Magic Alpha Mox Sapphire

A jewel that costs nothing

Mox Sapphire is one of five artifacts in Magic: The Gathering's first set that cost zero mana and tap for one mana of a single color. Pearl makes white, Sapphire blue, Jet black, Ruby red and Emerald green. A land does the same job, but a player may put only one land into play each turn. A Mox has no such limit, so an opening hand with two or three of them lets a player cast spells turns ahead of schedule.

The name comes from the American slang word 'moxie,' meaning energy and nerve, which itself traces to a popular early-1900s soft drink called Moxie. The five Moxen, along with Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall, Time Walk and Timetwister, make up the Power Nine, the cards widely regarded as the strongest ever printed. Six of the nine are artifacts and the other three are blue, which is part of why blue players prize the Sapphire.

The designers knew the cards were strong. During playtesting they judged the Power Nine to be powerful cards whose scarcity would keep them from overwhelming games. As print runs grew, that logic collapsed, and the cards were dropped from the game's core set with the Revised Edition.

Garfield, Adkison and a painter from Colorado

Richard Garfield was a doctoral candidate in combinatorial mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 when a colleague pointed him toward Wizards of the Coast, a tiny Seattle-area company run by Peter Adkison, then a systems analyst at Boeing. Adkison passed on Garfield's board game RoboRally but asked for something cheap and portable. On a hike near Multnomah Falls, Garfield hit on a game of collectible, color-themed cards that each player could build into a personal deck.

Wizards could not afford to pay artists in cash, so it offered them shares in the company. Dan Frazier was one of them. Born in 1945, he earned his BFA at the University of Colorado, taught art in public schools for 20 years, and moved into game illustration in 1990. He painted all five original Moxen, and later the original Mox Diamond.

A 2023 auction catalog description of this card notes that Frazier's commission required the Mox art to be recognizable from more than 15 feet away and upside down, which explains the bold, centered gem on a plain field that makes the card readable across a game table.

Summer 1993

Wizards did not have the money to manufacture its first order until Adkison demonstrated the game at the Origins Game Fair and came home with $40,000 in funding. The general release came on August 5, 1993. Adkison and his wife drove toward Gen Con in Milwaukee, stopping at game stores along the way, and found bigger crowds at each stop. The convention shipment, reported as 2.5 million cards, arrived a day late and still sold out.

The Alpha print run is widely reported at 2.6 million cards: 295 different cards, of which 116 are rares, printed on separate sheets so that rares came off the press in the smallest numbers. The usual estimate is about 1,100 of each rare. Alpha came in 60-card starter decks with two rares and 15-card boosters with one, and the rare usually sat at the front of the pack, where it took the most handling.

The game sold out its supply of 10 million cards by October 1993, and a second run, Beta, followed that month. Outside game stores, 1993 was the year of the World Trade Center bombing, the Waco siege, Jurassic Park and the Great Flood on the Mississippi.

From tournament tables to the grading slab

Moxen were made to be played, and they were. When Wizards issued its first restricted list in 1994, the Moxen were limited to one copy per deck. By 1995 the tournament scene was dominated by decks built on the Power Nine, whose prices had already climbed beyond most players' reach. In March 1996 the company created the Reserved List, a promise never to reprint certain cards, the Power Nine among them. Today Mox Sapphire is banned in Legacy and restricted to one copy in Vintage.

That hard play is why high grades are scarce. Card sleeves were not widely used until about 1995, so many Alpha Moxen were shuffled bare for two years. One longtime collector told a grading-company writer in 2016 that the best cards got used the most and so ended up in the poorest condition. The same article reported that Alpha Mox Sapphire commonly shows a print spot on its right border, that PSA had graded 19 copies at 9 and none at 10, and that it ranked as the second most valuable of the Alpha Power Nine after Black Lotus. A dealer quoted there said his last PSA 9 had sold for around $7,500.

Prices have since moved far beyond that. One PSA 9 copy, certification number 30672584, sold at an online auction on April 21, 2023, for $46,800. The same certified card came back to auction eight months later and sold on December 21, 2023, for $21,600, less than half the April price. A separate listing for an Alpha PSA 9 is recorded as selling for $28,849.99 in October 2021, though its record does not say whether it was a bid auction or a fixed-price sale.

Lower grades trade in a different world. Ungraded and mid-grade Alpha Sapphires have sold for roughly $6,000 to $14,000 in recent years, and a complete set of the five Alpha Moxen in CGC holders sold as a single lot in December 2024.

