Hey folks,
Would you make any additions or modifications to this list?
I am trying to begin the process of picking up a pool of modern playable cards from which I can start building and I thought I would start with staples.
Everyone, thank you earnestly for the advice. The replies reflect that you have actually read my longwinded posts (sorry about the length). This has been really helpful, I wish I had posted here weeks earlier.
I'm continuing to avidly read up, and playing a bit as well.
I'm happy to stay casual but I like what I see when I look at modern. I like the reasoning behind what is banned. I like the power level.
This is what I'm beginning to understand about my preferred playstyle.
I want to win incrementally. I don't mind fulfilling a win condition but I don't want it to just be some big infinite combo. I like games that feel like a match with back and forth.
I want to be faced with meaningful choices turn after turn, and win or lose by those decisions.
I like a possibility of adjusting strategies depending on the deck I face.
At the moment I have a couple of goals.
I don't quite want to just grab a decklist online and buy the exact singles I need, but I liked a couple that I saw in the link from Warmachine. I want to start acquiring modern staples especially ones that appear in overlapping decks I'm interested in.
The decks I gravitated to are
1.green tron (mono green or maybe green black?)
2.ub faeries
I'm not going to build either of these card for card, but get some of the pieces and see what I have that fits with them. Play around with budget and homebrew versions. I don't know if these decks fit the points I listed above for playstyle, I might have just locked onto them for flavor or something, I dunno.
My other big goal, and this is what I'm most exited about and stimulated by, is the idea of making a cube.
drmarkb I really appreciate those thoughts.
I let the two worst condition savannah's go already. I have a volcanic and a tropical up on ebay, even though they're blue mana I already mentally accepted losing them, because I'll still have playsets of those two. Not that I want to play them it just feels nice and complete to have four. The only reason I'd stop the auction now is to go cards for cards or inject them into cardsphere.
I might get shocks before fetches. Fetches later when I have a clearer picture of which color pairs I need four of. I like checks and fastlands a lot too. It's fun to figure out which of those two is better for a particular deck and how many.
I think I'll go ahead and crack this box of MMA. Should find somebody to draft it with I guess but I just kinda want some cards to build with and trade with and figure out what I like.
There are a few budget oriented Tron decks in the Modern metagame as well, albeit not quite as viable or competitive.
Shocklands and Fetchlands are the basis of most every competitive deck in Modern, they are essential.
Ok I'm starting to catch on. Tron is what we're calling the trio of Urza's lands now. Ok if that is still viable that should be the first deck I build I think. So now I have something to research. How to build a budget modern or pauper tron deck that has cards in common with it's more expensive big brother, so I can grow into it. Interested in mono blue or mono green tron to start. This way I have something to keep me busy and I can take my time acquiring the shocks and fetches.
Quote from KnickM » »
Personally, I'd advise strongly against Modern Masters '13. It was an AMAZING draft environment; I loved it to death, and it has some awesometastic cards. But the box cost just isn't there in value when you crack it. Modern Masters '17 is a much better entry point to Modern, since it has the fetch lands at rare and boxes can be had for significantly less than MM13 boxes.
Ackkk... read this a day too late. Pulled the trigger on a box of MM 2013 yesterday. $390 on craigslist. Maybe it's just a box of rocks, but the kid let me come in his house and really wanted me to crack it in front of him on the spot. He seemed really nice.
KnickM makes a good point on MM17 if you are into cracking packs and want to sample Modern. Again they aren't cheap. If casual is where you want to be at, no problem with that.
Yeah I'm happy to stay casual for now, it's a fun family activity with kids I care about. But I also am a gamer at heart. I was really into the crunchy mechanics of pathfinder which is a building game in it's own right, full of synergies. I'm seeing that MtG is an absolute playground for that sort of thing and the rules seem more elegant and concise and balanced. I'm bound to end up obsessed. So yeah, I'm not trying to skip my phase of casual enjoyment at all, I just want to sort of be smart about the cards I buy into and leave myself room to grow without ending up with a pile of un-moveable bulk and a lot of regret.
