Commander Player Weighs Options: Buy Card Storage or Keep Using Decade-Old Wet Box?
Ypsilanti, MI - Local Commander player Tommy Dwatoff recently dealt with the difficult issue of whether or not to keep storing his expensive Magic: The Gathering decks in a professionally made deck organizer or a cardboard box with signs of decay he's had since childhood.
The box Dwatoff currently holds his more than $4000 Magic collection in is a Khans of Tarkir fat pack box duct-tapped together and dripping an unknown fluid.
"Look, I understand that there's a bunch of other card-holders out there," conceded Dwatoff while ripping off a fresh new strip of tape to reinforce a corner of the box. "You can go to any LGS and find all different kinds of things to use: official deck-boxes from YouTube personalities, rigid bags with a picture of a sexy female Niv-Mizzet on them, or even cool Pokemon totes with deck holders covered in Gengar. Hell, the internet's even going crazy over tool boxes you can get from Home Depot that fit, like, fifty-hundred decks in.
"Anyone who's seen it knows my box is a little shabby; it's been with me ever since I bought it on my first Friday Night Magic, and at this point it's more tape than box, but it still works. Do I really need to put $50 down to get a new deck box when I have a perfectly good one right here? I can buy so many better things with that $50, like a Secret Lair with weird art and a mistake printed on one of the cards, or a booster box of Murders at Markov Manor since no one bought that set, or one single Onslaught fetch land. Since I've purchased all of those things in the past month, why would I spend even more money on this?"
If Dwatoff upgrades his box, he will be in good company. Roughly 70% of all Commander players spend as much money on card accessories as they do actual cards, according to economist Louis Venga.
"The card protection market has always been a hugely profitable industry," explained Venga while double-sleeving his credit cards. "People love to have the ability to not only customize their game pieces, but protect those same cards from damage. It's a far cry from what it used to be: back in the Alpha days, Richard Garfield hoped that cards would be wrapped in cellophane like a deli brownie to protect them from the elements. Now you can get enough protection to quadruple-sleeve your decks, and each sleeve can have a picture of a sexy female Niv-Mizzet on it."
At press time, Dwatoff was kicked out of a Commander pod for using a deck where half of the cards had different sleeves than the other half.