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@Rose0fthorns     -     Email     -     Articles Douglas Johnson is a 20-year-old MTG player who goes to college courtesy of a scholarship from Gamers Helping Gamers. He is currently found writing a weekly finance column at MTGprice.com, and you can always feel free to contact him on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit.

Conjured Currency – The Costs of Magic that Aren’t Magic

Welcome back, readers, to [card]Conjured Currency[/card]! Until now, this series hasn’t had a name, but thanks to my roommate and good friend, Sean, that is no longer the case. Although my articles won’t always have an extremely specific common topic, everything I write for this website does deal with specific goals. I always want to be helping you make and save money through Magic: The Gathering. In one way or another, I want to conjure you all some currency.

Grinding the Roads

Every weekend, Star City Games gets hundreds of players to travel and participate in their Open Series. I didn’t exactly survey everyone at the last open, but it’s safe to assume that the majority of players traveled at least a few hours to attend the tournament. If you’re a true grinder who wants to make it to every PTQ or GPT in your area, you have probably traveled upwards of eight to ten hours in order to make it to a specific event. Now, how much did that event cost you? If your answer was “whatever the entry fee was,” then you’re mistaken. Magic tournaments cost a lot more money than just the entry fee, especially when driving long distances. Yes, this is probably obvious to a lot of you: traveling does cost money. However, this is going to be an article that tries to save you money without dealing with trading cards specifically. Today, I will be attempting to give a few tips and tricks on how to reduce the overall costs of your tournament experience.

Gas is expensive these days. One of the easiest ways to save money on traveling is carpooling. The more people you can cram into a single vehicle, the more money you save on gasoline. If you normally travel to events with less than a full car and don’t know of anyone else to invite, ask your LGS owner if you can leave a flyer that says you are looking for people to travel to a given tournament. Put your contact information down, the times you intend on leaving and returning, and estimated shared costs for gasoline and hotel. If you don’t have a car, you can also generally rely on your local Facebook MTG group (if your local area doesn’t have one yet, make one yourself) to look for eager drivers looking to split costs. If you are the one with a car and are looking to reduce gas costs, expect that college kids without a vehicle will be more than willing to chip in their fair share to obtain transportation.

Another concealed cost of traveling for events is parking. Although I have personally never had to deal with it, I have heard of stories where the parking fee was as high as $30 a day. Plan accordingly for potential fees, and call ahead to your designated parking garage and learn how much your wallet is going to suffer.

This same logic applies to hotel costs. If you have any extra space in your hotel room, be on the lookout for anyone who looks like they might be planning on sleeping in their car, or who wanted to stay for Sunday but couldn’t due to lack of availability in the hotel. You’d be surprised how many people don’t think ahead to rent a hotel room until the last minute, and you can capitalize on this, literally. That person gets a room to sleep in, and you get $20 or 30 to mitigate your travel costs. In addition, SCG often has deals on rooms in nearby hotels if you mention the tournament that they are hosting.

Unless the financial costs of playing Magic are negligible to you, I can not recommend flying to tournaments. Not only are airline tickets incredibly expensive, but you incur other hidden costs throughout the trip, such as baggage fees, check-in fees, and taxis to and from the event. As much as I am dreading the eight-hour drive to Grand Prix Richmond in March, my wallet will thank me for not taking to the skies instead. Also if you fly, you risk much more severe delays than if you were to drive. A slight rain can cause a delay of hours, meaning you risk not getting to the event on time.

Finding Sustenance

Fist of SunsOne of the not-so-secret costs of traveling is food. Anyone who has traveled in their lifetime knows that food on the road is largely overpriced, and the convention cuisine is anything but an exception. Six-dollar hot dogs are real, with four-dollar small sodas. Wouldn’t you rather buy a [card]Fist of Suns[/card] with that money? No? Good, I didn’t think so. Don’t buy that card. Anyway, the point is that you can save a significant amount of money and hunger by preparing your own food and beverages at home, so that you don’t get forced into the misplay of seven-dollar burritos that also make your bowels feel like the guy who did buy [card]Fist of Suns[/card] at ten dollars.

If you are in a gambling mood and want to [i]potentially[/i] save money on food, you can always try your hand at the credit card game when eating out with friends. After agreeing with your fellow diners to put your genetalia on the proverbial chopping block, call the server over and have them take each party members’ card, selecting one at random. The unlucky owner of that card has their dinner transformed into a pricey night out, while everyone else lives to eat another day. Attempt at your own risk.

Squeezing Every Dollar

When selling cards to cover costs of a trip (yes, I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about actual cards in this article, but who hasn’t shaved off a bit of their collection to a dealer to feel better about how much they were spending at a tournament?), try to resist accepting the first offer you receive from a dealer, even if it sounds tempting. Make a trip around the room and get a quote from each of the dealers on their buy prices. Printing out buylists in advance can help you make the most money. Also, when planning on selling cards to dealers, expect to get less cash on Sunday. After a long day of buying on Saturdays, dealers will have less to offer. However, this means you can negotiate for a better deal on trade-ins if you are looking for speculation targets or pieces to a deck.

