I’ve been spending this week working EBay like a stockbroker on….Magic the Gathering cards. I started playing in 1997 and stopped at the end of high school, and although I sold most of my cards then, I held on to the rarest ones, thinking that maybe they’d go up at about the rate of inflation. I didn’t have any of the so-called “Power Nine”, the most expensive ones, but I had a few decent choices. I started poking around the internets, looking for prices, after a friend of mine brought me into curiosity about the game again (his younger brother has been playing, and I’m a creature of nostalgia, after all).

Well, it turns out the secondary market has totally gone nuts since I last checked, with prices multiplying several times over the past 5 years. Some of my holdings went up 400%, which would be beyond impressive for a ‘real’ stock or bond (and I don’t mean 50 cents became $2 either, more like $20 to $80). Those “Power Nine”, have skyrocketed to unbelievable values. While any ‘investor’ could be sore about a missed opportunity for ‘growth’, this is different: if I bought these, at the very least they’d probably stick to their value, and at the very very least I’d have them for tournament play. Nobody told me instead of paying for college, I could just buy Magic cards and sell them a few years later.

According to what I’ve read, the game is still very popular worldwide, and continues to have a heavy following in Japan, in particular. I guess, kids graduate from Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! into Magic, and eventually they get a taste for the stuff from the days of yore. Hopefully this will keep the ‘market’ voracious, as I’m not selling just yet, but rather trying to ‘short’ on some picks. I always compared Magic trades to a stock market (after all, magazines, now websites, would have monthly pricing guides and hot/cold picks, just like brokerage analyst reports), but now I have the resources to play around with it a bit. Maybe all those episodes of Mad Money with Jim Cramer will finally be put to good use…