Magic: The Gathering is launching its collection dedicated to The Lord of the Rings this Friday, and things are starting to heat up. While this collection may not have a significant impact on the competitive scene, it certainly excels in flavor, capturing the essence of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work. The artwork is breathtaking, and with the original texts accompanying the cards, this collection boasts some of the best descriptive texts in the game’s history. However, despite the limited number of cards that meet the competitive standards, the unique nature of the collection is causing the prices of some typically inexpensive cards to skyrocket.
First and foremost, it’s important to understand that Magic: The Gathering operates on a scarcity-based economy. A certain number of cards are printed, and once they are sold out, unless they are reprinted in a future collection, no more are available. This means that the more a card is played or in demand due to its artwork or exclusivity, the higher its price will climb. This is precisely the case with the Nâzgul cards.
Initially, the Nâzgul card itself is nothing special. Being a 1/2 creature with deathtouch for a cost of 3, it doesn’t stand out as particularly playable. So where does its value lie? It’s in the last line of text and what they’ve done with the card. The final line reads, “Each deck may contain up to nine cards named Nâzgul.” This is an anomaly because, unless specified otherwise, each deck can only have up to four copies of any given card, which doesn’t apply to the Nâzgul. Now, as we mentioned, it’s not a playable card, so it doesn’t matter whether you can have four or nine copies if it’s not going to see play. But that’s where the trick lies. In The Lord of the Rings, there are nine Nâzgul, just as there are nine human kings corrupted by the rings of power given to men. And in this Magic: The Gathering collection, there are nine versions of the Nâzgul card, each representing one of the nine different riders.
That’s what has made it scarce. Despite being an uncommon card, being the second rarest type of card —in terms of rarity, from most common to least common to find in packs, there are: commons, uncommons, rares, and mythic rares—, having nine versions of the same card makes it harder to find all the versions than simply finding nine copies of the same one. If we also consider that they seem to appear less frequently than usual for uncommon cards, we have a case on our hands of a card that is poised to explode in price on the secondary market.
As the first packs of the collection have been opened, the price of the Nâzgul card has skyrocketed. Going from around one to two euros to approximately ten euros in the European market, and reaching nearly twenty dollars in the American market, its value has exponentially increased in less than twenty-four hours as people realized that acquiring a collection of all nine Nâzgul could be much more difficult than initially thought.
On the other hand, there’s a small catch to consider. So far, only a very limited number of packs from The Lord of the Rings collection have been opened. The collection doesn’t officially release until Friday, June 23rd, and while stores open boxes early to sell cards that can be used in tournaments as soon as they become legal, one week before their release, it means there’s a relatively small amount of material circulating. This suggests that it’s expected for Nâzgul’s price to decrease over time if the collection is widely opened, which is likely given that it’s The Lord of the Rings, and if many cards are sold, although that is more questionable given the set’s focus on collectors.
At the end of the day, Magic: The Gathering is a game that treats its cards as luxury products. In recent times, they have tried to alleviate this by introducing special treatments for cards, increasing reprints and their frequency, but they don’t always achieve their goal. In any case, this will only affect collectors and not the competitive game, and as we know, this is how it works: if you want something, you have to pay for it. And no one ever said that collecting something is cheap.
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