For the past year now I’ve been dabbling a little in eBay selling whatever I could around the house. Dolls, magazines, electronics, coin collections. But what I enjoyed the most was Magic the Gathering. I’ve been playing, collecting, and trading M:TG cards off and on since I got into the game back in 1995. I love looking through collections, sorting cards. I’ve made a few dollars here and there. Nothing major. But it’s good to have a hobby that brings in money rather than the reverse.
So my post here is to ask all past Magic the Gathering players who are interested in selling off their collection (or even just a portion of their collection) to sell to me. Basically what I’d want is
a) the (approximate) total number of cards you’d be selling.
b) Any highlights about the collection you’d care to point out.
c) What years you played/collected so I have a general sense of what I’ll be getting.
d) card condition across the collection
For a general collection, I’ll pay at a rate of 1 cent per card (or $10.00 per thousand). I find this tends to even itself out over the long run of commons that aren’t worth anything and some of the “crap” rares that might generously be worth a quarter.
I’ll pay your shipping too! If nothing else, it’ll get some clutter out of your house and into mine!
Now if you feel you have a better collection than my bulk rate would suggest, I’ll be glad to work on an individual basis to strike a fair deal.
You can reply here, or PM me, or we can work through private e-mail. Whatever you prefer. To let you all know, in order to protect myself I’m going to request that you ship first and I pay when the cards are received. After a decade of posting on this message board, I’m not about to ruin my reputation over a few dollars so I hope that you can trust me to keep to our agreement.
Let me know if you have any questions! Thanks for your interest!
Complete sets, yes. Prices would be on a set by set basis.
Foils (rares and otherwise) absolutely. Again if there are particular ones we need to work out a price on, we can. Otherwise, we can do it by a separate bulk rate depending on how many there are in the collection.
I’m probably going to have to pass on the Vanguard/Plane chase ones. Never really collected them and I’m honestly not sure yet about their general collectibility.
A couple thousand cards, I’d imagine. Will count more accurately once we’ve started talking about it. I played from Alpha to, oh, Dark, I guess, with some other crap thrown in there occasionally. Quite a few Alpha, Beta, Arabian, Unlimited, Dark.
I’ve pared down most of the good, good stuff over the years, but I still have in my sideboard ( ):
Beta Demonic Tutor
Alpha Bayou
Maze of Ith
Mishra’s Factory (were there different versions?)
Beta Clone
Unlimited Chaos Orb
Beta Ice Storm
All are in played condition. Not mint, but not beat to hell.
No interest at all in the game anymore. Need money.
I’m going to send you a PM. I think the next step is to really nail down the condition of some of these cards and then we can work out a price. Thanks for your interest!
I’ll be happy to send you a list of what I’ve got, but the bulk rate wouldn’t interest me much. The last time I looked through an issue of Scrye, even the cheapest cards were 10 to 20 cents, and when my bookstore used to sell Magic: the Gathering cards, random lands went for a dime. So even if wholesale is half of retail, a penny a card sounds low by a factor of five.
I don’t play anymore, and I know there aren’t any $10 rares sitting in the random collection (the stuff that isn’t in the decks), but there are some really good cards in my decks (all of my decks have protective sleeves).
I can understand where you’re coming from, but your assessment isn’t accurate. The prices you find in Scrye are going to be representative of low and high prices you’d find if you were buying that individual card at a card shop. A card store that has extensive overhead and needs a substantial profit margin to stay afloat. So a card like Gray Ogre may go for 10 cents or 25 cents in the price guide but no one would pay for that because the card isn’t collectible or desirable to anyone outside the one guy in a thousand putting together a jank deck and wants to throw in a silly useless common. There’s no possible way that I could sell that card for a quarter. Even cards that are legitimately worth a quarter are really difficult to sell as is.
And the point of all that is there are tons and tons of “gray ogres” in everyone’s collections. Hundreds and thousands of cards worth zippity doo dah, price guide be damned. So what I’m offering, what I’m paying, is for the right to buy up everything of yours in one fell swoop, crap and good cards alike, and get them all out of your hair.
If I’m lucky, I’ll find a few cards here and there I can piece together to make some money. That takes a considerable amount of time.
I guess the bottom line is that my prices are actually in line with bulk lots you’ll see auctioned off online.
And none of this procludes negotiation if you know your collection is worth more than the minimum buy rate.
Also, Scrye ceased publication some time ago. There is no market for a print magazine providing price data, when prices can change radically.
I could do with the money but I suspect that transatlantic shipping costs would be prohibitive, at least for the full collection. (Besides, it includes a complete Beta set.) What I do have are three old folders (if I can locate them), and some foils including a batch of rares from Urza’s Legacy. They’ll need flattening first though. Let me know if you might be interested and I’ll try and trace the folders.
I like the sound of that. Most of the rare treasures I have collected over the years have left my house in this way.
I have a couple of original packs from when the game first came out plus some assorted booster packs. None of my friends play but I can’t bring myself to pitch them in the trash. You may be my only hope. I’ll check the treasure chest tonight and see if there are enough to be worth the trouble.
Well if it includes a complete Beta set, I can guarantee that shipping across the ocean wouldn’t be prohibitive. But I also know that I almost wouldn’t have the available cash on hand to make you a serious offer. Well maybe anyway.
If you’re serious about selling that collection, I’ve got a good friend who’s a dealer and he would be interested in the Beta set. I think it’s possible to work something out.
Ender’s assessment of bulk rates is spot on, FYI. He’s not ripping anyone off with that price. I recently bought a bunch of bulk commons/uncommons from a dealer for proxy purposes and paid $15 per thousand. That store would certainly not buy them back from me at $10 per thousand.
Yea, if anything a penny per card, no matter what the card is, is fairly generous. Most dealers won’t touch commons at all, and the bulk rare rate is 10-15 cents per. If I were in his shoes I probably wouldn’t offer that at all because 99.9% of commons have no value. Commons from long out of print sets and a handful of staple commons are the exception.
Planechase/Archenemy are virtually worthless because they’re in print. The older Vanguard cards I’ve seen go for anywhere from $2-$10.
I’ve been considering eBaying a bunch of stuff recently, but eBay is such a huge pain to deal with. I’ll put together a list of some stuff I was going to get rid of that I don’t care about. Probably not much of my older stuff, but I have some newer stuff I can unload because I won’t play with it. Plus I haven’t popped my boxes of Scars of Mirrodin yet. If I get some hot cards that I don’t see myself ever using, I could offload those.
Are you at all interested in a 1996 World Championship box set? It’s not sealed, but I believe only two of the decks have been played with, and they’re all in great condition.
There are eight decks in that set right? And you’re saying that six are still sealed?
Are the other two fully intact? Yes I’d be interested in purchasing it. Pm me and we can work the details out. Thanks!
There wasn’t a 1996 world championship box set. There was a 1996 pro tour collector set(8 decks which were considered a sampling of the dominant archetypes of the tour), but the world championships didn’t start having their decks collected and printed until 1997. The world championship box sets are all the top 4 decks from each year from 1997-2004(2005? I’ve seen conflicting sources) when they stopped printing the wold championship decks.
I remember this because I used to play with George Baxter and he carried his deck of the day around in the box which had his name and signature on it, which was from the 1996 pro tour collector’s set. I always thought it was a waste of money to buy those non-legal sets, but the shoe is on the other foot now youbetcha.
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