MTG · 1993 originals · Could contain Power 9 · five years or longer
This is the entry for MTG Alpha/Beta Sealed Starter Deck — Wizards of the Coast, Magic: The Gathering, one of 70 sealed products ranked on four separate axes. It's filed as a hold-sealed play rather than something to rip, and those two strategies want opposite things — holding wants time and shrinking sealed supply, ripping wants peak demand right now.
Appreciation is 97 but liquidity is only 35, and that combination describes a long project rather than a trade. Something that gains value slowly and takes months to sell ties your money up for the whole ride, which is fine if you planned for it and painful if you didn't.
Accessibility of 1 is the catch. That score tracks whether you can buy near MSRP or you're already paying a premium to someone else, and at 1 you are paying up. A box with real upside bought at double MSRP is a worse purchase than an ordinary one bought at retail.
Set against the 7 Magic: The Gathering sealed products scored here, its appreciation of 97 ranks 1st of 7, liquidity 35 ranks 7th, accessibility 1 ranks 7th, and risk 5 is the 1st-lowest. The closest thing to it on the numbers is MTG Modern Horizons 3 Collector Booster, which scores 88 and 82 on the same two axes — if you're weighing one against the other, the difference is in the reasoning rather than the scores.
Five years or more is a patience bet. Over that span the specific reasoning below matters less than whether the underlying thing stays desirable, and the honest position is that nobody knows what the hobby looks like in 2031. Size it accordingly.
Risk is scored 5, toward the low end of anything in the tool. Low risk in trading cards is still not low risk in any sense your bank would recognise — it means the identifiable ways for this to go wrong are fewer, not that they're absent.
You can realistically find MTG Alpha/Beta Sealed Starter Deck at a local card shop, a card show and online.
Skip the retail aisle for this. It is a hobby product, which means shops and distributors get it and big-box stores never do.
Out-of-print and harder-to-find sealed product surfaces at card shows more reliably than anywhere with a shelf, and a show is also the one venue where you can inspect what you are buying before you pay for it.
Every entry gets four separate scores instead of one grade, because a single grade hides the thing you needed. Full explanation in the guide: which sealed boxes return more than they cost.
Or browse all sealed products · how these scores are built
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