Trying to temper a case of pack-crack fever. But it's confusing because maybe the game gets hurt if everyone is investment minded. I mean someone has to buy bundles at LGS's right?
Oooookkkkk. Got it! So I can have my dual lands still for 2 life. Or 1 life to search for the color I need now. I like that one even better. Less flexible but that's one less land to draw later when I don't want it anymore.
These are much better than the ones I've been seeing. Coming into play tapped was not palatable to me at all.
Just seeing those I think I could get into modern. If my Urza's lands were legal I would sign on for modern for sure.
Yeah it should go without saying about sleeves but my brother and I shuffled hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars of value out of our cards. So I guess it always does need to be said.
Hey man thanks a lot for the patient responses.
Edit: I am watching Tolarian Tutor videos. I definitely want to explore control first, and get into tempo or midrange later.
Hey guys, Thanks for the replies. I'm sorry if I made this thread awkward or difficult to respond to by leading with the whole tragedy thing. I do think it's a factor in the mindset I have about these cards and this game at this moment in time though.
I'm finding myself pretty feverishly obsessed with MtG. I want to make sure I find a healthy way to enjoy the hobby. I lived in Vegas for six years and never fell victim to gambling addiction, but if they had put some dragons and elves on the slot machines I might have been in trouble. And if they had attached a fascinating well-designed and balanced game with ever-evolving strategies to the whole thing, I would have been a goner!
I can't answer your questions about what format and deck I want to play until I do some research. I don't know what all the lingo means yet.
Right now this is the setup:
My eldest brother has three kids. Each chose one of the three blocks currently in standard. They each cracked the 2 bundles corresponding to their block. Youngest (boy) is amonkhet (+hour). Middle (girl) is ixalan (+rivals). Oldest (girl) is kaladesh (+revolt). It's pretty cute. I paid for all this with cards so far but there's not much value left unless I start parting with some duals. They've added some boosters with allowance money.
What we do is we take out the bundle boxes and make decks on the spot, and play. Decks come from a single block. They know that if they go with two colors and put about 24 lands and 36 cards they will have something playable. I mean not playable by the standards on this board obviously, but we have fun games. Before this we were just using Explorers of Ixalan. This is way cooler.
The youngest one is supposed to have a grown up team-mate but lately he insists on flying solo. He can recognize the words "instant", "creature", "sorcery", "enchantment" and "artifact". He plays his cards at the appropriate step and phase, pays their mana costs correctly and everything, he just has no idea what they do until they enter the battlefield and we read them back to him. He hasn't won yet but he's playing. Before MtG he could only read his own name.
The parents also enter the fray, with premade decks (planeswakers) and do not seem to auto-win against their kids.
This little casual homebrew pseudo-draft limited whatever format makes me pretty happy and I wish it could go on forever, but I know how I am when I get into a hobby and I'm sure before long I'll be talking about the meta and archetypes and acronyms like BREAD or whatever. I'm sure the kids will get better too. Maybe soon we'll be looking at something like commander to suit our evolving needs for balanced fun casual multiplayer. Or maybe at least two-headed giant will help reign things in, it's getting pretty chaotic already with the alliances and betrayals.
So I have no idea what format or deck I'm going to end up with, I'm as casual as it gets at this point. I literally play with a kid who can't read. As far as constructed goes I hazard a guess that I will end up trying it and modern will be about my speed.
Sorry for being long winded. I've been frantically trying to figure all this stuff out like these duals were burning a hole in my pocket but I guess I just need to slow down and experience things organically.
Dominaria being a nostalgia driven set arriving just as I return to the hobby, I think I can justify indulging in some sealed product of that. Other than that maybe just start picking up singles that interest me.
I have two savannahs and one volcanic island and one underground sea up on ebay right now. I was thinking of getting a box of Modern Masters 2013 and some preorder Dominaria with the proceeds. Part of me thinks I'd be better off keeping them for trade fodder to get into some modern staples. The savannah's break up a playset, the volcanic island and underground sea are 5ths.
