How This Card Game Accidentally Became a Stock Market

You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription.

Writing by Sam Denby and Tristan Purdy
Editing by Alexander Williard
Animation led by Max Moser
Sound by Graham Haerther
Thumbnail by Simon Buckmaster

[stigmaoftherose]

The 3 million dollar sale for that black lotus was considered a fraudulent sale. It was a new grading company "selling" it to someone else in the company to falsely legitimize their grading service.

[zimbu_]

Finally a thing AI can't beat humans at: cheating at shuffling.

[MujaffaElAchmedAlSharif]

I imagine Sam sounds like he does because he has been yelling at Ben and Adam. Not in a negative sense, just "Look at that!"

[soasertsus]

the one ring is broken actually it's very heavily played in every format its legal in and people regularly ask for it to be banned

[kenroth]

People ask me how I ended up getting such a large collection. Was it having owned a game store in the past? Nah. It was starting to play in 1993 and just being a hoarder. If you don't get rid of cards, you'll always be able to build any deck you want! Oh and accidentally be able to buy a house with them or some silliness.

[Shadowpatin]

Even the cheapest One Ring printing is $120. The card is likely getting banned in one or more formats come December. That card is nuts not mediocre like you make it sound lol.

[deathkitty]

Calling the one ring "not that big of an advantage" is a pretty hot take as it's the most played cards in Modern (with a 43% share of the metagame) and has a pricetag of $100 a pop.

[wiyum]

As an avid MTG and commander player : Just Proxy the expensive stuff, nobody cares. Cardboard was never meant to be this expensive.

[sentientwaffle]

Small correction, the Commander RC isn't 30 years old, the game itself is. Commander is about that old, but the RC is only ~18 years old

[justfrankjustdank]

oh god, this video is going to take up a big part of the mistakes video for this year

[andyburchette]

Black Lotus very much can you win you a game; a tournament game at that. In 2019 there was a Vintage Champs top 8 game won by a player who turned black lotus into a 3/3 elk with Oko and swung for game.

[ltjgambrose]

A note from someone who plays a lot of MTG:
Some players invest a lot of money into speculating on card value. The other 99.8% of players think they are loud, whiny idiots that should *stop making death threats* to the company's employees.

[xLochNessie]

the one ring is a huge advantage in most formats it's legal in other than legacy or vintage.(and vintage has black lotus legal)

[Sirdinosaur]

Half as Interesting: “This card game became a stock market!”

MTG Players: “Always has been”

[Scienceboy]

As a player of Magic the Gathering, this is a pretty good quick introduction to the market! I think the key thing here is to highlight that the prices only get so high because the game itself if really well made and designed. If people stop playing because the game is bad, the card prices would obviously tank because no one's playing anymore. There are also many formats like Pauper that you can play well in with only cheap cards, because they revolve around playing only the cards that have been printed into the ground with hundreds of thousands of copies out there.

[CSDragon]

There are a LOT of mistakes here.
Too many for me to go over.
A lot of mixing information from the 90s with info from the 2020s.

[gargravarr]

Meanwhile, in Yu-Gi-Oh, Konami of America has adopted a simple, effective strategy.
1. Design a super powerful new card every competitive deck absolutely has to run 3 of.
2. Make it a shortprint secret rare that is found, on average, once in 30 packs.
3. Now, you are guaranteed to sell 90 packs per competitive player. Assuming 5000 competitive players and a price of $5 per pack, that's a guaranteed $2.25 million in revenue.
4. Of course, most players will buy the card on the secondary market for a price of $130 per card. Lower than the expected $150+overhead because some of the pack filler cards can still be sold for some money.

[pharynx]

I bought a friends entire collection. He set the price at 500. He had several revised dual lands, and on card that at the time, was worth ~300. That card is now worth anywhere from 600-2000.

[robertgraff]

7:09
Jeweled Lotus isn't going back up because it's playable in other formats. That DOES happen, but unfortunately, you chose the only banned card that's (quite literally) only playable in commander (and TECHNICALLY one legacy deck that no one has ever actually played in a tournament).

It's still 60 dollars because of 3 reasons:
1. The backlash made some people think it would get unbanned
2. The volume is tiny, because the card is stone unplayable everywhere but commander, so the price hasn't dropped a ton
3. Some people use it as a proxy for black lotus (Long story, but it is technically playable in commander in 1 deck)

[gm]

Step 1 research cards worth having for a nice set of decks for you and your friends to play.

Step 2 print off unofficial cards for home use only. No artwork. Stated unofficial on the back.

All the fun, minimal expense. No profit intended.