Inflation Ain't a New Thing

I've been putzing about the office over the last few days, and in an effort to clean and inventory, cracked open my few remaining boxes of Magic cards.

I think it's been five years since I played a game, and even longer in a competitive environment.   In a world where most I'm either buying miniatures direct or Kickstarting an RPG, the very least I can do to acknowledge a quality game store is to buy a few packs of Magic and scheme and dream of concepts, using a very old school brain. 

I picked up my first Magic starter sometime in the Fall of '94.  Sure, we completely botched the rules and the internet was more BBS's so we didn't know more than a few combos.   Certain cards stick to my mind

• Charles had a Shivan Dragon
• George's claim to fame was a Guardian Beast he picked up over the winter.
• I was reviled for first turn Black Vise, second turn Howling Mine, and eventually an army of Ironroot Treefolk. 

Anyway, over the years I've binged and purged the game so many times I can only feel nostalgic for most of the expensive cards I once possessed. 

But Magic has hit a level of crazy that I never expected, and I've got numbers of justify it.  

When I worked at New Frontiers in the Phillipsburg Mall, we had a very simple concept for selling the Revised Edition.  Commons and Lands were a nickel, uncommons were a dollar, and all Revised rares were five buck apiece.  You got half value in trade for other cards for uncomons and rares (I've long since forgotten how we handled commons.)  We tended to avoid the original sets and kept Scrye low prices for the Dark/Fallen Empires and beyond.  

With those prices we could build a kids an all commons red/green Kird Ape deck for $3 that the kid could actually compete in a weekend tournament with a decent shot of winning a game or two.  Heck, after a time of "concept album" decks, I ultimately turned to the $3 design and expanded upon it.  

Efficient Kird Ape
4x Kird Ape                        4x Scryb Sprites
4x Lightning Bolt               4x Tinder Wall
4x Chain Lightning            4x Giant Growth
4x Blood Lust                     4x Naf's Asp

1x Fireball
1x Regrowth
1x Berserk
2x Juggernaut
1x Fork
1x Feldon's Cane
1x Wheel of Fortune

8x Forests
8x Mountains

4x Taiga

It was a decent competitive deck for the Classic/Vintage /Type I.  A couple minor wins, some decent places, and yet a kid's 100 card goblin deck wiped the floor with me in straight games. 

During the last purge, well over 15 years ago, I got rid of a near-black border version of the deck.  Cruising through eBay for prices on pieces of my vintage Treefolk deck, I looked up average SOLD prices of the pieces today.  

With Revised Taigas/Black border everything else, with average card prices, the deck is now $4,844!  With Beta Taigas is swells into 5-digits!

The Vintage Treefolk deck is a bit crazier, because once you remove the three priciest cards, a deck of 57 mostly common cards is just shy of $900!   "Normal" Alpha commons regularly sell for $10-20, and even the Arabian commons that no one wanted seem to sell well, starting at $30-40.

And let's not even talk about graded cards, those prices feel like a cryptocurrency scam.

Despite these prices, I can understand and appreciate this vast inflation. 

While perusing the Crystal Keep, an old gaming resource webpage, that has been archived here., I came upon an article trying to explain the print runs for the sets, and the actual cards rarity. 

Magic: The Gathering:
	Alpha		2.6 million cards	50% starter/50% booster
	Beta		7.8 million cards	50% starter/50% booster
	Unlimited	 40 million cards	33% starter/67% booster
	Revised		600 million cards	25% starter/75% booster
	Fourth 		700 million cards **	33% starter/67% booster

    Collector's Sets: (Gold Borders)
        United States     3 million cards       1 of each card per set
        International   1.5 million cards       1 of each card per set

    Expansions:
	Arabian Nights	  5 million cards
	Antiquities	 15 million cards
	Legends		 35 million cards
	The Dark	 62 million cards
	Fallen Empires	360 million cards
	Ice Age         400 million cards **    33% starter/67% booster
	Chronicles      250 million cards **
	Homelands       200 million cards

With the rarity ratios, the actual individual card quantities are look something like this:

   1,100  Alpha Rare
	     4,500  Alpha Uncommon 
	    16,000  Alpha Common
	    85,500  Alpha Land (per picture)

So effectively there were never more than 1,100 Alpha Black Lotuses, and probably no more than 23,000 of the card ever, I world with millions of  Magic players you can see the value. In comparison, the wax packs of the 1980s were printed in quantities into the BILLIONS, with some conservative estimates marking print runs of at least a million copies of EACH CARD (Including that Barry Bonds card you stowed away for a rainy day.). I may just sell off my Magic cards and pick up a $20 box of '87 Topps. The nostalgia might serve me well, especially in a world were basic land is $40 apiece.