Last weekend I went to some yard sales and one of the items I found brought back fond memories. A whole bunch of old trading cards! Not to be confused with playing cards, these have blank backs, not numbers, faces or jokers. I recall my dear Aunt Molly taking me down to Mitchell Street in Milwaukee (when I was a youngster.) We’d stop for a hot fudge sundae at a Woolworth store and then, if I was good, I’d get to pick out a pack of trading cards. Now with that delightful treat in my tummy and the promise of adding more cards to my collection, I would never misbehave, but there was always that proviso.

We would walk over to the section of toys and games and hope they had a new selection. You would not get to see them all, pretty sure there were 10 or 12 in a packet, but just the top one showed. It was not too important if you got duplicates because after all, these were the ones to trade. My favorites were the dogs and horses! The makers probably knew that most kids like those best and you’d get ‘teased’ with one on top and then there would be flowers and scenery and ships for the rest of them. Bummer.

I remember getting a few cards with ‘girlie pinups’ and at my young age, they were pretty darn yucky. I sure did not want to offer those up for trade and tossed them out. One day I went to wake up my older brother and to my surprise, found them in his room, spread out on his night stand. At the time, I could not understand why he’d want to have them, but years later, I did.

Back then, kids played a lot of games such as marbles, ring toss, Red Rover and Red Light/Green Light. But we’d need quiet time too and trading cards were a hot commodity. I remember trading some cards with my neighbor, Mary, and getting a lot of dogs. She was a little younger and I may have taken advantage of her because that night her dad came over to see me and asked that I re-trade since he did not think the cards with flowers were very cool (and neither did Mary who cried after she went over the transaction.) Gee, we even said, “Tick Tack – you Can’t Trade Back!” But that evidently did not hold any water with her pops.

I collected a lot of them through the years and when I got older, had them in a box in the closet. My sister, Vicki, came across them one day and asked if she could have some. At first I stood firm, but soon relented, since I was into American Bandstand and even boys and these were from the past. When she passed on (much too early) she still had a box of them and her daughters, not knowing what they were, asked if I wanted them. I sure did and have kept them in a safe place.

I understand there are still a lot of collectors out there. I wonder how they display them because gluing them into an album would most likely hurt the possible value. Perhaps in cases, or frames, on a wall or in a game room. Or in a collage in a kids’ room.

To me, they are reminders of a simpler time, when just having a small picture of a horse would lead you to dream of the day when you might actually own your own shiny white steed. Or perhaps a collection of dog cards preparing you for your own home and hearth with a pup nearby. I realize there are numerous collectors of playing cards, some willing to pay quite heartily for a unique deck with desirable subject matter. I can’t help but question if some of them got started in their ‘paper addiction’ by a trip with a favorite auntie to get a pack of these trading cards.

[Click here for parts ONE, TWO, THREE and FOUR]

Among the thousands of cards in the Magic lexicon, a healthy handful stand out as exceptionally rare, valuable or powerful - and most are a combination of the three. Prices for these exceptional cards can exceed $10,000, so if you were playing Magic about 15 years ago, you’ll want to dig through your closet and see what you might have.

Basic trading card quality rules apply here, so all Magic cards are worth exponentially more if they’ve never actually been abused by being utilized in a game or stuck in a bicycle spoke or used as a beer coaster, so fortune favors the lonely and/or sober.

Additionally, almost all of the cards come from the very first releases of Magic, which emerged in three phases. ‘Alpha’, the very first release of Magic cards, happened at Origins in 1995. This inaugural set consisted of about 295 different core cards, all with black borders, and about 2.6 million were printed. When these sold out, a second printing called ‘Beta’ was printed up, with an additional 7.3 million cards. This collection was the same core set, but issued with corrections and a slightly more square shape (which has been used for every subsequent set). Finally, when these sold out, the far more common ‘Unlimited’ edition came out, consisting of the same cards, but with white borders, a few more corrections. A fourth printing, unofficially called ‘Summer Magic’ or ‘Edgar’, was to have revised further issues, but because of printing problems and more card errors, most of these booster boxes were scrapped. A few did emerge from the warehouses and made their way to England, though, and remain highly sought after.

