Six years later, I found myself hanging around a game designer and watching him create playtest cards out of foil rares. The rares were from a non-Magic card game that nonetheless had an active secondary market. My eyes were like saucers as he scribbled on gleaming card faces with a black Sharpie. "But that's a foil [insert valuable rare here]!" I said, incredulous, as if he was spray-painting an anarchy sign on a war memorial.
"You know they're all worthless, right?" he said.
He wasn't saying that cards are not worth owning, or games not worth playing. He was only trying to tell me that these cards cost fractions of a cent to print, and that I was working for a card company.