they were attacking with a creature with lifelink. Unwatchable!
Just kidding; but amazing work bringing light about such a niche topic!
The reason it became a stock market is because finance bros ruin everything. Because who's stupid enough to use a children's card game as an investment tool? That's asinine. I say that as a long time magic player. Your cards are not worth anything and if you think that they are and your banking on them for your retirement, you need to get your brain examined for worms or something.
I played the old Star Wars card game and while I still have them, only two will I ever consider actual investment items. Of course, I got both signed at a convention so that pulled it out of the card realm and into the autograph arena. (I have a Lando signed by Billy Dee Williams and an R2-D2 signed by Kenny Baker; I could have gotten a Warwick Davis autograph too but his Wicket card hadn't been released yet the year he was at my local convention.)
The people stupid enough to make it into investment are idiot content creators, especially ones who are feeling light on their content release schedule or drama. Social media has made hobbies worse.
HAI doing MTG was not on my bingo card.
I love this crossover. The Daily Show did a piece of Magic today as well. Magic is really hitting the mainstream.
man. im so glad i play pokemon tcg. as much as the cards have a reputation for insane prices for the rare classics, the price of cards that are actually legal in the "standard" format (ptcg rotates cards out of regulation after theyve been legal for a while) really dont break the bank. the most ive ever spent on a single card was $25 (prime catcher, if youre curious. bought it the day the set dropped cuz i desperately wanted it for my chien pao deck... ive pulled 2 since then. oops.)
MTG rotates on a similar schedule for standard, but it's more erratic. They tend to make the standard format a mix of reprints of classic stuff, some tweaked versions of classics, and a whole load of stuff dedicated to a game mechanic that they'll only use for one rotation.
@@johnladuke6475 i think pokemon rotates yearly, with cards from any given regulation category generally sticking around for 2 years (ex: currently cards labelled regulation F, G, and H are all legal, with regulation F cards rotating out in april. regulation E cards rotated out of legality early this year)
Hey! A video Im actually an expert in!
WotC and its players need to start treating it like the game it is, not stocks. Not only is it better for the game as a whole, as this video demonstrates, its got to be the most volatile market possible.
As somebody who knows almost nothing about MTG, I approve of Amy's picks! TBH if I were to start playing, I'd probably pick a starter set based primarily on which has the coolest art 😛
Ha i have a few jeweled lotus cards 😂 i got into magic for like 2 drops then moved on so i didnt keep up with the bans or value, i did pull a few sheoldred the apocalypse in the different versions by dumb luck, i think they've held well
Every single card game ever know be like :
I once built a land destruction deck. Early on in the game i would be able to destroy any land my opponents laid down, making them basically a vegetable that i could destroy with simple creatures. It was very effective, but nobody wanted to play with me any more.
I fell down the MTG card value rabbit hole recently on TH-cam. The most insane thing to me is people finding, buying and opening sealed boxes of really really really old cards, and it’s such a lucrative market that it’s a common scam target where people re-seal boxes of vintage cards. Which then caused there to become people who are experts in the card ordering of these vintage boxes, so that when you open them you can verify the cards are in the correct order to know it’s not a scam box where the valuable cards are swapped out.
Which isn't just an issue for old cards, or even unique to Magic. An unscrupulous card shop could do just that with a whole truckload of brand new cards before they ever hit the street, harvesting all the value and replacing it with junk. However considering the astronomical prices for some old MTG cards, I'm not surprised that someone would have researched the exact order that cards would appear in a 30-plus year old pack.
Rules Committee of 30 years? Crazy to think Olivia Gobert Hicks was part of the RC at the ripe old age of 9-ish. Crazier still was that commander didn't even exist 30 years ago.
There was that time at Gen Con 2023 when a couple guys heisted a pallet of Magic cards from the loading dock of the convention center. They even took the pallet jack. Of course they were seen on camera and then on the camera outside their nearby hotel. I know they were arrested but never found out their final fate.
one of the funniest aspects of this world is that people treat pieces of cardboard as an investment then complain that the market is unregulated
This is... very much reminding me of exactly why I got out of Magic 20 years ago.
Oh, you should try it now, it's _much, much_ worse. All the trauma in your memory was just child's play. You have too much money and sanity but not enough pretty cardboard rectangles, right?
4:22 want to say it was actually 2.6 million to also cover the taxes that came with it
I wish the tournament gameplay was as high stakes as the market itself. Give me a tournament that goes back to the days of playing for ante, but cranks it up to 11 - invite only, Vintage, no proxies (of course) - but your entire DECK is your wager to enter the tournament. You lose, you leave your deck and sideboard behind. The winner of the tournament keeps all decks. Have the deck have a minimum resale value on the market to be eligible for the event (so you can't just find some inexpensive deck that happens to work against the meta) so the winner of the tournament creates a multimillionaire overnight.
(All shuffling and cutting is done by judges. A tournament of this caliber will have a judge at every table.)
A whole video about MtG finance and not one mention of the Séance guy? C'mon!
whats really hilarious about this, is that wotc determined the resale economy would destroy the game and not the ridiculous release rate and market saturation caused by their own products ensuring both player burnout and lack of player funds to purchase said products
I am not aware of packs going back down in value 😂 they just keep getting more expensive because WOTC doesn't supply an MSRP on mtg products