Japanese MTG Cards? What would they be worth?

halkun

Waaay back in 1995, I decided to make an investment in Magic cards. At the time I was living in Japan, and thought a real creative investment would be to buy "the whole set" in Japanese.

Every weekend I went to Yokohama and bought a whole box of Japanese cards. (I think it was about $100 per box). I then went home and very carefully put them into order of color and then Japanese alphabetical order. I did this about 6 times. (I remember my final cost was ~$600 when I got the last card I needed.)

So now it's 2008 and I wonder how my investment is doing, but I'm having problems finding out how much something like this would be worth. Here's some stats I could come up with.

1) The set is 4th edition, but this was the first set that was ever printed in Japanese.
2) The cards have never been used. I don't know how to play MTG and never took them out of my binder after I organized them,
3) To keep things neat in my binder, I use a bunch of cards "front to front" to create a "blank" so that the different colors line up on proper pages. Because I don't play the game, and don't know what is rare and what isn't, I may have "hidden rares" in my binder.
4) I have all the cards, plus two boxes of extras. the boxes have been sitting upright for the last decade or so, so the cards are not warped and are perfectly stacked.

Does anyone know of a price guide I can look up?

TehSloth

Most of the places I know to sell them online only accept english cards, so I dunno whether the value would necessarily go up or down once you found somebody interested. Wrath of God and Birds of Paradise are the only cards I can think of from that specific set that would probably merit much value, each of which you could probably get an easy $5 from. Unfortunately most of them are going to be worth maybe a nickel, I guess it depends on whether you think having them in japanese is cool, and it'll probably be easy to get rid of lands that way, since everybody knows what they are, and I've seen a lot of people substitute their lands with ancient or foreign printings. Check out Card Kingdom. I'm pretty sure that's where my roommate last year went to re-buy all the pieces for an old deck he wanted to rebuild because our neighbor got into it. There's another one that just kinda facilitates the sale of cards between parties, like ebayish, but I can't think of it's name off hand.

Gabriel_Pitt

If you want a price guide, you're going to need to find one in Japan. That's also where you'll actually be getting any good amount of money for them, because aside from the novelty value, there's not a whole lot going for them. At least in this case you have the long reach of the internet to help expedite things.

Papillon

Black bordered or white bordered? Black bordered is worth more -- I believe Japanese 4th edition was printed in both.

Starcitygames.com sells some foreign cards, so you can look there to get an idea of their worth, although Starcity significantly overcharges on cards compared to what you'll be able to get.

I doubt you'll find a price guide for Japanese 4th edition cards. You would need to compare with English 4th edition, other foreign cards, etc. and find prices for a few Japanese 4th edition cards to compare against to get a general idea of how much they would be worth.

DiannaoChong

Black bordered japanese cards that are old are worth a fortune. Problem is that 4th edition isnt all that hot, that is right when the super mass production of not so great quality cards was done. Theres a few cards in that set that have value, and in japanese would really skyrocket said value. Its hard to tell if you bought booster/starter boxes, or full sets. were the cards in packs, or in a box in order? if in a box in order, you ruined alot of the value by unwrapping the box. If in packs, you also may of ruined value by taking potential worth and creating actual worth.

It comes down to since you have unwrapped cards, certain ones are going to be of decent value if you indeed have multiple sets. Overall, I would say you certainly wouldnt have a net loss if the cards are still in non-mint condition. Armeggedon/Wrath of god/bad moon/ball lighting/birds of paradise/mishras factory are going to be your super money makers. Wrath of god, ball lighting, and birds of paradise are your super "ka-ching" cards. If black bordered, I would dare say 30-40$ a card isnt out of the question easily if the japanese card market is still like it was 6 months ago.

4 japanese black border lighting bolts (these are commons) are 30$ on ebay right now, with alot of bids. Some "classic" commons are high dollar tickets and are worth a hell of alot more then the unusable rares, so keep an eye out on that.