What amazes me is that Charizards can sell for so much when they are so worthless to the game. In MTG the most expensive card Black Lotus is basically broken and can be used in some formats and so actually desired by players. Charizard from the the original Pokemon base set is bad now. His HP is laughably low, his attack throws away tons of energy and it's a 3rd stage evolution making it slow and hard to get out. Even the buffed 2016 Pokemon Evolutions version isn't much more playable.
I don't think it's too surprising - cards from this era are primarily collector items, so among equal rarity cards, the most "iconic" ones are the ones that demand the highest price. Charizard had a pre-existing (and continued) level of popularity that made it the obvious most desirable card, even if it's not particularly playable. MTG didn't have the existing IP, so the cards that became iconic are more based around their playability, rarity, and associated mythos. Not too many people are dropping $20,000+ for a lotus to play it in vintage, but the prices continue to rise because of increasing collectibility. For what it's worth, Ancestral Recall is arguably a stronger card of equal rarity, but it's worth substantially less on the basis of being less iconic (if only slightly).
Is there a standard list of highly valuable MTG cards? I have a couple thousand cards from the mid-90s and while I’m sure they are probably worthless, I can’t bring myself to just dump them even though I haven’t played in 20 years.
Depends on your definition of "highly valuable" - from that time period, there's a very short list of cards worth >$1000, quite a few in the $100-$999 range, and a ton in the >$10 bracket. What they're actually worth depends a lot on the particular printing and what condition they're in.
If you wanted a starting point, Scryfall is a useful tool for looking up cards (though they're missing pricing data for some early cards, presumably due to scarcity of transaction data). Here's something to get you started (cards printed before 2000, sorted by price, displayed as a price list): https://scryfall.com/search?q=unique%3Aprints+sort%3Ausd+dat...
A lot of it will come down to the value of your time. You can sell directly yourself but deal with headaches and scammers, or you can sell to someone like Rudy for what will likely be ~50% of prices you'll see online. Part of that is that most of your cards will probably be considered in "played" condition, either light or heavy.
IMO you'd get a lot of mileage from the "Reserved List" or "Vintage Staples" but site is decent for a general price lookup as well.
Feel free to shoot follow-up questions. There are a few cards that went from trash to treasure since you've been out of the game. Lion's Eye Diamond probably the most extreme example, but basically anything on the Reserved List has gone insane in the past few years.
Even "pretty bad" condition Beta is still worth a pretty penny. Lots of people just want to have complete sets, or play "1994" League which allows only cards from that era. There will definitely be a market if you do indeed have Beta :)
They are dual lands with basic land types without any abilities (other than the mana abilities they inherit from their basic land types) which also means without any drawbacks. They're just "Swamp Forest", "Mountain Forest", "Island Swamp", etc. See here:
And they are literally what their type lines say. So you basically get two lands with a basic type for the price of one (i.e. one card, or one land drop; card and tempo advantage, 2-in-1). Their only limitation is that they are not basic lands so they are subject to the restriction of number of copies per deck (4, in most formats).
Every dual land created subsequently has some kind of drawback or limitation (other than the number of copies restriction): "Enters the battlefield tapped", paying some amount of life or taking damage, sacrificing a permanent, discarding a card (I think), printed as bouble-faced card, and so on.
The original dual lands are very powerful in the game and haven't been reprinted since Revised so there aren't a lot of them. And people pay that much for them.
Modern dual lands come with restrictions/penalties for taking advantage of their dualness (time delays, damage, choosing which version to use when played, etc) and they are often some of the most valuable cards in a set.
Even though the Black Lotus value is mostly as a collector's item, in game, it has the advantage of being extremely versatile. As someone said, all decks are better with a Black Lotus. It is the most expensive because everyone wants it in their deck, no exception, and more than a one if it wasn't restricted (initially, it wasn't).
Ancestral Recall may be more powerful but it requires blue mana, which may be an issue in a non-blue deck, of course you can use a Black Lotus for that...
> As someone said, all decks are better with a Black Lotus. It is the most expensive because everyone wants it in their deck, no exception, and more than a one if it wasn't restricted (initially, it wasn't).
> Ancestral Recall may be more powerful but it requires blue mana, which may be an issue in a non-blue deck, of course you can use a Black Lotus for that...
It's true that everyone wants it with no exceptions. That's not good enough to make it the most expensive card, though; that's due to prestige.
If you look at the decklists for a recent Vintage event (here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mtgo-standings... ), you can see the top 16 decks play 16 Black Lotuses, just 11 Ancestral Recalls... and 16 Mishra's Workshops, which accounts for 80% of the decks that aren't playing Ancestral Recall.
There's no such thing as a "non-blue deck" in Vintage. Even the Mishra's Workshop decks can easily generate blue mana. (The Bazaar of Baghdad deck in 15th place can't, but its whole strategy revolves around not needing to generate mana at all.)
