There was once a potato who could not go without eating chips. ‘Oh, what does that make me, Mother? A monster’? He trembled at the truth of it. ‘Who knows’, said she as she heated the oil in the pan and sharpened her knife. ‘Who knows, little chip’.

First off, let me begin by clarifying that this post is not meant to offer any sort of financial advice. Long-term projections for both buying the lottery and Magic: The Gathering cards end up in a net negative, making them terrible ideas if your goal is to actually make money. I want to make it clear that here we'll be comparing a bad investment vs a terrible one.

tldr: buying MTG cards has ~4x more average return on investment than buying lottery tickets, but both lose you money in the long run. You can play with MTG cards, though, while a losing lottery ticket is useless.

...

I remember sweltering summer afternoons sitting with my grandmother in front of her TV (incidentally, the only place in the house with decent AC) watching the draw of the numbers for that week. I felt the excitement and hope that she might win. Sometimes she did, though just enough to justify the investment and keep her playing.

My grandmother was, I think, big on gambling in general. I have many memories of her inviting her cackling friends over for wild nights of poker and as many cigarettes as they could smoke. The lottery was just another outlet for her. While growing up, I often thought it was sort of silly since she always lost, but the more I grow up the more I realize that, perhaps, the reason she played was for the thrill of it, the rush that this time could be it, more than to actually win something.

I've been into MTG ever since a classmate introduced me to the game during middle school, and recently I realized that whenever I'm opening a pack there is some of that ‘gambler's hope’ in the back of my mind. Oh, I wonder what I will find in this pack. Thankfully, I didn't inherit my grandma's whole gambling tendencies, but definitely some of her is poking through.

MTG packs are designed so that in every one of them you're almost guaranteed to find something exciting, even though it might not necessarily be something ‘expensive’. I've frequently opened packs where the whole cost of the pack ($6) is matched by the cost of the cards, making it essentially free (though not really1).

You can sell these cards (a process that might be more or less complex depending on where you live) and sometimes even find cards that are worth quite a hefty amount of cash. This made me wonder: if we were to plot the long-term return of buying MTG cards vs buying lottery tickets, which would make you more money?

Let's start with some numbers.

First off, the street price for a single MTG pack is ~$6.5, and the EV (expected value; average amount of money you can sell the cards for) on a pack is ~$4.132, which is a return of ~64% of the investment.

For the lottery we have multiple options, different lotteries, etc., but Powerball is what my grandma used to play, so let's go with that. For Powerball3, you buy a $2 ticket, and you get back an average of $0.32–0.52 depending on jackpot size. At a typical modest jackpot ($20M), that's about $0.36 back. So, a return of ~18% of the investment.

Now, it's immediately clear that both of these are not good ways of making money, but the comparison is especially brutal for Powerball. Also, for Powerball the numbers might not be that clear since the average appears ‘higher’ than the actual return you would expect because the prizes involved are so high! According to the probabilities at the end of this page, you actually won't be winning anything 96% of the time. There's also the very important consideration that a losing Powerball ticket is nothing but trash, while an MTG pack that has nothing worth selling is still something you can play with :)

Now we're at a fork in the post. I could go deeper into the numbers, share graphs and projections, or I could go ahead and explore the obvious question of ‘why the hell people even buy Powerball’, and perhaps more importantly, ‘why don't those same people buy MTG cards instead’.

The answer to the first one, I think, lies somewhere in the thrill of it. The draw of the numbers is made to be a very high-stakes event and a somewhat lengthy process that results in a delicious sort of excited anxiety for those who like that sort of thing. But in the end you're just buying that experience rather than actually investing.

On the other hand, Powerball has the possibility of ‘making big bucks’, while MTG doesn't. Sure, in the latter you have some very expensive cards, but we're talking about a few thousand dollars at most (and usually just a few hundred). The only exception being the One Ring.

This is a story that's well known to most MTG players, but for those who don't know, a quick recap might be in order. A few years ago (in June 2023), Wizards of the Coast released a Lord of the Rings set, which included as part of it a very unique, very prized, ‘One Ring’ card. Sure, there were many cards with the name ‘One Ring’ (as this was actually part of a core mechanic for the set), but there was one that was unique. One to rule them all.

This 1/1 serialized card was eventually found and sold for 2 million dollars to Post Malone. A lot of money, and sort of comparable with winning the lottery, right? Well, if you do the math (as done here), it turns out that finding the One Ring was actually orders of magnitude more likely than winning the Powerball! Even just winning the ‘Match 5’ prize (1 million) is less likely4.

