Like many of you, I started playing during Revised as well.
You just reminded me of a part of my story I should have included. I actually started playing with Unlimited. But everyone warned me to not buy my own cards until the new Revised Edition came out. It would have the new rulebook with much clarified rules and be better balanced. I didn't want to be playing with outdated rules and cards. So I played with friends' decks and waited and waited and then bought my own cards the first day that Revised was available in my local shop.
I started playing local tournaments early in 1994 and did so through about 1997.
In 1994, none of the local shops hosted such things. One had a game room but it was used for RPGs or wargames. Magic was just played there on the side or between rounds. Events were usually held in pizza places back rooms and almost exclusively attended by college students. Nothing was sanctioned. I live in a major city, so there was a relatively large community.
Someone would put up a booster box or a handful of rare cards as prizes. Admission would be $5-10 to cover the price of the prizes. If you had a mox you wanted to unload, this was the preferred way. They were worth $50ish, but you could get 20 people paying $5 apiece to compete for one with a few boosters or something for second and third place. The rules and structure were decided by the donor, including arbitrary banned lists, and ante rules. Multiplayer games and single elimination ladders were the most common. You would see a lot of really random decks. In those days there were no official spoilers so sometimes you would see cards you'd never heard of too. At some early events I attended, if someone had a reputation as a net-decker, they would be kicked out. The same for anyone using card sleeves. This was the time in which I played the most competitively and I won half of my collection, including the sets I had missed buying.
Around the release of Ice Age, everyone started playing by the same rules. Events became either Type 1 or Type 2. Ante and multiplayer disappeared from competitive. Net-decking was still socially unacceptable but would only get you hated on instead of kicked and half of the people, including pretty much all of the winners were getting their deck lists from magazines, BBS's, or friends with access to these. Sealed deck became a thing because Ice Age was self-complete but it wasn't super popular.
Around Mirage, everything got even more formalized. A lot of events moved back into shops. The competitive crowd got younger as older players dropped out and were replaced by high-schoolers. I remember the tipping point when they got sick of the "kids" and their new janky cards. A lot of them cashed out. One guy I knew traded his deck for his first car, a Camaro.
Drafting became more of a thing with Tempest, but it still wasn't very popular. This was about when I completely stopped playing competitively. I had a lot of friends who did though. Arena drew in a lot of people and started the trend of places doing sanctioned tournaments. Sleeves were officially disallowed at sanctioned events at this time. Was there anything else you wanted to know specifically about?
I have looked at a number of these to hang on my wall. None that I have found are great. The biggest problem I have is cards randomly slipping out of their spots when someone walks by. Also some do not have UV protection and the cards fade over time if you have them on display. I settled on some ultra-pro 6-slot ones a few years ago. The cards are hard to get in correctly but they don't fall out when you get it ratcheted down. I've had six of my favorite cards on the wall for about 4 years now and they still look great.
Actually you probably could get them cut out pretty cheap. Most full-service binderies could cut them out and round the corners in about 10-20 minutes. You just would have to know someone to get it done. Heck a good kinko's may even have all the equipment necessary.
I used to work in a high-volume print shop. It's actually much more difficult than it sounds. First, to do it correctly you need a pneumatic press and the proper cutting die. Even if you have access to this, you need to calibrate and align it which usually means running through several test sheets first. People usually don't have a couple dozen extra Magic sheets to burn just to get the equipment set up. And if you do it without all that, cards that are even slightly off immediately stand out and look/feel wrong.
why not just miscut the hell out of it and say its super rare? lol
There is someone already doing something similar on eBay. For the past couple years they have bought out all of the uncut sheets they can lay hands on and are butchering them. To their credit, they are clearly selling them as not factory cut. I have some and the cutting isn't perfect. But I have already seen several people trying to resell them as factory miscuts. They have already chopped about a dozen sheets that I know of.
They're not the first. In the early days of Magic, Cartamundi used overhead stock to pad their pallets. A few distributors gave/sold these off and some got chopped for funsies. Then later, a ton of Arena lands sheets were given away as prize support and some people fraudulently cut them and tried to sell them as factory miscut.
I attached a few of my after-market cut recent acquisitions.
I neglected to mention above what I actually ended up doing. My collection was formally appraised at close to $80k. This made the insurance payments cost prohibitive. Additionally, many companies wouldn't touch it because of the value. Or they would insure it but only up to a certain much lower point. I actually cashed out about $20k in extra cards just to make room and bring down the value of my collection.