If the tournament you are planning on attending is a Grand Prix, be prepared to preregister for the tournament ahead of time, and potentially sign up for the VIP package to lock in your playmat. As the attendance of Grands Prix (yes, that is the plural of Grand Prix, it’s weird) have increased, the number of playmats given out have not. Not all 4,492 players at Vegas got the [card]Sword of Fire and Ice[/card] mat, and I doubt everyone will get an [card]Eternal Witness[/card] playmat at Richmond. If you like to sell the mat to recuperate some costs of playing in the tournament, then the initial $100 investment into the VIP package may be worth it in the long run—securing the mat and all the other VIP bonuses certainly has its perks.

Strategic Planning

Have a Plan

Overall, the most important aspect to saving money on any expedition, MTG related or not, is planning. Be sure to figure out who you are traveling with, how much it will cost, and determine your itinerary several weeks in advance. Budget your funds to allow a specific amount for food, fun, emergencies, and travel expenses.

Feel free to leave a comment below with interesting ways you save money, or as always, tell me ways in which I can improve my writing!

Feel free to join in on the discussion on Reddit.com, Twitter, or by emailing me directly. I will reply to every comment!

DJ Johnson – Getting Value Out of Lesser Commons and Uncommons

I don’t think I would be alone if I said that the MTG finance world is surrounded by a lot of misconceptions, especially as of late. With the recent [card]Splinter Twin[/card] and [card]Phyrexian Obliterator[/card] price spikes, speculators are pointed at maliciously. Casuals and grinders alike believe that those of us who want to make money in Magic are manipulating puppet strings behind the curtain to control the market and initiate price spikes. While this is not an article dedicated to disproving that misconception (the Brainstorm Brewery crew already discussed it in multiple recent episodes of the podcast, and my co-writer Anthony Capece addressed the topic in his incredibly well-written article Anatomy of a Spike), I’d like to bring up a different, less-discussed topic. If you ask most MTG financiers what the most profitable aspect of our game is, I think the most unanimous decision would be collection buying. If you have the cash on hand, buying a collection to piece out and sell can yield far more profits than speculation, value trading, or purchasing singles at FNM for buylist prices to later sell on TCGplayer or eBay.

The misconception is that there are still a lot of people who think that all of the value in a collection is held in the rares and high-dollar cards. While we all want to be the guy who goes to a garage sale and grabs the $50 shoe box of cards with a NM Revised [card]Underground Sea[/card] sticking out of the top, it’s probably not going to happen. It does on occasion, and I’m sure that someone will reply in the comments section about how they just found that exact collection yesterday, but stay with me for the sake of the argument. The objective of this piece is to show you how there can be a lot of value left between the cracks in the form of commons and uncommons, and they don’t even have to be the [card]Imperious Perfect[/card]s or [card]Merrow Reejeerey[/card]s of a collection. Those are common knowledge. We need to go deeper. We need to find the cards that nobody else cares about, the type left on draft tables for free pickings.

Turning Junk to Dollars

Most of these cards won’t be worth selling on eBay or TCGplayer, and it’ll be more effort than it’s worth to find a buyer or trade partner locally. That means we’ll have to resort to buylisting our diamonds in the rough in order to make a profit. I’ve mentioned this before, but there are two tools I like to use to make buylisting a less painful experience than it would otherwise be.

One of those methods is by inputting cards into Trader Tools at mtg.gg (requires an Insider subscription to Quiet Speculation). QS’s buylist aggregator is fast, simple, and removes stores that have a questionable history. You can also add cards to a list within the program and see the exact total of how much you’ll be getting from each store in advance. The downside is that seeing which stores are offering which prices is behind a paywall, so you need to be a QS Insider in order to get full value from Trader Tools.

A free alternative is MTGprice.com. They also have info on multiple buylists, but I have noticed that they omit some of the buylists that Trader Tools shows. If you don’t mind spending a bit more time for a bit more profit, use both. If you want to save even more time, follow my advice and restrict yourself to CardKingdom.com, ABUgames.com, and AdventuresOn.com. TrollandToad.com used to be at the top of my buylisting sites as well, but the amount of time it takes to process an order has steadly increased over the years. If you don’t mind waiting months to get paid, use T+T at your own risk.

While the process can be arduous and boring, it’s still a profitable way to spend an afternoon if you don’t have anything else going on. Turn on the TV, or put some music on, or listen to the latest episode of Brainstorm Brewery. Let’s take a look at some cards that I’ve found in piles of “stripped” commons and uncommons from a collection I bought somewhat recently, none of which are in Standard anymore, and none of these see heavy Modern or Legacy play like the obvious hits of [card]Kitchen Finks[/card], [card]Path to Exile[/card], [card]Brainstorm[/card], or [card]Hymn to Tourach[/card].

