Does anyone know if u still need 300 herb to see black lotuses in retail? I asked around in trade and googled but it seems no one knows. šµāš«šµāš«šµāš« Would really help me
Out.
2 Likes
all i could find is this
via wowhead in the comment section
2 Likes
i donāt think so. iām like 90% sure iāve picked them up without having 300 herbalism before
3 Likes
Inthought so too but they increased the spawn rate but iāve been flying around steppes for an hour and 0 so far. āIn retailā
1 Like
i think itās just still a pretty rare spawn rate. the only times iāve personally ever gotten any was randomly in blasted lands at like 3am in war mode.
2 Likes
Il try blasted lands ty. 
1 Like
Mint Condition Alpha M:TG Card? $800,000
Mint condition Beta or Unlimited M:TG Card? $45,000
A Black Lotus Car? Around $70-90,000
Oh waitā¦ weāre talking about WoW. 
3 Likes
~looks at his 5 Mox Gems and original Nicol Bolas card. ā¦The one before he made it big.~
/smiles
~also starts designing a gauntlet while searching for that elusive āMox Amethystā.~
ā¦For reasons.
1 Like
I think I still have a unlimited Mox Emerald swimming around somewhere in my collection. I had the Chronicles reprint of the Legends edition Nicol Bolas, and that binder and a binder of my AN set got stolen. 
Fāing Magic Cards.
Nice Art btw. If I werenāt an OG M:TG player Iād be asking all kinds of questions. 
2 Likes
I had a near mint Alpha Black Lotus in 1996 and sold it for just under $400. It was hard to sell too because at the time alpha was not tournament legal. I had an understanding that it was first run and like 5 times as rare as the next rarest printing, but for some reason never connected the dots that I should put it away until it was more appreciated. I was a poor kid and needed the money more (Iād actually traded up into it starting with maybe 100 bucks worth of stuff so in my short term mind Iād made out).
I also was very negative about magic at the time due to the reserved list, still thought they might rescind it and prices would crash (which was what I wanted, I just didnāt want to be holding the cards when it happened). Or the game would die and prices would crash, and Iād pick it all up later for way cheaper just to play with a few friends. And a 400 dollar card in a penny sleeve in a casual deck seemed like a recipe for disaster, I was literally afraid to shuffle it even in a sleeve because it was so pristine.
Meaning itās the one thatās worth 800 grand pretty much. Story of my life, if I had back all the stuff I got rid of rather than, say, getting a second (or first) job or something, Iād be a literal millionaire just from magic alone.
I was actually 100% wrong in all my predictions for the game, theyāve still never walked back the reserved list (and at todayās prices with todayās attitudes probably never will, none of the players who started even in the past 10 years have any emotional attachment to those cards, and with churn thatās probably 90% of players today).
I never thought the game would even last this long let alone be bigger than ever.
I had the most fun with it in 94-95 into 96 when I had all the power, but was bored and in financial trouble so selling off just a few years later, and try as I might over the years I was never able to rekindle the love I had for the game back then. Iām actually waiting on a friend to pay me for the last of my cards. Rarest thing I had left was a beta Will O the Wisp, still like $300 and exactly as rare as a beta black lotus, for what itās worth.
I was obsessed with getting the reserved list revoked for about 10 years after it was announced, so I probably gave up around 04 when prices were still miniscule compared to now. Blew up forums about it everywhere I went for 10 years straight. What a pointless crusade that was. Still insist restricted card oldschool type 1 is the best form of the game though. Like I said Iāve tried a few times over the years to get back in, even spent hundreds on a few decks, but it just isnāt the same. For me at least there was only a finite amount of joy in it, mostly in the earliest iterations of the game, and the game as it was designed originally literally cannot be reprinted, so I guess Iām done there.
I do have counterfeits, and Iāve even used them casually, but two problems there. One, itās cheese to play with power when your opponent has none (unless maybe your deck is just way inherently weaker than theirs). Two, none of my newschool players would take to them at all. Like, zero interest. Theyād take them as something to look at, but zero interest in playing with them. So the game I loved is well and truly dead, except to like 5 rich guys on youtube who are hoarding like crazy and so, ironically, making it that much more difficult for other rich guys to even get into it.
