Several years ago when I was into Magic The Gathering, I bought a box of boosters for the joke set UNstable. The UN- sets in magic are intentionally silly, featuring cards like “Frazzled Editor” “Urza’s Hot Tub” “Farewell to Arms” (you pick one of the opponents hands, they can’t use that hand anymore) and a personal favorite “our market research shows that players like really long card names so we made this card to have the absolute longest card name ever elemental.”
These silver bordered cards are tournament illegal, and generally good fun.
I’d originally bought this with the idea of doing a draft event with friends. My first attempt only had two other people show up besides me, and we three agreed that not only would this not be as fun but also too expensive (the buy-in for draft is box price divided by players.) Second attempt went about the same. And the first attempt (made on an April first no less) had the exact same people again coming to the same conclusion again.
So the box got put away and mostly forgotten about, until I recently found it again while looking for my regular decks.
So…what should I do with this thing?
1: Sell it. I have it on good authority that I could double it’s original price easily, maybe event triple if I sell direct to a collector.
2: Try to do a draft again. The two big problems though are; do we use the original price of the box or the current price, and we’ll all be left with cards we can’t put into regular decks.
3: Cube the set. Cube is draft, but re-usable. After every draft, you separate the rares/ultras into one pile, everything else into another, and blindly re-create the distribution of booster packs for the next time you play. But when could I use this? There could be valuable cards in the box, and if I bring this to a public event, what’s to stop someone I’ve never met before or will again pocketing a few of these for re-sale? But if I keep this among friends, it’s not going to get a lot of use.
4: Keep all the cards and make joke decks for casual MTG events.
