Scrapbook: The Lord of the Rings

I’m not a huge fan of the Universes Beyond sets—half of them aren’t even fantasy settings! But when I heard that they were doing a Lord of the Rings set, I got a bit excited. I love the books, and it is a fantasy setting well suited to a Magic treatment. Then, they did some really cool things with the cards: The panorama scene cards are really neat! The showcase treatments are fun! And they made nine different Nazgul!

I wanted to collect the cards from this set, but alas! Too many of the cards ended up really pricey. Some of this is just the typical priciness that comes from the popularity of Commander these days, so OK, I guess. But what I really take issue with is allowing these cards into competitive Magic. Sure, they’re not in Standard, but in my opinion, they shouldn’t be in Legacy or Modern either. I suppose Vintage could be the one place where any card ever printed can go, but Vintage has already priced most people out of it, so the demand wouldn’t be so great anyway.

I did build a couple of decks from the set: The Hobbits of the Shire vs. Sauron, Lord of Mordor, but I had to proxy up the Nazgul. As a casual player, I can live with that. But there was no way I was going to be able to collect all the cool cards—The One Ring is going for over $50! And the Nazgul are each about $10. So, I had to be satisfied with my two weak decks, and a digital scrapbook for the set. Here it is:

Scrapbook LOTRDownload

Scrapbook: Hydras

My latest scrapbooking project is my hydra collection. This has been a tricky collection to acquire because several of these hydras were out of my price range for quite some time. But I was patient, and thankfully Wizards reprinted them so that their prices came down. There’s only one hydra I don’t actually own right now–it was printed in a Jumpstart set, which doesn’t help. I hope that it gets reprinted soon, because it’s a good card, especially for a hydra deck!

The scrapbook is organized by release date, and I always try to acquire the original version when I can. There’s no way I can afford to acquire every different version of some of these (stupid Secret Lairs, among other things). I’ve supplemented the collection with descriptions of hydra lore and memorabilia, from the ancient Greeks up through Dungeons & Dragons and of course the Magic multiverse.

hydras-scrapbookDownload

Scrapbook: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms

I’ve become something of a card collector as much as a player of Magic: the Gathering these days. But my collection is not anything amazing for its value or the rarity of any of its pieces. I’m more of a thematic collector: I’ve collected all of the Sphinxes, for example, and most of the Hydras; and I have a full set of Invasion (my favorite set). Unfortunately for my collection, I’m still not willing to splash the cash for any single card, so I even have to proxy cards for my collection, because I like to put together scrapbooks with my collections.

This collecting has become more and more difficult, recently, with Wizards of the Coast’s policy of pumping out as many cards as possible every year. I find there is less time to enjoy a set and explore it from a collector’s perspective than there used to be. As soon as I start to collect the cards from one set, then bam! out comes another set. It’s just relentless and unending, which also makes collecting any specific type of card almost pointless, because every month, it seems, there is a new card to collect. I also lament the rise of Commander as a major format, because it means that a lot of cards that I used to be able to acquire (because they weren’t Standard staples), now are just too expensive for me.

Still, I was able to design and (almost) complete a scrapbook collection of Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. This was a fun set, even though I’ve never been much of a D&D player. There was lots of lore behind many of the cards, and lots of history behind the franchise. And I thought some people might like to see it.

scrapbook-pages-afrDownload