What's the Worst Trade You Ever Made?

Commander (EDH) forum

Posted on Oct. 28, 2020, 11:39 a.m. by Sultai_Sir

Some people are obsessed with Magic, and not in a friendly, favorite-hobby type of way. Some people are in it to get more cards, more value, and don't care how they do it. Now, imagine 10-year old me. I had just pulled a Doubling Season, and a guy had seen me do it. Now, I didn't know it was worth 50 dollars at the time, all I knew was that he was offering me a sweet deal for it: Samut, the Tested. It was a planeswalker! How could I refuse? Well, cut to me going back to my house, and checking how much it was worth. Here's a hint: less then 2 bucks. Doubling Season is a 50+ dollar card. So anyways, what are your worst trades?

VampDemigod says... #2

This wasn’t MTG, but when I was in second grade, I was on the playground. I found a yugioh card, in mtg terms it was a Karn Liberated. As I’m looking at it, a 5th grader walks up behind me. He forced me to trade it to him for what was basically a 1 mana 0/1 vanilla flier (once again, this is the magic equivalent of the yugioh card).

October 28, 2020 11:53 a.m.

Sultai_Sir says... #3

Dang, VampDemigod, that sounds bad. I've never played YuGiOh, but still.

October 28, 2020 11:59 a.m.

BodhiQL says... #4

It was the Shadows of Innistrad prerelease. Chronologically, this was right after Eldrazi Winter in Modern, so Eye of Ugin had just been banned. My prerelease promo was Sin Prodder and I had won a game or two purely off the card advantage it gave me and the damage, and I thought it was going to be really strong. At the time, the prerelease promo was 100 bucks, so I was psyched! After the event, I was doing some trading, and this one guy had a second prerelease Sin Prodder. I wanted it really bad, and so I traded my 4 copies of Reality Smashers and Thought-Knot Seers for it because I didn’t think they would retain value after the ban. Little did I know, Eldrazi Tron would still be good in Modern even 3 or 4 years later, and Sin Prodder is bulk.

October 28, 2020 12:42 p.m.

I once traded a Shockland for a pile of draft leftovers that I thought were cool...

October 28, 2020 12:43 p.m.

Sultai_Sir says... #6

BodhiQL: Ouch. You basically traded the core of Eldrazi Tron. Do you play Modern at all?

October 28, 2020 12:57 p.m.

Gontilordofmtg says... #7

This wasn't a bad trade in terms of card strength but I definitely lost money in the trade. Hour of devastation had just come out and in a couple of loose packs I pulled an invocation of Choke. At the time it was worth 20 bucks but since I didn't care for the card I instead traded it for a bunch of super cheap blue cards for my budget blue control deck. I don't remember many of them but two I do remember were Scourge of Fleets and Curse of the Swine. The part that sucks about this trade is that I could have easily sold a card that was peeking in price and bought loads of more cards and that while I didn't have a definitive offer from another person, I did know that they were interested in it and probably would've given me more.

October 28, 2020 1:42 p.m. Edited.

Back when Magic Origins had just come out, the five Flip Walkers were all more or less the same price - Gideon was a bit more expensive, because people thought he would make a white weenie deck real in modern, and Chandra was a bit less because she's just not as good as the others.

Anyway, I opened up a Jace, Vryn's Prodigy  Flip, and played it in prerelease, and immediately noticed that it waaaaaaay outperformed what I thought it was going to be. So I traded my then-15$ Gideon for a friend's then-12$ Jace. A short while later, Jace was 90$, and Gideon was bulk.

Sadly, I didn't get to enjoy it, because I'm a commander player and I really only need one of each card, so I traded my new extra Jace for a friend's Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh  Flip, because I like Chandra as a character.

October 28, 2020 3:14 p.m.

BodhiQL says... #9

Sultai_Sir I haven’t in a good while, even before COVID, but yes. I only play Modern, EDH, and Pauper.

October 28, 2020 3:28 p.m.

VampDemigod says... #10

This is kind of the opposite, but my lgs let me trade $10 of rares in for free entrance into a M20 Sealed. I opened 2 Mythics, tied for 1st in the tournament, and split a booster box with the other 1st placer. I ended up becoming a regular at that store, and I’ve co-run a few fundraisers for them, and they’re now the official game store of the local high school. Great trade for both of us.

October 28, 2020 3:56 p.m.

MagicMarc says... #11

My all time worst trade was trading away all of my loose collection of Legends for a complete set of the Dark when the Dark was released.

I don't know how complete my set of Legends was at the time but a single Legends booster pack is worth like triple an entire set of the Dark probably.

Don't get me wrong, some of my all time favorite cards are from the Dark. Buy, yeah...

October 28, 2020 4:48 p.m.

smackjack says... #12

I sold my Moat for $80 not that long ago :/

October 28, 2020 4:51 p.m.

Sultai_Sir says... #13

smackjack: Ouch. That hurts.

October 28, 2020 4:52 p.m.

VampDemigod says... #14

OH! That’s physically painful.

October 28, 2020 4:53 p.m.

MagicMarc says... #15

smackjack, that hurt me to read it.

