Is it Worth Investing in the Magic: The Gathering Reserved List Rares?

Every now and again I will jump on to CardMarket.com and buy a bunch of cards from the Reserved List.

The good ones seem to have jumped up in price, which leaves the crappy cards which are quite unusable in terms of play in a competitive match.

Source

I used to buy Betas, Arabian Nights and Legends but they have all gone through the roof and off my cheap list.

The Shopping Wizard yields little for me now as I’m a tight-arse and won’t pay much for cards. If a new seller arrives and has 100+ cards and the shipping is cheap, I will buy them all.

That way if a few of them spike, I can then shove them on eBay at some ridiculous price that's 10x what I paid and dump them.

Magic players are an extremely fickle lot and what is hot today is cold the next. You need to keep an eye on MtgStocks.com to see what is the current trend.

'Lure of Prey' is more valuable in the United States, which is the state of play for many of the older cards.

I can get one for 1.50 Euros, but the shipping makes it unfeasible. This is why I like to buy a LOT from one seller.

'Lure of Prey' does sell and I could make 100% on the card quite easily. I do own some that I bought for less than 1 EURO years ago.

The eBay filters on SOLD tell me there's a demand for 'Lure of Prey' but this is in the USA. It's not as easy to dump the card in the UK right now.

Does the card have any use? It's not featured in any tournament decks from Vintage or Legacy (too old for Modern) but I would say it has potential in casual play.

Sometimes it's some weird card that has never had any attention and someone is trying to manipulate the market that drives the spikes. If it's a card from a very old set, it is possible as few were printed.

Take Beta, only 3000 copies of any given Rare card were ever printed. Then take into account the printing was in late 1993. See here for the list of print runs (early sets only).

That is 27 years ago. How many now exist? Maybe half is a good estimate.

I have a 'Contract from Below' from the Beta set. It's not quite Near Mint but is close. Are there only 1500 in the entire world?

I would like to think so. It’s a shame it’s such a useless play card and only valuable due to its scarcity.

Other cards in the older sets (Alpha, Beta, Unlimited, Arabian Nights, Antiquities, and Legends) are all gaining ground due to this very reason.

Legends is the latest set of all these I mention with an estimated 19,300 of each rare being printed, and that was in 1994.

...'a few Legends that I own that are on the Reserved List. I didn't pay more that $5 each for any of them'...

Not all Legends Rare cards are on the Reserved List, but many are and they are the collectible ones.

I bought a few before the prices started going crazy a few years ago. The returns on these have been decent but not astonishing.

I feel there is still time for them to increase in value and are therefore hoarding them for the moment.

If you customise your filter on CardMarket.com then you can still pick up a LOT of Reserved List cards at cheap prices.

The next one to go up is maybe another 'Reparations’. In time I figure all of them will spike simply because they are scarce and will never be reprinted.

Sources: https://www.cardmarket.com/en/Magic, https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Reserved_List, https://www.mtginformation.com/print-runs, https://www.mtgstocks.com/news

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