Hey planewalkers! In high school, my friend introduced me to the game, and while I haven’t played continuously since then, I’ve kept collecting lands. Alas, no Guru lands, but there are some nice things in here. I curate this collection, so many things have come through it, but I try to keep it to only the best versions of lands that I truly enjoy, and I hope my fellow planeswalkers will too. These are the lands that I take with me to sealed events (the only time I really play) so please forgive the scratches on the binder pages. If you want to see out-of-pages hi-res pictures, check out the youtube video series.
edit: I’ve started updating my collection photos, and I plan to include each page in the initial post on this thread, instead of as subsequent posts to be hunted down…
I have noticed that some collect art, but instead of collecting it on the cards, where it’s cheap, they’ll opt for a playmat at many times the price, or an actual print of the artwork. BUT the cards turned into prints are few and far between, so…
You can actually buy prints of nearly any MTG art directly from the artists (a great venue for this is the ‘MTG Art Market’ group on FB). Just an FYI.
Very cool idea for a collection, btw! There are so many great basic land arts. The Shards of Alara Island you have happens to be one of my all-time favorites.
Oh god… I just skimmed the page, and pretty much every piece of art was in the $4-$8K range, with smaller pencil sketches in the high hundreds. Rip me.
Those are originals, not prints. And even then, you can buy less desirable originals for <$2000. Most prints are in the $25 to $100 range.
EDIT: For example, Mark Tedin prints can be had for as low as $15 (they won’t be numbered prints, but they’ll still look great on a wall!). Dan Frazier sells his smaller prints for $10 ea. And these are just the first two artists that came to mind.
Well, I believe a lot of people do collect MTG cards when they can. The problem is they’re extremely difficult to collect, particularly high graded copies. Anything high grade in Alpha/Beta are mostly hoarded at this point or have become permanent collector pieces. The very desirable cards have really low print numbers and vintage foils for example are insanely rare. I have just a hand full of Mint and Gem Mint MTG cards and all of them are extremely low graded pop, like under 10 graded copies. My rarest one is a pop 3 card and the odds of finding another is nearly 0% chance due to very limited sealed product and very low pull rates from the booster packs. Some of the sets are 300+ cards which is anywhere from 3-6x bigger than the average vintage Pokemon set. The other problem is, many of these cards from the 90s and 2000s were played and not stored away at all. Very few players had plans or intentions to preserve them for the most part. The same could be said about Pokemon cards as well, but I’m still convinced that in general the MTG stuff is way more rare/low pop overall and for specific cards it’s nearly impossible to get them.
I’ll share a couple I own. Pop 6 Exalted Angel and my pop 3-4 Azusa (I think BGS has like 3 that got 9.5):
These were 2 cards (non-foil) I used a lot in my decks when I used to play MTG as a teenager in the early/mid 2000s and I bought them strictly on personal joy, with secondary being investment. Looking at the old foils just never gets old to me, it’s very cool to own them. Azusa in particular is exceptionally rare because the Kamigawa sets did not sell well at all but now many years later a lot of people in the MTG community are warming up to them more since it’s a very unique MTG set (Japanese folklore themes compared to Western fantasy stuff).
Np. I wish Pokemon would do things like this for their special editions, where you preorder directly through wizards and they just print to demand. Everyone that wants one, gets one, at retail.
The Alara Plains with the sand dunes is also a favorite of mine.
