Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

So this interesting conversation came up with my MTG friends a while back. They constantly browse the shops looking at prices and obviously love it when their cards go up in price and when they go down. However they are utterly puzzled at me for liking to see cards tank in price. See, I prefer cards to be dirt cheap, so people can afford them (either for play or just collecting). I originally thought my friends (who NEVER sell their cards) only monitored the price for when they're powerful or not (generally if a card becomes powerful, it becomes desirable and thus drive up demand and then the cost) but as it turns out they actually like it when they cost a ton of money. Now, again, they never sell their cards, which meant that the following came as a surprise for me; they're against the idea of reprints that would devalue their collection. When I asked why (not only would it make it more accessible, but these people constantly complain about not being able to obtain the cards in the first place) they told me that it would devalue their collection, making it meaningless. To them, the total market value of their collection is what's important. Not necessarily rarity, completeness, or even usability (one guy went frothing at the mouth with joy when he got two Force of Wills, despite hating the color blue).

This mentality, obviously, does not translate into 40k since our community rarely cares about the value of discontinued models (unless it's cheap). The most common one I see is that we value the time and effort we put in making our armies our own. With the recent Primaris line of Marines, a lot of people are fearing their Marine collection would be "invalidated" and become replaced with Primaris Marines and I was up in that too for a while until I asked myself "why?". For me, I'm just afraid that GW will discontinue the kits we have now, meaning I would have to rush to get the old marines that I like so that my battle companies would look uniform, and not have random marines being taller or shorter than the others (this happened with my Tomb Kings and Bretonnian armies, which now have a variety of weird proxies in them to "shore up" the difference). But other people seem to be so terrified of the idea that it's akin to GW coming to their homes and destroying the very models themselves just because the rules went away.

So, what's the value of your collection to you? What is the true reason that would make you terrified if it ever disappeared? What aspect of it fills you with pride?

Knowing that (with a handful of exceptions) each and every misplaced brush stroke, awkwardly glued gun, and poorly highlighted edge is mine
Plus all of the countless, countless years of memories associated with them.

I value the fluff of my armies. If I make up my own chapter/regiment/whatever I like to come up with a background story and army doctrines. My home brew imperial guard regiment, for example, comes from a world where they mine and refine the minerals/chemicals that are used in plasma weaponry. As a result they have an unusually high proportion of plasma weaponry in their arsenal so every special weapon is a plasma gun, every character has a plasma pistol, every sentinel has a plasma cannon, and every Russ is an executioner with plasma sponsons. Even if plasma weapons got massively nerfed I'd still stick to it.

If I have an army which is not home brew, such as my White Scars and World Eaters (I have played both of these since 3rd edition through good times and bad), I will make an army which is 100% faithful to the fluff. For example, my white scars have no dreadnoughts, no devastators, no sponson weapons on predators, no thunder fire cannons (too slow), loads of bikes and all foot soldiers in a transport.

I take pride in the fact that my armies are fluff faithful above all else. If an edition comes around which makes my army particularly powerful, bonus. If not, doesn't matter to me, I'll play it anyway. I also take pride in the fact that I paint all my stuff myself.

Most likely with current redo paint job of some of my IG, I'd say about 1/3 more than what they were. Now I bought my 10 man squad for $25+, so already on the cheap. If something happens to me, all of them are to be sold to help pay for my younger brothers college or whatever he needs.

My value for me is the time and money I've sunk into them, not their resale value. Their appearance is also valuable to me, as is their uniqueness. My Hellraiser themed Taloi (converted from Wraithlords) are the pride of my collection, despite being worth precisely jack.

In terms of resale value, I undoubtedly have several thousand bucks of models. I've already sold painted armies of mine as lots before and gotten a solid chunk more than retail. Some of my weirder converted harlequin stuff is probably worthless, but I know that, for instance, my Vostroyans could be sold for probably upwards of 2000 dollars with the paint job I've got on them and the number of OOP and high demand models.

Mecha: back when MTG first came out, I had a collection of cards that would have made me rich in the late 90s/early aughts, although your friends never sell their cards now; they may see them as investments for the future(and will likely see them lose all value before they can be sold, but that is something else entirely).

As far as the premis goes, it is also how I justify my purchases: I can pay $50usd and go see 2-3 movies getting 3-8 hours of entertainment; or I can buy a squad of models that I like, assemble and paint them, and then use them in 1-2 hour gameds for as long as I continue playing. I still have some of the first marines I ever bought back when 3rd came out; I kind of hate them sometimes as they are somewhat poorly assembled and have many layers of paint on them, but I still keep them and they still see the battlefield.

Our models are an investment of time along with the money, they are fiscally worthless to most anyone else other than new players. But their true value is in our love of them or the game.

Of my large gaming projects (40K being one of them) the real value is in the time spent to get the armies up and running. I won't game or play with unpainted stuff, nor will I use stuff painted by someone else.

If I lost one of my projects or had it destroyed I wouldn't re-do it most likely. Perhaps in 5-10 years, but the crushing weight of the hundreds or thousands of hours wasted would be too much.