Because of the quantities of these cards that were printed, Alpha is usually worth more than Beta, which is worth more than Unlimited. The following list of uber-cards is almost entirely pulled from the fabled ‘Power 9’ collection - cards that are exceptionally more powerful than the rest of the cards in the game. It’s also worth nothing that sealed booster packs from any of the early releases can sell from $10,000 to $1000, easily.

1. The most valuable Magic card in public release is the Black Lotus, which currently averages around $1500 for a near mint Beta edition. The Alpha edition has notably sold for over $10,000 in one or two rare cases, and like most collectibles, professionally graded editions of the card just get wacky. While the card is basically a nigh-invulnerable explosion of pure death magic, it also works in any possible deck that the player might choose to make, as it isn’t mana-color specific. Early adapters of the game weren’t just rewarded with super-powered cards - if they held onto these things for about ten years, they could afford about 5 years worth of rent. Or bail money, which is the opposite of rent. As long as you don’t have the reprinted ‘Collectors Edition’ of the card, you have money in the bank. It’s times like this that I wish I could go back to my 14-year old self and tell him to buy the heck outta this game so that future-me could go to a good college.

2. Speaking of time travel, Time Walk comes in as the second most valuable wide-release card in the game. It’s a card that cheaply, but assertively, informs your opponent, “screw you, I’m taking another turn.” While a player generally gets to start fresh at the beginning of their own turn, your opponent’s resources remain tapped out. Your monsters are now fresh as belligerent daisies and can make another violent attack, easily penetrating any flagging defenses, easily dealing a game-ending blow when played at the right time. The Unlimited edition of Time Walk has recently sold at auction for prices around $500, while a Beta finished up at over $700, and the original Alpha is nowhere to be seen. Like the Lotus, this is another one of the ‘Power 9’ cards.

3. Also part of the Power 9, the third most powerful and rare cards are the five Moxes : Mox Pearl, Mox Ruby, Mox Jet, Mox Emerald and Mox Sapphire. All of these are Artifacts, or magical items, like the Lotus, and all of them entitle you to an anytime, anywhere source of magic, like an iPod with Andrew Bird on it, or a never-ending carton of Whoppers. Since magic, or ‘mana’ is pretty much the lifeblood of everything that you summon onto the gaming table, any card that gives you fast mana is usually pretty popular. The Unlimited editions of these cards round out at about $300, while the Alpha and Beta versions have recently topped $700.

4. Ancestral Recall - the card that allows you to painlessly add three turns worth of weaponry to your hand in short order, was recently valued at about $700 on eBay for a Beta edition. Of course, you can also force your opponent to draw three cards, which sounds exceptionally generous - unless they’re out of cards and playing in ‘Vintage’ format, wherein one suffers an automatic loss if you cannot draw a card when you are required to do so. Such is the nature of the blue cards. Like my second girlfriend, they’re master manipulators - they get inside your stuff and mess it up hardcore, but at least they don’t call you when they’re drunk at 4 AM and admit to various infidelities with overweight dorm-mates. Again, this is a Power 9 card.

5. Timetwister is the last of the ‘Power 9’ block of cards, allowing all players to reshuffle and reuse all of their exhausted cards. While the Beta card is worth about $300, it’s still nothing to scoff at. Again, Timetwister is a blue card - arguably the most powerful and dangerous color in the game.

6. Not willing to settle for only nine ‘Power’ cards, three more cards are sometimes referred to as part of the ‘Power 10’ - not unlike the various Fifth Beatles. Sure, they’re great, but they don’t really fit perfectly into the established set. Two cards from the first major expansion, ‘Arabian Nights’, have this honor : Library of Alexandria and Bazaar of Baghdad. Neither of these were actually even rare in their printed quantities, but their power in the game makes them highly desirable. The third major card in the ‘Power 10’ set is Mishra’s Workshop, from the ‘Antiquities’ set. All of these currently sell for around $130 to $300.

