Chaos Orb — Unlimited Edition (1993), PSA 7 Near Mint

Chaos Orb belongs to the founding mythology of Magic: The Gathering — one of the cards of the Unlimited Edition of 1993, the printing that carried the game beyond its first run and into the hands of a far wider generation of players. A two-colourless artifact, it was cheap to cast and impossible to ignore on the table.

Its ability remains the most literal ever printed. For one mana the player taps Chaos Orb, lifts the physical card above the battlefield and drops it from at least thirty centimetres; every card it touches is destroyed. The mechanic binds the object and the game in a way no other card has managed, and no later design has been able to repeat it — the reason the card was progressively banned from tournament play, and the reason it survives as an emblem of the game's early, uninhibited inventiveness.

This example has been authenticated and graded PSA 7 Near Mint: a card of this age that retains well-preserved corners and only a few visible traces of handling occupies a sought-after position among Unlimited cards, where the gap between circulated and genuinely near-mint material is wide. For collectors of the first era of Magic, a high-grade Chaos Orb is at once a piece of design history and one of the most recognisable icons of the hobby.