It’s surprising what you can be okay with at one o’clock in the afternoon and be haunted by at one o’clock in the morning.

But come! Let us not speak of serious things I swore to not discuss here until they were firmly dealt with. Let us instead talk of the amount of money sunk into this monstrosity:

Baneslayer, in the upper right corner, is worth a median $50 on her own. There are four of her in the deck. Luminarch, my own personal creation I was playing before this, used her and Elspeth with Day of Judgements to make peasants tremble. This tosses in pretty much every other card in standard worth anything.

I’m playing a very different game than when I was 13, that’s for sure. If we work out the median value of the deck as of the exact instant of this writing, counting only cards worth over $1 as a single, we come up with:

• Baneslayer Angel (4): $200
• Emeria Angel (4): $20
• Knight of the Reliquary (4): $36
• Noble Hierarch (4): $56
• Ajani Goldmane (1): $10
• Elspeth, Knight-Errant (3): $99
• Maelstrom Pulse (3): $63
• Martial Coup (3): $15
• Gargoyle Castle (1): $2
• Path to Exile (4): $24
• Marsh Flats (3): $42
• Sunpetal Grove (4): $36
• Verdant Catacombs (4): $68
• Day of Judgment (2): $26
• Luminarch Ascension (3): $12
• Total: $709

Now, thankfully, that’s not the amount I’ve paid to assemble this, as I’ve been very lucky (or skilled, if you want to give me some credit) lately about getting things before they exploded in value, as well as yanking a few things from packs and trading well. I also sold all my Lotus Cobras while they were $30 each because I hate that card and I knew it’d drop like a stone. If you’re extremely foolish and accept those prices as what you’d get for liquidizing your collection, and you add in my winnings from tournaments, I’m actually pretty close to dead even in money spent on Magic vs money gained. A good chunk of that is squarely on Ms. Walletslayer’s back.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what the 12 year old who was so thrilled to have four Serra Angels would think if he knew that he’d be sleeving up a deck perilously close to being worth four digits a decade and a half later.

And now I’m just begging to be mugged. I need to get a rider on my insurance…