Will mtg cards still be worth something in say 30 years? - Magic General - Magic Fundamentals - MTG Salvation Forums (2024)

There's no way to know for sure in this day and age. Cards printed over a decade ago are being reprinted all the time, and the only MtG cards that really have a strong value retention in the long haul are vintage and legacy reserve list cards like dual lands and Black Lotus. Cards that primarily have value because of a format are very likely to lose value in the long run once the format in question moves into the annals of history.

Really, the boat has kind of sailed on singles being a good place to see value long term with the kind of print runs they are doing. If you really want to see values go up it's best to get VPN sets like Eternal Masters booster boxes and sit on them for a while and to avoid the standard sets these days as the print runs are enormous.

Quote from Paige712 »

Hi everyone I'm curious about the long long term value of Mtg cards (especially out of print ones/vintage/p9/chase rares etc) and how much value these cards will have say in 30 years if they remain in Mint condition.
If mtg were to god forbid die off do you expect cards like say Zendikar Jace, tarmagof, Liliana, dual lands, p9 etc to retain value or will they become worthless since nobody plays the game anymore? What are your thoughts? Aside from sentimental value do MTG cards have good money value (Collector wise) in the distant future?

People are still paying premium prices for Star Wars CCG and Star Trek CCG even though both games failed over 18 years ago...

Quote from knifemind »

Here's the thing....People will ALWAYS play Magic. Forever. No matter what happens to WotC, as long as there are physical cards in existence, people will play. If the game dies off, demand will likely tank... but, as the others said, it's kind of impossible to determine how that will impact value of individual cards. Magic cards, in general, will always have *some* value, because people will want to play, but that is all you can say with any certainty.

People still play AniMayhem with DBZ banned...

If mtg were to god forbid die off do you expect cards like say Zendikar Jace, tarmagof, Liliana, dual lands, p9 etc to retain value or will they become worthless since nobody plays the game anymore?

Even of wizards dies off, there will be someone playing eternal. So, eternal staples will remain (relatively) high.

The prices of eternal staples will likely not go down unless wizards suddenly prints better cards, or reprints them en-masse.

All the reserved list cards will simply get more expensive.

All the super expensive legacy cards are quite an investment and you make a lot of money investing in these cards, as long as you can keep them save.

Sealed product you almost always make a profit over the long course of time, if you can put them in a good spot that has no humidity , buy a bunch of displays cheap and store them (like 10+ years).

Its quite a long term investment, and its better for some sets and worse for others, but in the end, old sealed product simply gains value, as less and less of them exist and some people always want to draft old sets or get some Christmas present etc. (some like the set they started playing magic and value them higher and such stuff).

----

For my collection of cards they increased in value A LOT over the course of time.

If you ever bought some Force of Wills in the past, they are simply more expensive.

For stuff like goyf, you have to take the reprints into account, it "can" effect the card pretty badly, but so far, it overall didnt (especially if they print a card that might "trump" goyf, it will lose value really fast).

Quote from Incanur »

Card prices are based on artificial scarcity created by intellectual-property law and player norms against counterfeits. As you see with Chinese counterfeits already, IP law only goes so far. Improving printing technology constitutes an existential threat to high card prices. It's possible law enforcement and community norms will keep counterfeiting in check, but I sure wouldn't bet on it. Once basic printers card can pop out counterfeits of any MTG card for pennies with the correct file/program, who's going spend $texas on singles?

Thats the case for "new" cards.

But 20+ year old cards, or even 50+ year old cards in 30 years to come, these arent really cards you print out from a printer, they are old.

Beside, printers are something we get less and less in private houses, some people dont have printers (and you dont really need them if all is digital).

----

So while you will for sure get counterfeits of new cards, especially if they get reasonable expensive and easy to sell ; the really old cards will just increase in value.

Ofcourse someone will always try to fake a Black Lotus and somehow make it look as perfectly as possible, and if it carries a crazy value that might even be worth it.
But in the end, checking if a card is "legit" isnt the most difficult in the world.

Maybe future cards will use some form of actual ID that you can scan to identify a card as "unique" , so nobody can simply copy it.

Theres plenty of room to make the protection more clever and still keep them as cards.

----

With VR maybe becomming a thing, we might play Magic in the future with some glasses on and the cards are just plain white cardboard and the VR glasses project the cards images on the cards, at that point, it will become a cross-over digital product.