But I won't know what I need for staples until I know this game better. And I can't learn the game better without cards. Round and round it goes in my head...
Yeah I liked green with llanowar elves and fastbond and bird of paradise. I didn't know words like ramp or stompy or tempo or even mana curve but when I see them now I can understand pretty quickly what they must mean. I had gaea's liege in that deck and something that gave forestwalk and something that made lands into forests I think? Nothing fancy but I figured it out myself and I was proud. I guess I would splash red and white because I remember being a fan of savannah lions and kird ape. I was obsessed with having something to do every turn.
I also remember I used to play a stasis/kismet/howling mine/icy manipulator deck, and I know it wasn't something I thought of myself. Somehow I read about it and I was definitely not on the internet then. There must have been some publication going around comic stores. Icy manipulator might have been my own addition, not sure. Serra angels. It was in some magazine.
But up until then we were on our own. I didn't know any jargon or anything like that. And we totally played for ante.
Yes, Force of Nature I remember that guy! I definitely played him. Is there some bbcode tag you're using to make the image appear when I hover on your card names?
Yeah words like "revised list" are in my vocabulary now, but only just. When I say gaming group I'm talking about DnD/Pathfinder, and the group was made up of the friends of my youngest brother, 18 years my junior. I started DM'ing for them when they were little kids. Of course being gamers they played casual magic cards too, so it was right under my nose, but I never got back into it at all until now. DnD yes MtG no.
Over the years we have been through the whole "I wonder what my cards were worth" thing, and the brother closer to my own age who was around in early nineties does say "oh yeah Dan had those" if you show him a picture of moxes and black lotus. I don't remember exactly but I don't think many of these crazy cards were pack pulls. I was a middle school kid with modest allowance. What I do remember is the other kids looking at me with a raised eyebrow when I was willing to trade a 5/5 whatever for a land? Or an artifact that's basically just a land?.
In my mind I remember using all dual lands in my decks, no basics. I know memory is not as reliable as we think it is though, so who knows?
I've checked attics and basements for my mythical middle school cards but when this box came back to me via a grieving mom, I wasn't thinking about my lost cards being in there at all. But here they are. No power nine just the duals. A few binder pages of other okay revised and beta stuff. If sol rings had turned out to be revised list I would be rich! Middle school me seems to have been single mindedly obsessed with getting lots of mana fast. I see some birds of paradise here too. Fastbond.
Anyway this whole experience is a weird cocktail of emotions. Grief & nostalgia all mixed with elation at a windfall and excitement about returning to a great hobby and a great game. I'm at peak enthusiasm for magic right now and really prizing the time I spend playing it with my eldest brothers family, my youngest brother (who lost his best friend), and some coworkers too. That first day that I found them I definitely wanted to dump them for cash and crack a case or two of whatever set was on the shelf. Even now that I've been educating myself some part of me stills want to do some variation of that, but just in a more savvy way.
One thing I'm really enjoying is cracking open a bundle from a set and experiencing it almost like a comic book. Reading the flavor text of every card and wondering "what is happening on this plane?" I've done that with Ixalan, Amonkhet and Kaladesh now, and that's as far as my dollar goes unless I sell some of these vintage cards. And I am dying to see what happens when the God-Pharoah returns to Amonkhet haha. At the same time I don't want to turn a somewhat stable value nest egg of cards into a bunch of lotto tickets and feel a real let down when I realize what I've done.
I do think I would really enjoy buying and selling and trading cards and tracking their worth, but I guess it makes no sense to trade myself out of reserved list and into volatile bulk. It just sounds so fun though. I already signed up for echomtg and cardsphere and I'm just itching to put playsets of modern standards into 4-column binders and double sleeve my favorite deck with pro-mattes. Etc etc etc. I'm a bit obsessed honestly.
