Why is Black Lotus so Expensive: [Price, Power, History]

Magic: The Gathering has been around for almost 30 years. There are over 20,000 unique magic cards that have been made since then. With so many combinations of cards that can be played in a deck, you would be surprised at all the things that you can do.

Black Lotus is one of the most powerful cards you can play in Magic: the Gathering. The card was printed in only three sets when the game was first made. An Alpha Black Lotus can be bought for $500,000 due to huge demand, little supply, and no way to be printed again because of the Reserved List.

The most complex game in the world offers many complex explanations as to why a piece of cardboard with some ink on it can be grouped with some of the most expensive collectibles in the world today. Today, we do a study into one of the most iconic cards in Trading Card Game history, the Black Lotus.

Black Lotus: A Staple of the History of Magic the Gathering

In 1993, a man by the name of Richard Garfield created the game Magic: the Gathering, most of the time just called Magic or MTG, while completing his Ph.D. in combinational mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a small trading card game project based on Dungeons and Dragons that he did not expect to go very far.

Much to Garfield’s surprise, the game grew very popular. His original game printed 295 brand new cards in the first set of the game. This set is now called Alpha. There were about 2.6 million cards printed for the Alpha set. Or about 1,100 of each rare card.

In each booster pack of cards that were sold, there was a set distribution of cards. Each contained 11 commons cards, 3 uncommon cards, and 1 rare card. You were guaranteed a rare in each booster, but because they were not distributed evenly, you could open 100 packs and never see the same rare.

Introduced in Alpha were:

• 74 common cards
• 95 uncommon cards
• 116 rare cards

This made it hard to come by some of the cards that you wanted.

In the second set of the game, called Beta, the number of cards that were printed was tripled to 7.3 million cards.

This means that there were 3,300 of each rare printed. This set was released only 2 months later. There was such a high demand for these cards that they sold out almost immediately.

Finally, a third set was released in December of 1993, named Unlimited. This set printed 35 million more cards, tripling the supply of cards that had ever been printed. There were 17,500 of each rare printed in this set.

The third set of cards printed were different than the first two sets. They had a white border. Every card before that had been printed with a black border.

This means that the black border cards are way more collectible and can be sold for more as they are much easier to distinguish as being the originals. Their white border counterparts are still very expensive cards but not near as expensive; for example, an unlimited Black Lotus can be found on TCGplayer for $12,500.

Black Lotus was printed in the very first three sets of the game, along with the rest of the Power Nine (which we’ll get into later). The card was an instant hit, as it gave you a distinct advantage in the game.

Magic: The Gathering is a resource-oriented game. The core skill of this game is resource management. The best players are the ones that can manage their resources most effectively, or make their opponent squander their own resources. A key component of this resource management is lands.

To play cards, you must have mana, which generally comes from the lands that you play (as well as certain creatures and artifacts). You are only allowed to play one land per turn unless something says otherwise. You must tap a land to gain mana and to play the cards you want.

The card Black Lotus costs 0 mana to play and when you tap it and sacrifice it, it gives you 3 mana of any one color. So on turn one, you can essentially be 4 turns ahead of your opponent, or even more if you have a Mox.

That is a massive advantage, and typically the player that goes first and starts with a Black Lotus will likely win the game. The opponent might not ever be able to recover from your explosive start.

Pair that extraordinarily powerful artifact and some of the cards that came out not that long afterward that allowed you to bring Black Lotus back from the graveyard and heavily abuse it, and Black Lotus becomes an absolutely oppressing and game-winning card.

The term goldfishing is used when a player wins without giving the opponent basically any time to do anything (maybe one or two turns maximum), and Black Lotus is quite the enabler of decks that can goldfish.

The video below explains more of the history behind the Black Lotus and the other Power 9 and a short history of some of the most valuable collector’s items in history, and we highly recommend giving it a watch to learn even more about Black Lotus.

https://youtu.be/AAvLC3fz068

How Does the Reserved List Affect Black Lotus?

If the cards are so powerful and worth so much money, why not just print more of them? This is one of the most heavily debated topics in the Magic: The Gathering world.

In July of 1995, the twelfth set of cards was printed into the game. The set is called Chronicles.

This set was different from all of the other sets printed before it because it created no new cards.