The Picks

  • [card]Mind Sculpt[/card] currently has a buylist price of $.19. Yep, casual players really love destroying each others’ decks, especially when they can’t afford Glimpse the Unthinkable, or if they want to play mono blue.
  • [card]Squadron Hawk[/card] only sees play very periodically in Modern Soul Sisters, but if a person needs one, they need a playset. If that person needs a playset, so do the online retailers. That’s why AdventuresOn.com is buying them at $.10. That may not seem like a whole lot, but every economics major in the world will tell you that every little bit counts.
  • [card]Fog Bank[/card] is a casual all-star, as many of my friends who do not play competitively tell me. In a mill deck that needs to not die while getting rid of the opposing 60 cards, [card]Fog Bank[/card] is a cheap blocker that lasts forever as long as the opponent doesn’t have removal. It also commands a price tag of at least a quarter in all of its editions, topping out at a little above $.75 for the original Commander copy.
  • [card]Vapor Snag[/card] is in the new Ninja Bear Delver Whatever deck that Travis Woo has been playing recently, but that hasn’t affected its price at all. The [card]Unsummon[/card] with bite has been buylistable ever since its rotation for quite a lot, as in $.24 to AdventuresOn for the New Phyrexia version. Or you could sell to Cardkingdom for a whopping $.39 for Duel Deck version.
  • [card]Spirit Mantle[/card] is another casual all-star, because giving your guys protection from their guys lets you hit them directly. Auras may get a bad reputation, but removal be damned, the core set version of these are $.43 to ABU Games, and the Planechase versions are $.65 to Card Kingdom.
  • [card]Go for the Throat[/card] rotated a while ago, and it was a valuable uncommon while it was in Standard. That hasn’t changed, and you can still buylist them for $.78 to ABU Games.
  • [card]Unburial Rites[/card] is in the same boat. It rotated, sees no play in Modern or Legacy, but it’s a reanimation spell that doesn’t mind getting dredged away. That earns it a price of $.17 to Adventures On, which adds up quickly if you happen to have a bunch still sitting in a box from previous Standard, like I did.
  • [card]Vampire Nighthawk[/card] is an interesting case. It’s been reprinted to death, but it has three extremely powerful keywords that work well in casual vampire decks, so the reprinted version is still worth quite a bit, up to $.69 each depending on the edition. Compare this to [card]Lingering Souls[/card], which sees even more Constructed play than Nighthawk does, has also been reprinted twice, and has a lower buylist price for both the Duel Deck and the DKA version. This is another great example of how strong a hold casual players have on the MTG market.
  • [card]Geosurge[/card] is something I’m not sure what to make of. It never saw Constructed play as a ritual because of the restrictions on what you can cast with it in addition to it costing RRRR, but it still has a buylist price of up to $.08. I guess casual players enjoy slamming down Shivan Dragon-esque monsters on turn 4 with only a single card, which is fine for both them and us.
  • [card]Rancor[/card] rotated along with [card]Vampire Nighthawk[/card], but the core set version can still buylist for almost $0.50 to Card Kingdom. Built-in aura insurance probably helps with that. It sees occasional play in the Modern Hexproof deck,
  • [card]Full Moon’s Rise[/card] and [card]Moonmist[/card] are worth $.10 and $.05 respectively, probably because people who missed out on Innistrad want to make their werewolf decks. I have long been advocating pulling these out of draft leftovers and piles of bulk that other people don’t care about, and now they’re finally worth something.
  • [card]Triumph of the Hordes[/card] is an extremely powerful [card]Overrun[/card] effect in EDH that can leave your opponent dead when they least expect it, and it can be buylisted for…okay, there are no stores that want it right now. Bear with me though, I’ve died to this thing in EDH more often than I want to admit, and it’s a whole mana cheaper than the original [card]Overrun[/card]. I’m fine with hoarding these somewhere until they’re worth $.15 or so. I don’t advocate going out to buy any, but if you ever go through bulk commons and uncommons looking for gems, there’s not really a downside to setting [card]Triumph of the Hordes[/card] aside.
  • [card]Mask of Avacyn[/card] is currently worth a dime to Adventures On, and I’ve seen it pop up on other buylists for up to $.20 at times. It’s a lot less expensive then [card]Lightning Greaves[/card] for players who want to keep their Commander decks on a light budget, and the power/toughness boost isn’t irrelevant in a format where 21 is a magic number.
  • [card]Palladium Myr[/card] lets any color jump from three to five mana in a single turn, and is a cheaper alternative for those who don’t want to buy [card]Coalition Relic[/card]s. Even though it’s vulnerable to almost all removal, these are a dime a piece to ABU Games.

What About Standard Cards?

