Gold Border "Championship" Card Legality
Asked by DreamGoddessLindsey 10 years ago
I'm having a lot of trouble trying to figure this out. I recently got a gold-bordered copy of Duress , and have wanted to play it in my Orzhov deck. There is a second copy of Duress with the normal black border in the deck, and I have probably 20 copies of the card since it's a Common.
The thing is, I've been told the card isn't legal to play as it's "not a real card". This confuses me utterly. The rules text is identical, the spell name is identical, everything about the card is exactly the same except that it has a gold border instead of a black border. The back of the card is a moot point as I use the opaque Dragonshield sleeves, making the back impossible to see. The owner of my LGS said they're not legal because "if they were, the value of the actual cards would tank". This strikes me as utterly absurd, as Duress is a 10 cent card and can't possibly be worth any less. It was always my understanding that any card is legal as long as a) the card itself is legal in the format (Standard in this case) and b) is not marked in a way that can reveal the card as different from others.
I switched to it merely for aesthetic reasons because I think the gold border is pretty. Since the card isn't marked and is identical to a card I have many copies of (including others in the same deck), why wouldn't it be legal? I'd understand if there were no sleeves (obviously) since the back is different, but as it stands, this makes absolutely ZERO sense to my brain, which is ruled by pure logic.
Could someone explain this to me in detail? What is the rule? Why is the rule what it is? If it's not legal, why were they printed at all?
Epochalyptik says... Accepted answer #2
The value of the cards has nothing to do with why they aren't legal.
Gold-bordered cards are visually distinct from black- or white-bordered cards. They don't have the traditional Magic card back, so they aren't legal for play. You can identify a gold-bordered card while it is face-down.
This rule applies even if you have sleeves. There are no special exemptions for players who have sleeves.
December 9, 2013 6:54 p.m.
DreamGoddessLindsey says... #3
Sadly, none of that makes any sense to me.
I guarantee that no one could identify the gold bordered card while in my Dragonshield sleeves. They're 100% opaque.
If they aren't legal for play, why print them to begin with? Makes no sense to me. Actually, it kinda makes me mad because there's no sense or logic involved. All I wanted was a card that was prettier than usual when the card was face up. It's not like cheating is even remotely possible.
That's stupid as hell. I'm sure glad they don't print these anymore. Greedy cash grab is what I think in that case.
December 9, 2013 7:01 p.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #4
If you want the actual rule, this is the relevant section from the Magic Tournament Rules:
Players may use any Authorized Game Cards from Magic: The Gathering expansions, core sets, special sets, supplements, and promotional printings. Authorized Game Cards are cards that, unaltered, meet the following conditions:
- The card is genuine and published by Wizards of the Coast
- The card has a standard Magic back or is a double-faced card
- The card does not have squared corners
- The card has black or white borders
- The card is not a token card
- The card is not damaged or modified in a way that might make it marked
- The card is otherwise legal for the tournament as defined by the format
- The card is a proxy issued by the judge of a tournament (see section 3.4 for rules about proxies)
December 9, 2013 7:06 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #5
It's a collectible product. This is, after all, a collectible card game. And while Magic is a game, not every product is meant to be played in every sense. Take, for example, planechase sets or Un-sets. I don't think it's right to call every tertiary product a greedy cash grab. It seems more like you're just bitter about not being able to play a gold-bordered copy of a 10-cent card.
If you want something special, think about getting some altered-art cards. They're much better than gold-bordered stuff. And you can always use the gold cards in a cube. Most of the Wasteland s and Force of Will s I've seen in cubes are gold-bordered.
December 9, 2013 7:07 p.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #6
They were printed as collectible items. They weren't popular enough to continue past those few years they appeared. Printing them wasn't an inherently evil Capitalist cash-grab, it was just an experiment to see what kinds of special products the public was interested in. Sometimes they work out really well, like the Commander sets or the From The Vault series, and sometimes they get killed for lack of interest, like the World Championship Decks or the Premium Deck series.
December 9, 2013 7:09 p.m.
I still have the Mark LePine Finalist deck kicking around.
I'll tell you what made the World Champ decks worth the money: They all came with 15 gold-bordered cards with blank frames and rules text boxes. So I can get things like this done:
December 9, 2013 7:20 p.m.
When you really think about it, this rule makes sense, but it's still pretty obnoxious. They banned/ made illigal the gold bordered cards because if they weren't banned then people could use them for tournaments, which would drive up the price of them considerably, and they'd be almost just as expensive as the original. Wizards banned the reprints so that the price of the reprints wouldn't go up so high that it would make them just as hard to acquire as the original.
October 1, 2014 4:27 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #9
@55666: Check the post dates before you comment. This thread is almost a year old.
Furthermore, the very core of your argument is factually wrong.