Yeah bayou's, I have 2 of those here and they are the only ones that look like they came out of a time capsule. They were in a binder page sandwiched between two red commons. They don't look like I even played them in middle school and indeed I don't remember playing that color combo. The colors pairs I did play and the color pairs my much younger brother played after inheriting them are really worn through. We both just thought of them as lands. Shuffled them into oblivion, greasy pizza fingers, whatever. I have a black border icy manipulator here that still says mono artifact. It's so so beat up because I remember we didn't realize you had to tap it. We thought it was the most broken card ever.
Above all, thanks for mentioning meditation and prayer. I happen to be a person who practices both and hadn't remembered to in this instance.
My familiy and my gaming group recently suffered a tragedy. My younger brothers best friend, a core member of our longtime gaming group, took his own life. His mother asked me to dispose of a collection of magic cards that were causing her pain by reminding her of her son. When I went through the cards it turned out that many of them had belonged to my youngest brother... and among them in a box of basic lands were 25 revised dual lands (also one beta) which I had collected during the only three years of my life in which I played MTG. 1993-1995. The rest of the valuable stuff I had, power nine and everything, is gone, but these duals made their way back to me after sitting forgotten for a long time.
Coincidentally, I have been playing magic again since christmas, when my other brother and his wife suggested I give the game as a gift to my nieces and nephews so we all could play together. I'm really enjoying it and when I saw those dual lands I had a huge urge to convert them to cash and buy a boatload of sealed product and go nuts cracking packs.
Luckily I did some reading before I acted on that impulse.
I understand now that converting these cards into almost any other cards will be financially inadvisable but I still feel inclined to indulge myself to some extent. I like the idea of having a good sized collection and a nice trade binder and diving into this hobby. I really think I want to sell a few of these reserved list cards and buy some more enjoyable cards even if they are less stable in value. I just want to do it in a smarter way than cracking a case of one of the printed into oblivion recent or forthcoming sets. I have thought about buying a small collection or two on craigslist, with the aim of getting into some playsets of modern staples and having some nice trading fodder. Would that be a crazy idea?
What are the best resources for evaluating and inventorying cards? Would it be better to try to trade cards for cards rather than cashing out and trying to buy singles?
Any thoughts?
One things for sure I don't want to make many moves with these cards until I think it over and understand the MtG environment a little better. I wacked a pair of savannahs up on ebay thinking I wouldnt miss them because I don't have any ideas for green white and they were some of the poorer condition cards. But right away I started regretting breaking up a playset and I'm thinking of ending the auction.
This game meant a lot to me as a kid who felt like an outsider and I would really like to get back into it. My financial situation is so strained that short of finding these dual lands there would be no way I could start a collection at all.
Would you make any additions or modifications to this list?
I am trying to begin the process of picking up a pool of modern playable cards from which I can start building and I thought I would start with staples.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/how-build/staples-modern-2017-03-07
Has anything changed much in a year since that article?
------
I'm continuing to avidly read up, and playing a bit as well.
I'm happy to stay casual but I like what I see when I look at modern. I like the reasoning behind what is banned. I like the power level.
This is what I'm beginning to understand about my preferred playstyle.
I want to win incrementally. I don't mind fulfilling a win condition but I don't want it to just be some big infinite combo. I like games that feel like a match with back and forth.
I want to be faced with meaningful choices turn after turn, and win or lose by those decisions.
I like a possibility of adjusting strategies depending on the deck I face.
At the moment I have a couple of goals.
I don't quite want to just grab a decklist online and buy the exact singles I need, but I liked a couple that I saw in the link from Warmachine. I want to start acquiring modern staples especially ones that appear in overlapping decks I'm interested in.
The decks I gravitated to are
1.green tron (mono green or maybe green black?)
2.ub faeries
I'm not going to build either of these card for card, but get some of the pieces and see what I have that fits with them. Play around with budget and homebrew versions. I don't know if these decks fit the points I listed above for playstyle, I might have just locked onto them for flavor or something, I dunno.