7. The Wizards website states that the rare ‘blue Hurricane’ card is one of the most sought after cards in the game. Since Hurricane is a green spell, the misprinted blue version is especially rare. It was only included in the aforementioned ‘Edgar’ set, which was accidentally shipped to England. Hurricane itself is a very common card from the very first set of Magic, but the blue version is something like the philatelist’s ‘Inverted Jenny’ or the numismatist’s 1933 Gold Double Eagle. Is there a word for a Magic card collector?

I usually just use ‘nerd’. Lovingly, of course, as I’m one too.

8. There have also been a small group of cards which have never been available for sale to the public, produced completely outside of the regular sets. Only two different and completely unique official cards were produced. Both were painted by Christopher Rush and designed by Mark Rosewater. The first unique card, called Shichifukujin Dragon, was created exclusively for the DCI Tournament Center in Tokyo, Japan - which was, at the time, the largest single place for organized playing cards. The card’s name actually refers to Japan’s seven deities of good fortune, and the creature itself has the ability to become more powerful with each turn, slowly and infinitely. Most players would deny these as being ‘actual’ Magic cards, given their special circumstances and inutility in game play. Those people would be spoilsports. When it comes to ultra-rare cards, players sometimes make ‘proxy’ cards for fun - regular magic cards with a new face pasted to them to act as a substitute for an otherwise inaccessible card.

9. As I’ve mentioned before, game creator Richard Garfield created three cards for three personal occasions. The first one, Proposal, was slipped into a game between Garfield and his girlfriend, and had the ability to propose marriage. Fortunately, the one time that it ever entered a game, it worked. Because of the personal nature of the card, the image has never been published, and only three people in the world were given a copy - Garfield, the printer at Carta Mundi, and Quinton Hoover. Unfortunately, Hoover’s card was stolen at a convention and has never been recovered.

The other two were printed in quantities of about 100 or so and given to personal friends of the Garfield family - birth announcements for their two children, ‘Splendid Genesis’ and ‘Fraternal Exaltation’.

10. Remember those two unique cards? The second is called 1996 World Champion, and was given to Australia’s Tom Chanpheng. You can probably guess why. After this card was printed, all proof copies, and the printing plates, were destroyed. Last we heard, this card was stored safely at Tom’s place in Australia, and in a screwdown case.

After sending Tom a quick inquiry, he had this to say :

“I sold the card in 2001. In late 2000, I started up an internet cafe and things were going well so I was thinking about expanding, right on cue I got a phone call from someone representing an anonymous collector who was interested in buying the card. I didn’t want to part with the card but he made a good offer and I needed the money to expand the business so I sold it. The price I sold it for was $17,500US. I thought it was a good offer at the time. I have no clue how much it would be worth now.”

So, this price tag officially marks it as the most valuable Magic card. Once Tom started up the cafe, he fell out from the official tournament scene, but still has his old cards and plays from time to time.

And that’s the 15th anniversary of a little card game called Magic - a thing that’s inspired many, and somehow altered the course of countless lives. If that’s not enough reason to take it seriously, I don’t know what is.

[Special thanks to the folks at StrikeZoneOnline.com and Pojo.com for their help in assembling this list!]

[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.

I first laid my hands on Magic cards back in 1994, when I was an exceptionally cool 13 year old.

It was a hot summer day and I was helping out at a tag sale in the driveway of a family friend. Since he collected all kinds of comics and cards and toys (with the sole intent of eventually profiting from them), it was always fun to help out and take home anything that he didn’t feel like packing away into his dank garage again. On this particular afternoon, I was handed my first set of Magic : The Gathering stuff - a sealed box with a paperback-sized first edition rulebook and a good handful of cards - all with pictures of dragons and warriors and magical items on them. And it felt special.

I was very much into Dungeons and Dragons at the time, drawing serpentine beasts in the corners of my notebooks, listening to Jethro Tull, and fascinated with the Renaissance Faire for reasons that extended slightly beyond the bounteous cleavage present, so everything synced up sublimely. I spent the rest of the afternoon figuring out the puzzle of the cards - what symbol meant what, the terminology and the rules, and trying to understand the high concept that playing cards didn’t need to be emblazoned with hearts and clubs in order to be useable. This was, after all, the very first example of a collectible card game (or CCG) since 1904. It was a lot to take in.

