Usually, half-million-dollar TCG cards take months if not years to sell. But, sometimes, the planets and stars all align and a couple of record-setting sales happen just a week apart from each other. Case in point, the Black Lotus card from Magic: The Gathering sold for $540,000 on March 16 only to be auctioned off for $615,000 just days later.
The first of the two cards, a PSA 10 Graded Alpha Black Lotus, was the leadoff lot in the PWCC March Premier Auction.
Late artist, Christopher Rush, signed the case of the card in 2014. It's a one-of-two owned by David Edwards, a well-known avid card collector. Over two weeks, the "perfect" Black Lotus card started selling for $1,000 before eclipsing the previous record holder, another one of Edwards' signed Black Lotus, which sold for $511,000 in January 2021.
After the record-setting sale was finalized on March 16, another Black Lotus card fetched nearly $100,000 more on March 24.
This time, the $615,000 sale was made at the Heritage Auctions for an artist-proof "Near Mint/Mint +8.5" Black Lotus that's signed by Christopher Rush.
Typically, the lower-grade card would sell for a whole lot less. However, unlike the Black Lotus that sold on March 16, the current record holder is a "whiteback" card with Rush's signature on the item itself - not the case.
Thus, the latest Black Lotus sale is now the "most valuable Magic: The Gathering card ever sold at auction."
Keep in mind that we're only tracking public sales here. Post Malone once claimed that he bought a signed, artist-proof Black Lotus for $800,000 although he didn't specify what condition it was in.
The Black Lotus card dates back to the first Alpha printing in 1993 and is one of the rarest cards in the world. There are only around 1,100 of them in the wild and that's if everyone who ever had a copy kept one. It's also famed competitively as it doesn't cost any mana to play while it adds three mana of any color. Because of this, the Black Lotus is part of a set of cards banned from competitive play, the Power Nine.
Trading card games have become more popular and lucrative in recent years, which is why the recent news of MTG cards being thrown at a landfill broke so many hearts over on the internet.
On the plus side, it's nice to see the collectors who genuinely need the cash make money off their prized possessions. It's unclear if the 1-of-1 Yu-Gi-Oh! card, Tyler the Great Warrior, will sell for as much as the record-setting Black Lotus card.
