Star City Games1000 Assorted Magic: The Gathering Cards Gold Collection, Model Number: B00JJXEX48

I have bought bulk 1,000 mtg cards on eBay before with ok enough luck with usable stuff and cards from older sets that have odd interaction. Those sets I spent around $20-$23 each on, some with a lot of duplication, some with mostly junk. This time I decided to spend a little more and got the gold collection for $35.I’m honestly impressed, duplication was pretty light, got a bunch of legendary creatures and usable stuff, some staples were in my set of 1,000. Some of the rares were pretty good to for using. I felt like the person who packed this was leaving breadcrumbs of card interaction to build two new commander decks I’m onto making now: blue/white flyers and blue black mill. I got enough out of this deck to get inspired to build those two new decks, and got a great start on the 99. This set is great for beginners too, you can build some jank decks out of it outright or get started with usable cards for deck building. Card quality was fine, maybe two or three cards were heavily played. I honestly am going to get this set again down the road.

First Things First - This review is from the perspective of someone who started playing Magic: The Gathering during the pandemic with Arena and then bought a few pre-constructed decks to start playing the physical game. I wanted to make my own deck and start a collection, but wanted to keep my precons intact. So for all intents and purposes, these are my first MTG cards. (Probably not the best way to start but my LGS is sold out and this is a cheap way to get a lot of cards)Lands and Playing Right Away- Do NOT buy if you want to start playing with these right away. My box only came with 66 land cards including basic, dual-color, and colorless. This seems like a good chunk, but divided across the 5 colors there's 13 cards of each mana type, give or take a few (they were spread out pretty evenly, which is nice). This is not enough to form a deck and start playing with. If the colors do happen to be enough to play with, there's no guarantee it'll be in the color you want to play. However, I don't think this is a negative as anyone who already has land cards (or even myself if I were willing to separate my other decks) wouldn't need many more and could be disappointed if too many cards were lands. So all in all it's a fair amount.Amount of Cards - As others have mentioned, it is not strictly 1,000 cards. They just stuff the box full and I ended up with 1,091 cards all in great condition (considering their age) to near mint.Age of Cards and Variety - The pulls come from all sets with the earliest I got being from the first expansion, Arabian Nights from 1993, and the most recent being Commander Legends from November of 2020. A majority of the cards were from sets from 2000-2015 (among many many others. I got a little over 100 different sets, although many only had 1-8 cards with 3-5 being average). Along with the great variety of sets there's also a good mix of card types. I did not catalogue any so I can't give numbers, but I did feel like there was a good mix between creatures, instants, artifacts, etc. I don't think I got any tokens though. Similarly to how the lack of lands impacted the ability to play out the box, the variety is great for collecting, but probably not the best for trying to make a cohesive deck.Rarity of Cards - I did not count the commons and uncommons, but I did receive 31 rares and 22 foils. I think one of the foils was a rare and the rest were mostly common with a handful of uncommon.Duplicate Cards - This is where my being a new player comes into play a little more. Because I am looking to make a new deck and want to collect anything I can get my hands on, I personally don't view copies as a bad thing as they can be used over several decks or stacked in one to increase your chance of getting it. That being said I do understand wanting unique cards. So for this section I only counted copies that were greater than 4 since that's the amount of a single card allowed in a deck. Here's what I got by number of copies of a single card: 5, 8, 5, 5, 10, 8, and 6. Overall of 1,091 cards, there were only 7 card names I got more than four times and 19 cards that are "worthless" as I already have four other copies from the box. Overall not too bad.Different Languages - I only got 1 card that was in Japanese, which I personally think is kind of cool. Especially now that Strixhaven boosters come with a 50% chance of getting an alt art Japanese card it's kind of cool to get one from an older set.TL;DR - Good variety spanning most sets, low land count for new players but arguably high count for those that already have lands, relatively few copies, 1 from a different language, and small amount of rares and foils (but come one what did you expect for a $20 box of random cards?)

Full breakdown of the cards I got is listed below-So I have purchased a few lots from different sellers, and this one is by far the best lot that I have ever purchased. I could tell right away by the reviews that this would be worth my money, but after sorting out the cards I realized this is a very worthwhile purchase for variety.The box came with exactly what it described and even a little more! Whether this was a mistake or not, I'm not sure-- but the box I received came with 36 rares in all. 7 foil and 29 non foils (no mythics). I also received over 1200 cards, which is more than the compensation cards they say that come with it. In all, I only saw a few duplicates, only two, three, four or five (rare) of a few cards. All of the cards were in amazing condition- the only sign of age I could see was slight discoloration of the older cards when looking at the edges (save one card with a bent edge). As for lands, the box came with a sealed package of 80 lands- 16 of each. (which is very useful for me, as I don't have enough lands to create many decks).Ratio of cards: The number of older cards to new was pretty good as I saw a wide range of sets. As I said before, I saw barely any duplicates so there was a ton of different cards in the box. I can use a lot of them in my current decks as many of the cards I received were actually good, useful cards. I found only 6 foreign cards in the entire box, so this did not take away from the number at all. See breakdown of cards below for better info-Now as for the shipping- Amazon said it would get to my house by January 3d- January 6th. I received it December 29th, (almost 5 days early!) so I basically got 2 day shipping without choosing it. This is very impressive to me as The shipping was all the way across the US where I've seen similar packages come in after a full week or so.Recommendation: I would recommend this lot to anyone trying to add to basically any sets of cards they have. This lot would definitely work for new players as well, considering it contains enough land to make 2 or 3 bi-colored decks. (monocolored decks would not work with 16 of each color though).Exact breakdown of card types:Total number of cards: 1205 (yeah, this is more compensation than expected)Rare: 36 (7 foil) Uncommon: 160 Common: 1009Foreign/damaged: 5 , 1Red- Total: 151 Rare: 7 Uncommon: 16 Common: 128Creatures: 90 Other spells: 61Blue- Total: 207 Rare: 9 Uncommon: 28 Common: 176Creatures: 113 Other spells: 94Black- Total: 183 Rare: 4 Uncommon: 29 Common: 150Creatures: 99 Other spells: 70Green- Total: 173 Rare: 5 Uncommon: 22 Common: 146Creatures: 99 Other spells: 74White- Total: 173 Rare: 6 Uncommon: 23 Common: 135Creatures: 88 Other spells: 76Multicolored- Total: 56 Rare: 4 Uncommon: 20 Common: 32Creatures: 37 Other spells: 19Artifact spells- Total: 64 Rare: 1 Uncommon: 28 Common: 35Nonbasic lands: 11Note: I do not play in tournaments and I do not know quite what qualifies cards for being used, but they're all in good enough condition for sure.

Good variety of older sets, good amount of rares. Nothing valuable but that's to be expected. Good starter collection to add to some commander precons