What Is This?

Everyone in the Magic: The Gathering community jokes about going into credit card debt for shiny cardboard. That's the joke this started as. It's turned into something simpler: track every dollar spent buying packs, and every dollar they actually sell for, in public — no matter how the money moves.

The experiment is simple: buy packs, rip them on camera, list what I pull, track what it sells for. Each set gets its own Chapter in the Tavern Ledgers, and the Lifetime Dashboard tracks the whole arc. The question is whether pack ripping can actually pay for itself.

Full disclosure: I already run a TCG store, The Tavern Games. I'm not starting from zero and I won't pretend otherwise. The label printer, shipping supplies, and store infrastructure were all in place before this idea existed. I'm not rebuilding any of it for this project — that would be stupid. But you deserve to know it's there. Every ongoing cost from this point forward is tracked and shown. Nothing is hidden.

No inflated pull values. No skipping the bad weeks. No pretending a $3 rare is worth $15 because TCGplayer says so. Pull values are shown for reference only, clearly marked — the real numbers are what's actually spent and actually sold, actual money in, actual money out, updated every week.

Fees, shipping costs, slow weeks, bad pulls — all of it is here. Maybe the math works. Probably it doesn't. We'll find out together.

Follow along on YouTube for the pack openings, the reactions, and the full weekly breakdown.