Magic's most-valuable card hits an absurd $3 million after 'private sale', some call shenanigans, no one knows what's real, but what's true is it was bought with bitcoin

In January 2021, Magic: The Gathering had one of those moments that went mainstream. The sale of a single Black Lotus card, an extreme rarity from the game's first-ever set of cards, reached a final amount of $511,100 in an eBay auction. Previous examples of the Alpha Black Lotus (the first series of MTG cards is called the Alpha series) had gone for as much as $250K, but this more than doubled the record and the general reaction was of astonishment. Not that Magic: The Gathering cards can be valuable, that's long-established, but that a single card could ever be worth half-a-million dollars plus change.

That particular trade was given legitimacy by the organiser, trading card investment firm and exchange PWCC, which regularly handles sales across various CCGs for high-value cards. But now an Alpha Black Lotus has apparently been sold, per the Certified Guaranty Company (CGC), for 3 million dollars. This sixfold jump in value, nevermind the headline figure, has the community in a mix of shock, disbelief, and wondering just what the heck is up.

The news initially came from an Instagram post by CGC, which is a company in Florida that specialises in grading cards. Grading is a key part of any collection or sale, in which an independent expert assesses the condition of a given item and assigns it a description-slash-value that reflects this: in the case of CGC, the numerical scale tops out at 10. Here's the company's statement:

«An Alpha Black Lotus, graded by CGC Cards, just fetched a jaw-dropping $3 MILLION, making it the highest-priced Magic: The Gathering card ever sold! Its sky-high price demonstrates the high value collectors place on CGC Cards' Pristine 10 grade.»

The «Pristine 10 grade» is as good as you get but, even then, the $3 million price tag is remarkable. The seller was Adam Cai of Pristine Collectibles, and CGC notes it broke various records for cards it has previously certified, including «a 1952 Topps #311 Mickey Mantle Type 1 graded CGC 8 that