No matter what, for the foreseeable future putting some money in the classic cards isnt really a bad idea over a course of like 10+ years.

Quote from Incanur »

Card prices are based on artificial scarcity created by intellectual-property law and player norms against counterfeits. As you see with Chinese counterfeits already, IP law only goes so far. Improving printing technology constitutes an existential threat to high card prices. It's possible law enforcement and community norms will keep counterfeiting in check, but I sure wouldn't bet on it. Once basic printers card can pop out counterfeits of any MTG card for pennies with the correct file/program, who's going spend $texas on singles?

Quite a number of people, for the same reason Action #1 sells for a 3 million dollars, but reprints don't, no matter how identical it is to the original.

It's important to keep in mind that very, very few printers are capable of producing top-notch counterfeits, and anything US based that has the equipment to do so gets shut down pretty hard and fast. For starters, the press alone to properly print the cards with the same method WoTC uses is
a)enormous and requires a TON of space
b)Extremely expensive (think 6 digits)

So there's not a lot of people with the capability to do this to begin with on anything that wouldn't just immediately be bleedingly obvious. Secondly, old cards like duals and power undergo MUCH more scrutiny from buyers, they need to be even more perfect than people just looking for cheap fetches. Duals and power are not easily duplicated, and even if a few "good" examples exist, very few (if any) would pass scrutiny that someone forking over big money for would give. Modern cards, and counterfeits that are designed to pass for play purposes in a sleeve are the biggest issue, but it's unlikely, if not completely impossible to make a true counterfeit dual or other big money card that would pass the scrutiny these items are subject to. There's just entirely too much risk. This leaves counterfeit distributors forced to deal with the Chinese printers, which are varying degrees of sketchy with a wide array of quality issues. Are there people playing with fakes at events? Certainly. Until top 8s undergo randomized authenticity deck checks, this problem is almost impossible to eliminate unless you're willing to take every fetch your opponent plays under a loupe. I'm sure some number of legacy players do this knowingly as well, scummy as it may be, but I'm pretty confident that the equipment and precision needed to produce fakes that pass scrutiny probably don't even exist without a time machine and a security clearance to Carta Mundi, let alone if they did exist would be US based. I believe that the fullest extent of the counterfeiting issue ends with the dilemma of cards being good enough to get past judges and opponents, but not serious buyers and collectors. The cards that would be the most damaging to fake successfully are IMO, pretty safe from it- it's far more profitable to sell the fake fetches for modern and standard staples than it is to try and elevate your technique good enough to pass off fake Moxen on ebay. While some do exist, and are decent enough to dodge the casual eye for play purposes, people selling them as authentic are going to get caught by a buyer sooner rather than later and the ramifications of that are simply too great. Do you have enough confidence in your fake beta Mox that the guy who gives you $3k for it really isn't gonna figure out it's counterfeit? No, you're gonna sell fake fetches, marketed to people looking to buy fake fetches for tournament play, and a few of those jokers might pull some fast ones and vanish, screwing some people they traded with at a GP or something, which is unfortunate, but not enough to seriously impact the overall value of the cards. Besides, none of the "target" cards are RL, sooner or later WotC will either reprint, or obsolete every single fetch, chalice, and Tarmogoyf to where the trouble it takes to obtain passable fakes isn't worth just simply spent acquiring the real deal. I honestly think counterfeiting has reached the pinnacle of what it's capable of and the damage it can do, and while not insignificant, and certainly harmful-particularly in the hands of malicious individuals- isn't economy shattering.
Here is how I see Magic playing out from here forward:

WoTC and various gaming companies will continue to support Legacy at its current level as long as there is interest. Legacy players are a tight knit, self sustaining community and I can see it continuing on for a long time, even if its growth stagnates due to market prices. If prices ever slip, or new cards are printed that allow more players to enter the format, great, but duals will always be expensive, alongside certain legacy staples. WoTC has done all it can to give new cardboard to legacy short of ditching the reserve list. The sheer length they've gone to signifies to me that the reserve list is, for better or worse, here to stay. If breaking the RL was an option, they would have done it long before EMA, instead it seems like they've done everything but break it, making it more of a sacred cow than ever. As Magic's oldest community members age and get better jobs and have more disposable income, duals will still get sold, bought, and traded. There is not a single card on the RL that is flat out unattainable. I mean, if you really wanted a Black Lotus, you could go buy one, it's not like they just don't exist. Counterfeiting will result in some people sliding in underneath judges and cheating their opponents from time to time and you'll hear stories about people getting ripped off because they did something stupid like buy a Tabernacle off ebay or get one in a trade that they didn't inspect, but Legacy won't see a floodgate of perfect copies destroy its value. WotC will continue to make it a point to print a new Thalia every other set so people looking to get into the format can play Death and Taxes. Rishadan Port will be a common in a Legacy duel deck. (Last two predictions /s obv)

