MTG thread

mtgprice.com Is a decent place to get info on individual cards, and, handily, it will point you towards the "Buylists" that are currently paying the most for cards. Buylisting (selling directly to a card sales website) gets you less money than ebaying, but is generally faster, easier, and safer (while ebay scamming isn't super common, it's not rare either).

Few ways to liquidate listed from most to least value out of your cards.

-Privately sell every card of value (ebay etc)
-Find a vendor/LGS that will take them for store credit who has shit you'll use the credit on.
-Privately sell in one or more big lots
-If you have a LGS with their shit together enough to do single sales you can often do a little better than you would buylisting to the big guys by going in and haggling if you know what you have, what they can sell it for(if), and reasonable expectations.
-Buylist them out to a LEGIT buyer. Research the folks you buy list to before you send them $500-1000+ in cards please. Some places are notorious for high buylist prices but impossible card condition standards or just general shady shit all the way up to outright theft.

You just need to figure out what all you have and that's a huge PITA because 95+% of whatever cards you have are probably worthless. But if you put in the time to sort and ballpark it and have some desirable stuff there might even be a couple folks here who would do you better than buylist prices.

Ebay is a huge hassle. Buylisting will get you out the door with a check that day, but you can likely expect about 50% of the cash value you see online. Those prices factor in a lot of business expenses that the brick and mortar stores incur staying afloat, plus shipping, transaction fees etc. It's a good metric for trade value, but as a private seller you really shouldn't expect to get that much.

I buy a lot of singles off private sellers looking to move individual staples or collections. It varies widely in terms of what I'll offer, but my standard rule of thumb is to look at what shops are paying in store credit for a single, and offer right around that as a cash price. Example: Underground Sea is a $300 card on Starcity, ~$255 on TCG for NM. SCG is buying NM Seas at $175, but they're extremely strict on grading. A LP Sea is $150. They also give 25% as a bonus if you take store credit over cash, so $218 NM or $168 LP. Based on what I can pay on TCG and what SCG is paying, I'd probably offer $220 if it were pristine, or about $175 if it were LP. Anything more than that, and I may as well pay the premium to a shop where I can flip junk cards to offset the price and have no concerns whatsoever about authenticity.

While coming in $80 under the retail price might seem low, I'm really not "making" any money on the transaction. It's a sunk cost for me, and I would need to trade that card at or near retail to see any real profit. I can't just go flip it to a vendor and pocket any cash. A brick and mortar isn't going to make enough off the sale to offset its costs at that either, so if I were a shop I would be buying inventory at far too high a price to remain in business. It's just a reasonable value for both parties, factoring out all the nonsense either of us would have to pay for dealing with an actual business.

The same thing applies for lower end cards as well, provided that it isn't just bulk. I'll make a reasonable cash offer that comes in somewhere above what the seller could get from a shop, and below retail. If it's a collection, I'm not going to inventory the entire thing. I'll just ballpark the value based on a quick sift through the boxes and then ask what the seller wants. If it's close to reasonable, I'll usually pick it up and then pay some kid in cardboard to sort it all for me.

As someone who relatively recently cashed out entirely, do NOT bother trying to do it privately/through Ebay. It's a pain in the dick and not worth your time. Find a local shop that will buy it, or just ship it all to troll n toad or starcity or something and be done with it, collect your free money then never worry about it again.

The absolute golden scenario is to go to a comic/nerd/anime convention or something near you where one of the big vendors has a booth and sell it all to them direct there.

If you just find the cards in your house or your parent's house or whatever pretty much any scenario is golden.

Punko_sl said:

there are no golden scenarios when selling non-bulk 15-40% below the price

troll and toad offering 84$ for an english NM futuresight Goyf, the cheapest (bent + spanish) one available on Magiccardmarket is 103?, 110? being more realistic

stop selling to stores, pls

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uhh.. what? The less inventory sold to stores, the higher their margins have to become to stay profitable, and the prices of cards would go up.

Where do you suggest a private individual sell their cards if they need cash? Even ebay is going to take 10-15% between their fee and paypal fees, and you won't get the same total sale price as a retail site.

Most people don't want to spend dozens and dozens of hours sorting/listing/shipping cards out piece meal to make an extra 10-15%.

If you aren't a vendor, the retail price of a card is completely irrelevant to you regarding the cash value of your cards.

I buy and sell crap professionally (not MtG cards, thank god) and if I could I'd sell every single thing I own in this world right now this second for 80% of full retail price. Box it up, truck it out.

There's nothing offensive about that Goyf offer at all.

You're confusing people who still give a shit about the game with people that literally haven't touched it in 15 years that want to offload their apparently valuable cardboard that's sitting in a basement someplace. None of them are going to have any "private buyers" to sell to and Ebay is a shitshow that isn't worth the time/effort for most people. Hell, they might not even have a local card shop to sell their shit to.

