It’s because of a few factors all coming together!
First, this set was released in 1993. The cards from it are so rarely in good condition anymore that the ones that are in mint condition are disproportionately valuable.
Second, there is, of course, the nostalgia value of this being the first set ever released for the game.
Third, Magic: the Gathering was the very first trading card game. Richard Garfield, the designer, had no idea how popular it would get, and there was literally nobody else on the planet who had experience balancing a type of game that had never existed before. These days, TCGs are a whole industry, and you can look at the past efforts of other designers for your cues. In 1993, this was completely unexplored territory. As a result, the set this came from is completely imbalanced. Cards they thought would rule the game were regarded even then as nearly useless; cards they thought were fairly balanced or that would be rare in a neighborhood due to people just buying a box or two instead snapped the game in half. There’s a really famous combo using only four cards, all of which are in this set, to kill your opponent from full health before they even get a turn. Black Lotus is part of that combo.
As an addendum to the balance issue–Black Lotus, which gives you free “mana”–which you use to play other cards–at a rate better than literally anything else in the game, is considered the single most powerful card ever printed, because things that generate resources are generally more useful than the things that USE those resources.
Fourth–and this is a point of contention even to this day–Black Lotus cannot be reprinted due to legal issues. After the unexpected popularity of the game took off, Wizards of the Coast released a set called Chronicles that reprinted a lot of cards that were hard to find…which tanked the value of their original printings. Collectors threw a petulant hissy fit, and Wizards made the ill-advised decision to publicly commit to a “Reserved List” of cards that they would never reprint.
The Reserved List stopped getting new cards put on it after a couple of years, but the damage was done. Sure, some of these cards can’t be reprinted in certain competitive environments because they’re too powerful, but it’s been so long since they were last printed that they’re extremely hard to find even if you have the money to buy them. They’re so hard to find that officially sanctioned tournaments that allow those cards often allow a certain number of stand-in “proxy” cards just to make it so that people can play the game. Wizards releases anthology sets on a more regular basis, now that the collector’s market no longer has a stranglehold on the game, but they would be sued to oblivion if they abolished the Reserved List, despite the vast majority of players hating it.
So to sum up–Black Lotus was a “rare” card in the three limited-run sets it was printed in, it can’t ever be printed again, it was last printed twenty-five years ago in sets with extreme nostalgia and symbolic value, and it’s the single most powerful card in the entire game.
So, yes, it sells for tens of thousands of dollars.
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