(RE: Timetwister)
I've only once had any cards stolen of mine: a rith, the awakener by a bully way back in high school. These days my average deck value is probably in the neighborhood of at least a couple thousand. Not many quite make it to 5K, but I did recently build my all-lands deck with tabernacle, the 6 available duals, full fetches, etc. Most cards I bought long enough ago that the value is significantly higher than what I paid - my tabernacle was $400 which is the most I've ever spent on a single card.Sinis wrote: ↑4 years agoThis. I remember reading an article about how Magic cards are among the most liquid and fungible assets people just kind of carry around without any respect for the value it has. If you have an Underground Sea in your deck, it is near equivalent to its buylist price in cash. There are stores in my home city (Toronto) that will pay you cash on the spot for your trade-ins. They might cut you a cheque if it's over a certain amount, but, carrying valuable Magic is basically carrying around something resembling cash.gilrad wrote: ↑4 years agoDefinitely in the category of cards that, if I were ever driven to run it, i'd opt to bring a proxy instead. Playing with expensive and powerful cards is fun and all, but there's a practicality threshold where you're essentially carrying a bag full of a non-insignificant slice of your net worth.
But we don't treat it that way. If you were carrying around 5k in cash, you a) probably wouldn't, and b) would protect it with more than some deck boxes and a backpack.
I am at the point that my collection causes me anxiety. Some decks do not leave the house, and I have been considering just selling the really big ticket cards, or buying a small airtight fireproof safe for them.
I definitely get nervous sometimes about my collection, especially recently as I ran a few commander-cube drafts with my duals and some other valuable cards. But I'm generally pretty bad about keeping a tight watch on my collection, and I've had at least a couple times where I'm semi-frantically looking around for my cards, only to realize I left them abandoned on a table somewhere, or in a backpack that got kicked under a table or whatever.
My experience thus far has been that the vast majority of magic players are very honest when it comes to cards, especially considering how expensive so many of them can be. But despite how many places I've played, it's still a fairly limited sample size, and I do of course hear horror stories about people having cards stolen. I honestly have little idea of how likely theft is.
To a certain extent, I think I worry less about the value of my cards because, at the end of the day, I paid what I paid, and I don't really have much intent to sell anytime soon. So as far as I'm concerned, my tabernacle is still $400. Which is a lot, but it's a lot less than it's currently worth. And I paid that much because I wanted to play with the card, not to let it sit on a shelf and just be valuable.
I generally disdain non-medical insurance, on the reasoning that, unless you absolutely cannot afford the potential risk (i.e. cancer treatment costs), then your EV is better to remain uninsured, since the insurance company wouldn't be in business if it didn't think you were paying in more than your expected withdrawal. At this point the value of my collection is getting high enough that it does kind of stray into the "too valuable to risk" territory (outside of the fact that, obviously, I don't really "need" my cards).
I think people are pretty bad at estimating risk - one thing that came up in another thread, and I've seen the TCC prof highly recommend, is double sleeving. People are often surprised I don't double-sleeve my collection, but my experience has been that any risk of water damage is very unlikely so long as you're reasonably careful, and that the hassle of shuffling double-sleeved cards is pretty significant, not to mention the cost of double-sleeving a large collection both in time and expense.
I think when people think about their cards, they tend to think about the worst case scenario, and not about the actual chance of that occurring - both in terms of theft, and in terms of damage. I just watched a double-sleeving video from the prof where he recommends using self-sealed double-sleeves for those with "thousand dollar commander decks" which I found kind of amusing, since $1000 is much lower than most decks I build, and I don't even regular double-sleeve. He argues that they're worth it "for those who don't want a speck of harm to come to their favourite cards"...which I think is such a simplistic, emotionally-charged argument. Of course no one wants their cards to be damaged, but life is full of little risks. Double-sleeving protects against one particular kind of risk - namely water damage (dirt although I think playmats generally do a good job against that and it's also usually not enough of a problem to actually damage the cards unless you're playing unsleeved imo) but there's no real way to protect against accidental bending, or against simply losing the card, shy of not playing it. It's easy to say "you don't want your cards to get damaged, do you?" but it's not really that simple - you have to weigh the risk of damage against the costs of protection - whether that's paying for double-sleeves and the hassle of shuffling them, or the cost of locks and GPS trackers and whatever else people try to use to deter theft. Risk is inevitable, and I think people tend to look for easy answers rather than really considering how worried they really ought to be.
But maybe I'm insane, and I'm risking way too much by playing single-sleeved and being less-than-vigilant about protecting myself from theft. I've rambled long enough, what does everyone else think?
So I am maybe unreasonably free with talking about finances, but in the end I think it'd be better for everyone /philosophyrant 
)