Price Value $ Odds
One Ring 2 million ~ 1 in 3 million
Match 5 1 million 1 in 11 million
Jackpot ~20 million to more than 2 billion 1 in 292 million

Of course, it should be noted that the ‘One Ring’ was a unique event in the history of MTG, so we can't really use it as a point of comparison, but it does make for a good story!

Well, I think that answers the first question of why people even buy Powerball rather than MTG cards: the stakes. I think there's something to be said here about the human tendency to behave erratically in high-risk/high-reward scenarios. Perhaps some interesting connection with how we evolved as a species, with it making sense for some of us to try crazy shit every now and then if that thing would benefit them personally or their social standing. However, this post is getting quite long already, and I don't want to introduce extra stuff, so maybe we can deal with this in a separate post.

Now there's the follow-up question of why they don't buy cards in the first place.

To look at this, I think we can pose a thought experiment. Suppose you are an average (boring) married grown-up. One day you come home, and your spouse finds a lottery ticket in your bag. Most of us wouldn't feel ashamed (maybe just a bit), and our spouse is unlikely to scream at us for wasting money. In fact, they might even be excited, likely to sit with us to watch the Powerball numbers being drawn with a sparkle in their eyes.

Now imagine you're that very same person but now a little bit less boring since, in this new scenario, you sneaked off to your local game store after work and bought a couple of packs. You close yourself in the bathroom and start cracking them open, reveling in the smell and texture of new cardboard, when all of a sudden your spouse opens the door! You thought you had locked it, and now they've caught you hiding like a rat; they know your dirty little secret. How would the average boring spouse react? At best, they would be indifferent and say something like ‘well, at least it's not drugs’. At worst, they divorce you and tell everyone what a little kid you are for playing with cards. And I think that's the core of it! ‘What little kids’...

Most people think of MTG as ‘just a game’ and, as such, don't take it seriously, even when they do take seriously such questionable financial decisions like ‘investing in buying lottery tickets’. Isn't the lottery a game as well? Not according to those people, it seems.

... alright, I think I might have some unresolved issues with unsupportive parent figures ...

Anyway, I hope that when (and if) I have grandkids they will not remember me chasing after the ghost of riches, but might cherish memories of how we dove into card packs together and how, most importantly, we played with them afterward.

In the end, both of these are not so much about making money (as we saw, both are terrible options) as about being entertained and having fun. You might chase the quick high and crash of playing the lottery, or you might opt for a game that can potentially involve those around you and create a sense of community (all board games are great at this), not to mention the joys of collecting, which we really haven't touched on in this post.

Whatever you choose to do, I hope you're happy :)

I have a few notes for completeness:

  • MTG return rates can actually be improved substantially by buying booster boxes. A box has 36 packs and costs ~$130–150, which is ~$3.60–4.20 per pack.
  • MTG return rates can actually be better compared to the more expensive scratch-offs. A $20 scratch-off returns around 72% (according to the Minnesota Lottery page). The return is actually a bit better than MTG, but you still lose money in the long run and don't get to play with tickets after scratching them.
  • In this post I spoke exclusively about MTG, but the truth is that there are many other collecting games one could do this same analysis for, with varying numbers! For example, I did some quick searching on the following TCGs to get their average EVs, and according to this page (live EV data for different TCGs) we have that:
    • One Piece: this is actually profitable! Some sets actually have positive EV (up to +61%), meaning you actually make money. Of course, that's assuming you can even find the product in the first place.
    • Pokémon: of the three this one is the worst, with typical sets returning ~40–65%. It's still better than Powerball, though!

Footnotes

  1. Big caveat here: this is gambler's logic. The pack is not really free because I haven't sold the cards :P, and even if I did sell them I'm very unlikely to get the full price of the card, since one also needs to factor in the cut that the escrow platform takes + shipping fees. I've never really sold any card myself, so I'm afraid I don't know all the details, and my analysis here might be too simplistic. If I understand TCGPlayer's fees correctly, a $50 card would be losing ~13.9% in fees. To keep things simpler, in this post I'll assume we're talking about the pre-fees prices. You could also be dealing with cards that cost more than $100, and in that case you'd also probably need to send it for grading before being able to sell it (a well-graded card can be sold for more). ↩

  2. According to this page. Different sets have different EVs, but for the argument of this post I'll just run with the average. Some sets actually have much better EV than the average, with a few of them even having positive EV. Also, here I'm just factoring the average per pack, but someone more serious about this should also consider drop rates for the different serialized cards that still need to be found. ↩

  3. According to this page and this other page. ↩

  4. Powerball probabilities taken from the bottom of this page. ↩