You can go to a good print shop and get yourself an entire stack of Black Lotus proxies for a few bucks. It is the most heavily counterfeited card in the series
Which is probably why that's the one they chose for this picture; it being a counterfeit and not an original, of course
Is there a higher resolution image of this? I want to print it but there's too much JPEG
Finally, a use for Magic cards
Actually, one place I know uses them as coasters, and another has a tabletop made out of them covered in resin, so I guess this is the third useful thing
After years of uncontrolled MtG addiction, I have so many basic lands that I used them for that, and to scoop up weed to put in the bowl, and to pick my teeth, and to cut into doobie filters, etc etc.
•
Hell yeah hahaha. I try to find relevant commons or shitty in commons that match what I’m doing.
I think an awesome way to use them would be to have the BBEG be a planeswalker. When the fight starts, the DM pulls out a Magic deck and starts playing Magic against D&D.
I know two friends.. who would absolutely lynch you for doing this.
Anyway, it has been fun following them and occasionally ask "whats this card worth?" and general answer has been 5-50€ a card. The cards can be worth more than literal money.
The problem is that this specific card is worth 5.000-18.000$
https://www.cardmarket.com/en/Magic/Products/Singles/Alpha/Black-Lotus
No, I do not know why
I know Black Lotus is one of the most (the most) valuable MTG card, but why is that so?
It's a nice card, but not all that extremely powerful or special, is it? Was it just super rare? It's from one of the first series, I believe?
/u/DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca is right on the money. Mana paces the game, so anything that can break that is super good. In an otherwise even matchup, if one player has a Lotus while the other doesn't, that can easily make the game. It's not going to win the game in and of itself, but it's a huge enabler to play the thing that will win you the game, before your opponent can reasonably do anything about it.
On top of that, it's literally good in all decks. It's been banned in every format besides Vintage, where it's restricted to one (and not including casual/fan formats). It had to be banned partly for power reasons, but also because it makes deck-building less diverse. There's no deck that wouldn't want a Lotus if it could have one, much less four.
It's also part of the Reserved List. After WotC overprinted cards, they essentially promised not to reprint certain ones. I think it's a dumb decision, but they've annoyingly stuck to it (and players are worse off for it). Black Lotus is on that list. And it was alreadly limited in printings, because it was a rare card, and a bit of a design mistake.
It's also simply an iconic card. Despite being a design mistake, it's a major part of Magic history, and gets referenced all the time. To some extent, it's famous for being famous. That makes it the biggest prize for collectors.
So, all this together, it has an incredibly high demand, a very limited supply, and no indication of a reprint anytime soon.
So I printed off a proxy at a professional card printer for 30¢. :)
After WotC overprinted cards, they essentially promised not to reprint certain ones. I think it’s a dumb decision, but they’ve annoyingly stuck to it
WotC goes out of its way to avoid upsetting the used market/card arbitrage people. If they did a reprint of Black Lotus, the howl of anger from those folks would shake the Earth from its orbit.
Like when Demon Days finally got a repress.
The market of people paying £100+ because they were the only copies dried up, leaving only the people who wanted a first pressing.
I believe that WotC have stated multiple times that they'll never reprint Black Lotus - it was a limited run even in alpha.
not all that extremely powerful
It’s game-breakingly powerful. It lets you get 3 mana for free instantly. Combined with spells that let you draw extra cards, this can result in having unlimited resources to do whatever you want on the very first turn of a game.
Very old/rare, and bonkers powerful.
The whole game is about what you do with mana (currency).
If all we are looking at is the mana, this lets you pay for other cards on your first turn that you normally wouldn't be able to play until the 4th turn of the game. That's a huge advantage.
This is often cited as the most powerful card ever printed.
Very few cards are strong enough that they form part of a first-turn-kill, with the vast majority of decks, it's not remotely possible to get enough mana to play the kinds of cards that would end the game before your opponent can even do anything. Black Lotus gives you three mana, without having to play a land. If you're trying to build a hyper-broken combination, it's much easier to do if you have a black lotus.
Even outside of hyper-broken combinations, black lotus contributes heavily towards mana ramp, a mechanic that a large number of decks rely on to get going.
MtG has a lot of extremely powerful cards, but most of those are still somewhat situational. Black Lotus is a card you could add to almost any deck and improve that deck. It's so universally broken that it's impossible to build a deck that can't be improved with a black lotus... unless that deck already has four black lotuses.
As for it's value... they printed 500 of them. Total. The cost you'd pay for a black lotus is "highest bid at auction" - they don't really have a list price, because it's determined entirely by "is there one for sale right now?"
This is enough of a crime to lock you up in a jail for the rest of your lifetime.
10K at the low end.
If it makes you feel any better, the wood grain in the hole doesn't line up with the wood grain of the rest of the table. It's a slightly sloppy photoshop.
You can also tell by zooming in and looking at the focus/detail/resolution difference between the card's art and the wood of the table along the edge of the cut-away hole. That slightly jarring difference of resolution is a dead giveaway for a photoshop.
Come on, that's literally just JPEG artefacting because it's a meme and it's been shared a bunch. There are so many fakes of this card out there, it's not that far-fetched and it's likely not a $10k+ card that was destroyed.