Robot Viking

Give me a Shelby Cobra. Now that's a mythic rare.

It’s a phrase heard at game and card shops around the world, typically when someone with deeper pockets buys some ridiculously overpriced card or miniature: “It’s just paper and ink. There’s no way I’d pay that much!” That may be true, but somebody would. Here’s an essay on why the things we love cost as much as they do. You were hoping for something about dragons or zombies or something, I know. Next week, Vikings. Next week.

I particularly love the, “It’s just paper and ink” argument. I always ask the person who said it if they’ll give me a $20 bill. When they act incredulous, I say, “What, it’s just paper and ink.” Here’s the truth about value — all value is an illusion. Things hold their value because we all buy into the illusion. If people stop believing something has value, it loses that value. Here’s a link to an article on Currency I wrote for HowStuffWorks.com a few years ago that goes into this sort of thing in greater detail.

So why is our friend the Lotus Cobra, for example, worth more than a Felidar Sovereign? Or why are Moxes worth so freaking much? Some of the answer is simple. A lot of it is more complex than you think.

The simple part is basic supply and demand. Increased supply drives down prices. Increased demand drives them up. For an in-print game (I’ll use Magic: the Gathering for all the examples since most gamers are at least aware of how it works), supply is pretty static. You get a certain number of cards per pack; a certain number of them are common, uncommon, rare and mythic rare. The supply is even self-correcting for increases in demand — as more people become interested in the game, demand increases, but so does the number of people opening packs, so supply goes up as well.

The supply of certain types of cards is intrinsically limited by the design of the game. Rares are rarer than uncommons. Reduced supply means those cards will naturally tend to cost more. Obvious enough. When you introduce demand, however, things get interesting. For one thing, there can be virtually no demand for a crappy rare. It might sell for under a dollar. There might be a common that pretty much everyone wants four or more of, so even though you could open a few packs and almost guarantee getting one, a single common might sell for $3 (like Lightning Bolt). Demand can shift rapidly, too. That crappy rare? Well, suddenly some guy in Lansing, Michigan wins a PTQ with his Donate/Illusions of Grandeur deck, and the price of Donate goes up 1,000 percent because everyone else wants to build one, too.

You may think of yourself as a rational person, an individual unswayed by groupthink and resistant to conformity. The truth is, all humans are prone to herd mentality. It’s some kind of evolutionary advantage when you’re hunting and gathering, no doubt, but it sucks when you’re making economic decisions. Let’s say you’ve been playing a red and green aggro deck at local Magic tournaments. It does well consistently, but there’s a big regional tournament coming up, so you look online for a few tips to tweak it and gain a slight edge. You see that everyone is using four Lotus Cobras. You’ve been running a common in that slot for months, and it works. You know it works. You’ve tested and proved that it works. You have raw empirical data that shows you should not be using the Lotus Cobra in your deck. But even the most independent thinkers among us will be severely tempted to go out and buy a playset of Lotus Cobras before the big tourney. So, often demand can be driven up not by the actual quality of a card or its utility in a given situation, but by a simple desire to follow the crowd.

Perceived desirability has a strange effect as well. You can notice this most readily with foil cards. Functionally, foil cards offer no advantage over non-foil versions. Their rarity makes the supply of foil cards smaller than non-foils, so they have correspondingly higher prices. However, this wouldn’t be true in the absence of demand. If we all made perfectly rational decisions when we purchased things, no one would ever buy foils until their price reached the same level as the non-foils. But people buy them.

This is even more exaggerated when you look at the Power 9, those classic overpowered Magic cards from the first set. Their prices today are astronomically high. This can’t be explained by simple supply and demand. The supply is relatively low because they are out of print, but very few gamers are looking to buy them. There’s virtually no use for them (vintage tournaments being few and far between), and they’re restricted to one per deck, so no one needs to buy four of them. They’re not even that inherently powerful; contrary to popular belief, the card text on Black Lotus does not read: “You win.” I suspect that they are being perceived as extremely valuable cards, regardless of their specific utility. They are considered the ultimate Magic cards to own, and often serve as status symbols, much like an expensive diamond ring. This perception of value is like a positive feedback loop: “They’re so expensive, they must be awesome. If they’re awesome, they must be worth a lot of money!”

The final factor I’ll mention is another aspect of human nature that researchers have confirmed many times — we all think we’re better at stuff than we actually are. I’m not as funny, smart or skilled at driving as I think I am, and neither are you. How does this drive up collectible game prices? When you play and lose, you will tend to think that you suffered from some disadvantage at the outset. You didn’t have the right cards. If you did, clearly your superior skill would have won you the game. Which are the right cards? The really expensive ones your opponent had, most likely (remember that herd mentality thing). At some point in their playing “career,” every collectible gamer says or thinks the following phrase: “I could do so much better if only I had…” You may, and you may not, but you almost always think you will.

Ok, class dismissed.

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