Despite having almost zero working knowledge of The Lord of the Rings, I’m already on board for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic: The Gathering’s big cros꧂sover set, Tales of Middle-earth. I’m e꧅xcited to see that famously deep worldbuilding that’s passed me by brought to the card game, and seeing which characters are revealed next has easily been the most engaged many of my non-MTG-playing friends have been with it.
That being said, there’s one aspect of Lord of the Rings I wish Wizards of the Coast wasn’t quite so faithful with: 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The One Ring. One very special Collector booster is going to have a one-off, unique version of the card, complete with a serial number of 1/1. It’ll be the only one printed in the e⛦ntire world, and has immediately caught the attention of both Magic collectors and Lord of the Rings fans alike. And I hate it.
Magic has long battled with ways to make the game feel more collectible without ꩵtaking cards away from those who just want to play. When this balance is found, we get cool stuff like booster fun treatments giving us easily attainable, but special-feeling versions of cards right in the packs themselves. When it goes wrong, we get things like the Reserved List banning cards from ever being reprinted, a move that’s only honestly defended by those who already own the hundred-thousand-dollar cards, and stand to gain from keeping them away from the unwashed masses.
We’ve even had Lord of the Rings’ serialised cards before, in the form of retro artifact reprints in The Bro𝓰thers’ War. There were dozens of cards released with unique serial codes, and, while they are expensive and easily the biggest chase cards from that set, the idea felt almost too ridiculous for anyone but the most avid collector. Nobody’s going to spring $300 for #2🦂34 of a Burnished Hard when the same card is available for le♛ss than five cents in its unserialised form, after all.
Dropping the number of cards up for grabs from thousands or hundreds, as it was in The Brothers’ War, to just one card makes The One Ring and its .00003 percent chance of finding it feel different. Magic’s managed to sidestep the ongoing c💃ontroversy over lootboxes in video games, buꦰt it’s impossible not to look at The One Ring and just see Collector booster packs as lottery tickets for a card so valuable that it could let you put a deposit down on a house.
One of three things is going to happen wiꦰth this card, and all🧜 three of these outcomes suck.
Like most online fandoms, there are way more silent players who don’t feel the need to share their pulls or go online to brag about their PSA 10 Time Walk. The most l𓂃ikely outcome of this is that a “casual” finds The One Ring, thinks it’s neat, and then never thinks about it again. Wizards’ big attention-grabbing card whiffs, and then the community gets angry and starts accusing it of never actually releasing the card at all. This is easily the best possible outcome, as it treats the card as every card should be: a game piece with pretty art, rather than a cheque.
The second outcome is that the Collector booster ends up in the hands of someone more involved in the community, be it a Redditor, influencer, or contentཧ creator. This would be completely innocent and above board, of course, but suddenly the MTG community is plunged into theories that the packs were rigged to make sure a ‘high-profile’ person gets the card for maximum brand impact, and the validity of the pull is called into question. Again, this whole affair ends with salty players, but with the 𝐆fun bonus of a specific target to harass for it, which is just swell.
The third outcome is the one I hate the most. This set was always going to be scalped hard thanks to the widespread interest the Lord of the Rings name is attracting, but now those obnoxious TCG Finance Bros have a reason to gobble up all the stock they can find, hoping to find The One Ring and flip it for potentially tens of thousands of dollars. Now the card isn’t being respected as a game piece, and is instead purely a cash cow in the same way all those Reserved List cards sitting in PSA grade tiles are. It’ll make headlines, because expensive trading cards always do grab the attention of the news, but it’s a feel-bad moment for both Tolkien and MTG fans alike as the worst ki💃nd of person imaginable suddenly gets to buy a few sportscars.
The thought that The One Ring is going to be the card everyone talks about for the entirety of the build-up to Tales of Middle-earth’s launch puts a damper on it for m🐼e. Wizards just made possibly the most valuable MTG card ever printed, and now it’s throwing it into the Mount Doom of fulfilment centres and scalpers’ stockrooms. I hope the lucky owner of The One Ring riffle-shuffles it into their casual kitchen-table deck and then ties that deck up with a rubber band, because that’s how TCGs should be – games first, speculative market cash cows second.