Hi, I'm Chris Wilson. As many of you know, aside  from game development, I've spent the better  

part of the last 24 years working on my Magic the  Gathering card collection. And during that time,  

I've tracked down a lot of quite difficult to find  cards. But there's one in particular I want to  

talk about today. I want to tell you a story about  a card that took me 16 years to find. The card I'm  

talking about tracking down isn't something crazy  and expensive like an original Black Lotus or a  

Richard Garfield card. Instead, it's a land card  that honestly most people laugh at. It's a foreign  

variant of this card, Arena, which in English is  just worth a few dollars. Now, normally for super  

rare cards, people know exactly where they are.  If there's 10 copies of a test print in the world,  

generally people know who has them, and it's big  news when they change hands. And there are one out  

of one cards like The One Ring and everyone knows  who has that. And even if the owner isn't willing  

to part with it, people at least understand how  difficult it would be to collect it. But with a  

card like the one I'm talking about today, it's  difficult because people just don't know how many  

there are out there. And that's mainly because  no one cares about the card. And as a collector,  

that makes it very difficult for me. The context  for me looking for this card is that my favorite  

collection to work on is my nonbasic land  collection. Basically, I'm trying to collect one  

of every nonbasic land card printed between 1993  when the game came out and late 2021. Now, this  

sounds straightforward, but Wizards have printed  Magic in 11 different languages. There's foil and  

non-foil versions of cards and other variants.  That's weird promotional copies and it's been  

kind of a lifelong effort to try to collect all  of them. There's over 30,000 unique cards in this  

collection and I'm getting pretty close. Apart  from quite a big pile of Portuguese cards that I'm  

looking for, I have pretty much everything. So,  I'm trying to track down the remaining stragglers.  

To help you understand the context of this card,  let's have a look at some of Magic's oldest lands.  

So, these cards, while expensive, are pretty easy  to track down. If you want to get an alpha or beta  

card, you just message someone online and they'll  sell it to you within a day or so. So in addition  

to Alpha and Beta, we've got Collector's Edition,  International Collector's Edition, Unlimited,  

Arabian Knights, one of my favorite sets,  Antiquities with all the different Urza Land. We  

have the foreign black border Revised dual lands,  really good for EDH. Then we have white border,  

English and foreign dual lands, the really  vibrant Summer ones, Legends and of course  

The Dark. So then chronologically we come  to the card we're talking about, Arena. Now  

this is a card that wasn't present in booster  packs. As you can see by this pen symbol here,  

it was a book redemption card. Basically you buy  a book called Arena back in 1994 and read it. It's  

a story about the game. And you can then fill  in a form in the back of the book, send it in  

to the publisher, Harper Prism, and they post  you a copy of the card in the mail. Basically,  

a tie-in in exchange for a promotional book that's  helping grow the popularity of the game. Now,  

this wasn't a very good card and isn't a very good  card. Back in the day, people just didn't play  

with it. I mean, it's a land that doesn't generate  mana. There are much better lands available to  

put in your decks. This one has an overcosted  ability that wasn't super relevant, and it was  

kind of a joke. Like a few people would collect it  because it was an interesting thing to show off,  

but it was never worth any money. I can't  emphasize enough how unimportant this card is. No  

one really cares about it. Few people remember it.  Thankfully, you can pick it up cheap. Even today,  

more than 31 years after it was printed, it's just  five bucks. Getting this card is not a problem.  

There are hundreds of them online available for  purchase today. Okay, so what's the issue? Well,  

there are foreign versions and my land collection  involves collecting all printings of the card. So,  

how were the foreign versions distributed? Well,  exactly the same way. There are foreign versions  

of the books, and if you fill out the form, you  get the card. I eventually tracked down a French  

version of Arena, which, as you can see, is quite  a lot lighter than the English version. I managed  

to find a Spanish copy, which has a white border,  unlike the black borders of the other ones. And  

on a cruise with my family where they went to do  tourist stuff, and I went to the local card store,  

I found a Portuguese copy. At this stage, I had  everything apart from Italian. For many years,  

the Italian Arena sat there as a hole in my  collection. I'd heard that it existed. I just  

didn't have any proof. It was hard to find people  who cared or really acknowledged the card was a  

thing. And when I did talk to collectors about it,  they either told me that it did exist, they had  

just never seen it before, or that it didn't exist  and it was a mistake to look for it. There was  

specifically a rumor going around that the Harper  Prism Arena books were never released in Italian,  

which means maybe the card was printed but never  actually distributed to anyone. In that case,  

it's kind of a gray area. Do I collect it or do  I not collect it? The reason this is relevant  

is that my long-term plan for the land collection  was to store it in a series of binders like this.  

Once I had most of the lands, I was planning  on asserting them sequentially in the binder,  

leaving a hole for every card that I'm missing.  Now, if I don't know whether the Arena actually  

exists or not, it raises a question as to whether  I leave a hole there. And if I make a mistake,  

I have to potentially move 30,000 cards  by one slot. And that would take hours,  

dozens of hours. For 5 seconds per card, that's  like 40 plus hours of just moving them from one  

section in the binder to another. More time  went by and I kept asking people about the  

card. Eventually, someone pointed me to a site  called Magic Librarities. It had a whole bunch  

of historic information about the game and it  included a section on the Harper Prison promo  

cards. It had information about the books and the  cards that were redeemable, but more importantly,  

it had a section about Italian cards. And this  specifically showed me a copy of Arena in Italian.  

