vivien on the hunt
14, Jul, 22

This is the Strangest MTG Alter in History

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Article at a Glance

Making sales online always has a possibility of going horribly wrong. With MTG cards being worth a surprising amount of money considering they’re pieces of cardboard, an altered card can undeniably plummet the expected value. Even worse, you could be the proud owner of a counterfeit MTG Badlands card. Well, for this particular player, a counterfeit is the least of their worries.

This is an MTG Badlands

Reddit User u/Spiher purchased a Badlands from an online seller and what arrived was… this. The only words I can find when looking at this is ‘cursed,’ while I also wheeze from laughter at the state of it. For reference, Badlands are incredibly expensive. This MTG card is on the reserve list and is part of the most powerful land cycle in the game’s history: dual lands. These lands all tap for two colors of mana (black and red for this one, if the alter didn’t make that clear enough), have both basic land types associated with their colors (allowing them to be searchable with Fetch Lands) and come in untapped at no penalty. According to the rules of the Reserve List, Wizards of the Coast isn’t supposed to reprint these or a more powerful version of these cards.

According to TCGplayer, Revised Badlands like this one typically retail for about $450 in Near Mint condition. Moderately Played Badlands get a third of the price, retailing for about $300. I have no idea what something like this would go for but saying that it’s damaged is an understatement. A generous offer may be $70 (if it’s even an actual Badlands)? I may be one of the few that find this alter hilarious, which is why I would pay anything for it. The seller should have been transparent that the Badlands they were selling looked very little like a traditional one. According to the Reddit post’s discussion, there is a possibility that the seller was transparent, but this seemingly wasn’t apparent to the buyer.

What Would you Pay?

As expected, many of the Redditors commenting on this post were outraged, and for a good reason. While we do not know what the buyer spent on this card, we know with absolute certainty that anyone trying to sell this won’t be able to for the total price. Assuming it is an actual Badlands, what would you spend on it?

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