(no subject)
Fell down a rabbit hole this weekend of pricing Magic cards. Basically, as part of tidying up the library, Alex and I decided that realistically, we're just not going to get back into playing with our old Magic cards, and my default reaction was to say that in that case, we should just chuck them out but Alex was sure that we ought to do *something* with them - perhaps sell them, perhaps pass them on to someone who still plays. We couldn't think of anyone in the latter category, so on Saturday morning, I started looking into selling options. I'd initially assumed that we'd just sell the whole thing in bulk to someone, perhaps through GamesKeeper, and was focused on finding out what a sensible "lucky dip" type price would be but all the threads I found seemed to suggest that you should sell the singles yourself. Even that might not have convinced me on it's own, but for two things - number one was that I recognized at least two high value cards as ones I was certain I had somewhere (we're talking over £100 per card here) and number two was that I found a site specifically dedicated to providing a UK market place for Magic singles, meaning I wouldn't have to worry about complicated postage problems.
I decided to give it a try so I took one of our boxes of old decks and went through about half of them, pulled all the rares and uncommons and then went through and listed them. I found one of the really valuable cards I'd remembered in the process and by the time I'd listed them all the collection was worth about £500, which made me decide to take the plunge and go the whole hog. Over the rest of the weekend, I sorted about 40% of the boxes and listed all the rares/uncommons I could easily identify and the collection is now worth about £2500, which is a significant chunk of a holiday if it actually sells. The big unknown at the moment is how much of it actually will sell. I did get one sale almost immediately but it was for a card that I realised afterwards I'd significantly underpriced so that's not necessarily an indication of how busy things will be but I guess I can only wait and see. If it goes well, there are lots of cards still in the boxes that might be worth something because they're from an era when the rares/uncommons weren't given gold and silver symbols to make them easier to spot but I'm probably not going to do that trawl through unless there's enough volume on the easy cards that it seems worthwhile. I'll probably finish the rest of the boxes over a few evenings in front of the TV though. On the off chance anyone on here is interested, you can see the collection here: https://lilianamarket.co.uk/tinyo
Something about the whole process of sorting and listing was rather hypnotic though and I ended up basically spending the whole weekend doing it rather than, say doing the gardening. Still, it is useful, at least in theory, so I guess that's not too bad.
I decided to give it a try so I took one of our boxes of old decks and went through about half of them, pulled all the rares and uncommons and then went through and listed them. I found one of the really valuable cards I'd remembered in the process and by the time I'd listed them all the collection was worth about £500, which made me decide to take the plunge and go the whole hog. Over the rest of the weekend, I sorted about 40% of the boxes and listed all the rares/uncommons I could easily identify and the collection is now worth about £2500, which is a significant chunk of a holiday if it actually sells. The big unknown at the moment is how much of it actually will sell. I did get one sale almost immediately but it was for a card that I realised afterwards I'd significantly underpriced so that's not necessarily an indication of how busy things will be but I guess I can only wait and see. If it goes well, there are lots of cards still in the boxes that might be worth something because they're from an era when the rares/uncommons weren't given gold and silver symbols to make them easier to spot but I'm probably not going to do that trawl through unless there's enough volume on the easy cards that it seems worthwhile. I'll probably finish the rest of the boxes over a few evenings in front of the TV though. On the off chance anyone on here is interested, you can see the collection here: https://lilianamarket.co.uk/tinyo
Something about the whole process of sorting and listing was rather hypnotic though and I ended up basically spending the whole weekend doing it rather than, say doing the gardening. Still, it is useful, at least in theory, so I guess that's not too bad.