The second I cracked the pack, a wave of nostalgia rushed over me. The smell of 15-year-old cardboard unlocked memories I didn’t even know I had.
It was sometime Fall/Winter of 2018, and I was enjoying time by myself (as was customary) at my house in Jacksonville Beach, FL. Bored and looking for something to watch, I found myself engrossed in Yu-Gi-Oh!, a show I religiously watched on Cartoon Network as a kid. Waking up at like 6am to catch YGO or Transformers is a core memory.
Yu-Gi-Oh! as a show is insane. Crazy duels, ridiculous villains, and SO many episodes to binge (Season 1 alone had 49 eps!). If you’re at all interested in anime or trading card games, I’d encourage you to watch. Rewatching it, I came to love and hate the format: epic battles stretched across 3, 4, 5+ episodes, with at least half of every ~20-minute episode just recapping everything that happened up to that point in the arc. That’s how you end up with episode titles like “Clash in the Coliseum — Part 6.” Anyways, I digress.
I was watching one of these absurd battles at the end of Season 1 (ep. 45 for those following along at home) when Yugi pulled a crazy maneuver: teaming up with sworn nemesis Seto Kaiba, he fused Kaiba’s boss monster, Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon, with his own Black Luster Soldier to summon the never-before-seen Dragon Master Knight.
I was shook. Summoning the monster took half the episode, it was the craziest thing ever, and most of all, the card looked SICK. Memories came rushing back, my brother and I begging mom to buy us packs at Target, getting home, ripping them open, trading cards, and knowing nothing about actual dueling. I had to have the Dragon Master Knight.
I started looking into it, along with other cards I loved as a child, and quickly learned how deep the hobby goes. There’s the core knowledge – sets, editions, eras, card types, rarities – but also all the nuances of certain sets, print runs, and the ins and outs of the YGO community. That massive bank of knowledge PLUS the nostalgia factor really scratched an itch for me.
It was a crazy time to get into YGO, too. I really started buying cards and packs right before COVID, which (as you may or may not know) caused a BOOM in the collectibles and card market. Cards I had bought for $10, $20 were selling for $200, $500 seemingly overnight. What started as another special interest quickly became “wait, I can make money AND collect the cards I love?!” And the community that was there pre-COVID was so cool. Everyone knew everyone, and it felt like we were all working together to find the next stash of boxes that had been packed away and forgotten about.
Over the next three years, I got into YGO in a big way. Like, hundreds of hours, thousands of cards, and an insane collection of graded, sealed, and raw cards. I was scooping up collections on Facebook Marketplace, scouring eBay for steals, hunting at local card shops for minty raw cards or old sealed product they had forgotten about. But most of all, I was ripping packs.
I remember the first vintage packs I bought: Legacy of Darkness, 1st Edition. I was so excited to open them, and the second I cracked the first one…there it was. That smell. I’ve read that the brain regions for smell and memory sit right next to each other, but reading about the connection and experiencing it are two very different things. In my first lot of packs I even pulled the Injection Fairy Lily, a crazy good pull. Ended up pulling two of these, top 5 pulls in my YGO career for sure (well, technically, Leona pulled the second one).
Needless to say I was hooked. I opened hundreds of packs, new and old, learning more about the cards and sets the whole time.
I even eventually got the Dragon Master Knight! Turns out, it was a pretty rare and expensive card; a perfect example of those nuances I mentioned earlier. It was only printed a handful of times, and the first printing and highest rarity (important for collecting) was in Retro Pack 2. This set was notoriously scarce (EU release only), and the chances of pulling THAT secret rare were astronomical. I ended up buying one raw from a friend who said it was gradable. I submitted it to BGS, ended up with a 9. How it goes!
Nowadays, OG (’02–’03) 1st Ed packs are expensive. Like $60+ for a single pack on eBay (prob scaled, too). Back then, I was buying packs for like $10, sometimes less. Looking back at my purchase history on eBay is a real hindsight 20/20 moment, “if only I had bought more!“
Legacy of Darkness is still one of the cheapest OG sets, I think only Ancient Sanctuary is cheaper. As I was writing this, I found a lot of packs going for $28/pack. Wild still, but nothing like how it was when they were like $5 lol. Anyways I bought some 😭
Besides the whole “gambling” of it all (which, let’s be honest, isn’t anywhere CLOSE to what’s happening these days…), the real draw for me as a collectible was all the intricacies of the product itself. It has all the great signals for collectors: scarcity, rarity, production errors, lawsuits… all the good stuff that creates lore.
Collectibles are awesome. I love collecting things. Over the past ~7 years, some cards (not just YGO) and other high-value collectibles have arguably even outperformed the stock market. I’m not a financial advisor, and this is not financial advice telling you to dump stock. I’m saying buy cool things because you enjoy them. You never know, maybe you’ll end up making money as a happy accident.