Status (998)
What is the completion status of my collection?
First, I need to define what I collect: at least one copy of every unique English paper magic card that was publicly released by Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) in the United States in the first 25 years.
According to my calculations, WOTC published 216 sets encompassing 36,213 cards in this 25-year time frame (1993-08-05 to 2018-08-05):
With such a precise definition, the following sets and cards are excluded from the status denominator:
- Oversize sets (not true magic cards). 177 cards.
- Summer Magic (not truly publicly released). 306 cards.
- Foreign Black Border (non-English set). 306 cards.
- Renaissance, Rinascimento (non-English sets). 122 + 69 cards.
- Fourth Black Border (non-English set). 378 cards.
- Salvat 2005, Salvat 2011 (not released in the US). 600 + 0 cards.
- Portal: Three Kingdoms (not released in the US). 180 cards.
- Introductory Two-Player Set (not released in the US). 67 cards.
- Alternate Fourth Edition (non-unique). 378 cards.
Also, at some point, it becomes a judgment call, usually revolving around supply (and therefore price). When a complete set of Limited Edition Alpha costs a
half-million dollars to assemble, is it really realistic to expect I would ever reach 100% completion? Therefore, I have decided to collapse the first three core sets into one set. That is, I will have satisfied the unique copy rule if I have an example of a Limited Edition Alpha
or a Limited Edition Beta
or an Unlimited Edition card. 295 + 302 + 302 🠢 302 cards.
Therefore, the number of excluded cards totals 3,180.
So, I am actively attempting to acquire at least one copy of each of these
33,033 = (36,213 - 3,180) magic cards. Since I have been actively collecting for most of the past 25 years, I have accrued the vast majority of them already; it is now much easier to calculate what I want rather than what I have:
Putting this data together, I can calculate the completion status:
95.41% = ((33,033 - 1,514) / 33,033) * 100%.
