Fire up your TiVo for the GatheringMagic Vorthos Wednesday regularly scheduled programs. Skip the commercial and tune in for this week’s group-therapy session for Vorthos. We’re going to delve into the recesses of the minds of hoarders and find out what makes them tick and why their appreciation has turned into an obsession.

I’ll admit that during a dark time in my life, I also hoarded. It’s hard to admit, even now.

Hoarding was once a glamorous thing.

The print runs weren’t that large when the game began. Magic started as a nonsleeved game that I played across a real kitchen table after I ate dinner with my entire family. We gathered after our respective sports practices, music lessons, helping in the cleanup after dinner and before homework. We could easily get a game in before homework was imminent. Homework lasted no longer than an hour or two, and back to wizardry it was.

Times have changed.

Games have changed.

Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) have dominated the intake of normal Magic players. It has replaced strategy and discussion over a kitchen table. I’m not yelling from my porch, but my upbringing is no longer valid; it simply doesn’t exist anymore. Rural areas without game shops made the game focused in urbanized areas. They held the population density to support a niche gaming demand and a community of players. In my rural Minnesota upbringing, we were able to stop into Minneapolis and pick up a few boosters and some singles at the now-defunct Shinders. The Internet changed the access issue with MODO, proving that a North Dakotan could become the player of the year.

I remember seeing the first big “tourney player” in my humble upbringing with two full pages chock full of one card: Mana Drain. I remember staring at him in disbelief. I learned quickly that dudes bashing sideways didn’t work well. Blue was the way to win, but control players were terrible people. Something changed in them when they lost their innocence and their sportsmanship. Preventing a player from playing, using counterspells, pushed more of my friends out of Magic than any athletic endeavor, girl, or rural farming chore could ever achieve. I’ll never forgive blue.

Hoarding Before the Legacy Boom

Prior to Legacy’s rise in prominence, hoarding was not a difficult endeavor. Most $5 to $10 cards held their value and rarely rose or declined to a catastrophic level. Granted, errata changes could create an issue, but it was mathematically formulated from the mothership itself.

Finding Alpha and Beta cards was easy in the pre-planeswalker time. Finding gem-mint cards was still difficult, but if you wanted a certain card or even a few playsets, the Internet was your playground.

As the print run for Alpha was 2.6 million cards, spread evenly between boosters and starter decks, this meant the following statistics were readily known about each card:

Rare: 1,100

Uncommon: 4,500

Common: 16,000

Land: 85,000

This meant that there were 1,100 Alpha Black Lotuses printed. Are these numbers exact? I’m not sure, but I cannot imagine even 10% of those numbers are in near-mint condition. Using the numbers above, MagicLibrarities.net held contests on hoarding that asked for a percent of the print runs of certain cards. Their last contest was a 4% initial print-run race. (Despite that, in 2007, countless numbers of these cards were likely lost, destroyed, buried, or eaten by dogs.)

These were the numbers required:

Rare: 44

Uncommon: 180

Common: 640

Land: 3400

Uncommons seemed the logical hoarding rarity due to the low price and relative ease of collecting large numbers of them. Rares could be astronomically priced to win in any reasonable amount of time. A German user collected 180 Dwarven Demolition Teams. He now has over 200. He singlehandedly made an Alpha uncommon a minimum of $20 by himself.

Hoarding was indeed once a glamorous thing.

Grit alone could net you a hoard.

Since the Legacy boom, it’s now near-impossible.

Hoarding in a Scarcity-Aware Community

I found a Twitter user just the other day discussing how he was going to start hoarding a particular card. To explain the new normal, I recruited three hoarders to give insight into their world. As I have taken the twelve-end-step program, I will inject insight when I’m able. As part of their participation, I agreed to fuel their insatiable desire for more and plan to send them part of my own collection in their respective card as a measure of goodwill.

The three members will remain nameless, but BernieB, Dwiz, and Nderdog will give some insight into their world.

What card do you hoard?

BernieB:

Stone Rain.

Dwiz:

Collector’s and International Editions of Jade Statue.

Nderdog:

Gruul Nodorog.

Mike:

Power Sink.

How many do you have now?

As a baseline comparison of a casual collector, I have 699 copies of Power Sink.

BernieB: 36,034 copies of Stone Rain.

Dwiz: 550 copies of both Collector’s and International Editions of Jade Statue.

Nderdog: 2,023 copies of Gruul Nodorog.

What began your journey in hoarding?

BernieB: When Tempest came out, a guy I knew started collecting Skulking Ghost and tearing them in half; he had over a hundred of them in a binder. I thought, I can do better than that, and found out what the most common card in Magic was and started trading for them, buying them, keeping them when I opened a pack with one in.

Dwiz: I began playing during Unlimited in 1993/1994. My favorite deck revolved around “Buddha,” as Jade Statue was nicknamed. It wasn’t a great deck by today’s standards, but it did well back then. It had four Jade Statues, four Mishra’s Factory, four Consecrate Land for the factories, four Wrath of God (which killed everything but my “creatures”), four Armageddon, and of course four Erhnam Djinn (every deck had four).

Nderdog: I started collecting them when I noticed that Nodorog is similar to Nderdog, so I just joked that they typo’d my name.

How do you acquire them?

BernieB: Because it is a common, a lot of the card-selling sites have them for very cheap, plus trading sites like Magic Online Trading League are great places for them. Trading with your friends and attending tournaments and conventions are also great places to get cards relatively cheap.

