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The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found

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Re: The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found

#41

Post by Manuel_D »

kodt wrote: post #23
pclark wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you pay to win in a sealed draft?

That (and pauper) are the best ways to play. Or using preconstructed decks. Trying to be competitive in Modern or Standard or even EDH requires spending at least $500+ per deck unfortunately (Vintage & Legacy even more I'm guessing). Though if you have a group of friends who play casually, it can be fun.

The most fun I had was a company MTG bracket where we opened a new pack once a week. We'd keep the same cards throughout the whole block (3 sets back in the day, so quite a while). Trades were allowed but only between the same rarity. So everyone had to build a deck with (roughly) equal power, and had to think of a relatively original deck using the cards available to them.

There was still some metagaming. Getting ahold of mythics had a greater degree of randomness, and if you had a buddy that was running a separate color deck you could effectively pool cards.

Re: The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found

#42

Post by tedunangst »

lackbeard wrote: post #29
karmakurtisaani wrote: post #14

Ah MTG, the original pay to win game.

No, it's just a really expensive game with a subscription model. What's the price to pay to get four copies of each card in every standard set? That's your quarterly subscription fee. It would be pay-to-win if you could do stuff like, pay a fee to take a second card at once during a draft, or tutor a card from your collection during a game, etc...

I think it's pay to win in the sense that there are multiple subscription tiers, and if you only pay for basic, you're not winning against the players paying for gold++.

Re: The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found

#44

Post by gorkish »

Tade0 wrote: post #3

> multiple resellers are already offering millions to buy it. I had a heated debate about this sort of artificial scarcity with a guy who uses a precision scale to weigh boosters he buys, because the foils are ever so slightly heavier due to an additional layer. Would be really funny if he was the one to find this card.

I did this in the early 90's with a particular series of baseball cards. Good money for a kid. I used a micrometer as well. Glad to hear it still works!

Re: The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found

#45

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

OK, true believers, correct me if this anecdote is wrong in some way.

So Wizards has put out a few releases of a joke set called "Unglued" where the cards are completely unserious in-jokes, sometimes with unplayable or really meta game mechanics.

One Unglued set featured a card whose effect was derived by throwing it in the air and then seeing which other card(s) it landed on. So far so good. But apparently there was some "emergent gameplay" as we say, and players began tearing the card into small confetti so that it would touch many cards on the playing field and have an outsized effect.

So the even more emergent effect here was, of course, that tearing the card into bits made intact ones even rarer than ever, and so this card, whatever it was, became one of the most valuable and sought-after cards of the whole game.

Side note: One time I was so angry at an opponent that I ripped his card into two and threw it back at him; it was not one of these cards, and thankfully he did not punch me in the face.

Re: The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found

#46

Post by tedunangst »

gwern wrote: post #40
erulabs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge sorting machines drop cards into packs at amazing speed. All you'd have to do is ceremonially place this card into the "rare" pile and watch the machine whirr. No one would be able to tell which of the hundreds of sealed and plastic-wrapped boxes coming out the other side of the machine contains the card.

Buying up mere hundreds of packs for a high chance at a $2m+ shiny sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

I guess you'd have a trusted employee come out and insert a magic card into the sorter intermittently for as long as it takes, so nobody knows which batch it's actually in.

Re: The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found

#47

Post by SilasX »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #45

OK, true believers, correct me if this anecdote is wrong in some way. So Wizards has put out a few releases of a joke set called "Unglued" where the cards are completely unserious in-jokes, sometimes with unplayable or really meta game mechanics. One Unglued set featured a card whose effect was derived by throwing it in the air and then seeing which other card(s) it landed on. So far so good. But apparently there was…

That was Chaos Orb, and it was a normal card, not parody Unglued one:

https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...

Re: The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found

#48

Post by __s »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #45

OK, true believers, correct me if this anecdote is wrong in some way. So Wizards has put out a few releases of a joke set called "Unglued" where the cards are completely unserious in-jokes, sometimes with unplayable or really meta game mechanics. One Unglued set featured a card whose effect was derived by throwing it in the air and then seeing which other card(s) it landed on. So far so good. But apparently there was…

https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...

Re: The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found

#49

Post by tedunangst »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #45

OK, true believers, correct me if this anecdote is wrong in some way. So Wizards has put out a few releases of a joke set called "Unglued" where the cards are completely unserious in-jokes, sometimes with unplayable or really meta game mechanics. One Unglued set featured a card whose effect was derived by throwing it in the air and then seeing which other card(s) it landed on. So far so good. But apparently there was…

Intact chaos confetti runs about $0.43.

https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/836/magic-unglued-chaos-co...

Re: The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found

#50

Post by distortedsignal »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #45

OK, true believers, correct me if this anecdote is wrong in some way. So Wizards has put out a few releases of a joke set called "Unglued" where the cards are completely unserious in-jokes, sometimes with unplayable or really meta game mechanics. One Unglued set featured a card whose effect was derived by throwing it in the air and then seeing which other card(s) it landed on. So far so good. But apparently there was…

You might be conflating two things.

One is Chaos Orb, a card in the original Magic sets. https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...

One is Chaos Confetti, a card in one of the Un- sets that you were referring to. https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...

I don't know if the Chaos Orb play is real or apocryphal. It may be that Chaos Confetti is a reaction to the story behind Chaos Orb.

As a side note, neither of these cards are legal in any common tournaments anymore.

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