Boy have there been price spikes lately or what? The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale is officially worth more than most of my friends’ cars, Lion’s Eye Diamond now costs more than some dual lands, and Bazaar of Baghdad is officially a card that I will never, ever be able to afford unless you all start really getting friendly with Hipsters’ Patreon—and I mean really friendly.
As a Legacy player who likes to dabble in some vintage and EDH from time to time, I find these price spikes nothing short of heartbreaking. We all know what’s causing them. Not players finally saving up to buy the cards they’ve been wanting to round out their legacy deck forever; oh no, it’s people buying anything and everything on the reserved list, including cards that no one gives a single fuck about.
Frankly, to me, anyone who buys out cards to force a price spike and just make money hates Magic and our community. It does nothing positive for anyone except the person buying out the card. Congratulations, you made $1000 dollars and also guaranteed that little Blake will never finish their first EDH deck that they’ve been working on to make as powerful as their big brother’s for so long. Yeah, that’s simplifying things, but at the end of the day that’s what it is. And while I have nothing but disdain for people who buy out cards—because lets be real, 99% of the time those people aren’t players—we all know they aren’t the real villain. They’re just assholes gaming the system; the real villain is the reserved list.
There have been so many conversations about the reserved list over the last twenty years it isn’t funny. A couple years ago, Saffron Olive wrote about why he thinks the reserved list should be banned in Legacy. (I followed up with why I thought that was an awful idea.) My question is: why aren’t we doing away with the reserved list? As Hipsters already covered this week, yes profits were down this quarter thanks to Toys’R’Us going bankrupt, but overall Magic is a huge money maker. Are you trying to tell me that Wizards has a chance of losing more money from people possibly suing them over getting rid of the reserved list than they would make by reprinting even just some of these cards? Most of the originals wouldn’t even lose a ton of value in the long run anyway. There are so many cards that have been reprinted and the original printings hold more value, even when the newer ones are sometimes better looking. Are you that worried? Reserved list the art, and the reprints won’t look anything at all like the old cards—making them still a collectible.
I’d rather have 1,000 people to play with my cards worth $10, then ten people to play with my cards worth $1,000. I have money to lose in this argument. The side I am on is not friendly to my fly-filled wallet, but this game and this community are that important to me. If Wizards came out with a well written waiver saying I would not sue them for reprinting cards that I own on the reserved list I would definitely sign it if they had a plan for the reprints and not even think twice. I wouldn’t worry about depreciated value; I wouldn’t worry about anything because I would be so happy that I would have more people who could access some of the funnest cards to play with in Magic. This imight be a complicated legal mess, but I’m quite shocked that a company owned by Hasbro hasn’t put together a solution for this yet.
What’s you’re idea? How do you think we should deal with these ridiculous secondary market price spikes?
Kate hails from Worcester MA and also does a bit of Card Altering. Check her Stuff out on Facebook! She mainly plays legacy and modern though will occasionally find herself playing EDH.