This is the ninth in a series of blog posts discussing the trading card game Magic The Gathering (hereafter shortened to just “Magic”) and its connections to the world of sales.
Magic: The Gathering has been around since 1993, which means that some cards in the game are 25 years old. Some of these cards that were created 25 years ago are on something known as Wizards of the Coast’s “Reserved List”. The reserved list is a group of super old cards that Wizards of the Coast has legally promised their customers to never reprint, because these cards being reprinted would instantaneously tank their value. This action ensures that these cards retain their high values, as some of them cost many thousands of dollars each. For example, a copy of the rare card “Black Lotus” from the original Magic: The Gathering printing in 1993 sold just a few years ago for $27,000.
The reserved list’s effect on the game is that it makes some cards just too expensive to play. It can mean that entire formats can only be played by those with $50K to spend on a single deck of cards. Some people believe that the reserved list excludes those without large sums of money or those who did not pull these rare cards themselves from old packs. However, if Wizards were to abolish the reserved list, Magic would collapse in on itself. Wizards would no longer have any investor confidence in their product and no one would even be willing to purchase their lowest cost cards. Wizards of the Coast’s reserved list protects the game itself because if Wizards were to abolish the reserved list, they would be sued into non-existence.
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