Magic : The Gathering, or MtG, is a card game in which you, the player, represent a powerful wizard. Using a store of magic powers (your deck of cards), you summon creatures to attack your opponent and defend yourself with, and cast spells to various ends - make a creature stronger, or take away the life points of another player, or give a creature a special ability, and so on. If an opponent’s monster or spell manages to break through your battlements, you lose some points off of your life total. It’s that simple and that complex.

Using a vast, vast variety of Magic cards (well over 45 standard sets worth), the player constructs their own deck of roughly 60 cards to go into battle with. In this deck, the player includes Land (which provides magic for spells), all manner of creatures from dragons to moths, and a good deal of magical spells to help and hinder the creatures at battle. Given that three or four sets of 100+ cards have been coming out consistently every year since 1993, the variety of cards that is presented to the player is staggering. The biggest challenge for a competitive player is to see past this huge collection of beautiful, challenging cards and to hone their Magic deck into a finely tuned machine - and then hope that their most effective cards happen to enter their hand quickly from the randomized deck. It’s very tempting to make an army of Merfolk or Tree People or Giants, but will it work effectively in battle?

MtG has undeniably been the standard, driving force behind all of today’s popular collectible card games : Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Upper Deck’s Vs. system, and so on. To remain consistently selling millions of cards over a 15 year period is a testament to the universal appeal of MtG as a paramount example of strategic gaming, as well as stellar aesthetic sensibilities.

My own history of collecting the game is something that informed many of my ‘collecting’ attitudes. We were still in those fabled pre-internet days, so I was completely unaware that any cards existed outside of my basic set until I came across more by accident. I remember long car rides with my uncle to hunt down packs of new, mysterious cards. Legends, Antiquities, The Dark, Fallen Empires - all different aspects of this world that we were dueling in, represented in collections of new creatures and spells. We’d tear open the plastic packs of randomized cards and celebrate the new, rare additions to our armies or lament the quintriplicate cards that we were cursed with. Of course, multiples of the same card in your deck can work to the player’s advantage, but when you pull your 35th Uncle Istvan card, they lose their appeal quickly and you begin considering avunculicide. Or, like one player I met this weekend, sent all of the guys into battle in one deck and see what happens. An army of indestructible, ticked off, old Russian men with axes is nothing to scoff at.

For a variety of reasons, I faded out of playing in 1999. The local game shop was shutting down, so the generous owner was no longer going to be around to give me a free pack or two with every purchase I made. At least a quarter of my early collection was accumulated through the generosity of John Callahan. The gaming friends I had introduced the game to became more interested in drawing naked bits onto the Elves than actually using them effectively in a game. I began focusing on art and writing. The rules were starting to get convoluted. Still, even after I stopped playing, I collected the cards for a few more years, very casually, because I remained in love with the artwork, which did an excellent job of making the Magic universe a little more real. Over time, I even started communicating with some of the cards’ artists about art and illustration, and learned a few things that remain an influence on my own art-things to this day.

So, I suppose that MtG played a far more integral part in my mental and creative development than I’d previously realized, and when I attended the 15th Anniversary Celebration / 2008 US National Championships in Chicago this past weekend, it all came back to life, as strong as ever. My huge boxes of unused Magic cards that were once on their way to eBay were relevant again, and I was already leaps and bounds into creating a collection of these things - this time for play. The rules of the game had gone back to basics, the art was better than ever, and I had more fun playing games in a weekend than I can ever recall having.

I’d always sensed that there was a real culture behind the game, but when I heard that there were worldwide tournaments of Magic, broadcast on ESPN and with thousands of dollars in prizes, it was just a little intimidating. I’m not competitive by nature. Hell, my uncle and I used to glue our own art and text onto existing Magic cards just for fun, and I hid behind the telephone pole during high school baseball.

I quickly learned that there was absolutely nothing to be afraid of - the strange lexicon, the hardcore players, the structure of the tournament - everything was saturated with goodwill, a solid code of polite and moral gaming, and above all else, the fun of matching wits and skill against other players from around the United States - whether you were a seasoned champion, or a complete neophyte. I learned new games, relearned an old one, and was quickly reminded why I was so enraptured with the game in the first place.