While these casual cards are always great targets to pick out of bulk, I’m not going to assume that everyone has piles of unsorted commons and uncommons to dig through. For players who primarily deal with Standard cards, there is still hope. There are a lot of gems throughout Return to Ravnica block that you can buylist now to receive a nice sized check in the mail later. While many grinders I know look only for the [card]Magma Jets[/card], [card]Burning-Tree Emissary[/card]s and [card]Boros Charm[/card]s of a set, there is hidden value to be had elsewhere. Let’s see what RTR block brought us:

  • [card]Judge’s Familiar[/card] is up to $.23 on ABU Games from $.18 a couple of weeks ago. I recommend selling these now if you can, as I don’t see Mono-Blue Devotion ever being more powerful than it is now.
  • [card]Rakdos Cackler[/card] is sellable for $0.34 on ABU Games. Like the Familiar, I don’t see Cackler holding value post-rotation. It doesn’t seem to have any casual appeal, so if you have extra copies that you can’t unload elsewhere, this is a great way to get rid of them before they take their leave of Standard. At the very least, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the price throughout their remaining year.
  • [card]Unflinching Courage[/card] doesn’t see much play at the moment, save for the sideboards of GW aggressive decks, but it’s worth almost a quarter to Adventures On. If you want to squeeze every bit of value out of these possible, I recommend waiting until Born of the Gods comes out with the GW temple. Having access to a non-gate dual land helps the chances for the voice of green white decks to resurge.
  • [card]Wight of Precinct Six[/card] is a Standard staple, and as such…wait, what? Yes, this creature is actually worth money, even though it sees no Standard play. This is a [card]Mind Sculpt[/card]-esque card whose value is sustained by players who want to put the top cards of their opponents’ decks into the graveyard, and then beat face with this guy and [card]Jace’s Phantasm[/card] (who is also worth a good amount of money for a casual uncommon from a recent core set). I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get rid of these though, as the casual demand won’t fade upon rotation.
  • Interestingly enough, even some commons have value to buylists if their power and demand is high enough. At the time of this writing, you can dump 40 copies of [card]Frostburn Weird[/card] for $.04 each, and 39 copies of [card]Gray Merchant of Asphodel[/card] for $.07 to Adventures On. Prices like that aren’t worth making a buylist cart alone, but they’re a nice way to cover a small percentage of the shipping fees for sending in your cards.

As for the uncommons from Theros, I recommend picking up the ones that see even fringe Constructed play, or ones that you think have potential. When you’re at FNM drafting, here are some targets I recommend scavenging and holding for later if you get the chance:

  • [card]Dissolve[/card] only has a buylist price of $.10 at the moment, but [card]Dissipate[/card] went a lot higher than that in comparison when it was in Standard. you might be able to get $.30 each a year down the road.
  • [card]Nemesis of Mortals[/card] has synergy with the scavenge cards from RTR block, so it might fizzle out after RTR block rotates. People love their graveyard-based decks though, so maybe this will be an uncommon worth buylisting at some point this year.
  • [card]Magma Jet[/card] is only a quarter on the highest buylist, but you can actually just trade these off at a dollar a piece in your binder.
  • [card]Arena Athlete[/card] seems like it could be an all-star in the right hyper aggressive deck, in a [card]Lightning Mauler[/card]-esque role supplemented by [card]Titan’s[/card] Strength and other cheap heroic tricks. That card ended up being buylistable for almost a dollar, and Google Drive thinks “buylistable” is a word without me having to tell it to accept it. Huh.
  • [card]Fanatic of Mogis[/card] already gets a lot of attention for being able to just kill people on turn four, and there are certain grinders out there who ensure that RDW will never die. I can see this guy being sellable for more than the $.07 he’s worth now.
  • [card]Mogis’s Marauder[/card] and [card]Tormented Hero[/card] both currently play a role in a Rakdos aggro deck with [card]Xathrid Necromancer[/card], [card]Rakdos Cackler[/card] and [card]Rakdos Shred-Freak[/card]. Once Theros isn’t a 3x Draft format and supply becomes more limited later in the year, these two black aggressive cards may be able to hold their own at a solid quarter or more. They’ve already proven themselves in Constructed, so I don’t see the downside in putting them aside for later.

Extracting Value

Even though this article wasn’t full of tips to make big money on the next Modern speculation target, I hope it helped at least a few readers look at one of the more unexplored areas of MTG finance. Making money off of Magic isn’t all about rares, and it isn’t all about the obvious hallmark uncommons like [card]Manamorphose[/card], [card]Spell Snare[/card], and [card]Memnite[/card]. The best way to make money is by taking control of a field that nobody else knows about, and this seemed like an area that (at least in my locale) is largely unexplored and ignored. It doesn’t seem like much, but there’s very little effort required, and its a great feeling getting the checks in the mail from stores for taking cards that you had no use for anyway. Thanks a bunch for reading. As always, feel free to leave constructive criticism on either the topic of the article, or any way in which I could improve my writing in general.

DJ Johnson – Trading to Your Outs

Hello again! For those of you who took the time to read my last article and still bothered to click on the link to my second piece, I thank you. I hope I was able to share enough information to make it worth your while. If you’re just jumping on this article series (if you can call it a “series”…I don’t even have a cool name for it), you can read my last piece here.

Last time, I mentioned that I would be discussing your “outs” to make the most out of every card you own. To some of us MTG financiers (someone really needs to come up with a better name for those of us who dabble in the MTG finance market), the things I’m about to list are common knowledge, but I hope that everyone reading this learns something. Either way, I’d greatly appreciate any constructive criticism or feedback on my writing to help me improve the reading experience for you.

