MTG's Rare Rings Of Power Are Being Tracked By This Obsessed Fan

Magic: The Gathering is already full of very enthusiastic and, if we're honest, a bit obsessive fans. With the release of the Lord of the Rings set, two different fandoms collided in what may be the biggest card game collab of all time.

Besides the 001/001 One Ring, which has already been found with only less than three weeks since the release, many other Ring cards were printed, with foil versions and all the other works, and though they are in a significantly larger number than the rare One Ring, one dedicated fan has taken on the task of tracking down every single declared copy online.

User Visual-Whole-8187 has posted on Reddit what their task is and how they are doing so far, alongside some explanations for the more curious of us who are wondering just what could be the reason for doing this.

In the post, the user explains that they're attempting to track down all the foil MTG Rings of Power, and documenting the whole thing on a spreadsheet. So far, they've managed to track down 9% of the Elven Rings, and 7.2% of the Dwarven Rings.

As the Rings of Power are Sol Rings in Magic: The Gathering, each different foil-version and thematic version has a different number of printed cards. These cards all do the same thing, but they are illustrated differently and have received different treatment.

There are 3,000 non-foil elven rings, and 300 foils versions. Dwarven rings were printed as non-foils 7,000 times, and 700 times as foils. To complete, there's also 9,000 non-foil human rings, and 900 foils of those.

The user state on Reddit that they've limited themselves to the Rings of Power, besides the elven and dwarven rings, as "900 is just a daunting number of cards to track". They've only been looking at eBay and TCGPlayer listings, though, so their findings might not be accurate.

In all, these reports are just as accurate as the next one, as many cards reported as found haven't made their way into these databases, fan-made or otherwise. There's also the issue of cards that are pulled privately and never reported or logged anywhere, which are then essentially lost.

Visual-Whole-8187 states their numbers can only be considered a "minimum value", as only the starting point of the actual cards found in the wild.

The eccentricities of The Lord of the Rings - Tales of Middle-Earth set have apparently just begun, even though the Ring was just found. Maybe somewhere, a pair of friends has just gone on a fishing trip to celebrate a birthday...