Punko_sl said:

to another private buyer

afaik the difference between 83$ and 120$ is not "10-15%" either, i did mention non-bulk also

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Ok, lets that NM Future Sight Tarmogoyf.

On ebay, the most recent completed auctions for a NM are between 140-160. Let's call it 150. Ebay and paypal take roughly 15% of that, so you lose 22.50. Then, you pay about $2-3 to ship it with tracking at the least, more if you insure it. So, we've 'made' about 125 now.
The highest buylist offer, according to quiet speculation's tool, is $110 and their are multiple offers close to $100.
So, that's about 15-25% extra profit selling it on ebay. But, those shipping fees are a flat value, they eat a much higher percentage of your profit when dealing with lower price cards, such as under $20.

If you only ship in a regular envelope, with no tracking, you can get away with just a stamp, so then your total shipping costs come down about 60 cents per package. But, you also will have about 1 out of 40 packages 'lost' according to the buyer. The post office really does misplace roughly 1 out of 80-100 packages, even when I've used tracking, but whether it's dishonest buyers or the post office being more careless with regular packages, more issues come up.

That's not even factoring the time you spent doing any of this, which becomes a pretty low hourly rate dealing with the sub-$40 cards. Or, the fact that you will NEVER sell 100% of your cards at those prices. You will have some amount left over after however much work you put in, that you then either sell as a lot to someone for less money anyways, or have to buylist.

TCG allows individuals to sell on there, but not everyone wants to be bothered with the effort to make a little bit more money. If their job pays them a 40k+ salary, the difference in profit would have to be over $20/hr for most people to care.

Until two months ago, I was selling on TCG and when you scale it up, those 10-20% profits can be a sustainable business. But, again, not everyone wants to be a mtg vendor, even part time.

edit: double post, database errors..

Punko_sl said:

you are from chicago telling people to ship their cards to stores

because there is no local community of any kind in your small town? i don't get it

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Ok, you are either trolling or have no reading comprehension. He never referred to his town specifically, we are talking about why people, in general, would want to sell to an online store (which pay better then many LGS anyway).

Next you're gonna try and tell me I'm a sucker for not redeeming every shitty 10$ mail in rebate I get on junk I buy from Newegg.

Son, time is money, and most peoples time is worth more than this piddly shit.

Or not fixing every problem with your car yourself, always building your own PC, growing your own food in your backyard, sewing your own clothes from scratch...

Also worth considering that cards get lost in the mail - even if you ship it with tracking it is a huge pain in the ass to get any compensation. If you are lucky and get anything it takes a long ass time and a lot of effort.

Ebay don't give a shit about sellers either. Guy sells a few boxes of sealed Modern Masters, buyers opens all the packs, keeps the tasty stuff and sends the rest back opened. Ebay refund the buyer and screws over the seller. Loads of horror stories like this amongst communities of sellers. I wouldn't touch ebay with a bargepole.

Facebook groups are a decent place to sell stuff, but then what you're selling needs to be interesting enough that people want it.

enzie_sl said:

Or not fixing every problem with your car yourself, always building your own PC, growing your own food in your backyard, sewing your own clothes from scratch...

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Naw bro I can get like 2 oil filters and a quart of oil at autozone for under 20$, no fucking way am I paying the jiffy lube guy 25$, that's a ripoff!

The most cost efficient way to sell-out magic collections is to not do so. Because if you do so, you've triggered the Universe's "Force Him To Play Magic Again At Some Point And Greatly Regret The Sell-off" subroutine.

Cards rotting in your basement produce a miasma that wards off this effect.

I can't believe none of you mentionedMtgfanatic - Buy Magic the Gathering Cards and Singles
for selling. I've posted about them here before and they rock. I used a couple other sites until I discovered mtgfanatic and I never went back. I have never, ever seen anyone pay near as close to as what they do and they have only ever rejected maybe 2 cards out of hundreds that I've shipped them. And they didn't really reject them, they just lowered the grading that I sold it as. I assumed something was NM when it was not, and just got a little bit less because I selected that option.

I've used them for years, they are quick and pay very well. Sometimes they even pay more for cards that are in worse condition than ones that are in better condition (it's very strange... like sometimes I would have a NM and the buy price would be lower than Played so I'd just sell it as played with no problems) and more for non foils than foils, although it's rare. My point is they just pay really, really well. For fucksake it says they are paying $175 for PLAYED Future Sight Tarmogoyfs!! I have no fucking clue how they make any money lol. It's hard to believe really. Maybe they haven't updated their prices or something, or they changed their format and I'm misreading, either way, they still offer the best prices I've ever seen. I remember selling like 25 Cabal Coffers to them a few years ago for like $9 each when they were on Ebay as a buyout for less lol.