Hi All,
I'm not quite back in Christchurch yet, but I will be by the end of the week, and I am itching to get back into work :). As you know, I attended the Card Show in Christchurch a few weeks back, and I want to share with you some of the coolest cards I picked up while I was there. Incidentally, they all come from one 500-count box traded in to us from a guy who'd come down from Nelson. So if you are reading this, thank you, so many very cool cards.
Let's start with possibly the coolest card, this Elephant Token. https://magicatwillis.co.nz/products/mtg-10th-anniversary-japanese-elephant-token?_pos=5&_sid=0c7cc3e11&_ss=r
This Elephant Token comes from Japan's Tenth Anniversary Magic Promo Token collection. It doesn't have a regular magic back, but it is still an official magic product.
Japan is no stranger to creating its own exclusive Magic: The Gathering promo cards (The 1 of 1 SHICHIFUKUJIN DRAGON is what I'm most familiar with, but there are tons of other exclusive to Japan Magic promos https://scryfall.com/card/pcel/2/shichifukujin-dragon)
This is a token in a group of tokens ( https://www.cardmarket.com/en/Magic/Products/Singles/JingHe-Age-MtG-10th-Anniversary-Tokens ), all very cool, that have mostly spiked in price in the last year or so, with the growing popularity of Premodern. And understandably so. This has to be the coolest token you can have to represent your Call of the Herd Elephant. The only price for a NM copy I could find online was 100 Euros, so $100NZD felt a perfectly fair price, at least to me.
Next up, another token that has been spiking in price due to Premodern, but these are significantly more well-known. https://magicatwillis.co.nz/products/mtg-goblin-soldiermagic-player-rewards-2001
In the earlier days of Magic, Wizards had a rewards program appropriately called 'Player Rewards'. Once you had your DCI number (which used to identify each Magic player), you could register for these. Three times a year, Wizards would mail promo cards out to each player based on how many sanctioned Magic events each player had played in. This was the only way to get these cards and, other than Unglued, the first way to get official Magic tokens.
This was from the first wave of Player Rewards gift cards from 2001, which included a bunch of other tokens and a foil original art, original border Wasteland. The last lot was printed in 2011, with the big one being the Day of Judgment Textless Promo. You can find out more information about these cards here. https://mtg.wiki/page/Magic_Player_Reward
If you are a magic player who has been around a while and has some of these cards just lying around, I recommend going digging for them. A lot of these cards (especially the tokens) are worth significantly more money than you likely remember them being. Premodern has done silly things for the prices of these cards, too.
This particular token was created for use with Goblin Trenches, though there have been more cards since then that create exactly these sorts of tokens.
Portal: Three Kingdoms is a set based on the great Chinese novel, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Our next card is from this set. https://magicatwillis.co.nz/products/mtg-kongming-sleeping-dragonportal-three-kingdoms?_pos=1&_sid=f9fa02b9c&_ss=r
If you are familiar with the fantastic anime Ya Boy Kongming! (Paripi Koumei), you should recognise this character. Yes, this is the same Kongming.
We got a variety of P3K (Portal: Three Kingdoms) cards in this collection, and this is just one of them. Portal was a collection of sets aimed at new players and did a pretty terrible job at introducing new players into the game. A fantastic YouTube show talking about each magic set in order, The Resleevables, has done a full breakdown of each of the three sets if you want to know more on that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhrTAwMPW7c
P3K was the third set in the portal block and was only released in Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and Australia/New Zealand. On top of this, none of the cards were legal until October 20 2005. Given that most copies were in Japanese or Chinese, these English versions are super rare.
I initially had 8 cards to talk about, but this has gone pretty long already, so I think I'll do one more, and do the other 4 next time.
This fourth card is one that I knew nothing about before I saw it. I know the Mercadian Masques foil, but it also has a quill symbol, too? Very interesting. https://magicatwillis.co.nz/products/mtg-warmongermagazine-inserts?_pos=6&_sid=3084bc0ce&_ss=r
It looks like the card could be found in the Mercadian Masques Fat Pack (the first time Wizards ever did Fat Packs) and the Duelist Magic magazine issue 42. A side note, Fatpacks have since been replaced with bundles. It's a cool symbol to put on a promo and something I've never seen done since.
This copy is damaged and sitting in the back of one of our folders after a player at the Christchurch Card Show asked if we could set it aside for them so that they could put it in a commander deck. Could that player please make themselves known to us? We have awkwardly forgotten who you are.
Anyways, that's it from me, I'll be back in a fortnight with another 4 cards to look at :)
- Rose Willis
