My return to Magic at the time of Theros rekindled my love of the game, and it took no real time for me to start acquiring old cards that I loved my first time on Dominaria, with the Dual Lands being high on the list. This past week I made the trip down to Ohio to see my dad who I’ve not seen since Feb, and to cast my absentee ballot. An added bonus is that I had a bunch of mail waiting for me here, including my fortieth dual, an Unlimited Tundra. Behold!
I picked up one or two on my own to use in Commander decks, but fortune really smiled upon me when my wife was chatting with an old friend of hers and mentioned the game. Joseph as it turns out, had his childhood collection and was wanting to sell it. We met up and he basically had a complete Revised set and then a couple packs worth of other old cards in there. Well, most of those cards weren’t particularly valuable then, so we agreed on a fair price basically for the Revised set plus some for the others.
My next bit of luck on this journey was a twofer, on a different visit to my family in Ohio. My cousin Todd mentioned that he wanted to sell some cards to take his family on vacation to DisneyLand, and my friend Kelly said her husband had a collection that they didn’t want to move with them to a different state. I met up with Todd first and poked through his cards, and we chatted about playing in the 90s. He is older than me, so when we played back then, he’d often take me and my friends to play with gamers from Wright State University, or take us to events. He played a lot of Blue Red Dragon + Doppelganger decks back then, particularly reveling in smashing opponents with Shivans, a defeat I remember all too well. Anyhow, I got a bunch of great stuff from him, and replaced the Dragons and Doppelgangers with later printings for him so he can still play games with familiar cards with his kids.
I then met up with Kelly and her (now ex-) husband to have a look at what he had, and oh boy, was it worth it! He basically played a lot of casual stuff, but had drafted a fair bit in the later 90s/early 2000s, so had lots of that stuff, but what I was mostly interested in were Dual Lands. I need to note that at the time of picking these up, I was running a side gig called Cash4Magic with two good friends, in which we basically each invested some cash and then used that to buy collections to flip, after buying stuff we wanted as individuals from the “business”. So C4M actually bought both of these collections, and then myself and my playgroup had first dibs on buying the stuff. Needless to say though, these two lots got me a lot closer to having the much sought after forty.
I’m sure that most of you are able to tell the difference between Revised and Unlimited Duals, and have spotted a few of the latter in the above pics. I was sure to grab some of those, which then planted a slight variation in my mind for the forty. I decided that one of each Dual in Unlimited would be a cool side quest, so I went about trading out some Revised ones for the other white border ones. Along the way, I met Tom, of Blasphemer fame, and he really helped me to find the Unlimited deals. For my Volcanic, which is a pricey one, Tom let me know that 401 Games had a beat up Unlimited, and I managed to leverage just how pristine the one I got from Joseph was, and traded 1:1 NM Revised for HP Unlimited. Then for Bayous, once again, Tom saw them and worked his silver tongue to secure an amazing deal for me. I had no desire to grab two of them, but the price was too good not to move on. Fast forward to this weeks Tundra pickup, and here’s the complete set.
I know that mismatched cards are annoying to some players, but for me, I love seeing the variety of cards in my decks. One strange thing about it though is that the Unlimited Plateaus, with the real art, do not register as Plateaus when I draw them. Having spent most of my Magic life owning Revised Duals, the wrong art is the iconic art to me. I might try and work on getting to an even fifty/fifty split of Revised and Unlimited, but with prices what they are now, I don’t foresee that happening.
When I think about Magic collections, the two most frequent quests we tend to hear about are P9 and Duals. I’m very stoked to have completed the latter, and am honestly not certain I’ll complete the former, but who knows.