The 2021 Card-A-Day Challenge

“Magictating” is defined as getting into the zone with your Magic the Gathering collection--thinking, planning, organizing, reminiscing about past games, and imagining future games. It is a combination of hard thinking about the game and calm meditation, reveling in the joy it brings you.

I’m a collector at heart. I also love to play games. Magic the Gathering offers me the best of both worlds. I love Magic, and I love hunting for bargains. Those of you that know me are well aware of some of my more epic finds while bargain hunting: eBay misspellings, garage sales, flea markets, and even the quarter ton of cards my wife found on Craig’s list. I am always hunting for bargains and good trades. In the spirit of the New Year, and exciting resolutions, I am taking on a new Collector’s Quest. I have done several of these during the last couple decades, and I highly recommend that you do one yourself each year. The sense of gratification that comes while feeding your need for more Magic is indeed wonderful, but I find that the hunt itself is where most of the joy lies. My challenge for this year is as follows: I am going to purchase a Magic card every day during 2021.

I never have the appropriate sense of dread whenever I start anything, be it big or small. You can call it dumb or you call it optimism, but in the end it’s just who I am. I love taking on challenges, and the harder they are the more excited I am to tackle them. My wife warned me that it may sound fun, but it will eventually become work. I am more than happy to find out if that’s the case. I’ve decided to follow some simple guidelines to ensure that the journey is as fun as possible. I must purchase a card each day specifically for this collector’s quest. This means I can’t buy seven cards on a Monday and be set for the week. Each day I will need to make a conscious decision about what card I’m buying to complete the 2021 card-a-day challenge. It takes effort to buy a new card every single day. As I’ve said, I’m a bargain hunter, so I’ll be sure to be budget conscious while I make my selection each and every day. Any large purchases I will be attempting to make through my LGS, and so I may need to schedule curbside or store visit hours accordingly. Again, it’s worth it to me to take that extra step. I will not be taking short cuts or opting to purchase random cards or packs or any other sealed products to complete this. It’s actually really simple: select a single card to purchase each day, and buy it.

I have several other collector quests going on, and I may be able to kill two birds with one stone on a few of these days. I anticipate that I will also be combining this with other collecting quests that I have made for myself throughout the years. I never did complete the set of original legends from Legends, but perhaps this is the year that I make that happen. This may be the year I finish the task of building a Commander Cube for drafting. I will surely inch closer to completing my quirky artifacts collection, and my Mega Cube could use some rounding out and updating as well. I am only one Bayou shy of righting that childhood wrong, so perhaps I finish that quest this year as well. All of those and more are possibilities, but I think that each day will bring new surprises and new revelations about collecting Magic in the year 2021.

I anticipate being able to share many of the lessons I learn about purchasing, collecting, prioritizing, and executing this challenge. I intend to keep all of you updated with a monthly summary of my experiences. There will surely be many things I stumble across while doing this, and I can’t anticipate what hurdles will arise, but I’m going to let you know what it took to get over them, and what you can do to help guide your own collector quests throughout 2021 and beyond.

The biggest challenges that I can foresee would be the ability to purchase a card each day when and if I go on vacation. The answer here is simple, but I may be wrong. I think the internet and 4G/5G access should allow me to make a purchase anywhere on any given day. My LGS even has a way for me to set up buying online and doing curbside pickup! How sweet is that? Answer—very sweet indeed. The other way I anticipate this challenge to be difficult is if I have a lot going on in my life and I just don’t think about Magic for an entire day. That’s technically possible, but unlikely. As Billy Bean once said, “I hate losing more than I want to win.” That’s my favorite quote from Money Ball, but essentially this means I will be motivated to buy a card simply not to lose. Losing to yourself is still losing! Well, at least for me it might be. I think the act of being on-it every single day could make it less fun, and especially if I start seeing it as a chore of sorts. I am not overly worried about that, but we shall see if it truly becomes an onerous task. I suspect that my inherent collector’s greed will power past such feeble obstacles!

Now, to make this even more fun to look back on, because who doesn’t enjoy looking back at the zeal they had at the start of a New Year’s Resolution? I’m going to make a few predictions. I’ll be sure to check how I did at the end of the 2021 calendar year, and we can see if I was right or tapped-out.

1. I will complete the quest by actually purchasing a card every single day.
2. I am going to struggle finding cards during the Summer months
3. I will have zero shipping, delivery, and pick-up issues with the cards I purchase.
4. I will spoil myself on my birthday.
5. I will find at least one card from Beta to purchase.
6. I will buy more black cards than any other color.
7. I will purchase from unique stores while I’m on the road.
8. I will be sad to be done with this quest and will choose to repeat it next year.

This quest is a way to feed the greed. It’s going to be fun to find a card on each calendar day in 2021. Discipline will be key—I have to utilize my instincts, and mobilize my inner greed monster. As I write this article it is December 30th, and I’m so excited to start down this path. I am looking forward to sharing the progress and the insights I gather from this mammoth collector’s challenge. I think that we will have many stories to share during the course of 2021, and I hope that we might even be able to return to some normalcy. I’m hoping that we can play Magic in-person again, and trade cards in-person, and meet at our local game stores in-person. I want 2021 to be a year of triumph. I am aiming to do so myself by completing this ridiculously annoying challenge. In summary, I am still collecting, still playing (using Spell Table, and it’s awesome), and I’m still writing. I love Magic the Gathering, and I really believe it is the best game ever made. Happy New Year to everyone, and I hope you create your collector’s challenges and that you find fulfillment while completing them!