I haven't played with or against the deck. So this is a purely theoretical discussion that is likely to miss something important. But here goes:
- The deck's plan is to attack for damage. It will do this by getting creatures onto the field without paying for them.
- There are 9 cards in the deck which require mana to play: the 4 Deathrite Shamans, the 4 Sticher's Suppliers, and the 1 Swords to Plowshares. The Shamans can produce mana and the Suppliers serve the important role of getting cards into the graveyard. But mostly, this deck seeks to avoid playing mana-producing lands, and therefore also won't play cards that cost mana.
- Bazaar of Baghdad is the center of the deck; every turn it will allow you to draw two cards (good!) and also discard three cards (great!)
- After that, it's just a matter of getting creatures into play. Basking Rootwalla can be played for free whenever you discard it. (Which you can do via the Bazaar.) Bloodghast will come out of your graveyard whenever you play a land. Hollow One can be played for free as long as you've discarded 3 cards. (Luckily, that's the exact amount of discarding provided by the Bazaar.) Hogaak can be played out of your graveyard as long as you have two creatures already in play. And Vengevine, which is probably most of the damage, will come out of your graveyard whenever you play a second creature in one turn. (You have to play them, so Bloodghast won't count, but Basking Rootwalla, Hollow One, and Hogaak all will. If you can play a Deathrite Shaman or a Stitcher's Supplier, those will count too, but this is not a necessary part of the plan.)
- Vengevine has haste, so whenever you do manage to get one out, it can attack immediately. It has been the core threat of various decks in the past.
- If you can get 3 Bloodghasts and 2 Hogaaks into your graveyard, you can recur all of your Vengevines just by playing a land. This deck has a tremendous capacity to bounce back from creature removal. (Graveyard removal will hurt more.)
Thanks! You know, now that you say it, it seems obvious especially given the Vengevine, but I tought Vintage was too fast for decks that win by attacking with creatures to compete, so I thought there was some hidden interaction I couldn't see.
I remember being kid and other kids telling back then, when the card game was released, that a charizard was worth 500 francs (around 75€) and I didn’t really believed them. Funny how it raised to even crazier prices.
Someone gave me a free Ponyta, which I traded against other cards, growing my collection without buying any pack. One day I was with only three cards remaining but managed to trade again them for a bigger collection. My brother did the same, also with a free starting Ponyta. A year or so later, I bough two packs of the Fossils extension. A guy stole my whole collection in junior high school and I wasn’t able to bring it back. I still hate him to this day.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. I bet most of them are ending up framed on walls or what have you by people who wanted it in middle school. And I bet there's way more of those people than people playing the game.
Me and every friend I had in elementary school played with pokemon cards. We never once played the actual card game, just the gameboy game. The cards were closer to stuffed animals than utility items. If you played a card game it was YuGiOh because it was so simple.
In my experience, kids who played YuGiOh didn't play with the rules on the cards, but came up with their own rules. I grew up in Greece where most YuGiOh - age kids didn't know much English, so they couldn't actually read the cards. I realised that when I tried to play with some kids once and they kept telling me "no, that's not how this card is played, this is how it's played", because I was trying to play like it said on the cards. I think maybe they had derived the rules from watching the anime.
Black Lotus only can be played in Vintage, and even then it is restricted (1 card total in main/sideboard). It is more of a collectible because of its pure rarity more than anything now.
I've heard that Pokemon TCG card prices are more related to collectability and less related to in-game strength, when compared to Magic the Gathering. Some of the most sought after cards are first edition printings, or promotional cards.
I can virtually guarantee that out of any 10 people that are buying these cards, 9.9 of them have never played an actual game. Hell, I remember only playing one or two games with the cards as a kid back in the late 90s, and then the rest of the time was flexing your collection/haggling with other kids for trades.
Just so you know, Pokemon Trading Card Game is still alive and it has a pretty good online client[0] (that runs well on Wine). Poke me if you'd like a game someday.
I agree! It's much harder to play in person due to the pandemic though.
There's a bonus though: each new physical deck and booster pack that you buy is also redeemable online, so you can buy a deck or two, redeem their codes in the online version, and immediately start playing them there.
Yes but that require buying cards. Sometimes I want to do it to make friends, but that would require a decent time and money investment. And while I saw few girls playing it at the university, I think it’s mostly kids playing, so it would be a bit weird too (in addition to being a visible foreigner).
You don't have to buy cards. In high school people were playing with cards printed at home, and put into card sleeves. I assume no on photoshopped their card to change the stats.
Store hates people playing with proxies. It’s obvious illegal in tournament. That would make me stick out even more. So no. But I’ll ask acquaintances around if some are playing the game.
As an adolescent in the late 90’s, my friend group played the Star Wars version of this, Star Wars CCG. At the time I had cards worth $40-50 and thought if I held onto them for decades they’d be worth thousands. Looked them up recently and they’re going for... $20-30. Oh well.
