I was curious given all the $$$ everyone spends on Magic. I bet at the Niagara Magicfest for Legacy the average deck was $1000+ given dual lands. Even in Modern opens, the price appears to be $400+. Standard is a bit cheap but still average decks are $300+ and $400+ if control.
I have been playing Magic at FNM level since 2008. So overall, I spent around $400 on my initial legacy deck (paid $40 for FOW and $60 for underground sea) which is now $3000+ given price spikes. Also, I have always offloaded standard cards near the end of season to a store and gotten staples at like $4 to $1 ratio.
Overall, in these past 10 years, I think I can barely break even if I sold all my current cards worth around $6000 on Ebay. So it seems like I spend on average $600 per year.
Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
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It’s hard to calculate just my Magic costs since I use the same budget for video games, family board games, other card games and, don’t ask, vacations.
The direct cost of the majority of my Standard decks is typically less than $100 starting out. I think my current deck had about $40 or so put into it when I first assembled it. I probably put another $100 worth of cards into it making adjustments and tweaking it. All in all the current iteration is valued somewhere in the ball park of $150 or so. Instead of spending $400 on a Standard deck, I’d rather pump that money into Legacy cards. I do buy one box (very rarely more) for ****s and giggles then flesh out the missing pieces with single purchases so... another $600 a year depending on what Legacy singles I buy I guess.
I don’t usually calculate lost money such as entry fees, packs, consumable supplies, etc. For instance, I spend somewhere around $160 a year on inner sleeves, penny sleeves, deck sleeves and boxes. Since I do FNM nearly every Friday and pre-releases (skipping only the Ixalan block), I think I spend about $345 a year on entry fees not counting any winnings.
I never travel more than 10 minutes, 15 if traffic is bad, to my LGS so travel expenses are essentially zero.
So I’m probably under estimating costs here but I guess about $1k a year?
This sounds fun. I dropped out of standard, modern, and legacy to go full casual which somehow increased the amount I spent on Magic. I have a mono-color EDH deck of each color, the price is probably low on them as they are more casual than competitive. 1 two-color deck that's red white giant tribal so low cost again. then 12 three color decks each filled with every nonABUR dual land I could get, which monetarily, mostly means shocklands and fetchs. Already I want to stop counting but three 5 color decks, one is a planeswalker deck with every planeswalker before the return to Zendikar. The others are a dragon deck and land deck. Within my various decks, I have a significant number of judge foils and other limited run versions. And I'm going to stop before I mention the sealed product I haven't gotten around to opening for the purpose of making more decks. Safe to say, far too much.
The positive: made some money when I sold 4 Mox Opal, 4 Arcbound Ravagers, 4 verdant catacomb, 4 scalding tarn for a HUGE profit, 2 misty rainforest, 4 arid mesa, 1 engineered explosive, and some other modern staples. Also sold 2 plateau, 2 taiga, and 1 savannah for a profit.
The negative: spent over 300$ on Standard cards which are now mostly useless. Bought a playset of goyf when they were 70$ each, now goyf is only 40-50.. so lost money. Spent money on a modern deck that was later too weak to even use at fnm, so lost money again.
Overall, I'm sure to have lost more money than I have earned. Although not by a huge margin.
If you stick with Limited only to get cards you can get away with Magic for a pretty reasonable cost.
Thats a draft each week for FNM, like 10-15$ or 10-15€ and you are ready to rumble.
Just doing that every week provides quite a bunch of cards to play with, instead of buying them as singles ; and store credit for winning something, or extra packs.
Magic is at its most expensive if you start with nothing and buy into a deck just to play it a little and then buy another deck of entirely different cards.
If you do that all on your own you buy into a lot of expensive stuff ; which at its best is an investment on cards that go up in value (almost all foil rares you can get for cheap can go up in value quite a lot over a long course of time like 10years).
The biggest money sink of them all is to buy into expensive STANDARD cards and keep them after they rotate out of standard, which almost all the time crushes their value massively. If a card sees no play outside of standard you have to get rid of it asap.