Somewhere in your Magic lifetime, a friend may have walked up to you after you scooped up your cards in the face of overwhelming odds and told you that you still had “outs.” This means that, no matter how small a chance, there was a sequence of events that could have followed that ended with you pulling an amazing comeback and taking the game for yourself. Barring situations where you concede to save time on the round clock, it’s generally correct to play the game until your possible outs approach as close to zero as possible.

This philosophy of playing to your “outs” applies to the financial world of Magic as well. If you picked up [card]Master of Waves[/card] at $12 in the middle of its massive spike before the Pro Tour, then you were probably happy when it proceeded to climb as high as $25. However, if you didn’t get rid of them immediately, then you were gradually less happy as it progressively dropped back down to $12 where it is now. If you have all of the knowledge in the world of when a card will spike in price, that doesn’t help you at all unless you can actively get rid of it (unless your goal is to just get cards cheaply for decks, making Magic less expensive to play competitively). Let’s discuss a few “outs” you can use to get value out of your cards when they hit that sweet spot on the top of the price graph.

1. Trading:

This is the most obvious method. Trading off cards that have spiked (i.e. [card]Hero’s Downfall[/card]) to Standard FNM players for sleepers looking to spike soon (i.e.[card]Inkmoth Nexus[/card] and [card]Birthing Pod[/card]. How are these not $10 yet?) is a good way to continuously increase the invisible value of your binder and make connections with your local community. The downside is that you don’t see any actual cash return by solely doing this. As much as we wish they did, Magic cards don’t pay the rent, or help towards gas and hotel costs when traveling to events. However, trading is a good way to get full retail value for cards, considering most people trade at TCG average or SCG.

If you plan on trading a lot, it’s important to remember to see as many binders as possible. I know that I am personally guilty of only going to a very small LGS because it’s five minutes away from where I live. After a while, trading can get quite stale. Take advantage of opportunities to broaden your connections, and you’ll meet many new players who need your cards!

1.5. Pucatrade:

Pucatrade.com is a website that just recently came out of beta and is now in revised (ha). You put up a list of cards you have for trade and send them to people who have that card on their want list. When the recipient confirms he or she got the card, you receive the cards’ value in “PucaPoints.” Once you’ve accumulated some points, you put cards on your own want list, and people can send you those cards in exchange for your PucaPoints. Unfortunately, there are some features that are behind a paywall, so if you’re looking for things like foil cards, e-mail notifications, or an advanced search feature, there’s a subscription fee involved.

Personally, I’ve had great success using the site to trade off cards that are hard to move in my local area (getting $72 in trade for a [card]Rishadan Port[/card] and $90 for a [card]Polluted Delta[/card] seems fine, especially when there is nobody else in my local area who plays Legacy). I can save these points to get other cards for speculating or foils for my EDH decks. It’s also a good way for players who don’t have high-dollar cards to slowly trade smaller cards into bigger ones little by little. If you don’t care about special features and just want to trade, the site is free to use, so I highly recommend trying it out regardless of if you can afford the paid benefits. Just take Nick Becvar ‘s word for it, he’s certainly using it to his advantage to speculate on targets such as Forced Fruition, foil Griselbrand, and foil ZEN basics.

bevcarpuca

Also, if you’re not following Becvar on Twitter, you should be. He’s often ahead of the curve on price spikes, and is good at pointing out cards with stupidly low spreads (the difference between the highest buy price and the average sell price). You can find him @Becvar, because he’s probably the only person in the world with that last name [Ed. Note: except possibly for his dad].

2. eBay and TCG Player:

I’m going to lump both of these outlets together because they are very similar. I have personally sold very little on eBay but am max level on TCG Player. Both websites provide a solid way to turn your collection into cash (well, money directly deposited into your bank account, but you get the point). From here on out, when I refer to eBay, I am talking about BIN (Buy it Now) listings and not auctions. Here are some benefits and downsides to each site, so you can figure out which works best for you.

  • Cost to list: eBay’s listings are free initially, but cost an insertion fee once you pass 50 listings in a month. Listing a card on TCG Player is free no matter what. If you plan on selling more than 50 items in a month, but don’t want to set up an official eBay store, then TCG Player might be better for you. You don’t want to eat the costs for putting up items that may not even sell, and that will happen on eBay.

  • Fees: TCG Player’s fee for selling a card is 11% + $.50 per order, not taking shipping into account. eBay’s fees are 12.9% of your sale (10% goes to eBay, 2.9% goes to PayPal), also not including shipping. Given these fees, it is more cost-efficient to sell cheaper cards on eBay, and more expensive cards on TCG Player. I believe that the tipping point for being better to sell on TCG Player is approximately $26.00 for a listing (my math skills are really bad, and that may or may not be correct. Feel free to correct me).

  • Time to list: Multiple friends of mine who sell on eBay (including Brainstorm Brewery’s own Jason Alt, @JasonEAlt on Twitter. If you’re not following him, you have me honestly astounded) have informed me that it takes much longer to list cards on eBay. One of the reasons is that eBay will no longer accept stock pictures of cards from Gatherer, so you would have to take the picture yourself and upload it. Doing that for every listing takes much more time. As financiers, we all know: time is money.