Interestingly, unopened packs seem to fetch a fair amount, certainly more than their “expected value”, which aligns with my experience trading loot boxes on Steam.
> Interestingly, unopened packs seem to fetch a fair amount, certainly more than their “expected value”
Yeah it's a phenomenon seen in a few different CCG markets actually. Roughly 2 years after a set's release the Sealed box price and the EV start to drift apart.
I missed getting into Pokemon by a couple years, since it wasn't out until 1998. I was already playing MTG and Star Wars: CCG for a while by then, and didn't continue playing after ~2000. I similarly expected SW:CCG cards to grow in value more than MTG, especially with the prequels - but I think the production runs were significantly greater from the beginning and people had a long association with Star Wars figurines/toys/cards as collectibles being valuable before that. One interesting thing for SW:CCG is that the newer print runs can often now be more valuable than the older ones for SW:CCG, since each run saw fewer cards printed as the popularity dwindled.
Before the prequels, it was relatively easy to meet many of the Star Wars actors. I met Peter Mayhew and had him sign my Star Wars: CCG Chewbacca card at a comic convention. A lot of people seem to comment on what a nice person he was to meet, and I completely agree. David Prowse was less obviously likeable, but was also interesting to meet.
If you have an EV of £20 for the contents of a random pack and can buy them for £10, it makes sense to buy as many as you can to open and sell on the contents.
They don't have to be opened, but if the difference is large it would make sense for people whose only interest is in getting a return to buy & open them.
That explanation only makes sense if you take alisonkisk's use of "worth" to mean "price", which makes it a very different comment.
That all packs with price less than their EV get opened makes sense. At the same time, packs with price more than their EV don't really make sense - it's better to just buy singles in that case.
But to me, the comment meant that packs with worth (total value of their contents) less than their EV i.e. underperforming packs were guaranteed to be opened, so the EV of remaining packs would rise, justifying the price increase.
As a long-time Magic: the Gathering player it’s been fun introducing that to my kids and also learning Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh with them. I think Pokemon is slightly less satisfying than MTG without a lot of concerted deck building, and there’s a lot more to keep track of, but I do enjoy it. Yu Gi Oh I will just never understand. Absurdly complex, both at the macro level of the rules and the micro level of every card having a paragraph of tiny text to read.
My boy learned to play MtG to a pretty functional level way faster than these other games, and while I’d never call MtG’s rules simple I still think it has an elegance some of these other games lack, but obviously nostalgia and familiarity colour that.
I would be suprised if the most valuable collection of Pokémon cards was worth only $10M.
I personally know multiple people with card collections in excess of $10M. They are using it as a form of investment and it’s been their best performing asset class in the last several years.
While those collections are not of Pokémon cards, I’m sure that there must exist people who see Pokémon cards as an investment too and are similarly wealthy.
There's also a sort of survivor bias to it. If he were willing to cash in, then he wouldn't have a $10,000,000 collection and they wouldn't be writing a story on him
Pokemon will enter the NFT digital collectibles space, and it would be absolute crazy if they don't already have a team working on it.
All of these collectors are making assumptions based on information other collectors have shared about "how many are known to exist" etc., whereas NFTs are provably scarce and they never get scuffed up.
It's highly unlikely that The Pokemon Company would want it to be publicly known how many of each card are in existence, and even then they'd likely prefer hosting this on their own self-hosted and fully controlled database over a blockchain.
I doubt it. it is not like you could buy a bunch of cars and stick them in your closet. I've never found any commodity car that fun to drive compared to commodity EVs
They've always been mildly popular with a smaller crowd but recently it's all Twitch and Youtube. One streamer bought something like $10,000 worth of pokemon, others followed suit and now everyone's into it again.
I gave you an upvote on a charitable interpretation, because I think it’s actually a humbling observation: how much money some motivated individuals are willing to spend on objects with no bona fide “value”.
That is, things that are not edible (food) and do not produce something edible (fire, farming tools, soil), that do not shield you from the elements or help produce such goods that do.
We all possess things that are basically irrational to possess. Many even pay for the opportunity to possess and protect things with no boba fide value.
For me, it’s books and records, in spite of easy access to the library and the internet. For others, it’s clothes, exotic food ingredients, streaming services/TV, season passes, and Pokémon cards.
I used to think like this, judging people by their value functions. But as I’ve gotten older, I increasingly find it unfair to knock people for the irrational things they choose to possess, as long as it brings no unreasonable harm to others (i.e. it’s OK to shame the person who invests their life savings in Pokémon cards, using it as a vehicle for speculation, but I still think it’s wrong to say they have no life).
I think about that often. I know many people that are pretty much losing at life that have voluminous collections of junk. Anime figurines, comics, video games, movies, etc. It’s a sad pathology.
For those in Pokemon cards, you should check out the Whatnot Slabathon [1], where we've been auctioning some super rare, PSA-graded cards on the app all May!