Dwiz: I started buying up all the Collector’s Edition & International Edition box sets I could find, starting in 1997. I realized that buying them at $100 to $150, I could break them up and make a profit. I’ve continued purchasing them for fourteen years now, even though the price is now $750. I started keeping the Jade Statue out of each set because it was my favorite card, and it also was a way to casually keep track of how many sets I had bought over the years.

Nderdog: I’ve traded for some of them, and if I find them at a store that sells them for a reasonable price, I’ll pick them up, but many have come from MOTL’s Hoarder thread or people sending me ones that they’ve altered, and those go to the very front of my binder.

Any tips for new hoarders trying to collect?

BernieB: Because it is a common, a lot of the card-selling sites have them for very cheap, plus trading sites like MOTL are great places for them. Trade with your friends, attend tournaments and conventions, also great places to get cards relatively cheap.

Dwiz: Collect something you enjoy. If it’s a random card, you may lose interest quickly. Also, let it be known that you collect. You can put it in your signature on message boards, or let people know at conventions or tournaments. Having contacts around the world can help also, such as on sites like http://www.magiccardmarket.eu/ where you can only have cards shipped to Europe.

Nderdog: The main tip for people getting started is just to let as many people know what you want as possible, and be willing to compensate those who have gone out of their way to track cards down for you.

Where do you keep them/display them?

BernieB: I have one 3,000-card box that acts as a holding box; once I get 600 of one edition, I recount them and transfer them to a box that holds 600. Once I get more I may combine a 600 box with another 600 box and put them into a 1,200 box, kind of a constant cycling of cards into bigger boxes. The biggest boxes I have are a 5,000 box full of Revised and a 3,000 box full of Ice Age. I have a folder that holds my most special Stone Rains; I have twenty-five autographed ones, one or two misprints (bad color), three or four altered art, and even a play-test Stone Rain.

Dwiz: I used to keep them in top-loaders, but that became a mess, and hard to display. Now they are in a binder in nine-pocket pages. Eventually, I’d like to get a custom binder made.

Nderdog: All of the Nodorogs are in binders.

Mike: Dan Frazier does alterations of play mats; I can’t imagine he wouldn’t do a poster board to slip in or a full binder itself! Contact him, he’s good people. He’s Vorthos Wednesday–approved. I can’t make up my mind on what I want on a play mat, but when I do, he’s going to get an e-mail straightaway.

Man made a ton o’ Moxen. He’s good at this.

I simply keep my ‘sinks in my basement. I had a problem a few years ago when some flavored chips fell on some cards of mine. My dachshund, being the clever fellow, chewed on a few cards, including dozens of my Power Sink collection. I lost three to four online trades because of him. He’s no longer allowed in the basement.

Anything hoarded besides the card itself?

BernieB: I have a folder that holds my most special Stone Rains, I have twenty-five autographed ones, one or two misprints (bad color), three or four altered art, and even a play-test Stone Rain.

Dwiz: I’ve tried to find the original art, but no luck thus far. I’ve also had no luck in having Dan Frazier sign/alter one.

Mike: Yet, I’m sure. A future Vorthos Wednesday article is “Where Has All the Art Gone?” Might be a few-months’ project in the making.

Other than a pair of altered ones, all of my Power Sink cards are all the standard English versions. I do recommend finding artists, reading up on whether they sign or alter cards, and getting together a self-addressed, stamped envelope with a tip included to send to them.

Nderdog: I hoard anything Nodorog-related. WotC put out a pin with a Nodorog on it, and I’ve gathered a few of them as well to spice up the collection. A MOTLer also included his own sketch in a trade, and someone made me a 3D card out of like twenty of them, so things like that are pretty cool.

Do you ever think you’ll stop hoarding?

BernieB: I doubt that I will stop hoarding them, at least until I can personally affect the price of Stone Rain. I want people to say, “Yeah, Stone Rain used to be a 15-cent card, but then some guy in Wisconsin collected them to the point that they are now a dollar apiece!” I would be happy with just that little bit of fame. People are constantly asking me, Why collect so many of one card? I just want to see how many I can get. Is it insane? Maybe. Is it just plain weird? Oh, definitely. I’m okay with that, though. Normal routine is boring.

Dwiz: No, I won’t ever stop. At this point, it’s fun because it’s kind of rare to see them pop up for sale. When I started, the card was a bulk uncommon in CE. I used to get them for a quarter. Now, since I buy them all when they come up for sale in a store, the price has risen to about $4 each. That price is four times the amount of what a tournament-playable, Unlimited-edition Jade Statue goes for.

Nderdog: Currently, I’m trying to acquire at least one copy of every version, foil and nonfoil, from every language. I tend to collect more English ones just because of availability, but I love finding stashes of foreign cards to add to the collection.

Breakdowns

Conclusion

The game has changed. I’m still not sure if the user-awareness of scarcity is good for the game or not. Entire discussions are arising on players using dealer costs to hustle out optimal gain. The “real” costs of cards hits these hoarders hardest. Once you gain your 5% or 10% of the print run, what do you do when you price yourself out of collecting? Do you win the game of hoarding or do you take the costs to dangerous levels?

I’m not sure there is a correct answer there. I got out when I realized how addicting getting a Power Sink as a throw-in was in a trade. I started speculating how many I could get for a dual land or for a piece of my Power. I still see them in bargain bins for $0.10 to $0.20, staring at me in the face. They taunt me. They want to jump into my pocket, but when I’m searching for obscure Commander cards, that $1 to $10 adds up quickly.

Who knows, I might dust off the collection and start again. I haven’t been to the basement in a while anyway.