I have a single room of my house dedicated to my collectibles. I had a security company install a system with motion sensors, vibration sensors, and 24/7 video surveillance. In case of an alarm, I and the police are instantly notified. I had a safe installed. As mentioned above, the fire-rating isn't really that important. The contents may not catch fire but they will get hot enough for all plastics to melt and pretty much all decent card holders are plastic. Then, I got a safety deposit box for the best of the best.
The security system monthly payment plus the cost of the safe amortized over ten years plus the cost of the safety deposit box is still cheaper than insurance would have been. Although I checked out collectinsure.com just now, and they will (narrowly) cover my collection at a much cheaper rate than the companies I was looking at previously. I will probably get insurance with them.
When the Kamigawa statues came out they rotted on shelves. Years later you could buy them for less than half of MSRP.
I think the Pops are doing better just because that product line is more popular and established. I really don't care for the storyline but if they made figures of some monsters I like I might buy a few.
I went through all the steps to insure my collection but never pulled the trigger because of cost.
My regular insurance company would cover collectibles but only to an extent without it being listed and itemized specifically on the agreement. So if my house burned down, I would have to report their destruction, prove I owned them, prove their value (not an easy feat), and after all that I think the maximum payout would be like $1000. They didn't allow riders for collectible cards specifically but were able to direct me to one of the few companies that would.
Then I had to have my collection appraised by an impartial authority. There are not a lot of entities which are both considered authorities and who are willing to do this. Due to the sheer size of my collection, over 90% of it was valued at a bulk rate, something like $5 per 1000 cards. Anything under about $20 wasn't worth my time to separate out. All items $200 or over had to be individually documented and photographed. Additionally, I would have to report any changes in the collection on an annual basis to keep my coverage. The going rate for insuring a collectible of this nature is 1% of the value of the collection per year. So, if your collection is valued at $100,000, the annual cost would be $1000 collected as monthly $84 payments.
At least this is my personal experience here in California. YMMV.
It depends on the card. I keep a minumum of 1 playset of any given card. Maybe I will eventually find a use for it and want a playset on hand. I've surprised myself before. This tier is mostly for garbage cards that are worse than something else, which is most cards in Magic.
If the card can work in multiple decks, I keep 4-6 playsets depending on how good it is. I have regretted getting rid of multiples of good playable cards that were just excess at the time.
If a card is a staple that can go into nearly any deck, I keep them all. Waste not, want not. I will never run out of Counterspells or Sol Rings or Hymn to Tourachs, which is vital because I run them in pretty much every deck of their respective colors.
For example, I maintain:
4 Shock - This will probably never get run unless I am doing something like singleton pauper burn. You never know though.
16 Incinerate - I may run a playset in a dedicated burn deck, but not outside of one, there are better choices.
24 Rift Bolt - I will run this in burn decks and may run it in other decks.
200+ Lightning Bolt - This goes into pretty much every deck that uses red.
Granted, my system is not the easiest. My cards are sorted alphabetically by color in 4-row long-boxes. It takes significant time to sort and evaluate every card. I try to keep myself under 100k cards but am usually over. Valuable cards that I do not run are the only ones I cash out. Any excess cards get stacked into file boxes. When the box is full I load it into long-boxes and give them away to children and newbies.
As described, I don't buy the narrative that these two completely innocent sisters were driven away by the horrible spikes. When their mistake was pointed out, if they had either admitted it or called a judge for clarification, would a "shouting match" have ensued? No; and it takes two to have a shouting match. Scooping and leaving when you don't get your way isn't very sportsmanlike behavior either. Even in the description of the situation, as is, the only thing the spikes did wrong was to allow a disagreement to turn into an argument before calling a judge, which the sisters also did. In their shoes, I wouldn't have allowed a do-over either, and I usually play casual.
WotC has never guaranteed the rarity of cards in packs or boxes; they only guarantee a certain number of cards in playable condition. As such, it is against their policy to replace product with unusual rarity. They have done it a few times for a pack here or there, but I really really doubt if they would start issuing replacements or refunds for mythic-less boxes. They have zero obligation to do so, it's impossible for someone to prove, and it sets a bad precedent.
Update to this necrothread: I have now opened somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-100 booster boxes personally. 2 is still the lowest I've gotten and 8 is still the most.