It also spawns at lights hope chapel. One node.
I have a beta mox ruby I won in 1996 after selling donkey kong country 2 to enter a tournament lol, not a bad 5th place price
Not a bad trade off 25 years later
To actually answer the OPs question, I doubt you need 300 herbalism to see it but Black Lotus before Cataclysm only spawned one MAYBE two per zone and had a respawn of about 60-70 minutes. Essentially 10 would spawn in the entire world and that was it till they were picked.
After Cataclysm it seems to have begun sharing nodes with Dreamfoil but will remain incredibly rare just like Khorium Nodes in TBC, essentially you need to pick everything in a zone and wait for respawn then check again, you could pick a hundred Dreamfoil and only get a single lotus.
I never really thought M:tG would die. Itās just such an idiot simple business model. You come up with ideas for cards, you commission art for them, then you print cards, people snap them up like schools of pirahna in the Amazon to do whatever with. The thing turned into a sport almost immediately and people have loved to play it casually since itās inception. Now with M:TGO and M:TG Arena their overhead is even less.
I was always more of a player than a collector. If there was a $400 card in my deck? Iād be using a proxy and Iād have the card itself in a hard plastic sleeve. In my day, though, the only $400 card WAS the Black Lotus. As far as the reserved list, I can say that it was nothing but good for collectors (not so much for players).
Speaking of the Will O Wisp, my first deck was black and I was super excited when I cracked a 3rd Ed Revised pack and got that as my rare. 0/1 Flying Regenerator? Yes Please! You can imagine my chagrin when it immediately got Disintegrated for 1 the very next game night. LOL! Good Times!
Yeah, Rudy from Alpha Investments comes to mind. I respect the guy as a collector, but as a player he makes my blood boil.
Not bad at all.
1 Like
Iāve actually thought about trying to sell him some of my old legends rares that were reprinted (not reserved) but have recently spiked from like 5 bucks to 50. He has a sick collection, and I used to collect too so I respect that, but I also as a former player canāt ignore the very fact that people like him exists means that game (the type 1 with the lotus moxes dual lands etc) can essentially no longer exist except as a niche very expensive hobby that is probably the most fundamentally gated game in the world.
Thatās why I hated the idea of the reserved list. I had the cards, but many of my friends didnāt. I wanted them to have the cards too so we could all enjoy the game that way. I think that oh so successful business model ruined the game for me, I wanted a deck that I could pretty much play anywhere anytime until the end of time only changing it when and if I saw fit, but since almost inception theyāve insisted you change all your cards every two years minimum, or worse yet, open packs on the night then throw the hodge podge deck in the trash except for the rares afterwards. If you donāt abide by that, expect people to refuse to play with you, mock you, etc.
I always hated what tournament magic was doing to the game (I was actually getting disenchanted once people figured out they could make very cheap and effective burn/discard decks that would annihilate every single casual concept from lists easily found on the internet) but I actually miss when cards had little to no value if they werenāt tournament gold or very old. I loved buying dollar rares that are like 50 dollar rares today because theyāre used in commander, another format I canāt get into even casually (I just donāt like the setup, I like restricted cards but not when itās all of them, itās not the version of the game I have nostalgia for).
That was the final nail in the coffin for me. They made a ācasualā format (that went into tournament territory anyway) in commander and all it did to me was make a bunch of jank I was used to getting on the cheap into expensive cards that still have little play value outside of that one format. I cannot justify spending 500 on a deck just to have some cool cards that maybe I want for theme or an idea or whatever but still arenāt that strong so the deck still doesnāt win.
Practically nothing with any utility at all is cheap anymore unless itās just outright poor in every respect. Not good enough for constructed used to mean it was a dollar. Now it can have a random use in commander and be $40+ even though it still pretty much sucks even in casual constructed.
I never expected the card prices to go into 6 figures or Iād have held out (I sold a beta mox pearl just in the last 10 years for like 750 and itād be 3k today even scuffed as it was), but I must say seeing everything remotely good in the reserved list priced way out of bounds of any rational common player (I refuse to believe any pure player would want to spend that kind of money, the guys who do so are (or at least think they are) investing in collectibles they in some cases happen to play with).
