The Pimpology of my Magic

I really enjoy Magic: The Gathering. It's a creative outlet for me that expands beyond just being a game. The game itself is fun and challenging, and requires that I really use my brain at times. However, as much as I really enjoy playing the game, I've gotten to the point where I don't get to play a whole lot anymore. This is mainly the result of a lack of time. Between work, school, family time, and my amazing Heartly, I really don't have time to play. To give you an idea of the paradigm shift that's occurred, I went from playing almost daily, to playing roughly twice a month.
Despite this, there's also a side of me that enjoys the collecting part of the Magic equation. I've become regarded as the resident Foil-Whore at work, because I want any and all foils.





To help out those of you who might be reading who have no idea what a foil is, a foil version of of a Magic card is a Magic card with a extra, shiny/glossy printing layer printed on it. It doesn't dramatically affect the weight of the card, but there is a itty bitty weight increase.

I have lots and lots of foils... I'm kind of afraid to count them due to the fact that the average foil costs two to three times more than their regular counterpart. But if I had to estimate, I'd say I have upwards of six hundred foils.

Well, it turns out foils aren't "pimp" enough for my collecting taste.

 

I love foils, and probably always will, but there's something greater: alters.

Alters are cards which... well... have been altered by someone. This is generally done artistically via paints, but it can often times be something as simple as an artist's signature. These cards tend to be more highly valued among players due to the fact that these cards are, as a whole, rarer and more unique.

One of my favorite alters I personally own is a Wrexial, the Risen Deep alter that I had commisioned to be painted to look like Cthulhu (The reasoning behind this is that I call Wrex Cthulhu all of the time anyways).

The alter (left) alongside a poor quality image of the original card (right)



As you see, alters are wayyyyyy cooler than foils and regular cards alike. In a good many cases a good alter will actually cost you less than the foil version of the regular card would. With that in mind, you're seriously winning: You're saving money AND you're getting a super-pimp version of that card out of all of it.

Another way I've realized I like to pimp out my decks is with foreign cards. As it probably sounds, these are cards that are in a language other than your own. I think they look a lot cooler, most of the time.

 

A Japanese Wrexial

Yep... Even that Wrexial is cooler than the English one... Most foreign cards cost about the same as the English versions, though it really depends on the language. Foreign foils tend to be 1.5 to two times as expensive as English foils though, so it's kind of a wacky market to shop in.

Well, this has been a very niche post to my Blog, and with that in mind, I created the entertaining Gollum memes. But I think this post is finished!

 

-Alex Johnson