You can tell Fifth Edition cards fairly easily. They will be white bordered with no expansion symbol. The copyright line on the bottom will be dated 1997. Fourth Edition will be the same as Fifth, only the copyright date will be 1995 instead.
The thing with those sets are, every single card in them more or less is worthless. There’s one or two outliers, Serra Angel, Wrath of God, maybe one of the dragons, that are worth a couple of bucks. Nothing worth more than 10, maybe 15 at the very top end. The vast majority of it you’d be lucky to get a quarter each for the rares, less for anything else.
Well yeah I know I was just trying to guess at what he meant by crescent. Thinking about it some more though, it’s more likely The Dark. Black bordered Dark cards are worth a bit more than your run of the mill card, simply based on rarity. But if they’re white bordered, then they are from Chronicles(a full reprint set that was a disaster for the secondary market at the time). Chronicle reprints are barely worth the paper they’re printed on.
The best way to tell if you have magic cards that are worth anything is to find someone you trust who’s played magic for a while to look over them, or to post an exhaustive list and have us go over it. A random sample will not give you much information, since most magic cards are worthless or nearly, but some are worth reasonable amounts and a few are worth a great deal. A random sample is very likely to miss the ones that are worth anything.
If you do go the exhaustive list route, you can list just the name of the card. Except for a very few cards, the set they’re from is immaterial to determining their value. Even better, if you want to catch the few cards where set matters, take a high resolution photo of the cards (you can do many per page, and throw it up on Flickr or something.
If you have a digital camera, it shouldn’t take more than 10 or 15 minutes to take pics of the binder pages. Throw them up somewhere, and I’d be happy to take a look.
I remember some years ago, there was a glitch in one of the price-list sites, that it ended up showing Forests as being worth something like five bucks (compared to five cents for all the other basic lands). What had happened was, the site was just taking the average auction price for all cards by that name, and there was some sort of rare misprint on a handful of forests that made them collectors’ items. So almost all forests were still worth a pittance, just like any other basic land, but those few misprints were artificially driving up the averages.
You can buy a Scrye magazine for $5 that will list EVERY card and tell you a high, low, and median expected value. That’s what I did yesterday - apparently this box that’s been living under my bed has several $30-$50 cards in it. (Legends, mostly.)
Thats another reason why I thought it was Portal. The timing fits.
Portal was the beginner set into Magic. It has legal game cards, but only has about a fouth of the depth. [Portal only has Lands, Creatures, and Sorcerries. - Including a counter spell effect with sorcery speed. :eek: ]
It is when I started playing. I have since bought older Cards, but Portal was right after 5th, and right before Tempest.
I also figured, if she didn’t know what magic was, the Beginner set would be the best time to get in.
Don’t underestimate Portal though. Since they allowed it into Vintage tournaments, it has offered quite a few amazing cards that have helped fuel some of the combo decks. I haven’t played for close to a year though so I’m not sure what the metagame is like now. But I believe they were all storm based decks at the time.
What was it about? I checked the first three pages for posts started by Covered_In_Bees! and couldn’t find anything. Well I ctrl+F’ed for “Cove” and nothing popped up. Can’t figure out my old username and password to search for your name.
My link was to The Mana Drain, a Vintage-only website. Filled with people who played Vintage on a serious, competitive level. Some of them only play Vintage on a serious level.
I provided that link (it’s in my last post here also) to their forum where people talk about and build new decks together. Elsewhere on the message board is a forum dedicated to announcing when and where upcoming Vintage tournaments are to be held.
Thanks but I already knew that. I mean, I have kept it for 15 years without opening it, specifically to be able to sell it to a collector at some point.
I have lots of unopened stuff. You should see DJs when they find out that I have unopened vinyl copies of FGTH Relax 12" and Talk Talk It’s My Life 12". One guy offered me $400 for FGTH but he didn’t have it on him, so no deal.
Thanks for the advice and the estimates, too, y’all.
I always hit up the sports cards section of our shop, but back around '94-'95 I bought a couple packs just to see if I could pull anything. The “best” card I got, was a (phonetically)Nevinyeral’s Disk, or something like that. The picture was of a stone disk with teeth and tentacles coming out of it; off hand, I couldn’t tell you what it actually did. I think it was an ‘artifact’?
I should still have it somewhere in a hard sleeve and at least near mint condition. Could anyone tell me if that one would be worth anything? None of these links are working at work.
Huh. Sounds like a pretty stong card, at least to someone who has never actually played before, but unfortunately I’m pretty sure it does have the white border.
Note that it’s not discriminating: It destroys your stuff as well. Which can be effective if your deck is designed around relatively few permanents to begin with, of course, but those can be difficult to make work.
I was just trying to guess at what he meant by crescent. Thinking about it some more though, it’s more likely The Dark. Black bordered Dark cards are worth a bit more than your run of the mill card, simply based on rarity. But if they’re white bordered, then they are from Chronicles(a full reprint set that was a disaster for the secondary market at the time). Chronicle reprints are barely worth the paper they’re printed on.