WotC employees have to sign non-disclosure agreements. I doubt if too many are willing to risk their careers so that their buddies can make a few bucks.
Additional fun trivia:
Legends was submitted with a Fog clone in all five colors. The green one was cut because it was seen as redundant. Development killed the red and blue ones as being too powerful in those colors.
My shop ordered 12 boxes (the maximum allotment for us). All 12 boxes were cancelled. I spoke with the distributor personally. They claimed that WotC had not been able to deliver the amount of MM2 that had been pre-ordered on time. So they cancelled the rest of the orders instead of leaving them in limbo which WotC may or may not eventually honor and fill. They have no information one way or the other as to whether WotC will be producing and releasing more boxes. So we made an order through a second distributor for 8 boxes and were given 2.
If they were kept sealed for a long time, they would be slightly thinner (noticeably so when looking closely) than a copy opened in say 1994.
This is exactly right. There have been a lot of CE/IE sets broken up in the past few years to resell since the value is booming. Cards opened today feel different and are measurably thinner than cards opened 2 years ago, much less 20 years ago. I would expect a minty CE card I bought today to feel thinner and flimsier than the rest of my played ABU cards.
I've always read that they were printed 'using Alpha Beta plates and inks'.
Beta, Unlimited, CE, and IE all shared plates, yes.
If you can stand it, maybe tear one one of the $.01 ones like Purelace and see if it has that blue layer in the card.
Please don't. CE/IE are some of the smallest print runs in the game. There's no mystery here. Nobody fakes CE because of the gold foil. It's vastly more work with less payoff than just faking Beta or Unlimited. If you're paranoid, do the light and dot tests. Those combined will find every single fake ever made to date and they are non-destructive.
You just reminded me of a part of my story I should have included. I actually started playing with Unlimited. But everyone warned me to not buy my own cards until the new Revised Edition came out. It would have the new rulebook with much clarified rules and be better balanced. I didn't want to be playing with outdated rules and cards. So I played with friends' decks and waited and waited and then bought my own cards the first day that Revised was available in my local shop.
In 1994, none of the local shops hosted such things. One had a game room but it was used for RPGs or wargames. Magic was just played there on the side or between rounds. Events were usually held in pizza places back rooms and almost exclusively attended by college students. Nothing was sanctioned. I live in a major city, so there was a relatively large community.
Someone would put up a booster box or a handful of rare cards as prizes. Admission would be $5-10 to cover the price of the prizes. If you had a mox you wanted to unload, this was the preferred way. They were worth $50ish, but you could get 20 people paying $5 apiece to compete for one with a few boosters or something for second and third place. The rules and structure were decided by the donor, including arbitrary banned lists, and ante rules. Multiplayer games and single elimination ladders were the most common. You would see a lot of really random decks. In those days there were no official spoilers so sometimes you would see cards you'd never heard of too. At some early events I attended, if someone had a reputation as a net-decker, they would be kicked out. The same for anyone using card sleeves. This was the time in which I played the most competitively and I won half of my collection, including the sets I had missed buying.
Around the release of Ice Age, everyone started playing by the same rules. Events became either Type 1 or Type 2. Ante and multiplayer disappeared from competitive. Net-decking was still socially unacceptable but would only get you hated on instead of kicked and half of the people, including pretty much all of the winners were getting their deck lists from magazines, BBS's, or friends with access to these. Sealed deck became a thing because Ice Age was self-complete but it wasn't super popular.
Around Mirage, everything got even more formalized. A lot of events moved back into shops. The competitive crowd got younger as older players dropped out and were replaced by high-schoolers. I remember the tipping point when they got sick of the "kids" and their new janky cards. A lot of them cashed out. One guy I knew traded his deck for his first car, a Camaro.
Drafting became more of a thing with Tempest, but it still wasn't very popular. This was about when I completely stopped playing competitively. I had a lot of friends who did though. Arena drew in a lot of people and started the trend of places doing sanctioned tournaments. Sleeves were officially disallowed at sanctioned events at this time. Was there anything else you wanted to know specifically about?
I used to work in a high-volume print shop. It's actually much more difficult than it sounds. First, to do it correctly you need a pneumatic press and the proper cutting die. Even if you have access to this, you need to calibrate and align it which usually means running through several test sheets first. People usually don't have a couple dozen extra Magic sheets to burn just to get the equipment set up. And if you do it without all that, cards that are even slightly off immediately stand out and look/feel wrong.