 Kommissar Kel wrote:
Mecha: back when MTG first came out, I had a collection of cards that would have made me rich in the late 90s/early aughts, although your friends never sell their cards now; they may see them as investments for the future(and will likely see them lose all value before they can be sold, but that is something else entirely).

As far as the premis goes, it is also how I justify my purchases: I can pay $50usd and go see 2-3 movies getting 3-8 hours of entertainment; or I can buy a squad of models that I like, assemble and paint them, and then use them in 1-2 hour gameds for as long as I continue playing. I still have some of the first marines I ever bought back when 3rd came out; I kind of hate them sometimes as they are somewhat poorly assembled and have many layers of paint on them, but I still keep them and they still see the battlefield.

Our models are an investment of time along with the money, they are fiscally worthless to most anyone else other than new players. But their true value is in our love of them or the game.

Probably one of the more insightful answers I've gotten, but I must ask.

How the hell are you paying 50USD for 2-3 movies? I live in canada (the North American equivallent of NZ in terms of price gouging) and I only pay 5 bucks a movie!

Here in Candada movie prices are like 15 now but if you get the cheap tickets like 10.

You can get massive discounts on Tuesdays.

Or at least that's true where I live.

Never much cared for the value of my gear.
My expensive MtG cards are usually traded price irrelevant for stuff I actually plan on using, interestingly my collection is three loaded folders of White, Red and Black, mostly uncommons.
Anybody else notice that Blue, Red and Black in particular seem to revolve around a playset or two of stupidly expensive rares and uncommons while White and Green revolve around a spead of humble rares and mythics or is that just me?

The thing that I find amusing looking at people's collections is the "pro-painted" cluster and trying to bite your tongue instead of getting confirmation that they were in their right minds when they paid money for those jobs.

Eh depends on whether you're talking mono colored or multicolored. Not to mention some of the most ridiculously overpriced cards came out of Green of all things (Tarmy is still up there if I remember, and Scavenging Ooze was 40 on release, and stayed there until the reprint). Then there's also Stoneforge Mystic and the original version of Elspeth.

However Blacks and Blues do have proportionally more "ridiculously overpriced cards" if only because the line between "Hilariously OP" and "Hilariously Bad" is a really thin one, and even just 1 extra mana can tip something from one into the other.

I generally run mono-colour but sometimes a multi-colour mechanic grabs my attention and I gotta try it.
Good duel colour lands always cost a fortune.

So, what's the value of your collection to you?

In money? £££thousands to replace. In fun? years.....

What is the true reason that would make you terrified if it ever disappeared?

Terrified would be overstating it. If the house burned down, I'd be rather more than slightly upset at losing them, but not as upset as losing the (cash worthless) birthday cards my kids have made me and my wife's letters over the years. At the end of the day, they're plastic soldiers, and can be (mostly) replaced.

What aspect of it fills you with pride? A stupid hormagaunt/ork conversion. It's dumb, but it makes me smile. Also, giving my son a hobby and time he and I have now shared for 20 years. Blubs.

My conversions are my most valuable pieces. I love my take on the exocrine. Im proud of my kit bashed malanthrope. My Tyranid Prime gets compliments every time a new person sees it.

Well it took me a long long time to save up to even get into 40k. Once your in it's not too bad, but entering the hobby is a big investment.

If my collection was lost it's not so easily replaceable.

I would say it's a personal statement. I like the Tau and their lore a lot. I like gundam and mecha stuff, but I wanted to build and customise my own ect. The simple visual style appealed to me.

My collection itself has so much memories associated with it and triumphs. My current Magnum Opus is probably nearly worth more than a good chunk of my collection and I went a little overboard on it.

It's one thing to be a fan of other geeky stuff, but when your a big video game fan it can be hard for a lot of people to "understand" just how much games you've played since so few people really get into that hobby and as a PC gamer it's doubly so hard to give them an impression of the value of the hobby.

However people can see and pick up my models and visually see how much work and effort goes into it. I've had comments saying I could go professional painter at this point if I wanted to, but then I wouldn't enjoy it. I have to take long breaks between projects or risk burn out.

They're worth the time that went into them. The money isn't a big deal (even though it's very difficult to get a decent insurance payout on stuff like this) but I doubt that I would recreate my armies if they were lost. As such, in the event of a fire or something they'd be gone for ever. Replaced with others, no doubt, but those armies would be gone.

I think there is a certain mindset in magic players to consider the cards as an investment even though few really appreciate and many plummet in value quickly. They are only an investment for those that trade actively in them.

The "value" for me comes from the joy I got out of them, not from what I put into them.

Once I got sufficient joy from them, I experienced no loss from letting them go. Some was freely given away, most was sold for what I paid for it (and much of it was nth hand resold before I got it) and the new owners got "bargains".

Twenty four years now. How much would you pay for that? I got a lot of the models second hand or bought from old gw mail order when they would add extras if you talked them up and spent a bit. I left five hundred bux worth of pant behind when I left the States. I dunno. I might let it all go for three grand.