Magic: The Gathering‘s rarest card broke its own record by selling for more than half a million dollars. Black Lotus is a powerful rare card from the first Magic: The Gathering set (the game released its 86th expansion this month), now known as Alpha, published in 1993. It is so powerful that, of the three formats it could be legal in, Wizards of the Coast banned the card in two of them and restricted it to one copy per deck in the other. As one of the cards of the game’s “reserved list,” Black Lotus will never be reprinted in a future Magic: The Gathering set, which has helped keep its value high for years.
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In an eBay auction that closed on January 27th, a Black Lotus that had been graded and enclosed in a protective case signed by the artist who created the illustration on the card, Christopher Rush, sold for $511,100. That more than triples the previous record-setting sale of a Black Lotus card for $166,000 in 2019.
This Black Lotus card was rated as a “GEM Mint 10,” meaning it is essentially a perfect card printing. That grade, plus it coming from the Alpha set, helped elevate the auction’s value above the previous record, with Rush’s signature on the case being an extra flourish.
Black Lotus’s card text reads, “Adds three mana of any single color of your choice to your mana pool, then is discarded. Tapping this artifact can be played as an interrupt.” As an artifact card with a casting cost of 0 mana, that essentially gives a player three mana for free. In an anything goes format like Vintage, a player with a Black Lotus in their opening hand is often capable of setting off a chain of spells that leads to a first-turn victory.
Black Lotus is part of the “Power Nine,” an informal collection of nine cards printed in Magic: The Gathering‘s earliest sets (Alpha, Beta, and Unlimited). These cards are considered among the most powerful ever released in Magic‘s 28-year history and would be regarded as broken by today’s game design and balance standards. Thus they are only legal in the Vintage format, where only one copy of each can be played in a deck. The cards are Black Lotus, Time Walk, Ancestral Recall, Timetwister, Mox Emerald, Mox Jet, Mox Pearl, Mox Ruby, and Mox Sapphire. A Power Nine set is considered the pinnacle of Magic: The Gathering collecting. A complete Power Nine set was even appraised on an episode of PBS’s Antiques Roadshow in 2019 and given an estimated value of $65,000 – $100,000.
What do you think of this high-dollar Magic: The Gathering sale? Let us know in the comments.
