Not Always Good to Be King

#1 – January 1, 2020

Yes, I’m really starting my first blog post with a dictionary definition. It’s important. And I’m an English major. We do that kind of thing. Just humor me…

Urza’s Saga, the 15th Magic: The Gathering expansion that was released in October of 1998, was oozing with great cards. Iconic cards. Cards still adored, and feared, over 20 years later.

Citanul Centaurs was not one of those. But I opened 5 Urza’s Saga boosters that contained this awful rare.

Recantation is another terrible rare from Urza’s Saga. I pulled 4 of these atrocities from booster packs.

Gaea’s Cradle, from the same set, is NOT a bad card. In fact, it’s so good that at one time (in 2018), near-mint copies of it were valued close to $500.

I opened zero of these from Saga boosters.

Scoria Wurm, a coin-flipping card in a game with very few of those and a long history of player mockery of the coin-flipping mechanic (this ain’t Pokemon!), is worth a surprisingly-high 47 cents. I opened 5 of them. And if that weren’t insulting enough, an even worse and less valuable coin-flipping rare from the same set, Viashino Sandswimmer, taunted me – nay, haunted me – from the backs of seven $2.99 packs.

I gave several Sandswimmers away years ago, thinking I was committing some altruistic, generous gesture by donating a couple of my extra rares to players with smaller card pools at their disposal. While I hope they found their way into some silly coin-flipping decks…I know better. Apologies, unfortunate recipients.

While unheard of in recent years, Urza’s Saga featured an astonishing 110 unique rare cards. Your chances of getting any particular rare (which were then, and still essentially are now, one per pack) were exceedingly slim. I didn’t track how many Urza’s Saga packs I bought while they were available for retail price, but my best guess is probably in the range of 250.

I can account for some: I know I bought 3 sealed booster boxes (36 packs each), played in a prerelease tournament where I built a deck from 6 packs (which somehow was decent enough to win me 7 or 8 more), and I went through at least another 20-25 making sealed decks with a group of guys I played with weekly while living in Seattle. Beyond that, who knows how often I would pick up a pack or two “just because.” The total bought might be closer to 300, which I admit is a staggering amount of Magic packs to have EVER bought. When you consider Urza’s Saga is just one of 80+ sets I’ve bought packs from…well, best not to consider that.

Just to set the record straight – not that it does much to make this all look less sad – I believe I bought more Urza’s Saga packs than any other set I’ve spent (wasted?) money on…by a large margin in most cases.

Based purely on volume of packs purchased, random chance should have awarded me an average of 2 to 2.5 copies of each rare in the set. By the time I stopped buying Urza’s Saga packs, I had opened at least one copy of every single card in the set, including every rare. Except for Gaea’s Cradle. The card was absolutely understood to be exceptionally powerful from the moment it was first birthed into existence, and it has always been among the most valuable cards, if not THE most valuable card, in the set.

So you see my point here, right? I was blessed with 7 copies of Viashino Sandswimmer, 5 copies of Scoria Wurm, 4 copies of Recantation, and 4-5 copies of several dozen more nigh-worthless rectangles from Urza’s Saga. But never once did I get the joy of opening not just the greatest card in the set, but one of the greatest cards in the game’s history. And, as made abundantly clear by now, a card with a rather high return on investment if you were lucky enough to get one in a $2.99 booster pack and hold onto it for awhile.

I opened at least one copy of 109 of the 110 rares from the set. And the one card I don’t get turns out to be among the most valuable cards ever printed.

This wasn’t even the first time I’d proved pitiful at pack-cracking. Nor it would not be my last.

You see, my friends, I…I am the King of Bobo Rares.

For more than two decades I’ve worn that self-ascribed moniker with a strange mixture of shame and grim responsibility. It really is true – heavy is the head that wears the (bobo) crown.

But that reign ends now. I will no longer be shackled to this strange fate. I have decided my Magic fandom needs a reboot. I’m starting over.

I’m doing nothing drastic like selling off my collection or forever swearing off sealed product in favor of buying singles. No, no. Nothing so sensible or, frankly, so dull. Instead my plan is to start anew in 2020. New year, new decade, new Magic experiences, and a new Magic collection. And while I’m at it, no more monopoly on bobo rares! This king wants a new crown.

From this point forward, Magic will be new to me. Or as new as it can be to someone who’s been playing it on and off since 1997. The next pack I open will be treated like my first Magic pack. My next deck will be my first. My next game will be the first of many, many, many losses.

Can I rediscover the game? Can I go home again? Can I write about it all with enough joy, humor, or bad pulls to convince anyone to follow my journey?

Next time I’ll lay out my goals and conditions for my “reboot.” I’ll try to make it more interesting than it sounds.

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Full and fair disclosure: long before a copy of Gaea’s Cradle was worth hundreds of dollars, I traded for one. Two, actually. One of which I foolhardily loaned (and mailed, via the USPS) to some rando in Wyoming who assured me it arrived unharmed. What he could possibly be doing with it is beyond me – I could never actually PLAY with a Magic card that’s still worth over $300.