  • Extra options: eBay gives you the option to pay $50 and become an “eBay store”, which grants access to lower fees and more free listings. This is obviously a benefit if you would have otherwise spent over $50 in fees while selling on eBay.

  • Navigation: The storefront on TCG Player is extremely easy to navigate and is very user-friendly. For example: when listing a card, TCG Player will bring up the current lowest price + shipping per card, per listing. This is very helpful when trying to match the lowest price to ensure your card sells quickly.

In the end, it’s up to you to take these pros and cons and figure out which of these sites is right for you. The nice thing is that neither service requires you to take much time out of your day. Just a few clicks on a computer or phone, and a few minutes to package and ship.

To me, it appears that TCG Player is a better out if you want to get rid of higher-valued cards at a slower pace, especially if you don’t have much time. eBay looks to be your better option if you plan on doing a much higher volume of sales and have more time on your hands to spend listing items.

3. Social Media

Most of you reading this article (if I have a readerbase large enough that the word “most” can mean two or three, I’ll be overjoyed) probably have a Facebook, or some other form of social media. Making an Excel spreadsheet of the cards you have for sale and slapping it onto the page of your local Facebook MTG group can net you a surprising number of sales (don’t have a local Facebook MTG group? Make one. It’s an excellent way to keep in touch with everyone you regularly play or trade with, and allows you to contact all of them at once).

You can list cards for the TCG low, or a certain percentage under the average, and still make more money then listing on eBay or TCG, because you won’t have to deal with fees, shipping, or supplies like toploaders, sleeves, printer ink, and envelopes. This is personally my favorite way to sell cards. You can almost always meet face-to-face to check condition of cards, you build a reputation as an honest seller, and both parties have the opportunity to negotiate. If my [card]Hero’s Downfall[/card]s aren’t selling on TCGplayer at $13.00, and I list them on my spreadsheet that I’m selling them at $11, I’ll probably take $10 if someone asks, considering the highest buylist price right now is $8.00.

3.5. Craigslist:

Craigslist doesn’t have to be the land of $300 shoeboxes of Ice Age commons. In addition to Facebook, posting reasonably-priced singles on Craigslist might bring players out of the woodwork. I’ve also heard that this is a good place to unload bulk commons and uncommons for anywhere from $8-$10 per thousand, where most retail stores will only give you $5 per thousand. This also beats dragging massive amounts of bulk to larger events, or eating shipping costs by sending it to stores in the mail.

4. Sell for your LGS:

This option will be feasible for fewer readers then the previous three, but I feel the need to mention it because it is a huge boon to the community if you can pull it off. I have lived in two cities in the past three years where the LGS was unable to sell MTG singles. While you do need a larger collection to attempt this, it’s an option to offer a deal with your LGS owner: if they can provide you with the space to sell cards, then they can take a cut of your profits. Even if they don’t have a spare glass display case, you can generally find those on Craigslist for only a couple hundred dollars, a cost you might be able to split with the LGS.

If you’re a regular FNM goer, this doesn’t have to be much more effort than you already put into MTG finance. Just restock the case when you stop by as you normally would. Selling cards out of a display case also gives you an opportunity to get cards for buylist prices.

5. Buylists:

I have to admit, I cringe at the word “buylist” sometimes. To a lot of players, buylisting means getting rid of cards at much lower than full value, taking hours to fill an online shopping cart, sort the cards in the correct set order, and then waiting forever to get paid, only for the store to reduce your payment because they felt that the cards were not up to their standards of NM. Sometimes these things can indeed happen.

Buylisting is my least favorite part of making money off of Magic, but sometimes it can be a necessary evil. Buylisting copies of [card]Dark Confidant[/card], [card]Snapcaster Mage[/card], and other liquid staples generally isn’t the correct play, but where else are you going to get someone to pay you the TCG mid price of $.50 for each of your [card]Judge’s Familiar[/card]s or [card]Selesnya Charm[/card]s? This is where buylisting comes in handy, especially if you tend to purchase a lot of collections, since you probably have a lot of playable commons and uncommons around.

Since buylisting is so boring and time-consuming (well, at least for me. If you actually enjoy the process, you might be able to market yourself off to lazier financiers such as myself), some noble paragons from the MTG finance heavens have created tools to help us quickly determine which stores have the highest buylist prices. Quiet Speculation’s Trader Tools, a wonderful little program found at mtg.gg, lets you search for the highest buylist price of any card. If you want to see which store is offering that price, though, you’ll have to subscribe to become an Insider at the site, which grants a bunch of other neat features. MTG Price also offers a buylist aggregator on its website, so you can figure out exactly to which store you should send your 10+ copies of [card]Exsanguinate[/card]. Each program has some stores that the other doesn’t, so using both can secure you maximum value. In my experience, Card Kingdom, ABU Games, Adventures On, and Troll and Toad consistently have the highest buy prices and process orders quickly.

Now You Know Your Outs

I hope that at least some of this information was new to everyone, because it’s a goal of mine as a writer to make sure that readers walk away with something new every piece. I know that this article could be improved, so please use the comment section below. Have constructive criticism as to outlets left out? Care to critique the content of the article itself? Here’s your chance. I want to learn from my readers as much as you do from me. Also, I’m looking to name my column, and am very open to ideas. Thanks for reading!

