There has always been an element of risk to trading cards. You buy a booster pack without knowing what's in it, and you might get cards that are great, cards that are rubbish, or cards that you already have. My first experience with this whole phenomenon wasn't with trading cards at all, but with football stickers, where everything could be split into two categories: 'got' and 'need'. In the modern world, things are not so pure and simple. There is a complex economy to trading cards these days, where value is arbitrary and through the ceiling. Nowhere is this more apparent than Magic the Gathering's The One Ring card in the new The Lord of the Rings expansion, as xQc's pursuit of it reveals.
xQc is a self-confessed gambling addict who has raised his profile in part through online gambling streams. In these streams, he encouraged his - often underage - viewers to gamble with him, using a code that meant the gambling site in question would share some of his own viewers' losses with him. Of course, since xQc was gambling huge sums himself, he often lost whatever he earned. These days, he's being paid $100 million to stream on Kick, a Twitch rival set up by online casino Stake.com to get around Twitch's anti-gambling laws brought in because of people like xQc in the first place.
Initially, xQc earned his bumper paycheque by goofing off watching Breaking Bad, but his first real headline grabbing act came via Magic the Gathering. xQc bought $9,000 worth of MtG cards, looking for one card in particular: The One Ring. While regular versions of this card are distributed throughout the packs, one very special version of the card is unique, and has a pull rate of 0.00003 percent. Mechanically, it is identical to other versions of the card. Literally, all the cards are worth the cardboard they're printed on. But in the mythos of the game, tied into the thematic links to LOTR itself, this card is now worth $2 million, because that's what someone is willing to pay for it.
This is another form of gambling for xQc. He bought a $9k lottery ticket hoping to win $2 million. He lost. The card is still out there, so he may well try again (he might not have won money, but he did get lots of attention, so it's a mixed bag of a result really). But this is bigger than xQc. Having just signed an eight-figure deal, we know that $9k is not a lot of money to someone like xQc. Even the $2 million prize money is not that much - he may well have kept the card and considered that enough of a victory in itself. However, others do not have that luxury.
Putting a $2 million golden ticket inside packs is a dangerous game designed to prey on desperate buyers is an underhanded move. Making just one of said card, while a clever nod to Tolkien's work, is reckless and only increases the fervour around it. Of course, when you're the one selling, that's exactly what you want. Card games are no longer games, and it's mostly the interlopers who ruin it for everyone.
I have no idea if xQc is interested in Magic the Gathering. Of all the things he's ever been in the headlines for, card games are not one of them, so it feels like he is invading the community in order to profit off this one rare item is not only an obvious episode in his gambling addiction, it's also a sign of things to come. It's probably going to be tougher to get your hands on Lord of the Rings cards if you're just interested in playing the game, because scalpers and gamblers will be getting there first. They're not interested in any of the cards at all, only the profit. Wizards of the Coast couldn't have created a more on the nose metaphor for itself if it tried.
Gambling issues aside, xQc did nothing wrong. He spent his own money on freely available cards, chasing a heavily advertised card that a third party (not even Wizards itself) is offering $2 million for. This story isn't about him. He's just the latest example in how an enjoyable hobby has gone from a game where there are cards you have and cards you don't into a collector's market where each item has an inherent and made up value that reduces cards down to receipts where the only game is hoping the contents inside the pack add up to more of the pack itself. Fun is never on the cards.