How Gaming Collectibles Have Evolved with Case Opening

Last month I paid a fiver at a car boot sale for a shoebox of mid-nineties Magic: The Gathering cards, mainly because someone had written DO NOT SELL on the lid in marker pen. My shelf space these days mostly goes on Bitmap Books, so a box of Magic cards is a bit off-piste for me, but I couldn’t leave it there. The box smelled faintly of loft, which is how you know it’s the real thing.

Nearly all of it is Revised and Fourth Edition, the white-bordered core sets, with a few hundred commons, a decent stack of uncommons and four rares. Boosters back then were 15 cards with one rare in each, so a few hundred commons should have come with twenty-odd rares if they were opened from packs. Four is low. I suspect someone went through the box before me.

What rare was for

The V&A calls Magic the first collectible trading card game, and its designer, Richard Garfield, didn’t want the power locked up in the rares. “If only rare cards were powerful,” he wrote in 1994, “players would either have to be rich or lucky to get a decent deck.” The idea was that rares would more often be the fiddly, specialised cards you’d only want one or two of anyway. Black Lotus, a rare, rather undermined that.

My four are closer to what he had in mind. Two are enchantments I had to look up, and the others are an artifact with a paragraph of rules text and a creature I’ve never seen anyone play.

Rarity moved into the box

The closest modern equivalent to a booster pack may be the virtual cases used in case-opening platforms. Instead of a physical pack containing a fixed number of cards, a virtual case contains a selection of digital items with different possible outcomes. The important difference is where the rarity comes from. With a physical collectible, scarcity is ultimately tied to how many copies were produced and how they were distributed. With a digital case, the contents, rarities and probabilities can be configured as part of the case itself.

Evoverse gives operators control over those elements, allowing them to build cases around specific items and rarities and configure the drop logic and odds behind their outcomes. That makes the case more than a digital container: its contents and reward structure are part of the experience being designed.

That took me a while to get my head round. The same skin can have a different probability of appearing depending on the case it is included in, without anything about the skin itself changing. A Fourth Edition rare, by contrast, came from a physical booster whose distribution was determined when the product was printed. That difference matters because collectors have always looked for ways to measure scarcity.

Counting copies

Serial numbers on cards seem to have started in American baseball, a long way from my usual patch of Spectrums and Argos catalogues. Donruss generally gets the credit for the first serial-numbered set: its 1991 Elite Series inserts, mostly numbered to 10,000 and so scarce that most people who bought Donruss that year never saw one. Now chase cards go right down to one of one, and the grading companies publish counts of every copy they’ve graded, which is just the sort of list I could lose an evening to.

Early Magic cards weren’t numbered at all, so scarcity came down to the print ratio and how big the run was, and a run ends. Alpha, the first Magic printing in 1993, reportedly consisted of about 2.6 million cards, and that’s every Alpha card there will ever be. Wizards of the Coast has printed a great deal of Magic since, but none of it is Alpha. A case can keep going at the same odds until the site takes it down, so there’s never a final number to count. Rarity was only ever part of the appeal. Garfield had seen the trading coming.

The shoebox

People valued the same cards differently, Garfield noted, which gave “a lot of opportunity for arbitrage”. In the nineties that meant a binder and a lot of haggling, and I’d guess whoever had my shoebox before me did plenty of both. It would explain the missing rares, and it makes the note on the lid a bit rich, given they’d already traded away everything worth having. Two of the elastic bands had fused to the cards, so it had been up in that loft a long time.