DJ Johnson – A Smartphone is Only as Smart as its User

Hello everyone, and welcome to a new article series here on BrainstormBrewery.com. My name is Douglas (DJ) Johnson, and I’m here to aid the Brew Crew in the never-ending goal of helping you squeeze monetary value out of this card game that we all know and love. Seeing as I’m the new kid on the block, I’ll take a moment to introduce myself and explain my background, both in Magic and life in general.

I’m a 19-year-old college sophomore from upstate New York who has been playing competitive Magic for about three years now, since Scars of Mirrodin. I’m not a huge PTQ grinder, I’ve only been to one GP in my life, and I’ve only attended a few SCG Open Series events. I don’t get the chance to travel much between school, not having a car, and not having the capital to afford hotel/gas/entry for a large-scale tournament, at least not more than once or twice a semester. The most interesting or unique attribute about me is that I won a $20,000 scholarship from Gamers Helping Gamers because I play Magic. Lesson #1 if you’re a college-aged Magic player looking to save money: look for every scholarship possible, and apply for this one. I’m not here to give you a complete analysis of the current top five draft picks, or a sick new Modern brew that nobody has thought of yet. I want to explain the methods that I’ve utilized to go from “random FNM grinder kid” to “random FNM grinder with an abnormally huge collection for a 19-year-old kid who didn’t break the bank.”

Finally, Content!

Let’s start by reminiscing about the past. For those of you who have done a lot of trading, you probably remember participating in (or observing) some absurdly lopsided deals, on either side of a transaction. I remember when I first started playing years ago, I brought my Yu-Gi-Oh! tin full of Magic cards to an LGS in Syracuse. I let some people look through my pathetic collection, and I took out some sweet new cards from their binders for my GW token/life-gain deck, including a [card]Beastmaster Ascension[/card], [card]Celestial Mantle[/card], [card]Conquerer’s Pledge[/card], and [card]Emeria Angel[/card], plus a stack of commons and ucommons. The only thing my trade partner wanted at the time was a [card]Noble Hierarch[/card]. My thought was that I could probably just swap it out for another basic land, or a [card]Llanowar Elf[/card]. The exalted didn’t even matter that much in my deck, I thought…DONE! I walked away with a bunch of cards, none the wiser that I had given away a $20+ card for a bunch of sub-$1 rares (some of them are higher than $1 now, but you get my point). I didn’t learn until much later how bad of a deal I had gotten, and I resolved to never “lose” during a trade again.

Granted, we’ve all heard these kinds of stories, and I’ve done my share of taking advantage of deals that were way too good to pass up. What does that have to do with anything nowadays, though? Personally, I’ve noticed a drastic decrease in these opportunities in the past couple of years. You don’t see many insanely lopsided trades anymore, because there is a fairly recent tool that saves the newbie from total financial ruin. Some of you might know what I’m hinting at: the primary cause of this dry well of free money is none other than the smartphone. And you know what? That’s a good thing. There are far fewer opportunities for PTQ-grinder Spikes to see a [card]Death Baron[/card] or [card]Nightveil Specter[/card] in a 14-year-old’s plastic tin of cards and shark them out of it for nothing. Even brand-new players can say: “Let me check the value on that really quick.” Smartphones provide a failsafe to prevent value traders from taking greed too far, and that’s okay. When a greedy shark rips a new player off so badly that it makes him rage quit the game, us honest traders lose out on a future customer. I forget where I heard this, but it applies to the Magic finance world very nicely: “You can sheer a sheep as much as you like, but you can only skin it once.”

But what does that mean for us, though? Smartphones certainly aren’t without their downsides in the trading world. I’m sure that I’m not alone in being frustrated when trading and my trade partner, adding up the values on his smartphone, asks me, “Well, my cards are $0.49 more valuable than yours. Can I find a couple other things?” and then proceeds to check the value on every single bulk rare they pull out of the box I hand them. Traders like this walk away unhappy over losing out on $0.03, and believe that you sharked them. One of the downsides of these devices is that they increase the paranoia of the newer grinders. They have heard war stories and legends of trading bloodbaths where their friend got screwed over by not getting out his trusty phone, so they have to make sure everything is even. EXACTLY EVEN.

Based on what I’ve vomited onto the page so far, it probably sounds like these devices are the equivalent of a medieval chastity belt to people trying to make value from trading cards. But fear not! The situation is not as dire as one might think. There are still ways to increase the value of your collection while out on the trade floor, even when your partner is wielding what they think to be a piece of Verizon kryptonite. I’m here to give you some handy tips on exchanging pieces of cardboard with people who are afraid of being sharked, think they’re a value trader themselves, or are just plain out to shark you.

1. Let your partner decide what pricing system they want to use

If you start a trade with someone and they ask about how much a card in your binder is, offer to let them use whatever pricing system they like. Different websites and online stores use different pricing systems based on their own needs, and you can use this to your advantage. If you memorize which stores have certain prices for certain cards, you can create a serious advantage for yourself by knowing which price points are closest to the “true value” of the card. Let’s use an example to try and work out how we can take advantage of this.