Now, this is before Wizards of the Coast did  digital mock-ups of their cards. So, if there's  

a photo of it online, then at least one copy of  it exists, and I must track that copy down. I was  

in a difficult situation, though, because a lot of  people knew I was looking for the card. After all,  

I'd asked pretty much every collector I could talk  to about it. And people also knew it was for the  

land collection, which I'd spent a lot of time and  resources on so far, and that this was something  

very important to me. And so, we have a card here  that no one cares about. No one's going to play it  

in a deck. No one else is trying to collect. But  because of the fact that I'm looking at it for  

this really important collection, people could  pretty much demand any price they wanted, and I'd  

pretty much just have to pay that or live with a  hole in my collection forever. After scouring the  

American Magic card sites for years, I realized it  was time to take the search to Europe. After all,  

Italy is in Europe, and the cards probably ended  up in Italy because they're Italian. The largest  

European Magic card site is Cardmarket. It's a  bit like TCG Player, a marketplace where many  

different sellers can list cards, but of course,  it caters for English and foreign languages. So I  

had a look and sure enough there were no Italian  arenas as I expected. Plenty of other foreign  

copies though. They do let you set a trigger  though. So when an arena is listed in Italian,  

it sends you an email. So I set my trigger and  I waited. A few months went by and then finally  

I got an email. Someone listed an Italian arena.  So I rushed to find someone in Europe who could  

receive the card for me. I did all of the setup  work. I bought the card and waited a few anxious  

weeks for it to arrive at their house. They  sent me a photo of it and it was in Spanish,  

not Italian. This process then repeated a couple  of times. My friend in Europe was accumulating a  

small pile of Arenas in every language other  than Italian. I guess it turns out that some  

European sellers were being a bit careless with  what languages they listed cards in. Eventually,  

I managed to get the contact details of the person  who took the photo that was on Librarities. He  

indicated that the cards are out there. Italian  Arenas do exist. They're just incredibly rare  

and are in the hands of forever collectors. He  promised to help me find one. Over the course of a  

year, he managed to find a collector who did have  a copy of Italian Arena, and they sent me this  

photo of it. This is the first living proof of the  card actually existing, aside from the photo that  

was on Librarities. Eventually, a deal was struck,  for a king's ransom, of course, and I received the  

card in the mail. Finally, an Italian Arena. After  16 years of looking for it, that part of the land  

collection was complete. The feeling was a mixture  of joy and relief. I didn't have to look for this  

card anymore. I excitedly told my friends, and  honestly no one really cared. They knew I was  

looking for it, but yeah, you know, Chris tracked  it down. That's going to happen eventually. I was  

happy though and it really really made my year.  I honestly treasure this card a lot more than a  

lot of the other ones in my collection because  there's such a cool story attached to it. But  

the story doesn't end there. A few months later,  another Italian arena triggered on Cardmarket. It  

was listed for a fraction of the price of what I  paid for this one, but still pretty high by Arena  

standards. I bought it anyway. I wasn't expecting  it to be Italian. None of the other ones were. It  

arrived at my European friend's home and he sent  me a photo of it. And it was also Italian. So now  

I have two and I love them. And this is honestly  why collecting is fun. I have arbitrarily decided  

this card is important to me, that this card  is expensive and hard to find. And the rest of  

the world may not agree on its importance, but  they certainly can't produce copies on demand.  

I didn't go into this thinking that out of the  half a million cards that I have, two of my  

favorite ones would be random Italian copies of  some bad land that had to be redeemed from some  

book promo in Europe in the mid 90s. But here  we are. The story behind them is the important  

part to me. So, you may be wondering now that I've  ticked off Arena, what is the card that today I am  

missing that's the oldest? And the answer there is  a Spanish copy of Flood Plain from Mirage. As you  

can see here, I've got Italian, English, French,  German, Portuguese, and Japanese, and no Spanish  

copy. Is there an equally crazy story involving  Flood Plains? Well, I haven't been able to track  

one down. I mean, there's certainly no copies on  Cardmarket, and no one's ever seen one before from  

what I can tell. So, I started buying copies of  the Spanish version of the Mirage set. And if we  

have a look at the lands here, this particular set  has all the lands in Spanish, but the flood plane  

is in English. This collector was unable to find  a Spanish one when they completed their entire set  

of Mirage. So I bought another another Mirage set.  And this one here is just missing the Flood Plain.  

And so I'm led to believe that it just doesn't  exist. I was speaking to someone from Wizards of  

the Coast about this issue and they remembered  that in Japanese they actually forgot to print  

Flood Plain entirely, but yet I have a Japanese  copy of it. So I asked them, "How do I have this  

card that you didn't print?" And could the same  thing have happened for Spanish? And they said,  

"Yeah, I mean in Japan we had to do a redemption  where we printed some extra copies of a missing  

card and if you send in some other ones, we'll  send you out a Flood Plain to fix the problem."  

I asked them, "Did the same thing happen for  Spanish? Did you forget it there?" And they  

honestly didn't remember. They certainly didn't  run a redemption program for Spanish. Maybe this  

is a, you know, local jurisdiction or law thing.  So, my theory at the moment is that Flood Plain  

was just not printed in Spanish Mirage and no one  has any information about this. Please prove me  

wrong if you can. I'd love to know whether it  exists or not. At the moment, I can't stick the  

30,000 land cards in a binder until I know whether  to leave a space for it, just like with Arena,  

but in this case, I have run out of information.  After Flood Plain, it gets a lot more simple. For  

example, this is Dwarven Hold and I'm missing a  Korean copy. That's just because I haven't asked  

enough Korean people whether they have that card.  This is a card that I believe has been printed and  

it's just a matter of tracking it down. And there  are small holes like that throughout the rest of  

the collection. I have most of the cards. I'm just  missing a few in various languages. To be honest,  

mostly Portuguese ones. So, if you know anyone  in Brazil who's good at tracking cards down,  

please let me know. Thank you very much  for coming on this journey with me. It  

was an intense 16 years trying to track that card  down and I'm really happy that I did in the end.  

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