Over the weekend, Reddit user LATIN0 posted some pics on the internet of something neat they saw while at the dump. They’d spotted a bunch of boxes, all in pristine condition, that were full of Magic: The Gathering cards.
They had simply thought it was interesting, and wanted to share the curiosity. “Someone threw away 6 pallets of Magic TG cards at my local city landfill”, they wrote. But not long after, all hell broke loose. The post received tens of thousands of upvotes. Websites started posting news about it despite knowing almost nothing about what was actually in them. YouTube conspiracy videos started popping up, spending hours poring over the photos trying to find out the truth behind it all. WHY WOULD THIS HAPPEN, they pondered, WHAT COULD IT MEAN.
The “why?” questions were kinda pointless. Stuff gets dumped in landfill all the time by freight companies if it’s not signed/paid for, can’t be held and can’t be returned. The “what was in them?” questions were more interesting, and could actually be answered because LATIN0 managed to grab some and open them up.
Turns out they were boxes full of stuff like Unfinity and Modern Horizons II sets:
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The next questions folks started asking were how many cards were in there, and how much were they worth? Going by the retail price of the cards, and multiplying by the volume of the boxes and how many boxes it looked like there were in the photo, estimates ranged everywhere from $100,000 all the way up to $250,000 (and potentially even more, depending on what valuable cards were contained within).
Part of the reason there was so much speculation over the cards was the fact that LATIN0—who says they’re not fans of the game, and only know about it at all “because of Reddit posts I’ve seen over the years”—originally only posted the one image of the landfill, which is located somewhere in Texas. The main reason, though, is the fact that we’ll now never know, because having received 24 hours worth of frantic messages from Magic collectors and fans, they drove back out to the landfill a day later only to find that the boxes had been completely destroyed.
“The cards are all under layers of trash, each day 2-4 layers are being added”, they said earlier today. “Don’t try to come and look for some. They are all damaged”.
LATIN0 expresses a little bit of remorse that they didn’t know how much the cards were worth when they posted the pics, and will keep the few they did manage to salvage “to remind myself of a woulda coulda shoulda moment of my life”.
“I’m not going to kill myself over this post or these cards. I’m going back to work like everyone else.”
If you can handle more of the horror of seeing these cards in such a state, there are videos here showing the scale of the devastation.