First, WOTC doesn't sell any physical product directly to players. They have no direct stake in the secondary market, which is to say they have no direct stake in preserving or changing the market price of singles.
Secondly, gold-bordered "cards" aren't even actual gaming cards. They don't have a Magic card back.
Thirdly, gold-bordered cards are printed in much smaller runs than their "real" counterparts. If anything, they're harder to acquire because there are fewer of them. The reason they're cheap is because their only value is in their collectible qualities (and the odd cube or EDH deck).
October 1, 2014 6:25 p.m.
ExpectDragons says... #10
Perfectly fine for casual though and a nice alternative for proxying cards you'll take time to trade/buy your way into since it's a legit Wizards product. I plan on picking up a couple gold bordered cards for my EDH decks until my collection is in a better place for me to justify the value the tournament legal versions.
April 9, 2015 2:09 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #11
@Phoenix-2063: Check the post dates before you comment. This question was resolved in 2013, and you're the second person to necro it.
April 9, 2015 3:43 p.m.
Gitaxias86 says... #14
It's a dumb rule, and I wouldn't follow it in a casual setting under any circumstance. It sucks that Wizards dropped the ball and allowed this to be the rule in a tournament setting.
April 12, 2015 11:21 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #15
I'm not really sure what ball you think was dropped. These "cards" aren't even cards. They don't have a Magic card back.
April 12, 2015 11:48 p.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #16
CE cards were never intended to be tournament-legal cards, only collectible items. The rule from the MTR simply documents this intent in an official way.
April 13, 2015 9:42 a.m.
Epochalyptik says... #18
Why yes. Come to think of it, I don't know why I don't play more Charizards, too.
April 13, 2015 12:10 p.m.
Kerplunk47 says... #19
this thread is so hilarious, I had to bookmark it
February 24, 2016 2:12 p.m.
But the original cards are so expensive? Why can't they print foil gold bordered cards too? They could make so much money just like the do off of singles
But seriously though, are these EDH legal at all or is that rule as firm set as it seemes?
March 18, 2017 3:44 a.m.
Epochalyptik says... #21
They're not cards, so they're not legal. Some playgroups make exceptions.
April 29, 2017 8:55 a.m.
ExpectDragons says... #22
Ultimate guard have released 'bordifiles' precise fits for double sleeving which have a black border around the sleeve. Quite nice if you want to keep your deck uniform with black border including gold border WPN cards.
I'll just leave that bit of knowledge here for those in Epochalyptik's play group lol :)
April 29, 2017 4:05 p.m.
The funniest thing is that most tournaments accept cards with a signature and fully painted cards without a visible border, but golden border cards are still illegal. In fact, Wizard can fix it! They, until now, have fixed many rules to cover their design mistakes, but none of the rules is for the championship cards published by themselves.
July 27, 2022 7:45 p.m.
dohctorssj says... #24
Epochalyptik, Can you cry a little more that someone revived the thread? You saying, "they're not cards so they're not legal" is dumb. Is the gold-bordered Duress a card? Duh. Is it legal? No.
September 5, 2022 11:48 a.m.
dohctorssj This thread has been dead for over five years, aside from one post from two months ago.
September 5, 2022 12:25 p.m.
yeaGO, Caerwyn, or a passing mod, could we please get this thread closed, or at least reviewed? The question's been answered for years, and it's attracting unhelpful comments.
September 5, 2022 6:06 p.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #29
Here's a link to the current version of the relevant section of the Annotated Magic Tournament Rules: MTR 3.3 Authorized Cards. The regular text is the text of the actual MTR document and the boxes with italicized text are annotations from a team of judges providing commentary and clarification.
The championship cards don't meet the requirement that the unaltered card "has a standard Magic back or is a double-faced card, or is a card that is part of a meld pair."
Thread closed. If there are any follow-up questions, please post a new question topic. Old "Rules Q&A" threads are complicated to deal with sometimes because it's possible some rules may have changed since the original question was asked, which can cause conversations spread out over a long period of time to be even more confusing.
Devonin says... #1
It is not legal in any format.
The gold bordered cards come from the World Championship Decks from the late 1990s. The printed the top 8 decks from Worlds and sold them with the gold border and the player's signature imprinted on it.
They are not legal in any format because many of the cards printed in them are very rare and valuable old cards. The reason your 10 cent Duress is illegal isn't that it will lower the value of duress. it's that those decks often ran 4x Wasteland and other very valuable cards, and either all of them are legal for play or none are, and none was by far the obvious choice for decks containing cards that are well over 50 dollars each now.
Whether your friends playing casually care if you use the gold bordered cards or not is fine, but you won't be allowed to play in any sanctioned event with cards that don't have a black or white border.
December 9, 2013 6:44 p.m.