[bart_spoon]

There’s only two camps, investors and gamers. I think that anyone who wants to “have cards that have relative value” are investors, whether they realize it or not. Its one thing to collect because you like something inherent about the cards themselves (I recall a recent Reddit post where the user was trying to collect every single Magic card that depicted an owl in any way). But if your concern is about the monetary value of the cards in your collection, you are an investor, of some kind.

I personally think cards should be for playing, and am pretty opposed to cards being valuable if that means that playing the actual game becomes prohibitively expensive. Standard decks costing hundreds of dollars is not a good thing.

[TacticalCoder]

> There’s only two camps, investors and gamers.

It's not that black and white. I used to play the game in the mid nineties. The most expensive card I bought back then I paid the equivalent of 5 EUR (the Euro didn't even exist yet) because I needed it for a deck but that card came out before I started playing.

I'm not an investor in MtG cards. But my collection went up in value. Nothing crazy (I don't have any of the "power nines") but with 28 dual lands, the most valuable card from Legends (The Tabernacle At Pendrell Vale) and the most valuable card from Arabian Night (Bazaar of Baghdad) and a few others, I'm sitting easily on 20 K EUR atm.

I didn't do it on purpose: I simply never got rid of my cards, not paying attention to the price. I just like my old cards and they bring me back memories when I look at them.

I'm take it I'm in a third category: nostalgic people who simply like their very own (and very old) cards.

[marricks]

An emotional investor is still an investor, and I think people like you are specifically a lot of the reason MTG/Hasboro wants it to be collectible.

It's the "oh this card is valuable because it's powerful, and has good art, AND everyone else thinks it's monetarily valuable which justifies my nostalgia of it"

It's a weird example of how money messes things up. The "it's good in and my deck and has emotional value" should be enough because scarcity makes it hard for the 13 year old with only spare lunch money to get into EDH.

[brightball]

This would have been me. My old collection would have been worth $30k+ today…if I hadn’t gotten rid of them 25 years ago.

[coffeebeqn]

On the other hand- I played in 1999 and looks like my collection would be worth probably less than what I sold it for at the time

[brightball]

The cards that I remember having, specifically 4 of every dual land (about $800 / each as of a couple of years ago) and my most valuable card at the time...a Time Twister ($1,500 now) make up the bulk of it. I don't remember what all else I had.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

https://old.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/13gihbr/today_i_f...

for the owl collector, who at the time of posting seems to have missed a few.

[larksimian]

This sounds good but doesn't actually make sense, like most corporate money-grabs. If cards accumulate in value, everyone is essentially playing for free(or indeed being paid to collect cards since generally the market rose faster than inflation). Everyone can sell their collection and if the secondary market is healthy they can get back what they spent on it and more.

This is the fundamental scam of the game-piece idea: it kills the secondary market and basically means instead of having the option to recycle your old decks into new ones you have to always pay $50/deck or whatever Hasbro is selling decks for.

[gigaflop]

I enjoy having high-value cards in my collection, but the best way to show them off is in a deck that uses them well. I'm not throwing my Surge Foil copy of The One Ring in a random Commander deck.

[j4yav]

I think you can not be an investor and like the gambling aspect. And I personally wouldn't consider gamblers investors.

[johnnyanmac]

>Its one thing to collect because you like something inherent about the cards themselves

I mean, isn't that a collector? I doubt there are more "investors" than "people who thought the card looked cool". A collector might turn into an investor, but people who aren't looking to flip their cards in months time are more likely to be a "collector". So for there card and art quality is key.

If you want my anecdote: I never seriously played YGO but there was a point where I tried to get every single Blue Eyes I could grab. I didn't care about mint condition or even the dozen of rarities. I just wanted to see the different ways Blue eyes was portrayed, even if it was the same exact card with different art.

[THENATHE]

I mean, I wouldnt care if all of the cards were worthless as long as all of the packs are free. Winning tournaments (esp local ones) currently feels bad and unrewarding because a pack of cards is $5 to buy but contains $0 value. Investing implies buying and selling for the sake of profitmaking, whereas I really like the idea of cards fluctuating in value due to organic changes in the game so that you can trade a doubling season for 2 tutors, and then if for some reason one of those tutors goes for a long time without a reprint, you may be able to trade that tutor for a doubling season and another tutor! Like, Im not gonna go on to TCG player and buy cards for the sake of speculatively investing and holding value, but it doesnt feel good when packs are $5 a piece and contain $0.50 of cards. It feels even worse to draft for $40 and walk away with $3. ON AVERAGE a pack of magic cards should hold its value, and over time eventually go up.

Meaning if I spend $500 on packs of cards, I should get $500 worth of cards on the secondary market immediately (or even slightly less, like $300 would be reasonable), and then if I hold that for 5 years, it should be like $700. This is how it has been for all of magic's history pre-Throne of Eldraine (nothing particular about that set, but that is the last set that I really see this happening on)