Thursday, September 23rd, 2004

by the Writer's Guild of Wunderland

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• The Covenant Communications Story
• The 2nd Ice Game Design contest is underway!
• The Ember Update: Burning Man
• Andy's Project eBay Archive
• Get ready for National Game Week!

I'm beginning this week to sell off a huge pile of old Magic: The Gathering cards we've had in our attic for the last few years. These cards date back to the mid-1990s, when we were still playing the game and collecting the new sets as they came out. In those days, when a new expansion was announced, we'd pre-order a whole bunch of display boxes so as to have plenty of booster packs to open for collecting purposes. After we'd assembled a complete set, we'd stop opening new packs, and if we'd pre-ordered too many boxes, we'd just stick the extras away in the attic to do something with someday in the future.

Well, the future is now. I spent last weekend sorting through boxes of old Magic cards, trying to decide how best to arrange them into auctionable lots for Project eBay. I have 16 full sealed boxes of decks or boosters which I plan to sell as individual lots (like the box of Ice Age starters I'm putting up this week) and I've organized the rest of the sealed stuff into a series of 23 bundles, each consisting of a single sealed deck of some vintage along with 6 or 7 sealed booster packs from various expansions. These bundles are of 3 different varieties, one of each of which is being auctioned off this week.

But that's just the stuff we set aside unopened. I have a lot of other old Magic cards to sell, too. Although we sold most of our complete collections some years ago, we still have our original Alpha/Beta notebook which we could sell, either as a complete set or broken up into lots. It includes a complete set of Arabian Nights and Antiquities, as well.

And then of course, there are the decks filled with cards we actually used to play with. Being used, these cards will obviously have a reduced value, but even so, I'm sure some of these cards will command a high price. My own personal original deck still contains -- for the moment -- one of each of the original "power nine" including the Black Lotus I traded for in 1993. I refuse to part with the complete set of ten dual-lands which are the backbone of my primary deck, but I'm willing to live without the Black Lotus, considering how much they're now worth. I'm opening the bidding on my played beta Black Lotus at $700, as this is the amount I was offered for it by a professional Magic card vendor at Gen-Con last month. (If you frequent any online communities where Magic players hang out, please consider mentioning that Andy Looney is selling off his Black Lotus and a bunch of other M:TG stuff. Thanks!)

But that's not all I've got for y'all this week! Besides another 2nd Edition Fluxx deck, I'm also putting up the Watermelon stash, another very unique set of Icehouse pyramids (akin to the Root Beer stash) created during the changeover from red pyramids to clear ones.