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Comment by hajile | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, Wizards reprint ban killed old magic.

The reprint ban means a vintage deck will cost over $100,000 using the "cheap" Unlimited cards and somewhere around $500,000-1,000,000 using just Alpha cards.

Even going to Legacy, the cheapest (heavily-played) lands that you need are $300-400 (almost double for good-condition). You need 15-20 of these for most decks which is $4,000-12,000 just in lands before considering any other cards.

You can switch to digital MTG for cheaper prices, but you'll still spend thousands on cards you don't actually own.

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Wizards may have killed old magic, but my printer and the plethora of proxy sites are slowly bringing it back to life.

I'd note that this is copyright infringement and also unusable in tournaments.

My first old school deck (B/u aggro with dark ritual, black knight, hypnotic specter, sengir vampire, etc and recall, walk, and psionic blast from blue) cost me $60 off tcgplayer. I took acetone to some misc commons and made proxies for dual lands, city of brass, strip mine, and power. Nobody batted an eye about my hand drawn proxies in the MTG Underground of the Midwest. I've seen Kinkos printed decks, 75 card proxied decks, no power, as well as fully powered, signed, and altered decklists. We're there to hangout and play games, not gatekeep whether you show up with a down payment on a house in a deck box.

I don't play legacy, but because of fetches, I wouldn't expect you to need more than 2-3 duals, right?

Optimally a lot of decks will have 4 fetches if they are dual colored, and 10+ if they are multicolored. You could have a single fetch and some shocks to save money but you'll lose some percentage of games from the damage.

risky when Wasteland is a thing, and decks run way to make it come back and loop.

Yes but the perfect manabase and the synergy with brainstorm make it up for it. At least, form some quick unscientific investigation it seems that many legacy decks run more fetches than duals.

I bought a "deck" of counterfeit "proxies" of a bunch of the best old mtg cards from AliExpress. Once I have enough friends that would be into it, I'd love to organize an alpha booster draft that includes the moxes and timewalks and demonic tutors.

They didn’t, the current WotC team is killing magic by killing competitive formats.

I definitely meet many new players who would aim for the holy grail of owning a dual lands and other old cards. Without them, magic is dead.

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