Modern and Standard will become a cat and mouse game. I suspect that counterfeit buyers will have to turn more and more to Chinese printers, where quality and trustworthiness are sketchy and erratic. For every person playing fake fetches, there will be someone who spent $80 on a bunch of obviously fake crap. A handful of printers will become the "go tos" for fakes and WotC will pursue them, maybe successfully, maybe not in off-shores copyright cases. Maybe a few will deem it's not worth the trouble and just stop doing it. In the meantime, MMA17, 18, and 19 will release, and other sets bringing along reprints of the cards being counterfeited. New cards will obsolete old ones, as Gurmag Anglers, Delvers, Oozes, and other new toys replace Bobs and Goyfs. WotC will also introduce other new ways to fight counterfeiting in the cat and mouse game, like the holostamp, which helped, but obviously isn't the be-all end-all answer. The object though, is to tip the scales to where modern and standard cards are more obtainable, getting counterfeits is much harder and more trouble than its worth, and when that happens, there won't be very many, if any shops with the equipment necessary that see a positive return in continuing to produce fakes. Skeezy, low quality printers might continue operating, but the fakes will be bad. I think right now we're seeing the scales starting to slowwwwly tip and the people capable of producing top fakes (but never perfect) are slowly getting squeezed out and their customers becoming seedier and sleezier than they already are (selling to people who really just want to flip them and scam others as opposed to using them to play with at events). Eventually, I think the cat will win. The techniques needed to print the cards well already require too large of an operation to be run by someone out of their basem*nt and don't fly under the radar particularly well. When people don't feel the need to seek them out as strongly anymore, it won't be worth running the operation anymore to keep a handful of scam artists afloat.

Crappy fakes will continue to exist though, and be used for kitchen table play. Whatever, no one cares about that as long as you aren't trying to pass the card off as real or sleeze it up at an actual event.

As to the value of Magic cards in another 30 years?
An issue of SCRYE I remember reading in high school had Beta Lotuses at $400 in 1995. There was no WAY that card would be worth that in 20 years right?
Right.

Quote from ElAzar »

Quote from Incanur »

You can already find Chinese counterfeits of old cards like duals and such. They're most expensive, so there's the most incentive to counterfeit them. Counterfeits have the potential to crash the market for old cards beyond maybe certified collectibles like power.

Yes, but they are easily recognizable as the cheap fakes they are. While there might be ways to perfect them, its going to take investement, as they have to be perfect, because everyone buying these will check them for any signs of being fake.

With newer cards, like fetchlands or current mythics, most people dont bother to check, so while they are much cheaper, they are a) more easily made b) don´t need to be perfect, because most people dont check them, and c) move more easily, because they require only a "small investement" from the buyer, and d) need no further investment in printing tech.

So, because of this, i actually doubt that we will see perfect revised list counterfeits. Its much more a problem of modern.

They aren't recognizable as counterfits anymore if you get them from the right sellers. There are counterfits of fetch lands that basically require a magnifying glass to tell the rosette pattern is off. The truth is people have been sneaking around counterfits for a while now at FNM and some have made it into circulation, which is the bigger problem counterfits have at the moment as someone could unwittingly purchase a proxy instead of a real card. Basically 3rd generation cards had a darker back so they could be identified if the card was unsleeved. 4th generation proxies are harder to identify as the backings are now the correct coloration, though depending on the source the printed image might be off. Wizards is basically stuck in an arms race with off shore third party sellers due to them letting the secondary market prices on many of the cards get out of hand and the only real way they can stop the sellers is to make it so that it isn't worth it for them to make the proxies. That means printing more of the high in demand cards to bring their prices down.

Basically, when someone chooses to get a proxy that is hard to ID from an original, they also have to take responsibility for that card and not let it get into the MTG secondary card market. They also have to take responsibility and not use that card in official tournament play. That's why many people are leery about proxies that aren't clearly marked or are super realistic duplicates as you basically make trouble for many other people if that card every changes hands.

It's "Gahr-uhk", not "Gare-oooooooooook"