After literally years of threatening to do it, and a couple of false starts, I’ve finally gotten serious about selling my Magic: the Gathering collection. I don’t have a trove of uber-valuable stuff; what I’ve got is thousands upon thousands of cards that can be sold in the $1 to $10 range. This has two distinct subjects on my mind, tangentially related at the point “Magic cards for sale.” The first subject is a ramble about which cards are worth what, and the second is how to go about selling cards should you want to do it yourself.
Let me get this out of the way now, and I promise only to do it once: you can visit my eBay store here, or check out my auctions here. Ok, back to blogging.
It shouldn’t surprise me, and yet I’m constantly fascinated by what certain cards are worth. Not in that generic “can you believe the prices people pay for little pieces of cardboard?!”; I got over that years ago when I bought my own Moxes. No, I just mean the fluctuation in the markets for certain cards.
Example #1: A couple years ago I was sorting through some artist proofs I have and, pondering a sale like the one I’m doing now, I checked some prices. One card I barely thought worth checking was Mishra’s Workshop, a cute little land that provides extra mana that can only be used on artifacts. It was never that big a deal back when I was playing, so imagine my surprise when I discovered it was far north of $100 (it now goes for north of $200…) . I still don’t know what the decks look like that are packing this thing, although my Holmesian powers of detection lead me to believe that artifacts are involved.
Example #2: The last block I seriously paid any attention to was Invasion; it was a mixture of timing (I had lots of free time), money (I was single and living below my means, so cash was easy to come by), and a set I found appealing. Anyway, a crucially important card at the time was Urza’s Rage - uncounterable red damage at two levels. Nice. The card went from anywhere between $12 and $25 depending on where you lived and how close a major tournament was on the calendar. Of course I knew it would probably not be AS valuable now… still, seeing that my set of four Rages is going to be good for about four bucks comes as something of a shock.
Example #3: Tempest had a popular-at-the-time land called Reflecting Pool; it taps to provide mana of any color you can already produce. Terrible if it’s the only land in your hand, doesn’t fix a missing color, but provides you with flexibility once your base is at least stable. It was $5 to $8 back in the day, then it rotated out of use and became trade cannon fodder. Well, the card is reprinted in the newest block and is apparently quite a hit, because the card is now going for $10-$11. This is nice to discover when you have 13 of them gathering dust in a box in your closet. Also happily, I have more stories like this than the Urza’s Rage one.
Variations on these three themes make up my last week or so, and will pop up again and again over the next call-it-four months while I sell off the stuff in my closet. What really gets me, in the end, is how macro the Magic market is, and yet how micro it feels when you’re actually making trades or acquiring the cards you need for a deck. To quote I have no idea who: perspective is a bitch.
{ 0 comments… add one now }