How to know an Alpha PSA 9

Alpha, Beta and Unlimited all carry the same Frazier painting of a blue gem in a gold setting, so the border and corners do the identifying. Unlimited, released in December 1993, has a white border. Alpha and Beta are both black-bordered, but the printer used different corner-cutting dies for Beta, and Alpha corners are noticeably more rounded. Alpha cards carry no set symbol and no card number; in modern databases the card is listed as number 265 of the set.

The Moxen were also reproduced in the 1993 Collectors' Edition and International Collectors' Edition, so a buyer looking for the original should check that the grading label reads Alpha.

A PSA 9 means Mint, one step below the top grade. For a card this old that was meant to be played, centering, the black border's tendency to show white chips at the edges, and that right-side print spot all count against a copy. Each PSA slab carries a certification number that can be checked on the grader's site, which is how the two 2023 sales of the same card can be matched.

Why the Sapphire

All five Moxen are mechanically identical except for color. Blue's place in the Power Nine, alongside Ancestral Recall, Time Walk and Timetwister, made blue mana the most coveted in the game's first years, and a 2016 survey of the Alpha set ranked the Sapphire second only to Black Lotus among the Power Nine in value.

Wizards has spent three decades trying to make a fair Mox. Mox Diamond, Chrome Mox, Mox Opal, Mox Amber, Mox Tantalite and Mox Jasper each add a cost or a catch. A Mirage-era design called Crystal Mox was cut late as still too strong; Frazier's art for it became Enlightened Tutor. The originals reached Magic Online with new art in Vintage Masters in June 2014, and reached Magic: The Gathering Arena in 2022, but the paper card will not be reprinted.

The numbers

Set

Limited Edition Alpha, 295 cards (116 rares); about 2.6 million cards printed

Alpha rares

An estimated 1,100 copies of each

Card

Artifact, cost 0; tap for one blue mana; collector number 265

PSA population

19 PSA 9, no PSA 10 (reported June 2016)

Tournament status

Restricted in Vintage, banned in Legacy; on the Reserved List

Packaging

60-card starter decks (2 rares) and 15-card boosters (1 rare), 36 boosters per box

Timeline

1. 1991

   Richard Garfield pitches a collectible card game to Peter Adkison of Wizards of the Coast.

2. 1993

   Magic: The Gathering previews at the Origins Game Fair.

3. Aug 5, 1993

   Limited Edition Alpha goes on general release, with Mox Sapphire among its rares.

4. Oct 1993

   Beta, the second run, follows with redesigned corners; 10 million cards have sold out.

5. Dec 1993

   White-bordered Unlimited edition is released.

6. 1994

   The first restricted list limits the Moxen to one copy per deck.

7. Mar 1996

   Wizards creates the Reserved List; the Power Nine will never be reprinted.

8. Jun 2014

   The original Moxen reach Magic Online in Vintage Masters with new art.

9. Jun 20, 2016

   A grading-company article reports 19 PSA 9 Alpha Mox Sapphires and no PSA 10.

10. Oct 23, 2021

    An Alpha PSA 9 is recorded selling for $28,849.99; the sale type is not stated.

11. 2022

    The Moxen are added to Magic: The Gathering Arena through a digital card.

12. Apr 21, 2023

    PSA 9, cert 30672584, sells at auction for $46,800.

13. Dec 21, 2023

    The same PSA 9 sells at auction again for $21,600.

14. Dec 1, 2024

    A complete set of five CGC-graded Alpha Moxen sells as one lot.

The world in 1993

• Feb 26, 1993

  A van bomb explodes beneath the World Trade Center's North Tower in New York.

• Mar 22, 1993

  Intel ships the first Pentium chips.

• Apr 19, 1993

  The 51-day standoff at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, ends in a fire.

• Jun 11, 1993

  Jurassic Park opens in theaters.

• Jun 20, 1993

  The Chicago Bulls win their third straight NBA championship.

• Aug 1, 1993

  The Great Flood of 1993 on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers reaches its peak.

• Nov 1993

  NAFTA passes the legislatures of the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Magic Alpha Mox Sapphire is number 39 of 100 in the trading cards entries of the FLOAT 100. 97 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (82 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• The word 'Mox' comes from the slang 'moxie,' which traces back to an early-1900s soft drink.
• The same PSA 9 Mox Sapphire sold twice in 2023: for $46,800 in April and $21,600 in December.
• Wizards paid some of its first artists in company shares because it could not afford cash.
• Frazier painted a sixth original-style Mox, Crystal Mox, but the card was cut; the art became Enlightened Tutor.
• Alpha's round corners were an accident: the printer used different corner dies for the Beta run.
• In 2007 five pieces of real jewelry modeled on the Moxen were made for the Italian market.