Like you said, great for open boosters with his box of beta that heās held since it was fresh or whatever and heās opened a lotus and it was a perfect 10. That guy is ballin and I bet it feels great for him.
Terrible for literally everyone else though, there were never enough of those cards to go around in the first place (I was never in any playgroup no matter how large where every player had access to pre-revised cards).
I guess the game I enjoyed truly is dead, Iām yet to meet anyone including old friends from that era who want to play it even with affordable counterfeits. Because thatās another thing the reserved list did, within a few years when the game started getting worse in many respects, or was at least rapidly changing (type 1 was always on a downward slide as new cards were added with stupid interactions with old cards until over like a 10 year period it became nothing but degeneracy) most of my powered friends started selling their power and turning to type2.
I donāt know who plays Vintage, which lets you use all the cards over 27 or so years, but that format stopped being interesting around 2000, even old greats like Juzam Djinn arenāt good there anymore because Iām pretty sure 15 years ago or so practically every creature was rendered obsolete and nothing was left but prison decks and combo decks. Whatever it is it does not resemble the powered games I playing in 94-95.
Actually a lot of my old collection came from the older players who got me into the game, until I was literally the only one I knew with those cards. When starting in the 2000ās people actually started crapping on me for having old stuff āwhy would you even have that, itās so expensive durr!?!!??ā in game stores I knew it was gone for good.
That and the jerks who wouldnāt even play a casual game with me because every single game they played had to be āplaytestingā for tournaments that didnāt involve my cards. Even the last time I tried to play a few years ago I ran into that, I didnāt have much of note anymore but I would not play standard, so about half the people there I never actually had a game with because literally all they did was āplaytest standardā against each otherās lists they got off the net. Itās not like I was overpowered, in fact since they were playing tournament decks I was probably going to lose, but the attitude of that sort is that any game spent playing against a deck that isnāt āmetaā is a waste of time.
One guy would actually churn his cards almost weekly, like if a new deck won a big tournament, heād sell the deck he had and make that one. Then next week if something beat that heād get whatever that was. I always cared that my decks were hand crafted and I always planned to hold them for a long time, so playing that way, while it may win you tournaments, is utterly foreign to me.
My last deck was a gremlin deck from Kaladesh that I really wanted to enjoy but people are just too cutthroat these days so no matter what I couldnāt turn it into a deck that didnāt reliably lose to anything better than a draft deck.
I never cared if I won every game, in the day weād play several fast games of type1 and not even keep track of the score. But you can tell when your deck just wonāt work no matter what, and I donāt see a point (or really much fun) in playing something that doesnāt work and never wins.
And just because two engineers and a taco guru can still play the reserved list doesnāt do the rest of us a damned bit of good. Iām willing to bet 90% of those cards donāt see play at all in 2022, 99% probably no more than rarely. Thatās sad.
I used to want just four collectors editions (four sets of beta essentially) and Iād just play out of that. Thatās the model Iād have preferred, buying entire sets at flat msrp prices. Bad for their bottom line perhaps but good for players imo. Iād still be playing if it was like that.
Even CE are stupid expensive nowadays, and though I never had four sets I probably had 50k worth of CE cards at todays prices as recently as 04, spending maybe a grand to aquire them all. Sold those short too (a bit less than I paid in fact, a rash decision) because at the time they were still practically worthless on the grounds they werenāt tournament legal and I never saw that attitude changing.
My last Lotus was a CE with badly clipped corners that I sold for what I paid for it (about 175) then last year it went up to 8k overnight. No one could have predicted someone would make an āoldschoolā format that allowed CE, they have a home now, they didnāt before.
I clipped all the corners on mine (or bought them already clipped) to pass them as beta in sleeves when I had them because people might have not wanted to play against them even casually back in 2000 or whenever that was. The amount of money that went up in smoke from just me doing that to like two sets of power and an entire set of dual lands makes me kind of nauseous.