My other big goal, and this is what I'm most exited about and stimulated by, is the idea of making a cube.
drmarkb I really appreciate those thoughts.
I let the two worst condition savannah's go already. I have a volcanic and a tropical up on ebay, even though they're blue mana I already mentally accepted losing them, because I'll still have playsets of those two. Not that I want to play them it just feels nice and complete to have four. The only reason I'd stop the auction now is to go cards for cards or inject them into cardsphere.
I might get shocks before fetches. Fetches later when I have a clearer picture of which color pairs I need four of. I like checks and fastlands a lot too. It's fun to figure out which of those two is better for a particular deck and how many.
I think I'll go ahead and crack this box of MMA. Should find somebody to draft it with I guess but I just kinda want some cards to build with and trade with and figure out what I like.
Ok I'm starting to catch on. Tron is what we're calling the trio of Urza's lands now. Ok if that is still viable that should be the first deck I build I think. So now I have something to research. How to build a budget modern or pauper tron deck that has cards in common with it's more expensive big brother, so I can grow into it. Interested in mono blue or mono green tron to start. This way I have something to keep me busy and I can take my time acquiring the shocks and fetches.
Ackkk... read this a day too late. Pulled the trigger on a box of MM 2013 yesterday. $390 on craigslist. Maybe it's just a box of rocks, but the kid let me come in his house and really wanted me to crack it in front of him on the spot. He seemed really nice.
Yeah I'm happy to stay casual for now, it's a fun family activity with kids I care about. But I also am a gamer at heart. I was really into the crunchy mechanics of pathfinder which is a building game in it's own right, full of synergies. I'm seeing that MtG is an absolute playground for that sort of thing and the rules seem more elegant and concise and balanced. I'm bound to end up obsessed. So yeah, I'm not trying to skip my phase of casual enjoyment at all, I just want to sort of be smart about the cards I buy into and leave myself room to grow without ending up with a pile of un-moveable bulk and a lot of regret.
Trying to temper a case of pack-crack fever. But it's confusing because maybe the game gets hurt if everyone is investment minded. I mean someone has to buy bundles at LGS's right?
These are much better than the ones I've been seeing. Coming into play tapped was not palatable to me at all.
Just seeing those I think I could get into modern. If my Urza's lands were legal I would sign on for modern for sure.
Yeah it should go without saying about sleeves but my brother and I shuffled hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars of value out of our cards. So I guess it always does need to be said.
Hey man thanks a lot for the patient responses.
Edit: I am watching Tolarian Tutor videos. I definitely want to explore control first, and get into tempo or midrange later.
I'm finding myself pretty feverishly obsessed with MtG. I want to make sure I find a healthy way to enjoy the hobby. I lived in Vegas for six years and never fell victim to gambling addiction, but if they had put some dragons and elves on the slot machines I might have been in trouble. And if they had attached a fascinating well-designed and balanced game with ever-evolving strategies to the whole thing, I would have been a goner!
I can't answer your questions about what format and deck I want to play until I do some research. I don't know what all the lingo means yet.
Right now this is the setup:
My eldest brother has three kids. Each chose one of the three blocks currently in standard. They each cracked the 2 bundles corresponding to their block. Youngest (boy) is amonkhet (+hour). Middle (girl) is ixalan (+rivals). Oldest (girl) is kaladesh (+revolt). It's pretty cute. I paid for all this with cards so far but there's not much value left unless I start parting with some duals. They've added some boosters with allowance money.
What we do is we take out the bundle boxes and make decks on the spot, and play. Decks come from a single block. They know that if they go with two colors and put about 24 lands and 36 cards they will have something playable. I mean not playable by the standards on this board obviously, but we have fun games. Before this we were just using Explorers of Ixalan. This is way cooler.
The youngest one is supposed to have a grown up team-mate but lately he insists on flying solo. He can recognize the words "instant", "creature", "sorcery", "enchantment" and "artifact". He plays his cards at the appropriate step and phase, pays their mana costs correctly and everything, he just has no idea what they do until they enter the battlefield and we read them back to him. He hasn't won yet but he's playing. Before MtG he could only read his own name.
