On a fall day in 2019, a lucrative bit of backroom dealing kicked off with a typo-ridden message on the chat app Discord. Two players of the strategy card game Magic: The Gathering were about to engage in a little insider trading.

“Hey mate, I just got some game changing news, but i kinda dont want to put it in the discord yet. I want just a day to get ahead of the field,” wrote one of the men, BaconShuffel. “Its litterally gona change…… everything.”

BaconShuffel, real name Craig Chapman, was sidling up to entrepreneur James Chillcott with some inside information that, if handled properly, would position them and the people in their network to reap thousands of dollars. Chapman was firing off messages in excited little fragments punctuated by smiley face emojis while Chillcott responded in more a more measured prose, which appeared adjacent to an icon of a hairgelled man in a business suit making a Zoolander mouthshape. Chapman was hunched over his PC in his suburban Ireland home office and surrounded by piled-high white boxes of Magic cards, sorted and stacked. These things had made him money, and lots of it. Here was an opportunity for more.

“Lol ok,” wrote Chillcott. “Hit me.”

“They are announcing a new paper competitive format,” Chapman messaged. He was talking about Magic’s publisher, Wizards of the Coast. “Its name is Pioneer.”

“Yummy,” Chillcott said. “Source on this?”

“The source is trustworthy,” Chapman said. “He hasnt led me wrong for 2 years.”

Chapman had come to Chillcott because Chillcott was the guy to come to. He runs a website called MTGPrice, a podcast called MTG Fast Finance and a Discord group called Pro Trader, all of which are aimed at helping players maximize the value of their Magic cards by buying and selling them at the right moment in the card game’s unregulated, unofficial secondary market.

It was October 19, two days before Wizards of the Coast would officially announce the Pioneer format—a new method for playing the card game with a special rule set—which gave new life to older sets of Magic cards by bringing them back into competitive play. The format was a noteworthy announcement not just for dedicated players up for injecting some fresh nostalgia into their veins but also for the speculators who make a business out buying and selling Magic cards: The launch of the new format would instantly make a slew of dormant, low-value cards massively, massively relevant again. Their prices would naturally spike.

If Chapman and Chillcott bought in now, before the news broke and while the card prices were low, they could be up a couple thousand dollars by the end of the week. There are a lot of ways to get ahead of the curve, and in Magic, insider trading is perfectly legal.

“I just made this discord alot of money 🤑,” Chapman wrote.

Magic cards are extraordinary collectables in that, despite their pulpy fantasy art and idiosyncratic fandom, they’re less akin to rare stamps and autographed baseballs than stocks and bonds.

You don’t tongue a Declaration of Independence stamp, and your dad might wince if you tossed him a $249.99 baseball autographed by Sammy Sosa. There’s no real utility to them—just novelty and a price tag. But Magic cards have utility; they are playable, and their usefulness constantly shifts as Wizards of the Coast issues new cards and tweaks the in-game dynamics of others. Some 20,000 unique Magic cards have been released since 1993, and about four times a year, Wizards of the Coast designs and prints more sets.