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Collecting Zendikar.

Last September Wizards of the Coast kicked off a new Magic: The Gathering block called Zendikar. It reminds me of classic magic sets like the Urza block. I bought a few packs and looked at them, but never really made any decks nor did I collect any more cards. Since then, they’ve released Worldwake and just yesterday they released Rise of the Eldrazi. On a whim, I asked Corin to pick me up a couple packs of Worldwake while she was at Wal*Mart. I opened them and since have been bitten by the bug.

But this time it’s different. I decided to stop buying booster packs like a sucker. No, I’m not going to pay collectible store prices either. I did some research and saw on eBay you can get complete common and uncommon player’s sets (4 copies of the same cards) for $0.99-$30. Commons and uncommons make up 75% of the set and though rares make up the other 25%, not all rares are created equal and most are useless (unless you specifically build a deck to use them). After some research, many of the rares I wanted to play with only cost one or two dollars for four copies. The most versatile (and thus most powerful) cards cost more, but even the $10-$20 cards don’t seem so expensive after I did the math.

Most serious players buy discounted booster boxes and get their cards from those. A booster box has thirty-six packs in it. A booster pack will typically contain fifteen cards: one rare, three uncommons, ten commons, and one basic land. Since the booster box costs $90, it brings the cost of the packs down to $2.50 per pack. If you take out the basic land, you only get fourteen cards per pack or 504 cards per booster box. Subtract the rares and it’s only 468. Since a player’s set of uncommons and commons in Zendikar is 644 cards, you’re definitely not getting a complete set in one booster box. You get thirty-six rares, but there are 53 in the set and my experience is that the really great cards are truly rare and you are lucky to get one in a whole booster box. By getting my commons and uncommons in one complete player’s set for a third of what I payed for a booster box, I can spend the remaining $60 on just the rares I need for the decks I want. Even if I occasionally buy booster packs, I can still keep the rares and resell superfluous cards.

I think this plan will help me collect what I want without spending more than I have to. The funny thing is that since I put my cards in binders, I spend almost as much on the storage supplies as I do on the cards themselves! They always get ya, coming or going.