The parents also enter the fray, with premade decks (planeswakers) and do not seem to auto-win against their kids.
This little casual homebrew pseudo-draft limited whatever format makes me pretty happy and I wish it could go on forever, but I know how I am when I get into a hobby and I'm sure before long I'll be talking about the meta and archetypes and acronyms like BREAD or whatever. I'm sure the kids will get better too. Maybe soon we'll be looking at something like commander to suit our evolving needs for balanced fun casual multiplayer. Or maybe at least two-headed giant will help reign things in, it's getting pretty chaotic already with the alliances and betrayals.
So I have no idea what format or deck I'm going to end up with, I'm as casual as it gets at this point. I literally play with a kid who can't read. As far as constructed goes I hazard a guess that I will end up trying it and modern will be about my speed.
Sorry for being long winded. I've been frantically trying to figure all this stuff out like these duals were burning a hole in my pocket but I guess I just need to slow down and experience things organically.
Dominaria being a nostalgia driven set arriving just as I return to the hobby, I think I can justify indulging in some sealed product of that. Other than that maybe just start picking up singles that interest me.
I have two savannahs and one volcanic island and one underground sea up on ebay right now. I was thinking of getting a box of Modern Masters 2013 and some preorder Dominaria with the proceeds. Part of me thinks I'd be better off keeping them for trade fodder to get into some modern staples. The savannah's break up a playset, the volcanic island and underground sea are 5ths.
But I won't know what I need for staples until I know this game better. And I can't learn the game better without cards. Round and round it goes in my head...
Yeah I liked green with llanowar elves and fastbond and bird of paradise. I didn't know words like ramp or stompy or tempo or even mana curve but when I see them now I can understand pretty quickly what they must mean. I had gaea's liege in that deck and something that gave forestwalk and something that made lands into forests I think? Nothing fancy but I figured it out myself and I was proud. I guess I would splash red and white because I remember being a fan of savannah lions and kird ape. I was obsessed with having something to do every turn.
I also remember I used to play a stasis/kismet/howling mine/icy manipulator deck, and I know it wasn't something I thought of myself. Somehow I read about it and I was definitely not on the internet then. There must have been some publication going around comic stores. Icy manipulator might have been my own addition, not sure. Serra angels. It was in some magazine.
But up until then we were on our own. I didn't know any jargon or anything like that. And we totally played for ante.
Yeah words like "revised list" are in my vocabulary now, but only just. When I say gaming group I'm talking about DnD/Pathfinder, and the group was made up of the friends of my youngest brother, 18 years my junior. I started DM'ing for them when they were little kids. Of course being gamers they played casual magic cards too, so it was right under my nose, but I never got back into it at all until now. DnD yes MtG no.
Over the years we have been through the whole "I wonder what my cards were worth" thing, and the brother closer to my own age who was around in early nineties does say "oh yeah Dan had those" if you show him a picture of moxes and black lotus. I don't remember exactly but I don't think many of these crazy cards were pack pulls. I was a middle school kid with modest allowance. What I do remember is the other kids looking at me with a raised eyebrow when I was willing to trade a 5/5 whatever for a land? Or an artifact that's basically just a land?.
In my mind I remember using all dual lands in my decks, no basics. I know memory is not as reliable as we think it is though, so who knows?
I've checked attics and basements for my mythical middle school cards but when this box came back to me via a grieving mom, I wasn't thinking about my lost cards being in there at all. But here they are. No power nine just the duals. A few binder pages of other okay revised and beta stuff. If sol rings had turned out to be revised list I would be rich! Middle school me seems to have been single mindedly obsessed with getting lots of mana fast. I see some birds of paradise here too. Fastbond.