Every card printed in this set had already been introduced to the game years before. Chronicles was used as a way to alleviate the high demand and lows supply of the cards. This set printed 180 million more cards. If you wanted to get more cards into the hands of new players, this was the way to do it.

The problem with printing so many old cards to the market was that the old cards that had such a low supply and were collectible were now practically worthless.

The printing of these new cards made it so that the value of the old cards dropped in price. The people who were collecting these cards were very upset that the cards they were sitting on had lost value overnight. They cried out for a better reprint policy so that the cards that they had collected would not lose their value so fast.

As a direct result of the backlash of the reprints of Chronicles, Wizards of the Coast, the company that bought Magic: The Gathering from Richard Garfield, set up the Reserved List.

The Reserved List is a list of cards that Wizards of the Coast promised to never print again, with cards from Alpha and Beta that weren’t printed in Fourth Edition on that list, among others. It states:

Reserved cards will never be printed again in a functionally identical form. A card is considered functionally identical to another card if it has the same card type, subtypes, abilities, mana cost, power, and toughness. No cards will be added to the reserved list in the future. 

Official Reprint Policy

This makes it so that no new Black Lotus can ever be printed on paper. There are very few Black Lotus cards out there, and it is one of the most powerful cards to have ever been printed, making it the most sought-after card in Magic: The Gathering history.

In 2010, Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) exploited a loophole in the reserved list by printing premium versions of cards that were on the Reserved List.

When creating the Reserved List, WOTC never said that they would not print a premium version of the card and were able to get around the Reserved List for a little bit. Because of this, they could reprint those cards as much as they wanted to, but only if they were in a premium version.

Wizards faced some backlash for doing this.

The community was not happy that they would so blatantly go against something that had been around for so long. The community said that this went against the spirit of the Reserved List. So, Wizards had to amend their Reserved List policy so that it included premium versions of cards.

Once again, there was no way to be able to get your hands on a real Black Lotus.

Black Lotus and The Power 9

During the initial design of Alpha, Richard Garfield was still trying to balance out the cards and make sure that what they were printing were actually fair cards that made the game fun to play.

Some of these cards did not end up very well balanced and made it so that you were probably going to win if you had one of these cards. The Black Lotus is the centerpiece of these 9 cards, known as the Power 9.

These 9 cards have been banned or restricted in every playable format, except one (this format is specifically designed to play with these powerful cards).

The cards in the Power 9 are:

• Ancestral Recall
• Time Walk
• Timetwister
• Mox Pearl
• Mox Sapphire
• Mox Jet
• Mox Ruby
• Mox Emerald
• And of course, Black Lotus

All of these cards are also incredibly valuable and expensive cards, similar to the Black Lotus.

Black Lotus is more expensive because it is quite a bit more powerful, but also because of it being so iconic in the Magic: the Gathering community.

One of the downsides to these powerful cards (despite their cost of course) is that they are all but one only playable in a single format, Vintage; and even then, they are restricted to one of each per deck. Timetwister is the only exception to this, as it is the only of the Power 9 legal in Commander.

Before deck restrictions happened, people were putting as many of these Black Lotus in their deck as possible. This means that if each person had 20 of the same card in their deck, then a small number of players would ever be able to have these cards. Things got so out of hand that Wizards of the Coast had to regulate it to keep up interest in their game.

They set restrictions on the decks that players played with, limiting total cards to no less than 60, and only allowing a deck to have a total of 4 of each card, barring basic lands cards. After a time, they also restricted the Power 9 to one card per deck and banned them in every format but Vintage.

Black Lotus, The King of Magic: the Gathering

The Black Lotus is the king of Magic cards.

It is supremely useful, very rare, and is something that will only continue to become rarer. There are many reasons why you would want to play a Black Lotus. People have traded away entire collections just for this one card. It is crazy to think that this one card, this one minuscule piece of cardboard could be considered to be something so rare and valuable that people have spent their entire life savings on it.

People oftentimes call Magic: The Gathering cardboard crack, because it feels like it is more addictive than crack. Some would even argue that a Magic hobby is more expensive than a crack addiction.

There are approximately 35 million people who play this game.

That is more people playing Magic than the entire population of Saudi Arabi. Richard Garfield may never have known what he was setting in motion when he created Magic: The Gathering. but he certainly did a great job when he did.

He has left a legacy in Black Lotus as probably the most recognizable and sought-after card in the TCG collectible communities.