August 20, 2020
clutch – noun : a tight grasp or an act of grasping something
Is a curse static and resolute, clinging to your very being, until lifted through some heroic deed or sacrificial payment?
Or can it be ephemeral and fleeting, flitting off to dissipate in the wind, or perhaps to haunt another victim, for no clear reason?
I think the Curse of the Bobo Rare may be dissipating, or transitioning. But today I was reminded of it, when it was in its brutal infancy.
A few months ago I went looking for a few cards I could not locate. They weren’t in the appropriate set-specific binders I keep, and they weren’t in my piles of “extras” (cards I own more than 4 copies of.)
Perhaps they’d found their way into a deck, and I’d forgotten about their inclusion? Perusing every one of my decks, most of which haven’t seen the outside of deckbox in years, I started to flip through a particular favorite – my Fervent Charge deck. A Mardu-colored deck, built around an enchantment? I’d completely forgotten I’d ever made the thing, but it was so clearly ME. Packed with gold cards, full of myriad and flexible answers to prevent “that one thing” from wrecking me…it was Mardoom before I grew to love Mardoom.
And I was forlorn to discover a number of its cards, including crucial pieces, were badly bent. What I did to bend them has long since fled my mind, but it probably happened a decade ago. Had there been a shuffling mishap? Had I spilled the deck onto the floor and rolled over it with my desk chair? Had I carelessly crammed the cards into the deckbox in some needless hurry?
So of course I did the very logical thing – I ordered replacements for the damaged cards, even discovering that I could replace my copy of Oros, the Avenger with an alternate art foil from the Planar Chaos prerelease I’d missed all those years ago.
The cards arrived, I catalogued them in my card tracking software, and I then did the very illogical thing – I dismantled the deck and returned its contents to my set binders.
I did this for ALL of my decks, actually. It wasn’t even (that) difficult.
In my search for the misplaced cards, I not only never found them, but I uncovered discrepancies between my physical collection and what I had logged in the program I use to track my full collection. And that was NOT acceptable. Nor were the dozens of random piles of cards I’d opened but never catalogued since starting my “reboot” collection when I began this blog.
I’d had enough of the chaos. It was time to get my collection fully logged and audited, so that I knew what I actually owned and what was (apparently) lost to time or overly-iffy organizational skills. And eventually I could get my “reboot” card collection conglomerated into something akin to a cohesive unit.
Though I have numerous cards from earlier sets, Alliances is the oldest set I have a full collection of (at least 1 of each card.) I started my collection review there, with the intention of moving forward in time to the present day. And today I completed my review of Stronghold. Thanks to a recent spike in the value of Mox Diamond (up over a hundred bucks for the week, to $575), a complete set of STH is currently valued at $1,112.40 – more than double its value when I last recorded it in my collection database in April of 2018.
Mox Diamond was a desirable card the moment Stronghold was released, and I remember it being a card I chased for months. STH pack after STH pack, no Mox Diamond. At the time it was going for the stupidly outrageous sum of $20 on the secondary market, and there was zero chance of my outlaying that kind of cash for a single card – that would have been utter insanity.
I did finally open one, and though my memories from 20+ years ago are admittedly rather sketchy, I believe the pack with Mox Diamond was the last STH pack I ever bought (I was “done” with collecting the set at that point.)
To this day I have just one copy of Mox Diamond, as well as a single copy of the other “big money” card from the set – Sliver Queen (going for $210 as of this writing.)
All told, I have 105 rares from Stronghold. Meaning I should have (on average) 2.4 copies of every rare in the set. So of course I have just one copy of the two most valuable cards from the set.
Alas, the Curse of the Bobo Rare was burning the midnight oil at the time: I opened 5 copies of Reins of Power ($1.73), 4 copies of Jinxed Ring ($.50), and 6 copies of Silver Wyvern ($.80).
As mostly a postscript to the above, my son agreed to a Core Set 2021 Bundle battle with me several weeks back. We each opened 6 of the 10 boosters from our bundle, and the first 3 packs I opened contained these:
Are curses inherited? Could I have inadvertently bequeathed mine to my son? If so…that is NOT how I wanted to shed the curse. The kid got no mythics, but did get 2 copies of this bobo…
Next time…I have no idea. And I say that, perfectly aware that will not build any suspense on your part. I just don’t know what comes next. But tune in anyway!
Casual Magicking 