The One Ring card, Magic: The Gathering’s coveted collectible, has been found | Hacker News Reader

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

polygon.com

69 pointsscop70 comments

> 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 believe the collector boosters are all foils, so that particular trick may not have worked in this case.

The foils aren't worth as much now as they sell collectors booster packs which contain almost all foils.

Additionally, who wants another man’s soggy taco?

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!

I would like to point out that this card contains a critical error - the number reads 001/001, but in fact, there were twenty made.

As we all know, three were given to the elves, seven to the dwarves, nine to the race of Men, and the one the Dark Lord kept for himself.

Yeah, the one ring

I wonder how does wizards of the coast adds this card into a packs in a double blind sort of way. Otherwise there would be internal collusion/fraud to self deal.

> he bearer wishes to remain anonymous

This is why we require lottery winners to be public record.

See also the McDonalds Monopoly scandal.

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.

There is only one course of action here and anything short of that is deeply sad and spitting in the face of Tolkien.

This card needs to be placed in a storage container somewhere randomly in the world and opened only 20 years from now at which point a group of individuals will attempt to take it to Tongariro which was the filming location for mount doom in the movies. They will each be offered 1 million $$ to sell the card at that point but if they accept it they will get the million in half off yogurt coupons. If they actually agree to cast it into the volcano of their own volition then a team will do that safely and film it well while the "fellowship" receives the actual million they were not promised if they agreed to do this.

Ah MTG, the original pay to win game.

How do you pay to win in a sealed draft?

It's not a sealed draft at all. You can purchase as many decks as you like, and you can also purchase from secondhand markets.

Draft is a particular format (and a fairly popular one).

The most popular formats of Magic by far are "kitchen table" (totally casual, play with whatever cards you own), and Commander, a casual multiplayer format where super-powerful decks are generally frowned upon.

Competitive Magic is a tiny tiny fraction of the overall market. It's also totally possible and reasonable to build competitive decks on Arena with a pure F2P account, if you're into that.

It’s still P2W, because more money = more power. The goal in those situations is to have fun, not win, so inherently P2W is lessened. However that does not mean it doesn’t exist. It’s still a very real problem that’s only getting worse, regardless of whether you care or not.

Somewhat reductively, that means all games are pay to win, because at the extreme, having enough money to retire, devote yourself to the game, hire tutors, etc. = more power.

As you say, this is so reductive as to be meaningless (it includes all games, so you might as well just say "game"). Pay-to-win means you pay the company to get an edge in the game.

Not really. You could have Scrooge McDuck vault levels of gold and all the training time in the world and you'll probably still get absolutely destroyed by Gary Kasparov in a casual game of chess.

There's always a genetic component that influences your min and max levels at any given skill.

The assertion was more power, not infinite power.

You might not beat Gary Kasparov, but if you retired, hired a coach, and devoted yourself to chess, you would be better than your counterfactual equivalent who doesn't.

I really hate people making the argument that "it's not pay-to-win, because you can win without paying!".

Pay-to-win doesn't mean you only win if you pay. It just gives you an edge if you do, and it's shitty. This is why I used to like DotA 2, to the extent that someone can like DotA 2, because all purchases were purely cosmetic and didn't affect gameplay at all.

I kinda disagree. There's clearly a cap, where you can't spend anymore to get any better/more powerful cards. At competitive levels, it really doesn't matter. Every kid that plays hockey needs $500+ in gear, but you wouldn't call hockey pay to win. So what if everyone that plays "competitive" magic needs $500 to build out a deck, that's just the cost, it doesn't escalate wildly from there. There is also the very popular sealed draft that all the local joints run. Yeah its pay to play cuz you gotta buy 3 sealed packs. but in no way is it pay to win.

I kinda agree, but I still consider it P2W. It doesn’t matter if that’s the standard “fare”, its an insane and arbitrary barrier to entry. Hockey is a horrible comparison, by the way. Because that $500+ is mostly for gear so you don’t get yourself killed. In Magic, that would be at best comparable to your deck box, binder, sleeves, etc.

