The Big Things: Collector's Edition

Magic is full of odds and ends, with every bit of the card serving as an opportunity for change over the past thirty years. Old borders, new borders, black borders…gold borders? That’s right, in this month’s edition of The Big Things we’re taking a look at the first product bearing one of Magic’s more controversial design choices: the gold border.

A quick note before we get into the thick of it: this article isn’t going to be talking much about 30th Anniversary Edition. Yes, it has a gold border, but the history and price of that product is based on an ongoing conflux of events so much so that it’s difficult to actually evaluate the product as-is. To put it simply, 30th Anniversary Edition is still too new and too infamous to be evaluated in the same light as its other gold border cousins. So with that out of the way, let’s get into it.  

 

Gold Border Origins

  The gold border debuted alongside Magic’s first product marketed exclusively towards collectors, the aptly named Collector's Edition, in 1993, with an overseas reprint tagging along shortly thereafter in the form of the International Edition. These were complete sets of Beta Edition, alongside 61 basic lands, printed with square corners and a gold border on the back. Approximately 15,000 of these units were ordered for print production, with an estimated breakdown of 9,000 Collector's Edition sets sold in the United States and Canada, 4,000 International Edition sets being sold abroad, and 1,000 International Edition sets being diverted back to the U.S. and Canada for sale due to a print run error in the production of the initial wave of Collector's Edition. One year into Magic’s release, and already the demand for collectible products had ballooned past printer capacity.

Initially marketed at $49.95 per set (or roughly $102.49 as adjusted for inflation), the appeal for this first-era gold border product was a mix of affordability and exclusivity. Getting a copy of Collector's Edition was incredibly difficult due to the myriad printing issues and supply shortfalls, which heightened the urgency of demand as people searched for the limited supply, but for those lucky enough to get ahold of one the price was relatively reasonable. While these weren’t tournament legal cards, the best comparison for Collector's Edition as a product is actually the retired From the Vault Series: a guaranteed set of highly demanded cards, an accessible price point, but printed in relative scarcity. Tournament legality didn’t impact demand significantly at first, as the appeal was comparable to that of an officially licensed cube product.

Understanding the origins of Collector’s Edition is crucial because it provides insight into how the price of the product has moved over time, both as a sealed unit and the cards within as individual assets. Rather than being rejected at launch, Collector's Edition was a celebrated and truly scarce product, meaning that its history since then has emerged from a positive origin with significant market demand. Now, onto the product itself.  

As A Box Set

  First off, the sealed box.

 

  Like all sealed product, the value isn’t just what’s inside the wrapping - but the status of the wrapping itself. As sealed product ages, the expected value within becomes less intertwined with the market value of the sealed product itself. Yes, a box of cards, especially when you know the card list for certain, will almost never drop below the sum of its contents, but as time moves forward sealed product has a tendency to increase in value regardless of the price movements of its individual contents. This is because supply of sealed product suffers from attrition with time, whether it be boxes being opened or damaged, while single cards naturally bleed into the market as those boxes are opened. When looking at the price chart for Collector's Edition, we can see that the value has retained a rather steady trend around the $17,000 mark for over a year. The prices of individual cards within, however, have shifted dramatically over that same time frame, with Black Lotus (CE) reaching a low of almost $2,500 and a high of nearly $5,000.  

 

Digging a little deeper, however, a second critical aspect of the Collector's Edition story comes to light. Just as with its initial release, the supply of sealed Collector's Edition right now on the open market is critically low, so much so that the $17,000 price tag from earlier isn’t as much a market price as it is the lowest asking price. As of writing, there are less than five such boxes found across TCGPlayer, Card Kingdom, and eBay combined. Meanwhile, there are dozens of Collector's Edition Black Lotuses floating around just waiting to be bought. This means that the price of Collector's Edition is stable not because it's robust, but because there have only been a handful of transactions recorded. Meanwhile, the market dynamism of the past twelve months, as well as the aftereffects of a Collector's Edition lookalike, Magic 30th Anniversary Edition, has had a real opportunity to shine through in the price of individual cards, as there is enough supply to support a shifting market.

This leaves us in a bit of a tricky position. With so limited a market, it’s difficult to really evaluate the value of Collector's Edition as a sealed box. Rather, the old maxim holds painfully true here; things are worth what people will pay, and for the past year that number has been around $17,000, regardless of constituent card prices. The reason it's important to differentiate between value and price here is that, with so limited a supply, the price is influenced far more by listings’ asking prices as opposed to completed transactions. As such, the price of Collector's Edition may be $17,000 because a listing or two sold, but that isn’t necessarily reflective of its accurate market value.  

Individual Cards

 

  When it comes to the individual cards, however, the overall market trend is readily available: prices are slumping. This is primarily due to two reasons.

The first reason is broad-market bearishness. It has been almost two years since the peak of the collectibles market, and since then nearly all asset classes, from Standard cards to Collector's Edition and everything in between, have fallen and plateaued. This has been especially damaging to markets with limited supply where the demand is far more from the investment base, as opposed to the player base, as money has flown out of Magic as an investment and back into other, less volatile assets.

The second reason is Magic 30th Anniversary Edition. This release created a panic selling of gold border products, as the market initially viewed Magic 30th Anniversary Edition as a mass-reprint of Collector’s Edition, albeit with round corners and a different card back. This had a much smaller impact on the price of Collector's Edition cards, and the market has largely recovered since then, but it nonetheless caused an exodus of investment capital from Collector's Edition.  

 

Conclusion

  While Collector's Edition cards have had a historical slump in the past year, looking forward this may no longer be the case. The fear from Magic 30th Anniversary Edition has largely dissipated, meaning that people are more comfortable adding to their positions of gold bordered cards. Additionally, as the collectibles market has started to firm up, with asset prices trending sideways (and occasionally upwards) as opposed to continuing a descent, Collector's Edition products have begun to catch on with the rest of the wave, with lower-priced noteworthy singles such as the dual lands beginning a gradual rise.