Most players agree that Star City Games overprices their singles by a bit, yet there are a lot of traders out there who will agree to trade by SCG prices saying, “Yes, it’s overpriced, but it’s all overpriced by the same amount.” This is the mistake that can let you trade up. While there is one camp of players who abides by SCG’s rule of law, there are (in my personal experience) more traders out there who believe that the average price from TCG Player is the true market value of a card. The spread between these two price margins is where we can get rid of cards that are inflated by SCG’s prices, and obtain cards that are closer to the real market value. For a simple example, let’s say that our trade partner wants to use SCG prices, and they want our [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card]. By SCG pricing, the [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card] is $29.99, but the TCG average is only around $25. Now we can look for cards with prices that are much closer together. [card]Hallowed Fountain[/card]s are $9.99 each on SCG, but the average on TCGplayer is only about a dollar less. If we get rid of the [card]Sphinx’s Revelation[/card] at $30, for three [card]Hallowed Fountain[/card]s that also add up to $30, our trade partner is happy because the trade is even. However, we’re even happier, because we turned $25 in TCG Player value into $28.

Making trades like this one requires a lot of up-to-date knowledge on the larger websites’ prices, but there are opportunities for much larger profits than the one I outlined in the above example. Putting in the effort to know the price differences between sites can really help you raise the value of your collection, while keeping your trade partner left feeling satisfied. In addition, the potential for profit in each trade goes up a lot higher when your trade partner says, “I don’t care which pricing system we use, as long as it’s the same one.” Figure out what website to use based on their binder contents, and you’ll be able to trade for value that your partner won’t see. However, be careful with this tool when you spend a lot of time trading at a local level. If you constantly swap pricing when trading at a local level, your trade partners might start to think you are out to shark them by taking advantage of different price systems at different times. Try to focus on a single website when you’re asked to look up card prices, but always be aware of the other websites.

2. “Sold Out” (or close to it)

When checking the prices on a smartphone, sometimes it’s better to use the actual retail website instead of a third-party site or app that sources its info. One of the main reasons for this is to see how many copies of that card a vendor has in stock. If we check out SCG’s prices on Lorwyn [card]Thoughtseize[/card], they have the price set at $39.99, but they claim to have none left in stock. When SCG gets more Lorwyn copies in stock, they’ll most likely raise the price on them, because they sold out at the previous price. That’s all the more reason for you to try and get copies at the “sold out” SCG price. Additional evidence of this is that the TCG Player average of an old [card]Thoughtseize[/card] is $43 and change. There’s an advantage to be had for being the guy who looks up the actual listing of the card, instead of trusting a blank page with a number on it that a smartphone application might display.

Being 100% sold out isn’t a reason to stray away from a trade target, either. As my fellow BSB writer Enmou Gao wrote in a recent article, [card]Threads of Disloyalty[/card] is a great target to pick from the binder of a paranoid trader who trusts his phone more than anything. As I’m writing this, there is only a single page of listings of the card on eBay, only 25 sellers on TCGplayer selling the card, and only nine NM copies available. While the phone will still spit out a price of $7 from TCG average or $8 on SCG (sold out), the fact remains that there are very few copies of this card out there at the moment, and a spike in price seems likely. Targeting these in trade seems like a great plan with little to no downside.

3. Be honest, build a reputation.

This tip works less when trading at larger PTQs, GPs, and SCG opens, and more for your local FNMS, 1k events, and such. Trading with a phone takes time. It might sound minor, but if you add up each second spent typing in URLs, waiting for pages to load, or just waiting for your phone to start, you’ll find a lot of wasted time. If you spend enough time around the trade tables at your local store and are consistent with your pricing, eventually people might just start to trust your pricing (crazy, right?). Note that I am not saying this in order for you to form bonds and relationships, then to go abuse those once your partner is relaxed around you enough to not pull out their smartphone. This is not the goal. Ripping people off by intentionally misnaming prices will only lead to you being labeled as a shark. The goal is to simply save time.

You can still use the previous two suggestions in addition to searching for speculation targets if you are looking to make money off of trading. The point here is that by being honest and consistent with your pricing, you might just be able to get your trade partner to trust you, taking minutes off of each trade you make. Minutes off of each trade add up, and you’ll be able to get a lot more done in a shorter time span. Finance is about efficiency in time, as well as money.

Conclusion

Well, I hope I’ve helped some of you in your trading endeavors. I don’t want this to seem like an article designed to help you rip off players despite their smartphones, but as a way to still increase your own card value during a trade without the other person losing out. Join me next time when I discuss the possible outs you have as a player for your cards, no matter what scale of inventory you maintain.

On a personal note, this is my first article that’s not related to school or college applications, so I appreciate any and all constructive criticism on my writing style, content, or anything else of note. I may not (yet) be a grinder who top eights all of the local PTQs or travels across multiple states for a GP, but I want to start leaving my mark on this game in my own way. If that way happens to be writing an article series for an amazing podcast team who helps people to make money off of a trading card game, then so be it. Thanks for reading!