Anyway this whole experience is a weird cocktail of emotions. Grief & nostalgia all mixed with elation at a windfall and excitement about returning to a great hobby and a great game. I'm at peak enthusiasm for magic right now and really prizing the time I spend playing it with my eldest brothers family, my youngest brother (who lost his best friend), and some coworkers too. That first day that I found them I definitely wanted to dump them for cash and crack a case or two of whatever set was on the shelf. Even now that I've been educating myself some part of me stills want to do some variation of that, but just in a more savvy way.
One thing I'm really enjoying is cracking open a bundle from a set and experiencing it almost like a comic book. Reading the flavor text of every card and wondering "what is happening on this plane?" I've done that with Ixalan, Amonkhet and Kaladesh now, and that's as far as my dollar goes unless I sell some of these vintage cards. And I am dying to see what happens when the God-Pharoah returns to Amonkhet haha. At the same time I don't want to turn a somewhat stable value nest egg of cards into a bunch of lotto tickets and feel a real let down when I realize what I've done.
I do think I would really enjoy buying and selling and trading cards and tracking their worth, but I guess it makes no sense to trade myself out of reserved list and into volatile bulk. It just sounds so fun though. I already signed up for echomtg and cardsphere and I'm just itching to put playsets of modern standards into 4-column binders and double sleeve my favorite deck with pro-mattes. Etc etc etc. I'm a bit obsessed honestly.
Yeah bayou's, I have 2 of those here and they are the only ones that look like they came out of a time capsule. They were in a binder page sandwiched between two red commons. They don't look like I even played them in middle school and indeed I don't remember playing that color combo. The colors pairs I did play and the color pairs my much younger brother played after inheriting them are really worn through. We both just thought of them as lands. Shuffled them into oblivion, greasy pizza fingers, whatever. I have a black border icy manipulator here that still says mono artifact. It's so so beat up because I remember we didn't realize you had to tap it. We thought it was the most broken card ever.
Above all, thanks for mentioning meditation and prayer. I happen to be a person who practices both and hadn't remembered to in this instance.
I don't know if this is the right place for this.
My familiy and my gaming group recently suffered a tragedy. My younger brothers best friend, a core member of our longtime gaming group, took his own life. His mother asked me to dispose of a collection of magic cards that were causing her pain by reminding her of her son. When I went through the cards it turned out that many of them had belonged to my youngest brother... and among them in a box of basic lands were 25 revised dual lands (also one beta) which I had collected during the only three years of my life in which I played MTG. 1993-1995. The rest of the valuable stuff I had, power nine and everything, is gone, but these duals made their way back to me after sitting forgotten for a long time.
Coincidentally, I have been playing magic again since christmas, when my other brother and his wife suggested I give the game as a gift to my nieces and nephews so we all could play together. I'm really enjoying it and when I saw those dual lands I had a huge urge to convert them to cash and buy a boatload of sealed product and go nuts cracking packs.
Luckily I did some reading before I acted on that impulse.
I understand now that converting these cards into almost any other cards will be financially inadvisable but I still feel inclined to indulge myself to some extent. I like the idea of having a good sized collection and a nice trade binder and diving into this hobby. I really think I want to sell a few of these reserved list cards and buy some more enjoyable cards even if they are less stable in value. I just want to do it in a smarter way than cracking a case of one of the printed into oblivion recent or forthcoming sets. I have thought about buying a small collection or two on craigslist, with the aim of getting into some playsets of modern staples and having some nice trading fodder. Would that be a crazy idea?
What are the best resources for evaluating and inventorying cards? Would it be better to try to trade cards for cards rather than cashing out and trying to buy singles?
Any thoughts?
One things for sure I don't want to make many moves with these cards until I think it over and understand the MtG environment a little better. I wacked a pair of savannahs up on ebay thinking I wouldnt miss them because I don't have any ideas for green white and they were some of the poorer condition cards. But right away I started regretting breaking up a playset and I'm thinking of ending the auction.
This game meant a lot to me as a kid who felt like an outsider and I would really like to get back into it. My financial situation is so strained that short of finding these dual lands there would be no way I could start a collection at all.