You can’t get this at a comic con. Stay tuned for an exhaustive recap of the thrilling weekend.

Back in 1992, when I was 11 years old, I was falling in love with fantasy role playing games. Despite this, I wasn’t at all into Satan. The evilest thing I wanted to meet at the time was a Beholder, and only if I was holding a +6 Sword of Eye Poking. That’s funnier if you know what a Beholder is.

I had inherited a few tattered Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, but I really wanted to expand upon my gaming repertoire. Because the internet didn’t really exist yet, I had only one other source of information : trading cards (which also held true for my superhero knowledge). For about $1.50, I could buy a pack of ‘Advanced Dungeons and Dragons : 2nd Edition’ trading cards from the local Waldenbooks. I’d go in there once a week and buy a few packs at the counter, take them home, ogle the art and read the mini-biographies of the pictured characters, or the descriptions of neat new weapons and items. What are magical items but externalized superpowers anyhow?

But oh man, were they ugly.

It’s Deanna’s recent exploration of Garbage Pail Kids, and the upcoming Magic : The Gathering National Championships that have brought back some old collecting memories, back from my earliest acquiring days. I dug around under my bed and after some epic battles with spiders and a frightening layer of dust, I reclaimed my D&D cards.

Of course, $1.50 per pack wasn’t a small amount of money when I was 11, so ultimately, I wanted a lot of bang for my buck. Some of the cards managed to inspire a few new character traits and stories that I could incorporate into a game, but most of the cards… well, take a look.

Sure, some of the cards (though not the one pictured at left) had some really wonderful art on them - crisp, expressive stuff that could really evoke a sense of fantasy and inspire art of their own, but none of the artists were credited anywhere on the cards. Unless they chose to sign their image in an area that TSR couldn’t possibly cut it off during production, and signed large enough to be seen in trading card scale, they were anonymous forever. While there are a few Brom and Ken Frank cards scattered within the gigantic 500-card set, sometimes…. sometimes it hurts to look at the others. Please avert your eyes if you have any sense of human proportions, decency, or may be pregnant.

This is real ‘stuff I drew with my non-dominant hand in the margins of my notebook during math class after drinking behind the sports shed during lunch’ quality stuff. As we see with the biology and physics lessons that Istha Rockhead’s card provides (pictured above), the pointer finger is the longest finger on the humanoid hand, and one does not need to close one’s hand around the handle of a mace in order to be able to wield it successfully - gravity will surely do the job for you.

Mortos Ironbeard is an evil guy, if only because of his fashion sense. Everyone knows that belly shirts after Labor Day are completely unacceptable. Also, if you’re a 70 year old man. Also, if you’re wearing two shirts and NEITHER reaches below your bellybutton. Don’t be fooled by those embrace-me arms and come-hither grin - his name is Mortos, and ergo predestined for evil, and his bio states that he murders strangers and takes their place - possibly because he’s angry about being short. I’m not making that up.

The list of offenses doesn’t end with poorly-painted character cards, though. Getting a dreaded Checklist Card in a $1.50 pack was always a severe disappointment. It always invoked a feeling of “here’s a list of cards that you DIDN’T get because you got this crappy checklist card!”

Of course, nothing was worse than the ‘guy holding a pointed stick’ card, or the exciting card depicting ‘chair’ or ‘belt’. Sure, we want to flesh out the D&D universe in every possible way (the game’s creator even made up a probability table for the exact type of ‘woman of ill repute’ that you could encounter), and there’s a LOT of room to do that with 500 trading cards, but is it truly necessary to acknowledge ‘left big toenail’? I musta had at least a dozen ‘Elven Pancreas’ cards.

Still, I always went back for more. It was something about tearing open the shiny silver-and-purple packs and finding the treasures within, even if they were sometimes unbearable, and even if this next pack contained cards I already had quintriplicates of. It was about always having something new that I could find and come home with, and it was about adding onto a social experience with new bits of knowledge.

Ugly, ugly knowledge.