Community Contest for Sol Ring Day

The first of February is when we celebrate Sol Ring Day! It's the day when month #1 turns into month #2, just like the card turns one mana into two mana. And just like the card accelerates all games it's involved in, February is also when "time speeds up" as far as our progression through the calendar goes. (Our planet actually moves fastest on its own eliptical sol ring at its perihelion in January.)

Of course we have reason to celebrate this day and card here at Cardmarket in particular. In truth, every day is Sol Ring Day at Cardmarket. Every year thousands upon thousands of Sol Rings find a new home via our marketplace. Other than basic lands, is the most traded card on Cardmarket and has been for years. It's a curious statistic if you consider the history of Sol Ring in any form of organized Magic. Whether you play by tournament rules or the rules of Commander, no one has been allowed to run more than one copy at any point in time for the past 31 years. (You can read more on the card's history further down.)

Costing mere cents, is easily the highest-powered card you can get for such a low price. It's no wonder everyone wants to have some of that. Nonetheless, it still puzzles us that so many of our users want to have so many Sol Rings. Indeed we have no idea how many copies the average Cardmarket user owns. But we would like to know! This is why you can find a brief survey below whose first question asks: How many copies of Sol Ring do you own? If you can, please count yours, but we also take a rough estimate. If you want to tell us why/how you acquired this many Sol Rings, too, you can leave a comment on this article at the very bottom of this page as well.

But that's not all. Here at Cardmarket we love games, and of course so do you. So, to make this more fun, we decided to add a second question to our survey for a little contest and some prizes: Can you guess how many Sol Rings the average Cardmarket user owns? Then you may win €25!

More accurately, we want you to guess what the average survey participant enters on the first question. And what the average participant enters is not the arithmetic average across all survey responses here but rather the median. (Imagine a data set of 4, 5, 6, and 500. The arithmetic average would be 128, but this tells us more about the outlier than about the average response. The median, which is 5.5 in this case, suits our purpose far better, and it also disincentivizes possible manipulation.)

• Four random respondents who guess the exact median receive €25 in Cardmarket credit.
• Ten other random respondents whose guess is within +/−1 receive €10 in Cardmarket credit.
• Ten other random respondents from among all participants receive €5 in Cardmarket credit.

The survey runs till February 9. You can redo it multiple times until then, for example if you decide to buy more Sol Rings in the meantime and need to update your answer to the first question, or if you want to submit a better guess for the second question. But if you do submit multiple times, only your most recent submission counts, both for the statistic and for the winner selection. Click here to read the full legal terms and conditions governing this contest.

A Brief History of Sol Ring

It didn't take the community long after Magic's initial 1993 release to identify as a problematic card. After all, one of Magic's core principles is that games are supposed to progress over time, from cheaper and less powerful spells early to more expensive and stronger spells later. Alas, the first Magic set also gave players , , , , , , and indeed Sol Ring. While these cards clearly differ in power, all seven proved too powerful. Magic's first list of banned and restricted cards made no difference between them and limited each of them to one copy. This was in January 1994, mere months into Magic's infancy.

• Learn more about the early history of the game in this brand-new article!
  Thanks, I Hate It: Magic as Garfield Intended

However, the packs themselves made a difference between the Lotus/moxen on one side and on the other. Two differences, actually: First of all, Sol Ring was an uncommon whereas the other six were rare cards. This means, during the same time that put an estimated 15,000–20,000 copies of into circulation, the world received about 100,000 Sol Rings. Second of all, the first revision of Magic's card pool meant no more Black Lotus or moxen, but the Revised Edition still added a ton of Sol Rings. Even at just 1.75 grams per Sol Ring, we really are speaking of a literal metric ton here.

It is this difference in availability, more so than the difference in power level, that explains why the first official ban list for Commander in 2005 forbade the Lotus/moxen but allowed Sol Ring. As an uncommon, Sol Ring also escaped Magic's self-imposed ban on reprints. The first Sol Ring reprint since 1994 was a judge promo in 2005, its second a limited edition in 2010. Afterward, releases aimed at Commander pried open the floodgates more and more. The next five years brought six further reprints, the five after that another thirteen reprints. 2021 added seven Sol Rings all by itself, and every year since then has seen a double-digit number of reprints across various Commander products and Secret Lairs. 2024 gave us seventeen reprints with eleven different artworks. We're sure there's more to come in 2025.