I have a friend who was a hardcore wheeler and dealer of Magic cards back in highschool. He would travel around North America, buying and selling cards.
He had all the old cards: Alpha, Beta, Arabian Nights, etc. He would also cycle through lots of copies of the "Power 9" (the moxes, lotus, Library of Alexandria, Ancestral recall, Timetwister, Timewalk).
We played in type 1 tournaments (it's a format that lets you use all the cards ever printed, with a few banned cards that involved things like coin flips) and he would lend me all these power cards for my decks. It was always a treat to play a mox or lotus on the first turn and watch my opponent's eyes go wide just from seeing an actual card like that in play.
When we went to college, he ended up "cashing out" and selling something like $30,000 worth of cards to fund his first apartment. He still had tens of thousands worth of cards, and over the years he was slowly selling them off to fund various things.
That was years ago. Prices for the old cards today have massively jumped in price in just a few years. I think if he had held on to those old cards instead of selling them to buy an apartment, he would have made more money just from them going up in value vs. renting out his apartment to pay off its mortgage.
He had all the old cards: Alpha, Beta, Arabian Nights, etc. He would also cycle through lots of copies of the "Power 9" (the moxes, lotus, Library of Alexandria, Ancestral recall, Timetwister, Timewalk).
We played in type 1 tournaments (it's a format that lets you use all the cards ever printed, with a few banned cards that involved things like coin flips) and he would lend me all these power cards for my decks. It was always a treat to play a mox or lotus on the first turn and watch my opponent's eyes go wide just from seeing an actual card like that in play.
When we went to college, he ended up "cashing out" and selling something like $30,000 worth of cards to fund his first apartment. He still had tens of thousands worth of cards, and over the years he was slowly selling them off to fund various things.
That was years ago. Prices for the old cards today have massively jumped in price in just a few years. I think if he had held on to those old cards instead of selling them to buy an apartment, he would have made more money just from them going up in value vs. renting out his apartment to pay off its mortgage.