You can bet your bottom dollar that someone somewhere out there wants more Magic cards. In fact it’s almost guaranteed considering the game’s enduring popularity and number of would-be collectors. So it is extremely sad when the cards end up in a landfill. Such is the case with recent penny-wise sets, and one MTG fan was able to track down exactly where the cards ended up. This is a story of a modern treasure hunt.
On the photo subreddit, someone posted a picture of boxes of MTG cards in a dump in the United States. It’s six decks of cards. Doing the math: six layers per pallet, 12 cartons per layer, four display boxes per carton, so that’s about 1729 display boxes on the six pallets. At $150 per box, for a conservative estimate, then that’s almost $260,000 worth of product (thanks u/Mirrormn). It’s a surprisingly valuable find sitting there in the dump. Magic fans were on the case.
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After the photo of the pallets was shared, within hours the exact location of the dump was determined and discovered to be Modern Horizons 2 booster packs, which are one of the most valuable sets of late. That cards worth more than $250,000 are simply closed and unused surprised many on the forum.
Someone dumped 6 pallets of Magic TG cards in my town’s landfill
by u/LATIN0 in photos
But why would such valuable cards, and so many of them, end up in the landfill, I hear you ask? While we won’t know the exact answer, there are good guesses. It is possible that someone (a collector and/or seller) ordered this large load, but the delivery company could require the buyer to pay for a forklift to deliver the load as a final step. Perhaps the customer then refuses the order and the delivery company offloads the claim to the shipper and rejects it.
But there may also be some defect with the cards. Maybe a box was bent or missing some items and the customer is unhappy and demands a refund or replacement. Then the unwanted boxes are simply thrown away. People who have worked for big stores in the thread confirmed that this could happen.
But since the boxes have not been opened, we have no way of knowing if the boxes contain gold or if they are actually just junk. If only someone could go to said dump and take a look. Well someone did. It’s unclear how the person was able to locate the exact landfill and the speed at which they did so, but the OP got there to take a photo of the boxes and find out what was inside. Looks like they found a treasure. Sharing a photo of what was inside the boxes, u/LATINO showed that they were indeed booster packs of the Modern Horizons 2 sets.
This is a find for the ages, and many Magic fans were positively drooling over the discovery, but what about the legality of taking items from a dump? This is where things get a little tricky. Basically, it depends on who owns the dump. If the landfill is privately owned, then technically all media are owned by the landowner. But if the landfill is city (or public) property, then it’s probably fair game. Of course there may be more specific local laws about all of this, so it’s a good idea to do your research before you go dump hunting to be safe.
But for the LATINOs on Reddit, they’ve stumbled upon a vast collection of Magic cards worth a fortune and a story that will keep them drinking for years to come. “Now let me tell you about the time I found hundreds of thousands worth of papers just sitting in a dump, ready for the taking…”