Older formats with stuff like Dual Lands are quite an investment as they are good cards combined with heavy investment items. All the people with lots of money to spend will at some point invest in Dual Lands, as they are a sure fire way to bank your money and grow in value over time ; its pretty much the equivalent to gold in magic cards (and funny enough lots of expensive magic cards are worth more than their weight in gold).
----
I play almost only Limited and get away fairly cheap with just some drafts for FNM.
Buy some product if its worth to do so and it keeps you happy.
Over time if someone leaves the game they sell their cards, often a lot of them in bulk, entire trading folders etc.
Bought a lot of these over time with tremendous financial gain over time.
Today people will check the value of their cards more often and sell singles online before they sell the stuff in bulk.
But the vast majority of my stuff is from buying the cards from people that left the game.
I am quite sure i attended every single Pre-Release i could get to since the beginning of time.
Maybe like ~3 or 4 i couldnt get to, so that alone is like at least 90 * 25 bucks = 2250 , but the cards gained in these events combined are way more than that, for the PreRelease promos of all of them and the cards alone.
Draft each week for 10-15€ over more than 20 years, thats like +- 50 drafts a year (cost of packs changed over time), 750€ * 20 = 15000 bucks , the vast majority of cards involved are worthless commons/uncommons you have to get rid of at some point.
Buying product outside of these events irregularly like Commander sets, the FromTheVault product line and such, is like 200€ a year approximately, at the beginning of magic a simple starter deck with a card worth the entire pack could do the trick (they sold for example decks with Umezawa's Jitte back in Kamigawa that was worth more than the pack to buy).
Its roughly 4000 bucks spend into these products over 20 years.
Buying all the bulk from people that leave the game is roughly 500 bucks a pop, very different depending on how much and what they got of course.
But easily 10000 bucks over 20 years, stuff that is worth easily 10x that much today (lots of Dual Lands and old stuff, especially in the Urzas Saga time frame, and lots of cards from Onslaught/Mirrodin, so a lot of fetchlands, a ton of random artifacts that gone up in price a lot).
Buying sleeves and other stuff is not that crazy expensive in combined total. Trading folders i have are all of the people i bought cards from and i use a lot of fairly cheap big white boxes for all kinds of bulk cards to put into and build a "wall" with.
I never spend money on playmates, simply the ones from tournaments are enough, or people get so many of them that they just gift them away (we got so many that we just put them all in our LGS at the tables, so the entire tables are "flooded" with playmates).
But say 100 bucks each year approximately, thats like 2000 bucks for 20 years.
Singles i buy here and there very infrequently. Its like 500 bucks a year, not more. 10000 bucks in total for buying singles.
So thats about it, spend approximately ; 42000 bucks in magic over 20 years time frame.
The collection of Dual lands ALONE is worth more than double that, so i made a hell of a financial gain with that hobby if i wanted to just check out of it and never touch it again.
The vast majority of value is in the old cards, as they gone up in value so insanely, its like having invested in bitcoins ...
I budget ~$100 USD a month for funsies. During whatever the big summer draft set is (masters, conspiracy, modern horizons, etc.) I pick up a bunch of extra hours of overtime/side work and spend about $600 filling out that set. I forcus almost entirely in modern and having 1-2 copies of all rares in standard and a playset of playable commons/uncommon. I draft 2-3 times per set and buy minimal sleeves (usually with store credit) a year.
I may buy one nice collectible (sdcc promo, judge, foreign, reserved list something) for birthday/Christmas.
I probably spend ~1.5-2k a year? Having said that I'm closing the gap significantly on modern staples and in 1-2 years I'll have all T1-3 decks pretty much (missing 2-3 cards at most from any given deck, and only cards that don't overlap).
I avoid legacy because the tournaments just don't fire off around me. There have been huge gains but I feel like the game isn't going to continue to see those level of gains going forward. An underground sea could be worth ten grand, but it won't matter if no one is buying. I feel like lots of the good buys are out of reach now.