October 28, 2020 5:28 p.m.

smackjack says... #16

Well well.. You get ups and downs. I bought 2 Mox Diamond for $20 before the spike, and i just bought a Maralen of the Mornsong for $5. My 3 Tundra cost me $90 each and i doubled my money on my Volcanic Island :).

Speaking of Maralen of the Mornsong, I just made a track in her honor. Check it out on my SoundCloud :) https://soundcloud.com/jensmansson/maralen-of-the-mornsong (for some reason i cant create links, sorry, just copy paste)

October 28, 2020 5:40 p.m.

MagicMarc says... #17

October 28, 2020 6:08 p.m.

smackjack says... #18

heyy MagicMarc Thanks for the link :)

October 28, 2020 6:15 p.m.

MagicMarc says... #19

thank you for the track!

October 28, 2020 6:19 p.m.

smackjack says... #20

To get back to topic.. This is not my worst trade by far, but it was a bad trade non the less.. A couple of years ago i was playing at my LGS (I seldom do, been playing there like 5 times..). At the time i was building my legacy Stasis deck and needed a Daze. There was this little girl there, like 12 years old who had one. I asked her if she wanted to trade it and she wanted so much of my cards. I ended up trading about $50 worth of cards for that Daze.

October 28, 2020 6:25 p.m.
October 28, 2020 7:36 p.m.

I can't remember what I traded for. I was relatively new at magic and checking for conditions of the cards. I got a Doubling Season and gave something of similar value. At the time Doubling Season was 60$ but I didn't know it was in heavy play condition. I can only assume it was worth 30/40$. I felt swindled when I got home. I should have check it when I got it at the shop in his face but I was too happy because I wanted one for the longest time.

I know this part is unneeded but I targeted the dude every chance I got at when we played commander. I felt cheated. Yet it's my fault for not checking the condition of the card but how was I supposed to know?

October 29, 2020 2:56 a.m.

RNR_Gaming says... #23

I traded a Scalding Tarn for an Engineered Explosives it was back when kci was the hot thing in modern and I wanted to play it. The prices were about the same and then they banned the deck and reprinted it :( Tarn is still hovering around 70 explosives is almost bulk.

October 29, 2020 6:05 p.m.

StopShot says... #24

Instead of getting scammed, I feel like I did the scamming, but to be honest we were both relatively new to Magic and we wanted to get into Modern, because Return to Ravnica was rotating out of Standard and Theros didn't seem that appealing to play Standard in.

My friend happened to have a Marsh Flats he acquired by selling off his Return to Ravnica standard deck. He was building a Jeskai control shell at the time and allied fetch lands had yet to be printed into Modern, so he ran 4 Scalding Tarns with the other fetches consisting of Marsh Flats and Misty Rainforests.

I was building a homebrew Black-White Modern deck at the time, so a Marsh Flats was highly appealing to me, but I didn't have the cash at the time to invest into that fetchland.

Khans of Tarkir just came out along with allied fetch lands however. My friend and I played at the prerelease as it was fun to crack packs and play for prizes. I happened to open a Flooded Strand among my prizes and tried to convince my friend to trade my Flooded Strand for his Marsh Flats.

To be fair, my friend was aware of the sizeable price gap between the cards and his first inclination was that I was trying to scam him of his card so that I could sell the more expensive card for a larger profit. I then told him that in his Jeskai deck his fetchland could only search for Hallowed Fountain, Sacred Foundry or Plains. If he used the Flooded Strand he'd be able to search for the same cards, but he'd also be able to search for a Steam Vents or Island making the Flooded Strand a strictly better card than the fetch land he was already using. I also brought up how the Marsh Flats had better use in my Black-White than Flooded Strand so this would be an exchange that would fairly improve both our decks.

He went with that trade, but neither of us knew that the KTK Flooded Strand was just a reprint of an Onslaught cycle and that he could have purchased the original card for much cheaper at the time. Even today that trade doesn't seem fair, but the price tag of allied fetches did go up due to be included into Modern and Standard though I don't think they ever reached enemy-fetch price-tag territory.

October 29, 2020 6:56 p.m.

Fotus_Konig says... #25

When I was relatively new to magic, I got a bunch of free Khans and Fate Reforged cards from some relatives who had decided to quit the game. Among them was a Polluted Delta. I looked at that card and thought: 'It's blue and black. Ew. And the flavor text talks about dragons dying!! I like dragons!!' Within the next 2 weeks I traded that fetch with my cousin for a Slumbering Dragon to put in my newly constructed mono-red dragon deck. I only learned of its true price about a year ago, and the card haunts me in a box full of unused rares everytime my cousin comes out.

October 30, 2020 12:15 a.m.

RNR_Gaming says... #26

StopShot it was his choice to do the one for one. Its not a scam if you both know what the cards are worth and he agrees to it - I'm kind of curious as to why he didn't ask you to trade up for it.

October 30, 2020 3:55 a.m.

RNR_Gaming says... #27

Fotus_Konig - lands aren't as appealing to new players. They're bland. It's a rite of passage to trade a high value card for a dragon.

October 30, 2020 3:58 a.m.

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