When you look back and your history of the game is just continually taking massive losses, itās hard to not be just thoroughly fed up with it. The sad part is that magic was semi-lucrative for me back then, I was easily able to spend a hundred dollars and turn it into 500 worth of cards within a month, then sell it. When I dropped out of college that was essentially my job for about a year, just hustling cards. Iāve had probably a hundred dual lands, 4-5 of each mox, and at least 6 lotuses in my time moved through my hands. I made a few thousand dollars total that way (which I was proud of at the time, but look how things turned out), anyway the shops I was selling the duals and other old stuff to mostly shipped them overseas so I was actually sowing the old gameās destruction in my area.
I guess thatās why I thought it would die, all the oldschoolers were selling their power, all my friends were quitting, the game didnāt seem to be producing worthwhile cards for like a 10 year period (stuff they print today is actually way more powerful than most stuff from say 1995 to at least halfway through the 00ās), their fear of powerful cards made them too cautious, most sets for what seemed like forever were lucky to have 1-2 truly useful cards, especially if you judged them by the standards of the old stuff.
I could go on most likely but I guess this is long enough. Suffice to say Iāve had a long strange relationship with that game.
Thatās exactly my problem with Rudy. You can tell by listening to the guy that he never really played the game with any seriousness. He might have spectated, or maybe played one game 20+ years ago, enough to pick up some of the OG lingo, but as far as knowing which cards were devastating back then and why? He draws a total blank and resorts to talking about card art. I was watching one of his videos a couple of days ago and the thought occurred to me: āRudy, you do know that some of the most brutal cards in the game have absolutely $#!% art right?ā
Thatās a bitter pill. I know youāll anticipate that Iād say something like āmake some proxiesā but I know itās just not the same. Plus you want those friends to take up the hobby and starting them off with proxies rather than the real thing is awful.
What got me Right Out of M:tG was simply the cost. I remember feeling lucky to scoop up a couple of boxes of Visions before they were totally sold out everywhere, but that was a big āaskā on my budget because there was nowhere local to even play them. So add gas money to drive into the city to the nearest comics shop with a M:tG weekly event on top of cards and by now WotC was whipping out sets at a rate of 2 or 3 per year and that churn you mentioned became real. Cards Iād just purchased would be unplayable because the main set block had just turned over. I started playing Everquest and then World of Warcraft to scratch the ānerd itchā and didnāt look at M:tG again until I found M:tG Duels on Steam.
Letās be honest. Noone. Itās just too niche of a group of people. And the people who still have those cards donāt want them scuffed anymore than they already are.
That boggles my mind. As someone who actually owned a Juzam, I have fond memories of getting my opening hand and seeing a couple of swamps, a dark ritual, and the Juzam and thinking āTurn Two Juzam. Letās. Fāing. GOOOOO!ā Then you see the color just completely drain out of your opponentās face and it was so good.
See, that just sucks. When I first started the people at the local card shop were really cool. Weād all sit down and play a big Round Robin style game where you could only attack right and cast spells left. It made things REALLY interesting. Especially when the two people sitting at opposite ends of the table were crazy baller collectors who had full power 9 + legends + antiquities and Iām puttering along with my revised and fallen empires. I think I enjoyed every one of those games except one where a big collector decided to show off his timewalk/timetwister infinite recursion deck. He started that nonsense and I said āIām gonna have a cigaretteā and when I came back about 10 minutes later he was STILL on his turn.
I couldnāt do that. That would literally kill my soul. I just love collecting too much. Probably why Iām enjoying M:TG Arena so much. All the fun of M:TG, none of the headaches. Shame it doesnāt go all the way back to the beginning, butā¦ one makes due.
Yeah, Iād never bother with CE? Mostly because theyāre not legal to play. Of course nowadays you could slip one into a sleeve and noone would know the difference. Thatās more of a testament to the card sleeve industry than anything though.
I feel your pain. Thatās why I really donāt care if I ever play physical M:TG ever again. Iām having the time of my life playing MTG Arena purely on a Free To Play basis. I usually do a draft event once a week and Iām looking forward to at some point being able to getting back into the constructed format. But the thought of trying to manage 3 or 4 inch thick binders full of Magic cards now when Iām in my 50ās? No thank you.
So say we all.
1 Like