At some point over the past decade Magic the Gathering slowly morphed from the undisputed kind of collectible card games into an extremely profitable and reliable category of investment. Now, in the second half of 2021, any long-term investors portfolio would benefit from the reliable profit and diversification Magic products grant.

While the product catalogue in Magic the Gathering is massive most investors who find the game and decide to use it as an investment vehicle focus on one of a few proven category of products. The main areas most target are:

-Sealed product of any era, vintage preferred.
-Graded product, mostly from the vintage / gold / silver era.
-Loose high value cards, vintage preferred.
-Loose general vintage cards.

The sealed product revolution can be hung on a single name: Rudy.

For the last 4 years Rudy from Alpha Investments has been ringing the bell on this market and making a lot of enemies in the process. Rudy is a Mafic the Gathering investor and store owner who loves and makes videos out of Florida and they report their total M:tG investment to be eight figures. They've become one of the largest M:tG sellers through their Patreonand the raw quality of their content has warped the Magic landscape around them.

Grading has been around for years now but over the past 5 has really taken off as a new subgenre of this investing class. Buying graded cards appeals to those who are interested in high quality unique pieces, are looking to avoid counterfeits completely, and are open to paying the premium these cards command. This is an area that I focus on.

I believe that over the coming decades Magic will continue to appreciate and cards from the vintage era will come to be valued as museum grade collectibles. The estimates for how many of these individual cards exists is a highly contentious subject but opinions range from "not many" to "far fewer than that". These cards are more than cards to me, they are a piece of my childhood and, in the most literal way, they are art. If you believe they are also far more rare than some assume and would like to own these pieces in your collection, it's not going to start getting easier.

I don't go for the high value cards for a lot of reasons. I'll simply say that when something is considered collectible it's collected and valued and saved. When it's not the items are lost, thrown out, given away, or destroyed. I'm someone who thinks that, on the longer timeline, literally all cards from early Magic the Gathering sets like Alpha, Beta, Unlimited, Revised, Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends, and The Dark will be valued very highly.

I have a specific criteria for the cards I target. They need to be fifteen or more years old, graded at 8.0 or above, graded by PSA or BGS, and be selling under value or be something that means a lot to me from my childhood. The cards shown above are not any I have specific memories of but I was able to get them for less than 50% their normal sale price by watching ebay closely.

These golden legendary creatures from Legends were some of my favorite cards ever growing up. I started playing before Legends so, when I first saw gold cards that required multiple specific types of mana, my little mind was blown! Both of these cards were favorite and it feels wonderful to own them again.

As a little kid with a big imagination the Legends set was all I needed to really come up with what I thought the world of magic was like and the overall darker tone of the time period was a huge part of that. I have always loved horror and before I was one of the larger horror VHS collectors in the US, I was just a kid trying to build every zombie deck in sight.

Some people have a really hard time with other people viewing 'their game' as an investible produce. To me it's just another way to play the game I've been stuck on my entire life. If I was going to be able to quit magic it would have happened one of the 3 times I sold everything and walked away. Now, slowly, the cards are coming back in. Sometimes one at a time, which is fine, I understand the value of patience now. And I still just like the cards.