Right now I'm fascinated by old, beat-up cards from the game Magic: The Gathering. I've dug around online and IRL to explore this and I've found some odd bits to share.
I think the thing that sparked my interest was the video essay "Dear Gonti, Love Sophie" by Rhystic Studies. It's about his own love and nostalgia for old cardboard. Towards the end, he shows an EDH [1] deck built by DJ that looks like this:
Beautiful, right? It's made up entirely of Highly Played and damaged cards that DJ has collected over the years. He plays them raw and unsleeved, which almost no one does anymore.
Here's some more of DJ's cards showing beautiful wear: a playset of Chainer's Edicts. (Someone in the comment says: "Those things have killed a lot of creatures.")
I also found a gallery of well worn cards on Fabien Sanglard's blog.
Fabien asks: "How many Hypnotic Specters did this ruined Dark Ritual manage to cast? How many creatures did this Two-headed Giant of Floriys manage to slay back in the days?"
There are other enjoyers of this aesthetic, such as the r/MTGGore group on Reddit. Here's a rain-soaked Necropotence that someone found while going for a walk:
The worn look is sought after by people who print their own copies of cards ("proxies") and want them resemble the real thing. The r/bootlegmtg wiki includes a section on how to artificially age your cards. This involves shuffling and scraping the deck, staining the cards with dirt. One person even suggests brushing them with soy sauce!
Here's an example of three artifically worn, proxied cards. Can you tell them from the real thing?
I also found a rare video (less than 200 views!) where someone did 7000 riffle shuffles on a deck of mint cards to see how much wear shuffling unsleeved would cause. Here's the progression of wear as more shuffles were performed:
I went hunting for worn out cards myself, looking in the bulk bins at local game stores. Here's one nice specimen I found:
And here's an old one already in my collection:
I also started looking at eBay listings for HP and damaged cards. Here's a beautiful Phyrexian Negator that I found:
I think I'm going to try to build my own EDH deck made of HP and damaged cards for playing unsleeved. I've still got a lot of hunting to do to accomplish this!
[1] Elder Dragon Highlander: a multiplayer game format within MTG where your deck is 100 cards without any duplicates, lead by a legendary creature. The format is also known as Commander.