Not sure how much I have spent in all but I can say that in the process of putting together my foiled out Seton, Krosan Protector mono green EDH, all in all it ended up costing me around $3,500-$4,000 >_>
But I spend probably somewhere in the $50-$125 a month on average if I had to guess
I'm one of those outliers. I have one of pretty much everything, multiple playsets of things (I don't like to break up decks). Collect masterpieces, mythic editions, etc. Probably spend 500$-1,000$ a month on Magic. But it's my favorite hobby and I refuse to try to turn a profit. Just like to collect and play.
If it's money I never get back, I enjoyed the entire thing. If I somehow end up making money on the cards (when I quit or, more likely, die), so much the better for my inheritance.
I'm not sure. I'd guess around $50/month on average. I'm low-income, but I don't really spend money on anything else apart from basic necessities/comforts & helping out friends. TCGPlayer claims my collection (what I've bought from them over the last six years) is worth $4k-117k. The high end is absolutely absurd, but the low end might be true, especially factoring in price increases. $50/month for six years comes out to $3.6k.
I have some higher-end cards, but mainly just lots of lower-value cards for my many EDH decks. In retrospect, maybe I should have bought into Legacy, but I love Commander & have kept building more & more decks.
I've been playing and collecting since '95, but I've only been keeping a spreadsheet since 2014 that tracks my Magic expenditures each year. I'm sure many will find it disgusting how much I spend, but whatever...
I've been playing and collecting since '95, but I've only been keeping a spreadsheet since 2014 that tracks my Magic expenditures each year. I'm sure many will find it disgusting how much I spend, but whatever...
I've been playing and collecting since '95, but I've only been keeping a spreadsheet since 2014 that tracks my Magic expenditures each year. I'm sure many will find it disgusting how much I spend, but whatever...
I've been playing and collecting since '95, but I've only been keeping a spreadsheet since 2014 that tracks my Magic expenditures each year. I'm sure many will find it disgusting how much I spend, but whatever...
Do you buy a lot of displays and have a room full of cards? Or do you play powered Vintage?
I do purchase about 10-12 boxes of each new set, but that's just a drop in the bucket. The vast majority of the cost is due to my penchant for collecting decks. I have over 400 decks built. For instance, last year I bought about 30-40 Revised/Unlimited duals for various EDH and Legacy decks. I also don't swap cards between decks. If I want to build 20 decks that each need 4 Goyfs, then I purchase 80 Goyfs.
I haven't spent as much this year because I've been buying tons of anime. I also used to collect video games. I have a room in my house that's floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall (three walls) filled with games, but I've sold about 15-20% of it over the past five years since I gave that up. I'm obsessed with collecting. I can't have something be a hobby without collecting the hell out of it...
I've been playing and collecting since '95, but I've only been keeping a spreadsheet since 2014 that tracks my Magic expenditures each year. I'm sure many will find it disgusting how much I spend, but whatever...
I've been playing and collecting since '95, but I've only been keeping a spreadsheet since 2014 that tracks my Magic expenditures each year. I'm sure many will find it disgusting how much I spend, but whatever...
I have been playing Magic at FNM level since 2008. So overall, I spent around $400 on my initial legacy deck (paid $40 for FOW and $60 for underground sea) which is now $3000+ given price spikes. Also, I have always offloaded standard cards near the end of season to a store and gotten staples at like $4 to $1 ratio.
Overall, in these past 10 years, I think I can barely break even if I sold all my current cards worth around $6000 on Ebay. So it seems like I spend on average $600 per year.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Right!!!
The direct cost of the majority of my Standard decks is typically less than $100 starting out. I think my current deck had about $40 or so put into it when I first assembled it. I probably put another $100 worth of cards into it making adjustments and tweaking it. All in all the current iteration is valued somewhere in the ball park of $150 or so. Instead of spending $400 on a Standard deck, I’d rather pump that money into Legacy cards. I do buy one box (very rarely more) for ****s and giggles then flesh out the missing pieces with single purchases so... another $600 a year depending on what Legacy singles I buy I guess.
