u/vsully360

I would’ve been in my early 20s when the game launched and was eagerly anticipating it after having spent the years leading up playing the hell out of the first game. I was in right around launch which was at the very end of June 2000. The game was drastically different back then.

I have a bunch of these screenshots from the first year or so of the pre LOD ladders. Back then, there were four realms: east, West, Europe, and Asia. And each realm had two ladders – one for standard/softcore, the other for hardcore. Ladders only showed the top 50 characters and there was no individual class breakdown.

You had to play a standard/softcore character through normal difficulty before you even had the option to create an HC character. I did exactly this, limping through normal on a sorceress before making the permanent move to HC all the way back almost at the very beginning. Random, but this game would’ve lost its appeal for me decades ago if not for the HC option.

The screenshot is from about two weeks after the game originally launched. There was not a lot of action in HC at this point.

The gaming landscape was so completely different back then.

Barbarians and necromancers were realized very early on to be the top tier characters. Corpse explosion damage scaled with players in the game, making it so you could very easily solo full games with just this skill. And whirlwind had crazy damage output in those early days.

Lots of great memories of these early days with the game. Was anyone else around back then?

https://imgur.com/a/YyfHSEa

Quick back story: I graduated high school in 1994, discovered the game that summer, and played very heavily up until about 2002.

Revised, Legends, and the Dark were available as sealed product when I started playing. I lived in a suburb of Tampa, Florida and traveled all around Florida and even as far as Atlanta Georgia for pre-releases, PTQs, States, and Nationals (which were held in Orlando back then). I never had any sort of major breakthrough success in the competitive scene- close to a top eight at Florida states once with a Bargain deck against a field of Opalescence, if anybody remembers that meta- but I played a ton of Magic over those years in my early-to-mid 20s.

I haven’t maintained any sort of a collection or even really played the game in all the years since but I’ve followed this trajectory to an extent. Honestly, the game is kind of unrecognizable in terms of what it has become in the last 20 or so years, especially somewhat recently, but I still love the early stuff, particularly limited edition Alpha and Beta. And sadly, that stuff is way too far outside of my budget.

I’m not sure what compelled me to put this set together, but I definitely caught the itch to get involved in some capacity in a collecting sense after seeing a Rhystic Studies video on Foils. And around the same time there was also a Nizzahon video on the top 10 most expensive foils, and it’s wild to think that a couple of years ago when I started working on this collection, it was classic foils like this comprising the top 10 and now it seems like it’s a bunch of random super exclusive Marvel and Final Fantasy foils that didn’t even exist a couple of years ago. I guess this is intentionally manufactured scarcity of a newer product?

Ultimately, assembling the set wasn’t a direct attempt to invest some money in the hopes of a big payoff, it was more because I have fond memories of the old-school stuff and this was something that was budget friendly enough that seemed like a fun undertaking. It was like Christmas every time a new card showed up in the mail and I got to open it and add it to the collection. And, of course, maybe it might be a really good investment at some point down the line. Or something that’ll end up in my will and passed down to my kids that they’ll be forced to sell off :D

So anyway, fast forward to two years later, and it seems like the value a lot of this set is really trending upwards. In looking at what I paid and comparing to what I see being asked around the Internet today, there’s been a big jump in price with a lot of these cards. I got my Final Fortune for about $900. Adarkar Wastes cost me about $300 (all of the pain lands cost between $200 and $300). I paid about $1100 for my City of Brass. $2600 for BoP was by far the most expensive single card. I see upwards of double and even triple of all of these prices being asked for some of these cards in various places, although I don’t really know which prices are the safest to accept as a realistic going rate.

The whole collection is what I would consider NM and I’ve thought about getting some of it graded but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. I probably will one day, possibly the 10 or 12 big boys in the album I linked. I wouldn’t even know where to begin, which company to use, stuff like that. I always wonder what if I send them my BoP that’s a gem mint 10 and they decide to keep that one and send me back some other 9.5 expecting that I’ll never know the difference? I’m sure it doesn’t work like that but in the back of my mind, it seems like a valid concern and honestly, makes me nervous.

Anyway, I think that this set has a lot going for it: fairly lackluster player response initially and a somewhat small print run (I’ve heard speculation of about 1000 of each foil rare), the first base set with foils, the last base set in the classic card frame, and the first and only time that many cards were printed in foil. So hopefully the upward trend will continue. What do you guys think?

About 50 hours start to finish.

Second image is after most of the linework was completed.

Third image is Jeff's mockup that we started with- the Prince from the Katamari Damacy Reroll cover and the King and Queen from the We Love Katamari intro cinematic. Then we just sort of pieced everything else in according to priority. There's a lot of stuff that made it!

Overview with the required soundtrack

Done by Jeff Ziozios, Bay City Tattoos in Tampa FL over about 60 hours and 14 sessions.