Magic : The Gathering – Part Four, Collecting the Cards

[Click here for parts ONE, TWO and THREE]

Richard Garfield isn’t a fan of the idea of a ‘collectible’ card game, despite having invented one.

Collecting Magic cards usually involves buying a sealed pack of 15 random cards and hoping for the best. Often, you’ll get a handful of multiples and a few new rare and super-rare cards out of it. Doubles and even quadruples usually aren’t bad things, as they can always be traded away or used in building your decks, but it’s certainly a bit more thrilling to see a shiny foil card or a gold logo sticking out of the corner of a pack.

‘Collecting’, in terms of miniature and card gaming, implies an uneven playing field. While can mean an exciting game of hard-fought battles, warriors using their scant resources to intelligently battle the larger, more expensive armies of their opponents, the fact remains : the kid with the fastest bike is probably going to win the race, every time. No one likes that kid, and his stupid swimming pool that he won’t let you go in and his big collection of Ninja Turtles. Man, he even had the Ghostbusters Firehouse Playset… but I digress. As far as the amateur, kitchen-table circuit is concerned, if you have more money, you have better resources at your disposal for any of the collectible games : Heroclix, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Vs., World of Warcraft. It doesn’t give you better aim, but you definitely have more ammo.

That’s one principle of collectible gaming that I’ve always disliked. While pure skill can usually help you with a victory or two, an evenly stacked match is always more fun to play. In my many games of Heroclix with my old college roommate Brian, we’d always make each others’ collections available for a common pool. This way, when my buttocks were handed to me, I could rest assured that it was fair and brutally square. The games we played were never an issue of Have vs. Have Not.

In the professional Magic circuit, getting random cards in packs isn’t so much a concern anymore. When you play for cash, prizes and fame, you know exactly what you need and you go out and get it. One doesn’t leave deck construction to chance if you want to go home with a trophy. There’s a very strong market for individual Magic cards both in comic shops and on eBay, and it’s uncommon to see many current cards go too far over $20. If you need to do a job, you get the right tools. At that level, it’s far less about collecting and more about having a specific set of tools to draw from.

There are more than a few ways to collect Magic cards, depending on your play style. Serious players will usually collect up to 4 of each card, as having multiples of useful cards in your deck means that they have higher odds of entering play sooner. The average Magic card can belong to four levels of rarity, also – common cards have a black logo placed between the text and the image, uncommon cards have a silver logo, and the rare (and usually most powerful) cards have a gold logo. Every so often, you’ll encounter a shiny ‘foil’ card, which is a copy of one of the other cards in the set – just shiny.

As a casual player and collector, I never actively pursued specific cards on the secondary market. I settled for what the hands of fate gave me, and as I faded out of playing, I still continued to collect for a completely different reason : the art.

I’d still buy packs of cards and completely ignore everything about the card except for the pretty pictures, which continued to inspire and evoke entire universes, even without playing the game. This aspect of collecting evolved into the then-teenaged-me using the artists’ directory on the old Wizards site to send fan letters to my favorite artists, gather a small collection of signed cards, and even buy a bunch of original artwork by the likes of Quinton Hoover, Tony DiTerlizzi and Richard Kane Ferguson – three of my all-time favorite Magic artists. In this way, collecting Magic cards even outlived the game.

More recently, a market for ‘modified’ or ‘Altered Art’ magic cards has popped up on eBay, in which artists (and sometimes the card’s original artist) will either cleverly extend the art from the card’s limited image space to fill the entire card, or add totally new images to the card’s art. Some of these are humorous, like adding Superman or Domo-Kun into otherwise dramatic or demonic imagery, but some additions are purely aesthetic. The whole Altered Art Magic movement is very much akin to the ACEO craze that’s swept eBay, which I’ve also participated in. These Magic cards are still legal for casual play, of course, since the underlying text of the card is either untouched or understood, but they likely wouldn’t pass muster in a professional game. Sometimes these alterations will amplify an otherwise common card’s value a hundredfold, and other times, the card is simply destroyed for the purposes of artistic expression. If you’re going to destroy a card, what better reason is there?

All of these are very different aspects of Magic card collecting, which continues to defy any one singular avenue of acquisition. Collectors often immediately slip their cards into protective sleeves, and often play with their cards while they’re still in these sleeves to prevent chipping and creasing of the edges. Other collectors safely store their cards in the traditional 9-pocket pages. Me, I stack ‘em up and shove ‘em in a box. Aspiring collectors – go get a pack and see what you like. There’s bound to be something in there!

Stay tuned for the conclusion of my 15 Years of Magic Celebration – a rundown of the top ten most valuable and rare Magic cards.