I don’t usually calculate lost money such as entry fees, packs, consumable supplies, etc. For instance, I spend somewhere around $160 a year on inner sleeves, penny sleeves, deck sleeves and boxes. Since I do FNM nearly every Friday and pre-releases (skipping only the Ixalan block), I think I spend about $345 a year on entry fees not counting any winnings.
I never travel more than 10 minutes, 15 if traffic is bad, to my LGS so travel expenses are essentially zero.
So I’m probably under estimating costs here but I guess about $1k a year?
I was playing modern as well but recently sold off both of my decks
The negative: spent over 300$ on Standard cards which are now mostly useless. Bought a playset of goyf when they were 70$ each, now goyf is only 40-50.. so lost money. Spent money on a modern deck that was later too weak to even use at fnm, so lost money again.
Overall, I'm sure to have lost more money than I have earned. Although not by a huge margin.
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Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
Thats a draft each week for FNM, like 10-15$ or 10-15€ and you are ready to rumble.
Just doing that every week provides quite a bunch of cards to play with, instead of buying them as singles ; and store credit for winning something, or extra packs.
Magic is at its most expensive if you start with nothing and buy into a deck just to play it a little and then buy another deck of entirely different cards.
If you do that all on your own you buy into a lot of expensive stuff ; which at its best is an investment on cards that go up in value (almost all foil rares you can get for cheap can go up in value quite a lot over a long course of time like 10years).
The biggest money sink of them all is to buy into expensive STANDARD cards and keep them after they rotate out of standard, which almost all the time crushes their value massively. If a card sees no play outside of standard you have to get rid of it asap.
Older formats with stuff like Dual Lands are quite an investment as they are good cards combined with heavy investment items. All the people with lots of money to spend will at some point invest in Dual Lands, as they are a sure fire way to bank your money and grow in value over time ; its pretty much the equivalent to gold in magic cards (and funny enough lots of expensive magic cards are worth more than their weight in gold).
----
I play almost only Limited and get away fairly cheap with just some drafts for FNM.
Buy some product if its worth to do so and it keeps you happy.
Over time if someone leaves the game they sell their cards, often a lot of them in bulk, entire trading folders etc.
Bought a lot of these over time with tremendous financial gain over time.
Today people will check the value of their cards more often and sell singles online before they sell the stuff in bulk.
But the vast majority of my stuff is from buying the cards from people that left the game.
I am quite sure i attended every single Pre-Release i could get to since the beginning of time.
Maybe like ~3 or 4 i couldnt get to, so that alone is like at least 90 * 25 bucks = 2250 , but the cards gained in these events combined are way more than that, for the PreRelease promos of all of them and the cards alone.
Draft each week for 10-15€ over more than 20 years, thats like +- 50 drafts a year (cost of packs changed over time), 750€ * 20 = 15000 bucks , the vast majority of cards involved are worthless commons/uncommons you have to get rid of at some point.
Buying product outside of these events irregularly like Commander sets, the FromTheVault product line and such, is like 200€ a year approximately, at the beginning of magic a simple starter deck with a card worth the entire pack could do the trick (they sold for example decks with Umezawa's Jitte back in Kamigawa that was worth more than the pack to buy).
Its roughly 4000 bucks spend into these products over 20 years.
Buying all the bulk from people that leave the game is roughly 500 bucks a pop, very different depending on how much and what they got of course.
But easily 10000 bucks over 20 years, stuff that is worth easily 10x that much today (lots of Dual Lands and old stuff, especially in the Urzas Saga time frame, and lots of cards from Onslaught/Mirrodin, so a lot of fetchlands, a ton of random artifacts that gone up in price a lot).
Buying sleeves and other stuff is not that crazy expensive in combined total. Trading folders i have are all of the people i bought cards from and i use a lot of fairly cheap big white boxes for all kinds of bulk cards to put into and build a "wall" with.
