How Much Would It Cost to Buy One of Every Magic: the Gathering Card Printed in 2020?

One of the past year's themes in the Magic world has been the proliferation of Magic. Not just products—although with nearly 30 Secret Lair drops, several big supplemental sets like Double Masters and Commander Legends, nine Commander precon decks, and much, much more, there have been a record number of those—but with Magic cards themselves. Take, for example, Teferi, Master of Time from Core Set 2021. If Teferi, Master of Time were printed in Core Set 2019 rather than Core Set 2021, it would have had exactly two versions: foil and non-foil. But in reality, Teferi, Master of Time has a massive 21 versions, with several promos that come with slightly different art in both foil and non-foil, the regular set printing (in both foil and non-foil), and even a random promo pack printing. 

Realizing just how much Magic happened in 2020, with the number of different products and the number of versions of each card within those products increasing drastically compared to past years, we started wondering about just how much it would cost if you actually wanted all of it. Literally all of it all of it. One copy of every version (foil and non-foil) of every card printed in 2020. Every Secret Lair drop; every Commander precon; every alt-art, extended border, showcase frame, and Judge Promo. Every. Single. Card.

While it took some work to calculate everything (there were so many different products that even the Goldfish crew forgot about some of them at first!), we eventually made it happen, not just for singles but also for sealed product as well. So, just how much would buying all of Magic printed in 2020 cost? Let's break it down, starting with the easier of the two calculations: sealed product.

Sealed Product

Let's say that you don't need every single version of every single Magic card printed in 2020, but you do want to experience at least some of every product printed in 2020. An easy way to accomplish this goal would be to buy one of each type of booster box (all of the main 2020 sets come with at least a normal draft booster box and a collector booster box, while Zendikar Rising also had a set booster box) for each set printed this year, one of every Secret Lair drop, and one of every supplemental product (Unsanctioned, Commander Collection: Green, Commander precon decks, etc). Assuming you bought each product when they went on sale (not 10 months later after they are out of print and potentially more expensive), how much would this set you back? Here's a quick breakdown:

As you can see, buying one of each sealed product released in 2020 will cost you $4,420, which would give you a closet full of 14 booster boxes, 19 preconstructed decks, and 28 Secret Lair drops to go along with a few scattered box-set products and one very expensive Double Masters VIP pack. Of course, this doesn't get you a copy of every card printed in 2020—the booster boxes you get won't even come close to giving you every card in the set, let alone every version of every card in a set, but it does give you an idea of how much a true sealed product collector would have to spend to have one of everything from the past year. 

While sticking a bunch of sealed product in your closet and waiting a few years might be a good investment for the long term, $4,420 for one year is a meaningful amount of money. As I'm writing this, there are 17 decks on the Standard metagame page. You could buy all 17 for $2,654, giving you every current deck in Standard and still nearly $2,000 left over to buy a Modern deck or two. Or, for almost exactly the same price, you could buy into the top deck in Legacy—Temur Delver, which currently costs $4,441—and likely play it for the next 10 years without making too many changes. 

Buying Every Single Card

If you think that $4,420 is a lot of money to spend on Magic, just wait another minute. Let's say that instead of one of each sealed product, you are the ultimate Magic collector and want one copy of every single version of every single card printed in 2020. For some reason, you need all 21 different versions of Teferi, Master of Time. You need every Godzilla promo (along with the normal-set version of the Godzilla cards, in both foil and non-foil, of course). One of everything from Jumpstart, Commander Legends, Double Masters, and all the Standard sets. Literally everything. How much would this cost? And in case you forgot, we typically get seven versions of every Standard rare / mythic as a baseline: a regular and a foil printing from boosters, an extended art and an extended art foil from Collector Boosters, a timestamped prerelease promo in foil, and a foil and a non-foil planeswalker stamped version from the Promo Packs.

$ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00 $ 0.00

Before getting to the numbers, a few quick notes on how this was calculated. First, we used current prices. While you could likely save some amount of money by trying to buy each card at its low point, this would be way too much work for the average Magic player (and also way too much work to calculate). Plus, trying to time your buys is more art than science, and there's a decent chance that you'll actually end up paying more for some cards as a result. Second, for booster releases, the cost is based on the value of buying all of the singles in the set. On the other hand, for products like Secret Lair drops, Commander decks, or other preconstructed / box-set supplemental products, we used the cost of buying the sealed product (which is generally lower than the cost of buying all of the cards in the product individually) from around the time the set was released (for sealed product, you'll often pay much more if you wait until the set goes out of print to try to buy it). Finally, most cards are printed in multiple languages. This calculation only takes into account English-language printings, so while you will end up with 21 Teferi, Master of Time, you won't end up with 21 English versions, 21 Japanese versions, and 21 Russian versions (etc.). If you wanted to buy every version of every card in every language, the big number would be several times as big, especially since some non-English cards (like Japanese War of the Spark planeswalkers) command a huge premium. So just how much would it cost to buy one of every version of every Magic card printed in 2020?

As you can see, the answer is a staggering $31,884 (if you are interested in seeing the data behind the calculations, you can check out a Google Sheet with all of the numbers here). While no one (outside of perhaps the most dedicated Magic collector) needs a copy of every single version of every single card, it's still a shockingly high number for just one year's worth of cardboard. Someone working a full-time job at $15 / hour could quite literally spend every penny that they made during the entire year on Magic cards and still wouldn't be able to buy a single copy of every unique card printed in 2020. This begs the question: what could you get instead?

How about a four-bedroom house? An airplane? A home theater with your choice of a PS5 or Xbox One; the nicest, most expensive gaming chair on the market; a massive pile of games; and a year's supply of Code Red Mountain Dew? 

Buying one copy of every set legal in Pioneer would only cost you $6,546, which means you could buy a playset of every single card legal in the format for $26,184, leaving you with more than $5,000 left over compared to buying once of every version of every card printed in 2020. Or, how about a complete set of every Modern-legal set (cost: $19,227). 

Or, how about this: let's say that rather than buying one of each version of each card printed in 2020, you started with Zendikar Rising and worked your way back through Magic's history, buying one complete, non-foil set of every Standard-legal set ever printed. You would make it all the way back to Visions (released February 3, 1997) before you ran out of money. You could quite literally buy every Standard set printed in the past 23 years for the same price as one of each unique card printed in the year 2020.

Someone recently calculated that it would take $522,000 to buy literally everything on Steam (not just every game but all of the DLC for every game as well), but there are over 30,000 games on Steam. This would put the average price of one Steam game (with all of the downloadable content as a bonus) at $17.40. This would mean that for the same cost as owning one copy of every version of every Magic card printed in 2020, you could buy 1,726.09 Steam games. Let's say you spent a relatively conservative (based on the number of hours I've spent playing Civilization) 40 hours playing each game. It would take you almost eight years of playing 24 hours a day, seven days a week to play through all of them. If you limited yourself to gaming for a mere eight hours of day, you would get 24 years of gaming from your purchase. At a more casual two hours a night after work or school, you wouldn't be able to play all of the games you bought in your lifetime. 

Along with high-end titles, Steam also has a lot of cheap homemade games of varying quality. If you limited yourself to AAA games, at an average of $60 a piece, you could buy 500, which should be a lifetime supply for your Xbox One or PlayStation 5. Board games have more variance in pricing, but if you assume the average game costs $40, you could get enough to fill a small room (750)—all for the price of one year's worth of every Magic card.

Of course, this is in some ways a silly exercise. No one needs 21 Teferi, Master of Time (outside of possibly Crim, but that's another story...). Honestly, it's a good thing that no one actually needs every version of every Magic card because even though Magic is the best game of all time, if you have $30,000 laying around, you can probably find something better to spend it on than one year's worth of cardboard.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.