An old urban legend from Magic: The Gathering Reddit has officially resurfaced. Canadian YouTuber 8th Place Dave reckons he’s unearthed the 10,000-strong Séance collection of the infamous ‘Burn Guy’. Dave shares footage of this collection in a YouTube video from March 7 (watch below), claiming he spent $1,500 and a plane trip to get hold of the MTG cards.
The story of Burn Guy (also known as Séance Guy) dates back to 2015. A Redditor going by the name Jobs141910 began asking MTG players to destroy Séance cards, often by setting them on fire. In exchange, they offered bitcoin or actual, real cash.
Burn Guy even offered $38,000 worth of bitcoin to a player that would use a Séance-focused deck in the MTG Pro Tour. This offer was removed for legal reasons, but Burn Guy resurfaced in 2017 for one last assault, offering Reddit gold in exchange for pictures of torn-up Séance cards.
To this day, no one is sure what Burn Guy’s goal was. Some have speculated it was an experiment to artificially raise the price of Séance, which is currently worth $0.16 on TCGPlayer. Wargamer reached out to ask Burn Guy directly, receiving an enigmatic response. “I am sorry, but I cannot answer any questions as to my motivations”, Jobs141910 tells Wargamer. “I have been inactive but am still alive.”
Burn Guy’s endeavours became a beloved meme on MTG Reddit, but we thought we’d seen the last of them – until 2023. In January, Redditor BornFromLegend shared a post titled ‘I may have found the 2015 Burn Guy’. They’d discovered a Facebook seller in Alberta, Canada who was selling over 10,000 Séances for 2,500 Canadian dollars.
When asked if they were connected to the 10,000 copies of Séance bought by Dave, Burn Guy had this to say: “I still read /r/magicTCG, and that post is somewhat evidence that at least one person took to going deep on that card some time in the past. I will have to go over my old notes and restrategise to see what should come next to reinvigorate things.”
8th Place Dave also spotted the sales post, and it spurred him to action.“I contacted the person who was selling it, and they were in Edmonton, Alberta”, Dave says. “As luck would have it, I had a trip planned to go there anyway.”
He ended up paying $1,500 for the collection, but Dave says it was “worth the price”. “I watched this thing unfold as it was happening, so to me it was a piece of Magic history. To be able to own that, I thought, would be pretty cool.”
Dave points out the person he met in Edmonton likely wasn’t Burn Guy themself. “The person that I bought these from said he got them when a game store was liquidating its collection”, Dave says, claiming the seller “had no idea” about the Séance memes.
Dave adds he had to bring the cards home in “two separate checked bags, because putting them all in one would have been over the weight limit – that’s how many Séances there are”. He hasn’t counted the cards, but he estimates he now owns around 8,000-10,000 Séances. The haul includes foils, artist proofs, and cards signed by pro player Shaun McLaren.
Additionally, Dave won’t be keeping all the cards; he’s announced new Patreon tiers where people can buy a few copies of their own. He’s offering eight copies for $5 (or $8 international shipping), as well as a handful of $100-dollar pledges that earn 275 copies of the card.
There’s plenty of new cards on the way in the MTG 2023 release schedule. If you’re planning to destroy them, please consider recycling instead of burning. If you’re looking for inflammable cards, you might prefer to check out some MTG Arena codes and MTG Arena decks.