For instance, in Modern due to a strong mana base and other expensive staples you can easily reach $500 for a midtier deck. One can argue this is “pay to play”, but there is no logical reason for these costs. It’s cardboard. Typically decade old cardboard. Wizards is playing with what is called “reprint equity” so they never make a set “too” good and “burn through” their backlog too quickly. To me its an excuse to profit off the secondary market.

Legacy is even worse, as the P2W is that at any decent level you are required to have the consistency of Dual Lands and various other strong pieces of mana to be competitive. It’s why decks typically cost a few grand on average. This is due to the Reserved List making it impossible to get such important cards via reprints.

And finally, on the extreme end you have Vintage, where the decks are primarily built around the most expensive and powerful cards in the entire game. Including the Power Nine. Decks here typically cost as much as a car regardless of level.

Casual Commander remains my all time favourite game. I miss playing it so much!

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.

Yeah, that’s usually referred to as a “Sealed League” by a lot of local game stores that run them. I agree that they are tons of fun.

Sealed isn't P2W, but constructed definitely is.

Proxy cube drafting is my favorite.

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...

Right, it's technically just expensive and that's the thing that may leave some players behind, but I bet that at competitive level, players are not missing any card they need.

Similarly with F1 after the cost caps. If you had 135M you could compete with no monetary disadvantage.

That would be a true description of any pay-to-win game — if you just buy everything available to be purchased, then you’re playing on a level-playing field.

But using this description, then the only truly pay-to-win game would be one where the win condition is literally an auction selling a “you win!” token.

I'd go around money advantage being way too significant and the money cap way too high or non-existent. Otherwise every game is kind of pay to win as getting your hands on one more chess book, or getting a better tennis racket gets you an advantage.

While mtg is not cheap, I would say that only older cards get crazy expensive and sometimes are straight out overpowered.

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++.

I would say, in that sense, there aren't really tiers; it's a continuum, and you can attempt to compete at whatever price point you're willing.

That is exactly what "pay to win" means in the parlance of our times: the more you pay, the better chance you have to win. Tiers vs continuum doesn't matter here. The important part is that players with the same skill must decide how much money to pay the manufacturer to gain advantages over other players. If everyone had to buy the full set every quarter, then it would not be pay to win, it would just be a very expensive subscription game. There are things like sealed deck drafts where everyone agrees to buy in at the same price so that everyone can compete on skill. But there is a reason WotC doesn't allow proxy cards (just printing an unofficial copy of a card or a piece of paper with the name of the card), because they make a ton of money from the pay to win dynamic.

I agree that "tiers vs. continuum" has no bearing on the question of whether or not Magic: The Gathering is pay-to-win. I was merely pointing out that what tedunangst was describing was a continuum, not tiers.

Obviously, I'm not articulating my perspective very persuasively. Here's some additional flavor that might help (probably won't:)

1. In Magic: The Gathering, the most expensive deck is not always (or even ever, really) the best.

2. Is Golf pay-to-win? I can spend more on a set of clubs that have bigger sweet spots & will give me more distance with the same swing than my opponent's set.

3. The term "pay-to-win" comes from free-to-play MMOs.

I think most people that claim MTG is pay-to-win are just frustrated by how expensive it is. I agree. Don't play it!

1. I'd expect that in most pay-to-win video games, the top players are not also the top spenders. Depends on the amount of strategy and skill required.

2. No, because the people writing the rules of Golf aren't the ones that sell you clubs (as far as I know. Maybe there's some devious stuff going on behind the scenes).

3. Correct.

While I don't think "money is the only thing that determines the winner", Magic is absolutely is pay-to-win. It would not be pay-to-win if people could print their own cards (following a set of standards, of course), even though printing costs money.

Pay to play, not pay to win

While that's a criticism that can be made of the game, it has nothing to do what's going on here. The card is perfectly available normally; it's simply the card with this particular frame treatment and artwork that there's only one of.

whoever drew that card, sounds like they know what they are doing. taking all inquiries through an attorney, getting it appraised immediately, etc. sounds like they’re going to get pretty rich out of this.

strategy games players are always thinking twelve steps ahead

hoping it's legit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36540956

I wonder what the chain of custody looked like for this card, from the printer to the store.

I'm reminded of McDonald's Monopoly contest and how the person in charge of security for the game pieces was later found to have stolen and sold them.

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.