I never spend money on playmates, simply the ones from tournaments are enough, or people get so many of them that they just gift them away (we got so many that we just put them all in our LGS at the tables, so the entire tables are "flooded" with playmates).
But say 100 bucks each year approximately, thats like 2000 bucks for 20 years.
Singles i buy here and there very infrequently. Its like 500 bucks a year, not more. 10000 bucks in total for buying singles.
So thats about it, spend approximately ; 42000 bucks in magic over 20 years time frame.
The collection of Dual lands ALONE is worth more than double that, so i made a hell of a financial gain with that hobby if i wanted to just check out of it and never touch it again.
The vast majority of value is in the old cards, as they gone up in value so insanely, its like having invested in bitcoins ...
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
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I may buy one nice collectible (sdcc promo, judge, foreign, reserved list something) for birthday/Christmas.
I probably spend ~1.5-2k a year? Having said that I'm closing the gap significantly on modern staples and in 1-2 years I'll have all T1-3 decks pretty much (missing 2-3 cards at most from any given deck, and only cards that don't overlap).
I avoid legacy because the tournaments just don't fire off around me. There have been huge gains but I feel like the game isn't going to continue to see those level of gains going forward. An underground sea could be worth ten grand, but it won't matter if no one is buying. I feel like lots of the good buys are out of reach now.
But I spend probably somewhere in the $50-$125 a month on average if I had to guess
Modern: B 8RACK B
EDH: BRU Mishra, Artificer Prodigy BRU, W Kemba, Kha Regent W, B Ghoulcaller Gisa B, BU Oona, Queen of the Fae BU, G Seton, Krosan Protector G, BW Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim BW, R Purphoros, God of the Forge R, UGW Arcades, the Strategist UGW, GW Karametra, God of Harvests GW, GU Edric, Spymaster of Trest GU, UW Grand Arbiter Augustin IV UW, BRW Kaalia of the Vast BRW, BRU Nekusar, the Mindrazer BRU, BGWU Thrasios, Triton Hero/Tymna the Weaver BGWU
If it's money I never get back, I enjoyed the entire thing. If I somehow end up making money on the cards (when I quit or, more likely, die), so much the better for my inheritance.
I have some higher-end cards, but mainly just lots of lower-value cards for my many EDH decks. In retrospect, maybe I should have bought into Legacy, but I love Commander & have kept building more & more decks.
2014: $40,450.81
2015: $43,963.45
2016: $39,402.16
2017: $20,526.52
2018: $42,456.75
2019: $6,914.26 (thus far)
Its only disgusting if the net worth of this stuff is like 90% less of what you spend (aka total loss).
Buying stuff that goes up in value, you cant really buy enough of.
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Do you buy a lot of displays and have a room full of cards? Or do you play powered Vintage?
Two Score, Minus Two or: A Stargate Tail
(Image by totallynotabrony)
I do purchase about 10-12 boxes of each new set, but that's just a drop in the bucket. The vast majority of the cost is due to my penchant for collecting decks. I have over 400 decks built. For instance, last year I bought about 30-40 Revised/Unlimited duals for various EDH and Legacy decks. I also don't swap cards between decks. If I want to build 20 decks that each need 4 Goyfs, then I purchase 80 Goyfs.
I haven't spent as much this year because I've been buying tons of anime. I also used to collect video games. I have a room in my house that's floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall (three walls) filled with games, but I've sold about 15-20% of it over the past five years since I gave that up. I'm obsessed with collecting. I can't have something be a hobby without collecting the hell out of it...
It's crazy, but it's my crazy!
I’ve sold out a few times. My collection is 10 years old at this point, and worth about $25,000 full market retail.
Take from that what you will.
O.o That is a monstrous collection. What formats do you play?
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread
Standard, Modern, Legacy, EDH, Pauper, 93/94.
Having a overview of your expenses is a very good thing, so its very valuable to reflect on.
Puts a lot of things into perspective.
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