MTGNexus

This sold for $300 on eBay a couple of weeks ago. Would you play it if you owned it? Or proxy it? Would you even allow someone else to play/proxy it?

Yikes.

I mean, if that's the only copy of Volc that I had, yeah I'd play it. I don't think that I'd pay $300 for the privilege of adding it to my decks, but you gotta start somewhere. And while it is heavily damaged, it looks sleeve-playable AND it has the name clean and unobscured. I would probably comment if my opponent dropped that, but I wouldn't call a judge on them for it.

the deterioration is severe..
I won't own anything like this.

yeah, if I still played legacy, then would allow the opponent to proxy it.

If it were mine, I'd spend another grand having an artist restore the cardstock and hand paint an alter over the degraded area. Then I'd play it.

i'd worry that I couldn't credibly defend it as a real card, even though it is x3 I'd crack up and look guilty when someone asked me what the hell it was

$300 still seems like a lot for that thing. How thick is it at the bottom? I'd rather spend that kind of money on...almost anything else.

The upper portion reminds me of an Ancestral Recall I owned. It wasn't stripped bare but had been dropped in a parking lot, rained on, run over by a car, sunbaked dry, found, and reflattened.

It also reminds me of a Walking Dead #1 that was graded 0.5 and then sold by a LGS for hundreds of dollars. It had been left on the dashboard of a car and then on the floorboard for years before becoming so popular that they had it graded, hoping for the 0.5 grade, and then marketed it as if the comic itself had been zombified.

As for the card in the OP, I'd chuckle if I saw it in Commander but would rather not see it in Vintage/Legacy (which I don't play anyways).