Last weekend, a Reddit user named LATIN0 posted an image of what they estimate to be six pallets of Magic: The Gathering cards. (opens in new tab)s that had been dumped in your local landfill. What would be a treasure for a dedicated gamer was taken as a curiosity by LATIN0, who only knew the game existed after a decade of using Reddit. So they took a picture, threw out the trash and moved on with their lives. They later posted the quirky photo on Reddit along with a few more photos. (opens in new tab) of open closed packages.
All without knowing that the retail value of these pallets and boxes was, on a conservative trend, something on the order of $100,000. Depending on the content, however, this could easily have been over $250,000 worth of MTG cards, containing a mix of Secret Lair, Modern Horizons 2, and Unfinity cards from 2019 through late 2022. That higher number is more of the valuable cards like Modern Horizons, which cost almost twice the price of a normal MTG pack, or the best Secret Lair cards were present. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now – you can’t pick things up from a landfill, so almost all the cards were left there by LATIN0 and his co-workers.
Naturally, people freaked out to a truly irrational degree, demanding more photos, an explanation, and that the person they had never seen go back and get all the letters they could. On LATIN0’s return the next day, spurred on by internet strangers’ estimates of the vast fortune at hand, the cards went through what happens to everything in a landfill in 24 hours or more: run over by a bunch of bulldozers, then buried in more junk, then run over a few more times just in case. The results were absolute carnage (opens in new tab). (NSFW for Magic: The Gathering players.) LATIN0 later updated their story (opens in new tab) with answers to common questions people asked.
Of course, there was rampant speculation about where, or why, this small fortune in retail products had gone to waste. The most likely answer is that it was a product that a shipping company kept because it wasn’t paid for that ended up being scrapped – which happens all the time. That or a warehouse product that got rejected by a big buyer like Target after someone had a forklift accident and/or a raccoon broke into a warehouse and peed in it or whatever. It also happens all the time, with workers totally unaware of whatever they are throwing away.
For others, it was a sign that the rumors rampant around Magic: The Gathering last year were true, and that Wizards of the Coast really is overprinting cards to boost profits. This came to a head last year amid controversy over the $1,000, 60-card anniversary set and a major bank devaluing Hasbro stock as it assessed it was “killing its goose that lays the golden eggs.” (opens in new tab) with the way Magic was being treated.
Anyway, no, that’s probably not a sign that retailers don’t see the value in carrying an excessive inventory of MTG cards and would rather just throw them away and throw them in a recycling bin. Our society is monumentally wasteful in just this way.
As someone who used to live near a landfill, no, there’s no chance you could get those cards just yet. Landfill people will yell at you. You will most likely be run over by a bulldozer. Even the best-preserved buried specimens appear not to have been completely drenched in hot garbage juice. Especially in Texas, where it will already reach a balmy 80F/27C daily.
Given the relaxed nature of LATIN0’s attitude towards this disaster, Redditors in responses asked for a lot of unreasonable things, to which the impassive LATIN0 responded: “Please don’t threaten me, this is Texas.” A phrase that makes me proud to be a southerner.
For their part, LATIN0 displayed excellent wabi-sabi on the whole thing. “I’m not mad I didn’t take any boxes, but I would like to know how much they were worth when I took a picture and saw them on the floor. I only know about MTG from the Reddit posts I’ve seen over the years,” they said. What’s the next step then? LATIN0 says “I’m going back to work like everyone else.”
Anyway, just a great reminder that none of the things we care about on this earth are forever and we will all one day go back to the constituent atoms we were made of.
For easy linking, here’s the original Reddit post (opens in new tab) and the update (opens in new tab)with a first (opens in new tab) and secondly (opens in new tab) image gallery.