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

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

Intact chaos confetti runs about $0.43.

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

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.

Chaos Confetti is a reaction to the Chaos Orb story -- that's why the flavor text is "And you thought that was just an urban legend."

Note that Chaos Confetti, being from Unglued, was never tournament legal. However, Chaos Orb was for a time, being from the original Magic set.

Since Orb specifies a full rotation of the card during descent, how would the destructive play be ruled? I would imagine that there's some kind of group theory argument that if each individual piece of the card turns over, then the entire card has turned over, but it's not satisfying from a physics perspective. Do you have any rulings from the time?

Again, it's not clear that the confetti story actually happened at all, let alone in a tournament. (I mean, likely after it started spreading someone tried it in a non-tournament setting, but such a case wouldn't be the origin of the story.)

If someone did try it in a tournament, it probably wouldn't be legal -- why would it be? The text of the card certainly doesn't suggest it ought to be; that's part of why it's a notable story in the first place, that it turns on such an unusual interpretation. There are a number of rulings on how to play Chaos Orb from when it was tournament legal, but I can't find any relating to ripping it up; there's not a need to rule on what's clearly illegal. I don't think most people would be misled by a humorous story, an urban legend -- generally not told about a tournament setting -- into thinking that such a play would be legal in tournament.

A recent video on Rhystic Studies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dDLQkg5O1o) contains one person claiming that they witnessed someone trying this in a tournament -- presumably influenced by the story rather than the origin of it -- and the person who tried it was disqualified. Whether that actually happened, I don't know, but if so it even further suggests that no, there was no need to make detailed tournament rulings of this.

(Of course, the punchline of the Rhystic Studies account is that the person was disqualified not for the illegal play, but rather for the fact that, by doing so, they had reduced the number of cards in their deck to below the minimum legal size. If the Rhystic Studies story really did happen, though, I think we can infer that this reason was probably given because it was a way to avoid getting into an argument over whether ripping up the card was legal.)

"The Wall Street Journal reports that the bearer wishes to remain anonymous, but multiple resellers are already offering millions to buy it."

Uh huh. Why am I reminded of the WATA Games and Heritage Auctions pump and dump scams for video games when a sealed copy of Mario 64 allegedly sold for a million dollars?

It would be funny if some random grandma bought a pack for a kid, and the kid would then take the card, play with it, put it in a pack of other cards, put a rubber band around them, spread some cheeto dust on the card, play with the cards on the ground, etc. :)

Is this the most expensive LotR memorabilia? A first edition printing of "The Hobbit" was only worth $210,000 in 2015. Maybe one of the movie copies of the One Ring is more expensive? Or Tolkien's drafts?

As a person who was looking to buy some of this new set, so glad this has been found so the street prices of the collector boosters will drop.

I wonder what ROI is over the years on a card like a Black Lotus?

Median price for a beta Black Lotus in 1994 was ~$15 via Scry Magazine. A lightly played beta Black Lotus currently goes for ~$45,000. Alpha ranges from 150k-1m+ based on grading.

So 300,000%+ ROI

Jesus. I remember when they had gone up to a couple hundred bucks and thought that was crazy.

That's a roughly 32% per-annum return on the beta card.

https://infinite.tcgplayer.com/article/A-History-of-the-Pric...

Looks like it floats around a 20% to 35% APR depending on the years.

Alpha and beta printings are more rare and the exact price is hard to get a handle on.

But for the most abundant printing, the buy list prices here are reasonably representative (for a one is very good shape - most will sell for less due to condition): https://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Unlimited/Black_Lotus

Honestly, you'd be better off looking at the reserved list as a whole if you want to get a sense of more general returns. It's wild how much things spiked a few years back. I play legacy in paper regularly and have a large collection I actually use, but it's getting to the point where even I feel like I should sell out.

You might be interested in some videos Alpha Investments on Youtube makes, he is all about MTG finance.

So just to be clear this is a Magic the Gathering and LOTR marketing campaign we are talking about here?

Philately (stamp collecting) seems to have been replaced with this kind of thing.

The more I read about MTG the more it reminds me of crypto and NFTs.

So, when is WOTC gonna send the pinkertons after the ringbearer?

Pinkerorcs in this case.

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