The Black Lotus from the original set was sold on eBay this week
Magic: The Gathering is a card-collection game of course, so it makes sense some of its cards would be, well, collector’s items. One just fetched more than $87,000 in an eBay sale.
As noticed today by Kotaku, the Black Lotus card from Magic: The Gathering ’s original launch — August 1993, so, happy upcoming 25th anniversary, while we’re at it — went for $87,672 after bidding closed this week. The Black Lotus, which officially “adds 3 mana of any single color of your choice to your mana pool,” showed up in three printings of Magic: The Gathering card sets from 1993.
What makes this Black Lotus card so valuable is only 1,100 were printed for MTG ’s alpha set from 1993. When a rare item has a known and fixed number, its value increases accordingly. Also helping this card’s sale price was a 9.5 grading (out of 10) from card collection evaluator Beckett.
Kotaku has a better explanation for why Black Lotus was so powerful — and so, therefore, rare. Magic players versed in the game’s balance and mana systems know that it gives players a nice head start if they begin a game with it. It’s shown up before and always commands attention when it does — a 2014 live pack opening contained one, for example.
For me, it’s fascinating to see a card collection game item from 25 years ago fetch a price that would legitimately make a sports collector’s year. And sports cards are a hobby that has taken a beating, badly, over the past quarter century. Magic: The Gathering ’s rarer items may not yet be getting the seven-figure prices estimated for baseball’s more prized possessions — but then, it hasn’t been around as long. Give the game some time, and we might be talking about the Black Lotus one day the way baseball fans do for Honus Wagner.
