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Now there's an odd failure mode. Tonight I opened a book I bought recently (new) and found that it begins on page 41. Nothing was torn out; it appears to be a binding error. I guess I should have checked sooner (I bought it a couple months ago), but it's a torah commentary on Exodus, which we start this week, so I didn't need it before now. Fortunately, Amazon has an extended return period for books bought late in the year, so they'll exchange it and I don't even have to pay to ship it back. Yay.

Dani has decided to tackle the vast collection of Magic: The Gathering cards (most of which are his, but the older cards are mine). We haven't played in years; I would consider playing again in a simplified world, but they lost me when not only were there 6000 different cards, but they decided that many of the commons needed four different types of art. When I can't easily track what my opponent has in play, I lose interest. I understand that it's worse now; Dani says they are still publishing expansions and making money at it. After 12 or 13 years of this, I wonder how many cards there are now. (For comparison, the basic game, the one I played in the beta edition, had 300 cards. The first, and best, expansion set added, I think, about 75. Things went downhill from there.)

A few links:

These "new rules" might be incorrectly attributed (the reason they're on Snopes), but they sure are funny.

Advice from hindsight (from unspace).

This biscotti recipe sounds easy enough to try (from cookingengineer).

The origins of the great war of 2007 (link from rjlippincott).

Aieee. As tsjafo comments, I wouldn't trust the government with a pill that can alter memories. Granted, they're a long way from erasure, but I still don't trust that sort of technology in the hands of anyone with the power to compel -- in which category I would also place health providers, 'cause they're mostly owned by the insurance companies.

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just so you know, if you ever encounter a misprinted book of that nature, the publisher normally buys them back if the vendor wont.
It happens more often than you might think =(

Oh, good idea! Thanks; I hadn't thought of that.

Wow, Guy still exists! I remember being very amused when he landed what was essentially the first "Professional Fanboy!" job ever.

PS: 6000 MtG cards is not that far off. Best estimate I can find is 7943, based on searching the card database (http://gatherer.wizards.com/) for 'a' and 'e' and stuff like that.

I gave up when they invented the Shadow power, which was defined as:
Shadow: All cards in this expansion automatically beat anyone without this expansion. You must now buy all of this expansion.*
It was a bit too obvious. I occasionally consider selling my old cards; I'd probably get somewhere in the $100-500 range if I spent the time to do it right, but....eh.

(* I might have the wording wrong.)

I guess I gave up before then, because that name doesn't ring a bell. Sounds obnoxious, though. (I think the last expansion I bought any of was Ice Age.)

A few years ago I sold my 20 most valuable cards (as best we could tell) for a total of $1000. There could be several hundred dollars' worth still in the crates, but identifying them and implementing the sales might be hard. I've definitely already done my cherry-picking.

($1000, by the way, is substantially more than I ever spent on the game, so that worked out for me. I never bought individual cards, only expansion packs and decks.)

Congrats! I have some pretty valuable cards lying around -- on paper. But I despair of actually getting any real money for them. So it's nice to hear of a success story in making money off of old cards.

(The "jungle" expansion that introduced Shadow -- I forget the name -- was about 3 after Ice Age.)

I was surprised that I could get that much. I sold them singly on eBay and got approximately the going rates for cards that had definitely been played. (Dani did some research first to set asking prices and we watched other auctions for a couple weeks before I listed mine.)

If it's worth your trouble to do the current research, you might be able to collect some of that money the same way I did. There were definitely people who would buy non-pristine cards. I assume there still are, though we might be farther down from the peak now. (I definitely didn't sell at the peak time.)

I had to do a cataloging project last semester for a library science class. I chose to catalog Magic cards. I came up with a count of 7694, so considering the number of expansion sets they produce each year, that's probably right in the ball park.
-- Dagonell

Did you catalog every card that ever was, or every card that's in print? Did you catalog the multiple versions of the same card as one entry, or one per version?

Perhaps that 6000 that I pulled out of thin air was off by a factor of two, then. I had this feeling that at the time I quit playing there were about that many cards, but maybe after the first 3000 you just lose track. :-)

Premise was that it was the potential inventory for a game store, so every card that ever existed. Multiple versions were classified separately because the database could be searched by artist. I got an A in the project. The teacher said another student had done MtG two years prior. My database was better.
-- Dagonell
BTW, I had to *design* the database. Actual number of cards entered into the database, 5. :)

I used to have a complete set set of white and blue cards...

Yeah I got into it when it was beta.. and one year I sold most of my cards to pay for my tuition. Good move on my part. I still have my beta Black Lotus which apparently is the most valuable card of all...

I have no idea how it plays anymore - there were too many cards to think about. And I was bored of it.

I know someone who works in their art department - he designed a few of their newer cards.

A friend introduced me to the game fairly early; I might have even had some alpha cards. I was always more of a player, not a collector, and at one point I traded my betas N-for-one for white-bordered cards. (N was nominally 2, for betas, but usually ended up being 3 or 4, especially for commons.) I figure we both won. :-)

I never had a Black Lotus, though I did get to see one once.

beta Black Lotus which apparently is the most valuable card of all...

Um. Yes. Sell it -- $1000-$2000 (http://www.gatheringground.com/store/showproductdetails.asp?product=29521) seems to be the price range right now(!). For that one card.

Unless you like continuing in investing in bubbles, that is.

After writing that comment - I went to look at ebay - seems they are going at about 1000$

Umm, tempting, considering I have some other rare ones too like my Time Walk and my Time Twister. I kept them for sentimentality reasons but really they sit in an old cookie box and really no one cares about them anymore except for me and my glory gaming days...

Wasn't it an Alpha Black Lotus that set the record for most expensive Magic card? There's supposed to be one in a jewelry store window in Japan that was purchased for $1M. I don't know if that's true or not.

sold 4 cards to a store and got $1650. Dang! (my black lotus was in slightly played). thx for the advice!

Hurray! And I'm sure some collector will make that store very rich. :)

looks like they sold the black lotus for $1250 already. if they sell the other cards at what they are asking for - they will make $900 on the purchase. not bad. crazy still!

Wow! So there is still a market there. :-)

Actually, 5-6 years ago the game went back uphill to some extent. Wizards figured out how to keep new expansions at roughly the same power level as the preceding ones. (Also, they stopped the "four different types of art" thing a long long time ago.)

The most commonly played formats only permit ~300-1500 of the most recently printed cards. It isn't difficult to jump back into the game. Of course, the bad news is that most of the cards you can acquire now will be nearly unusuable 2 years from now since they won't be legal in any commonly sanctioned format except "Extended".

Thanks for this information. I think I stopped playing around '96 or so, so I missed those improvements.

Keeping the playable set small is good; planned obsolescence, well, keeps Wizards in business. :-) I never did much tournament play anyway, so I suppose a gaming group could set its own rules to keep the set of cards (and money spent) within whatever parameters it chose.

re: Drugs that can alter memories --
If you haven't, I highly recommend reading Jonathan Lethem's first (published) novel, "Gun, With Occasional Music."

It's a surreal murder mystery with "film noir" style setting along with science fiction elements. It's got scientifically-evolved animals, babies that aren't really babies, and drugs that mess with your mind.

I can't explain more, not just because it'd give away the specialness of the book but because... it just has to be read.

Anyway. That's what popped into my head when you mentioned that drug.

Thanks for the recommendation. Sounds interesting (and no, I've never read or even heard of it before).

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