The trading card game Magic: The Gathering has been around for a while. I started playing it back in 1995, and lost interest somewhere early 1999. I sold most of my collection on eBay, and only kept a single deck and a few individual cards.
Back then, I thought it was really fancy if you had a variety of different land cards in your deck, compared to just having all the same cards from, for example German Fourth Edition. At least having a few Foreign Black Border versions, ideally in other languages than German or English, was always a goal.
However, I couldn’t just hop onto the internet, and just buy any card I want. There was no internet, no marketplaces. You could mail-order cards through magazines, but I didn’t have any money to spend on such services. After all, I was a kid with no real income.
Fast-forward to 2025. Now I have access to global online marketplaces, and I am disgustingly rich from delivering all those Amazon packages for 14 hours each day.
So I figured I would just have my variety of lands today! After a bit of thought, I settled on collecting all Swamp cards from Limited Edition Alpha onwards, until I’ve filled up a 3 by 3 UltraPro Portfolio Binder. I figured, I just randomly buy old cards on eBay, until I have all of them. It honestly seemed to me like that would just work out.
The First List
Once I had discovered Scryfall, it became clear to me how many cards I was actually looking for. I also realized, that there are versions of the lands that are worth hundreds of Euros, because they are in some super rare print run I had never even heard of before. Having online marketplace prices shown for the cards also helped dramatically in me understanding that I’m paying up to 1000% markups on cards on eBay, because there are people on eBay who just like to offer cards at prices way above their true market value to scam people like me.
I created my first overview of required cards in LibreCalc. Nothing beats a good spreadsheet. This is when I first realized that filling the binder would not even get me to Ice Age, and it would purely be the first 3 illustrations of a land that were ever printed. After removing the highly expensive cards from my target, I ended up being able to include Ice Age, but that was it.
Registering on CardMarket, putting credits in my account, and then ordering cards there, seemed too annoying to me to be worth it. I also thought that I don’t have to overthink the purchasing, because the scope of the collection is too limited. I would just continue to buy on eBay with a closer watch on the prices, but I would be done quickly anyway. And so I kept collecting.
Chaos
Multiple letters with cards would arrive each week. Every card needs to be evaluated, and put into the binder. Sellers need feedback, purchases have to be cleared. Letters go missing, or communication with sellers is required for other reasons.
Magic cards are identified by their Collector Number. Wizards of the Coast, the manufacturer of the game, did not officially assign any collector numbers to any of these early cards. There are generally agreed upon substitutes, but they are not official. Some sellers use terms like “Version C” to refer to a given print, but they don’t mean card 3 according to the unofficial numbering scheme. I only realized this after having multiple duplicates in my collection.
It’s also incredibly easy to misidentify land cards in foreign languages. There is the Swamp card in Spanish “Pantano”, and the same card in Portuguese “Pântano”. Distinguishing Japanese, Korean, and Traditional Chinese was also challenging initially, until I learned to identify the distinct shapes of the Kanji used in each language. All of this is made more difficult by missing or wrong data in online databases (which I’m helping to correct, of course).
A major oversight was that Ice Age doesn’t have 3 variants of each land, but 4. I spent way too much time on trying to figure out how to make that work with my 3 by 3 binder. I was also really unhappy about learning that Limited Edition Alpha only had 2 variants, with the 3rd variant only being added in Limited Edition Beta.
Foreshadowing
Nothing beats a good spreadsheet, right? Except that you will be thinking about replacing the damn spreadsheet with something better, every single second you have to endure using it. Every fiber in your body tells you “No”, but you already know deep down, that you will overengineer the shit ouf of this one eventually. But, for the time being, let’s look at our key learnings:
Buying cards in bad condition is a waste of money.
“At least I’ll have it” was a driving thought initially. I quickly wanted to replace those cards, especially after learning that they weren’t such a great deal anyway.
Buying singles on eBay is a waste of money, unless you know that you are buying a great deal.
eBay sellers don’t properly grade cards, or don’t guarantee the grading of their cards. It’s basically gambling, feels exactly like it. All the rush, all the disappointment.
Trading cards are not unique. They are a commodity item.
If you have a card in perfect condition, and someone else has exactly the same card, then they are of equal value. If you want that card, buy it from the seller with the lowest price. Any cent paid more, will not change the card you receive in any way. Any time you feel like you should purchase something outside of the correct purchasing strategy, you’re gambling, not collecting.
Don’t use any online service for collection management.
The vendor lock-in is annoying. Features are not sufficient. Your collection needs to be stored and maintained locally.
Targeting a card in a specific language is often not trivial.
If you’re building a deck, and you just need 20 lands, then you probably just want those lands as cheap as possible. You certainly don’t want to order some 500€ rare print that outvalues any other card in the deck. Online marketplaces tailor to that. Trying to order a land in every single language of a set is often not trivial.