There is no such thing as a crappy Magic card

Or at least, not in value... In this short opinion piece, I`m taking a look back at how I manage to play `for free` during the year, AND how I can fund my Legodiction with them.

Now, as most know, being a very season bound player for Magic the Gathering, I don`t tend to invest in the next big thing or keep heavy trade binders.

I usually play during the summer months, when the weather is more pleasant to be waiting on the bus at night, but also because other obligations are then far lower in time intensity.  This means I play most of my events usually in the Limited formats, being either Draft or Sealed.

This of course results in shoe boxes of common and uncommon cards of the not to playable kind, something that tends to happen at drafts, and a collection of what is labelled `crap rares`.  Surely, Planeswalkers and usually the rare lands tend to go for a few euros, but no love is handed out to that poor Tromokratis and his 20 cents value or such.

WRONG

For almost every card, somewhere out there is a collector that looks to complete all the sets, and who is constantly looking around for those cards.  Now, usually people rarely bother hauling them along on trades, and in webstores they tend to go in the 1 euro category, which is not that cheap, considering you can usually get a full playset of those cards on sites like Magic Card Market for half the price.

I personally tend to use the cards I draft and pick and win with the complementary booster on Friday Night Magic`s to be listed right away.  And since my mediocre skills, I rarely get to pick `money rares`.

But on the other hand, since I don`t follow the hypes in Constructed, and just tend to go `boom boom boom` with red, I don`t have any big expenses on new cards every few weeks neither.

This allows me to channel the values I do get to go to other sources, in my case, bricks.  Considering that the value of a playset of common or uncommon `bulk cards` is only a measly 2 eurocents, that doesn`t sound like the effort to sort and list out everything.  But for 2 cents, you also get one single Lego basic brick over on Brick Link.

So that means:

 equals

But this also means:

 equals

If of course you have the luck to pull open some `money rares` on the moment when they are hot and before the set settles in and prices start dropping, the equation goes up far more.  A new and good Planeswalker can easily get you 20 euros on the first weeks, a steady 10 during the set, only to sink after rotation unless it is a classic deckstaple for the eternal formats.

But those are NOT the cards that intrest me actually.  I usually use the TradeCardsOnline website to exchange a heap of cards for Lego Collectible Minifigures.  Because Magic is a hobby that tends to `exist` alongside someones other hobbies, being not that place intensive (if you keep it within reason).

I`m that kind of person that gladly takes over the whole collection of crap commons and such that people tend to throw away because `it is not worth it`.  Friends quitting Magic or just keeping the rares for trade, but not caring about those boxes full of common and uncommon junk?  I`ve always gladly accepted all those cards, and put in the hours and hours of sorting, making playsets, and updating my `have` and `want` lists.  Packing cards up and bringing them to the mail office?  With pleasure, because that means one of the days a parcel of bricks will be falling in my postbox.

Of course, if you`re looking to become a filthy rich card trader, these words weren`t ment for you, but if you`re looking to get a place to save those crap boxes from going on the old paper, contact me and you might as well just give them to me, you`ll get the satisfactory feeling that at some Lego convention, some child is watching some build of which some bricks are there thanks to it ;-)

So yes, if I make the tally this year, my cards have not only gotten me a nice amount of Planeswalker Points, my first two event victories and some nice times, which are rather priceless, but also did they allow me to technically buy the whole year for free on cards, AND gotten me the complete latest wave of The Hobbit sets from Lego.

Not bad for someone with a skill set that is just only above `holding the cards in the right direction`...