There is someone already doing something similar on eBay. For the past couple years they have bought out all of the uncut sheets they can lay hands on and are butchering them. To their credit, they are clearly selling them as not factory cut. I have some and the cutting isn't perfect. But I have already seen several people trying to resell them as factory miscuts. They have already chopped about a dozen sheets that I know of.
They're not the first. In the early days of Magic, Cartamundi used overhead stock to pad their pallets. A few distributors gave/sold these off and some got chopped for funsies. Then later, a ton of Arena lands sheets were given away as prize support and some people fraudulently cut them and tried to sell them as factory miscut.
I attached a few of my after-market cut recent acquisitions.
I have a single room of my house dedicated to my collectibles. I had a security company install a system with motion sensors, vibration sensors, and 24/7 video surveillance. In case of an alarm, I and the police are instantly notified. I had a safe installed. As mentioned above, the fire-rating isn't really that important. The contents may not catch fire but they will get hot enough for all plastics to melt and pretty much all decent card holders are plastic. Then, I got a safety deposit box for the best of the best.
The security system monthly payment plus the cost of the safe amortized over ten years plus the cost of the safety deposit box is still cheaper than insurance would have been. Although I checked out collectinsure.com just now, and they will (narrowly) cover my collection at a much cheaper rate than the companies I was looking at previously. I will probably get insurance with them.
I think the Pops are doing better just because that product line is more popular and established. I really don't care for the storyline but if they made figures of some monsters I like I might buy a few.
My regular insurance company would cover collectibles but only to an extent without it being listed and itemized specifically on the agreement. So if my house burned down, I would have to report their destruction, prove I owned them, prove their value (not an easy feat), and after all that I think the maximum payout would be like $1000. They didn't allow riders for collectible cards specifically but were able to direct me to one of the few companies that would.
Then I had to have my collection appraised by an impartial authority. There are not a lot of entities which are both considered authorities and who are willing to do this. Due to the sheer size of my collection, over 90% of it was valued at a bulk rate, something like $5 per 1000 cards. Anything under about $20 wasn't worth my time to separate out. All items $200 or over had to be individually documented and photographed. Additionally, I would have to report any changes in the collection on an annual basis to keep my coverage. The going rate for insuring a collectible of this nature is 1% of the value of the collection per year. So, if your collection is valued at $100,000, the annual cost would be $1000 collected as monthly $84 payments.
At least this is my personal experience here in California. YMMV.
If the card can work in multiple decks, I keep 4-6 playsets depending on how good it is. I have regretted getting rid of multiples of good playable cards that were just excess at the time.
If a card is a staple that can go into nearly any deck, I keep them all. Waste not, want not. I will never run out of Counterspells or Sol Rings or Hymn to Tourachs, which is vital because I run them in pretty much every deck of their respective colors.
For example, I maintain:
4 Shock - This will probably never get run unless I am doing something like singleton pauper burn. You never know though.
16 Incinerate - I may run a playset in a dedicated burn deck, but not outside of one, there are better choices.
24 Rift Bolt - I will run this in burn decks and may run it in other decks.
200+ Lightning Bolt - This goes into pretty much every deck that uses red.
Granted, my system is not the easiest. My cards are sorted alphabetically by color in 4-row long-boxes. It takes significant time to sort and evaluate every card. I try to keep myself under 100k cards but am usually over. Valuable cards that I do not run are the only ones I cash out. Any excess cards get stacked into file boxes. When the box is full I load it into long-boxes and give them away to children and newbies.
Update to this necrothread: I have now opened somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-100 booster boxes personally. 2 is still the lowest I've gotten and 8 is still the most.
Legends was submitted with a Fog clone in all five colors. The green one was cut because it was seen as redundant. Development killed the red and blue ones as being too powerful in those colors.
This is exactly right. There have been a lot of CE/IE sets broken up in the past few years to resell since the value is booming. Cards opened today feel different and are measurably thinner than cards opened 2 years ago, much less 20 years ago. I would expect a minty CE card I bought today to feel thinner and flimsier than the rest of my played ABU cards.
Beta, Unlimited, CE, and IE all shared plates, yes.
Please don't. CE/IE are some of the smallest print runs in the game. There's no mystery here. Nobody fakes CE because of the gold foil. It's vastly more work with less payoff than just faking Beta or Unlimited. If you're paranoid, do the light and dot tests. Those combined will find every single fake ever made to date and they are non-destructive.