Monday, March 10, 2014

MTG ... Magic The Gathering

if you've collected sports cards over the last twenty years, you know damn well what MTG is.  Dont deny it, you know it.

As much as most sports card collectors dislike Magic: The Gathering, i have a news flash, it is NOT going away.  Not anytime soon, that's for sure.  i recently started looking at MTG again for the first time in 19 years (you read that correctly).  i was a casual player back in 1994/95.  Revised Packs were $3, and Starter Decks were ten bucks. 

Playing with friends was fun, and i never went in for the tournaments, but i still had a good time.  i started playing friendly matches with other people, and grew bored with playing against people that would for example, use an "all red deck" and be content with ending the game in 5 to 10 turns.  Great, you "won", but damn that was boring and quite unimagineative.  bleh.

So, back in 2003ish i wound up selling all my magic cards (whoopsie).  sure i should have held on to them, because some of them now are pretty big bucks, but it is what it is.

The game now appears to be more popular than ever.  MTG celebrated 20 years of existence last year.  That's pretty crazy when you step back and think about it.  Talking to others about it, its going to continue to get more popular and appears to actually benefit from the online version, go figure.

From the purely speculative aspect of MTG, take a look at all the releases so far, and how many of those releases that are still around in unopened booster (wax packs, essentially) box form sell for less than $100 a box?  Now, im not saying that "investing" in them (or anything really) is a "good idea",
but one has to wonder as the popularity fo the game  grows, what the corresponding pricing will be.

There are a lot of things about the game that have changed since i last played, and that means there are a lot of things to learn, but i seriously have to wonder about the future of the unopened product, as with each passing year, there is less and less of it.

Food for thought.

2 comments:

  1. I worked at a card shop in the late 90's to help supplement my income as a new teacher and 75% of our customers were into either MTG or Pokemon. I remember how expensive booster packs of those first MTG Alpha & Beta were back then. Can't imagine how expensive they are now. I never got into them (although I did buy some Pokemon), because I figured it would fade out... I guess I was totally WRONG. Glad to see it still has a strong following.

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  2. Yea, the pricing on those old packs is CRAZY now and to be honest, due to their flimsiness in packaging, i dont know if id even bother with loose packs.
    It really is something how its not only thrived, but seems to be getting bigger.

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