Magic players love saving money. Magic players also love amassing a collection and filling their collection with beautiful foils and unique textless art cards. It seems an act of an injust and cruel god to marry two such desires, as they could be said to be mutually exclusive. Cruel though the fates may be, there exists a way to reconcile this dichotomy. It's name? Magic Player Rewards!

Now, melodrama aside, this is probably old news to most Magic players. For the uninitiated, Magic Player Rewards is a program run by WotC that...get this: rewards its players for playing Magic! They do this in the form of mailings a few times a year which are stuffed with delicious and expensive promotional cards. It's completely free to sign up, and anyone in good standing with the DCI is welcome.

Here's how it works: Every time you play in a sanctioned DCI event, you accrue a point. When they send out the mailings, you'll get a textless promo common or uncommon for every 5 points you have. You'll also get a FOIL textless rare for every 20 points you have. Any un-used points carry over to the next mailing. If you have 27 points when they send the mailings out, you'll get 5 Textless Promos and 1 Textless Foil Rare, leaving you with 2 points towards your next non-foil and 7 points towards your next foil. Note that points aren't "spent" or "used", they're more like mile markers.

Let's say you play in a weekly FNM, and your store hosts a Wednesday night free Standard tournament for store credit. Both are sanctioned DCI events. You'll be earning 8 points a month just doing this. Factor in any larger events like Grand Prix, PTQ's, 5K Opens, and Pre-Releases, and you can see how quickly these points accumulate. Just with regular play, you'll earn a foil rare each time the mailings get sent out. It's not impossible to sometimes get TWO if you play an awful lot.

Considering this is truly free, and is WotC's way of saying "Thanks for playing!", why on earth aren't you a member? Everyone can use 30 bucks worth of free cards a few times a year, so unless you're an MPR member you're not getting full value out of your gaming time! Information on the program can be found here.