Former Grinding Gear Games co-founder and Path of Exile co-creator Chris Wilson previously sold parts of his Magic The Gathering card collection “to fund the company” during PoE’s development, but has since amassed one of the biggest and most valuable Magic collections the world has ever seen, as he demonstrates in a new video.
Wilson could – but in this video, does not – claim to have one of the top 10 or even top five biggest Magic collections known to exist.
Showing off “My Oldest Magic: the Gathering Cards,” Wilson shows page after page, pile after pile, of high-value and hard-to-find Magic cards dating back decades. From Alpha icons to The Dark, Legends, Antiquities and many other early sets, in this brief look – which seems to represent a fraction of Wilson’s library, which includes tens of thousands of Lands alone – the man comes across like a dragon walking you through his treasure hoard.
The headliner is obvious: 14 copies of Black Lotus, the most famous Magic card around, crown Wilson’s collection. With 12 sleeved in a binder and two more 9-grade Lotuses safely encased in plastic slabs, Wilson is sitting on a fortune in cardboard flowers.
Wilson never really talks about the value of these cards – beyond turning his nose up at the prospect of paying modern prices for more Black Lotuses – and it can be difficult to price some rarities in a turbulent market. But these are apparently “raw Alpha copies” of Black Lotus with black borders, which can easily sell for five digits apiece, and often much closer to six digits, even ignoring private collectors who’ve reportedly shelled out millions for a Lotus.
The Lotuses are one thing, but there are also random pages in Wilson’s binders that could kill a Magic player. The Magic: The Gathering Reddit community was agasp at collection bombs like 24 copies of The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, a hotly contested Land which can go for thousands according to TCG Player.
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Wilson has one or even two dozen copies of tons of cards that many people have never held in their life. He rifles through piles of the fabled “Power Nine,” a set of cards – spiritually related to Yu-Gi-Oh’s Power Five – from early sets that offered enormous advantage, often in the form of extra mana, but also via extra turns a la Time Walk.
The Power Nine were printed back when the goblins in the Magic designers’ brains flip-flopped unpredictably between pack filler that will never be played because it’s unfit to even absorb beer can condensation on the kitchen table, and nuclear weapons that can never be played because they’re banned in every galaxy. Thank goodness Magic players don’t have to deal with that anymore. The Black Lotus, a bite of free mana, is just one of these nine.
Condition is obviously a factor in resale value, but Wilson has at least 12 near-mint copies of every Mox artifact in Alpha, and he talks over them like nothing. Those are just the ones in a binder; he has loose, more damaged copies of even more Power Nine, including yet more Moxes. The video feels like a fever dream; I wouldn’t have the patience to make proxies of all these. Wilson alone commands a non-trivial portion of the entire Alpha market.
“Alpha is special,” he says of the formative Magic set. “Because this is the original history of the game. These are cards that dictated the future of what was gonna happen and set it in motion. If Alpha was bad, the rest of the game would never exist. But thankfully Alpha captured a generation of people and that’s why we’re still playing Magic to this day.”
Gobsmacked Magic players also latched onto standouts like the sheets of Mishra’s Workshop and Candelabra of Tawnos. Likewise, Wilson has 12 honest-to-god, white-border, Unlimited Ancestral Recalls. Don’t worry, he says he “limited” himself to just a dozen because it would be “silly” to try and get 24 today. Signed Alpha cards dating back to the original artist run naturally round out the dizzying video.
“It just makes me feel so happy to go through sets like this and just appreciate the cool old stuff they printed – in my opinion, back when the game was even better than it is today,” Wilson says. “Of course, that opinion’s gonna vary.”
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