I'm in a real Magic buzz right now. Might as well get everything out.

I'm not sure if it's the same anywhere else, but in my country the guys who play Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic the Gathering, and other tabletop games never refer to the merchandise they buy as "cards" or "figures." They're always called "pieces." I suppose it's to make it sound cooler; saying that you're buying cards when you've gone past a certain age kind of doesn't have the same cachet as saying you're buying pieces. The word conjures images of antiques or works of art or parts for a high-performance machine. Pieces of cardboard and hand-painted plastic benefit a lot from the connotation.

To succeed in the secondary Magic card market, at least in my experience, one is required  to be a bit more cutthroat than usual. It can mean charming some mook into giving up his precious cards, and then ruthlessly short-changing him when it's apparent he doesn't have as good a grasp of the real value of the card. One would rationalize it as divesting someone who doesn't really "play the game properly." People steal outright when that rationalization wears thin. And it does wear thin, sooner than one thinks.

Click to see the full price history for Tarmogoyf, one of the most expensive cards now

Playing the secondary market game is like being in a sort of stock market. You're trying to predict which cards will gain value and which will tank, which you can give up without regretting it later. Throughout my time collecting and searching for the perfect combination of cards for my Madness deck I've lost quite a lot of valuable cards. I've lost opportunities of getting now-chase cards on the cheap. I've sunk money (probably a little more than half a grand in total). I don't really have anything to show for it except the satisfaction of finally building a deck that satisfies my aesthetics. Though my aesthetics resulted in a deck that's horribly low-tier.

But you want to hear something horrible? There's a tiny part of me that wants to feel like it was all worth it. And even more horrible, when I was trawling the shops for the Chandra's Phoenix cards I saw this in stock. And something stirred that felt familiar.

A story that goes back to zero, indeed.