It's important to note this isn't a thread for people looking to get rich quick. This thread is for theory crafting as to what, theoretically, would be the best way to make the most profit.
Rules:
1. You may deal with cards only, and only like a player would, not like a store would. This means "open a store" and "sell cheap boosters" are not valid answers.
2. No scams, no stealing, no misleading.
3. If luck is a factor, it's still valid. Sometimes you have to crack a pack to make money.
4. Mention "startup cost" and maybe even total time in your post. Sometimes the richest method isn't always the fastest, the cheapest, the most efficient, or the safest odds of success.
5. This post isn't about a way to make a lot of money, but the best way to make the most money possible. This means that a really, really poor profit for a lot of effort could be the best method.
That being said, I'm going to give my theory, please feel free to share yours!
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Essentially, the idea is trading up, up, up.
Start out with buying a booster box of an expensive set that has a lot of staples. In this case, it's going to be a generic $500 box. Purchase that box, crack that packs. The hope is to crack at least $400 worth of cards that cost more than $2-3. From here, take those cards and find someone in person to trade with. The goal is to get at least 1/6th more than their value, to 1/4th more than their value. A lot of people have no problem trading down for good cards, as it's easier than simply trying to sell the cards individually. The goal is to get 4-5 cards worth, total, $85 dollars for a $70 dollar card.
Then from here, repeat the process again. Get 4-5 cards worth $25 dollars for a $20 card. Then, repeat this once more, getting 4-5 $7-8 dollars worth of cards for a $5 card.
After doing this a total of three times, you can then take them all to puca-trade and wait, In the end, what was once $400 worth of cards is now worth $640, with a profit of $140.
A lot of effort for little reward, but I imagine that if your luck is right, you could work your way up to cracking some alpha edition magic and praying for the big dogs. It's like the lottery, except if you fail, you still have some sweet cards to play with.
Do we break rule #2 or just wait for stupid or inexperienced card buyers?
Which is still breaking rule #2 in my mind. Your advice basically constitutes lying or begging and starts you off with a $500 entry fee to boot.
My "theory" doesn't constitute any lying or begging. At more than few LGS I've been to, there are always people who are willing to trade slightly more value for convenience.
If you have a sensei's divining top (about $28) that I really want, there are a few options I have.
*I can pay the full price at my LGS.
*I can sell twice as many cards at my LGS to get the money needed.
*i can sell a playset of Sorin, Solemn Visitors ($32) at a slightly cheaper price so as not to wait too long for a sale, do some waiting, then end up with $28.
*I can right there, right then choose to trade them to you for a $28 card.
That's the biggest reason the theory stated expensive staples, as I've seen people easily trade away a playset worth slightly more than a card for the convenience, especially if it's a playset of a card they don't have any use for.
To be fair, i had deals you wont belive, like getting a 15euro card for my 3 2Euro cards, all after informing my trading partner of the values of the cards. I offered he get more, but he didn´t find anything else he wanted to play, so he still wanted to make the deal, because he liked the cards he was getting and didn´t care for the money. Yet, such people are rare, and finding them as a concept seems...hard to do.
That's a bit different. Our goal is to obtain at least 1/6 more than the value, while you obtained 2.5x more than the value (what a trade!)
There are a lot of people who don't mind the extra few bucks lost compared to the hassle of their other options.
The problem of trading down is you end up with a lot of "junk" that might have a potential price tag, but nobody wants to buy that card or trade for it.
Also you end up with so many junk cards that its completly unrealistic to carry them around all the time and trading cards becomes completly nonsensical.
Imagine someone has a binder with high value cards. Its easy and convinient to trade with that person.
If someone has a giant box of cards, all low value, people wont most likely not even care to look at that card box and spend lots of time just looking for something they want. In addition it will damage your cards in a box in the long run, further decreasing value and its much more effort to find a card.
All in all, its short sighted, as the "cost" that comes with trading down can by far outweight the profit.
Getting 1$ money isnt worth the effort to search the giant box of cards.
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Trading and investment in general are something you cant really count on.
You start with an investment of say 500$ and the cards you get for that money might trade you "potential" value of say 1000$ of junk cards. Keep in mind that your junk only has a "potential" value, you still need to get the money from someone (which is fairly unlikely). In the end you want to have some quality cards and the low value cards you stock should be cards that can be potentially much more expensive, but thats quite a gamble.
You could put all your money into 0.01$ cards and if they go up to 0.02$ you would "potentially" double your money, but realisticly thats not the case, as you cannot get rid of all the junk cards, as nobody wants that many, unless you find just another more stupid investor that buys your junk (something that "can" work, but more often than not, such an investment turns out to be a major bad decision and you have to sell your cards at a much lower value than they would be in singles, like a box of 1000+ cards for 1$ or something, even then its hard to find someone that is actually interest in buying boxes of junk).
If you sit on cards and they go up in price its a good investment. Especially if you are not a player, you can buy lots of cards that end up in "pro-player" decks early in the season and hope they end up with good results.
Especially a winning Grand prix deck with some new cards has an impact on the prices of that cards, as people jump on them and you have to act quick to catch that up-trend.
Also if cards leave a format due to rotation, you have to get rid of them quickly, as its best right after the last bunch of big events, do not wait till the very last event. Thats also a time to get the most value out of your cards and you can "shift" that money into long term investment from older formats (especially allstars like Duals, Wasteland, Forces and such), which will keep or increase in value.
These "high value" cards you can then trade against lots of new fresh cards from the upcomming set to catch the up-trend of these cards again.
Rinse and repeat, buy, sell and trade cards to get the most value out of your collection ; this is quite an effort and you have to keep a constant check what cards might be hot or not in the future, so tournament results are important and trending in card prices are also important.
In short, it ends up just as a stock-market, with magic cards instead of other goods , and thats exactly the "job" you are doing to get any meaningful profit.
To increase the margin you want to go big and make a shop, let some lesser workers do the physical work , but that also means you need much more starting money, like allways in making a business.
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Cracking packs is a really bad investment. Ofcourse you can open insane value foil mythic cards or Expeditions, but thats so unlikely and especially unlikely to repeat that doing so is a poor decision if you want to make a "guaranteed" (or at least a very high chance) profit. the topic here is high-risk vs spreading-risk, you really REALLY do not want to put all your money on 1 outcome, and buying a box is exactly that, a 1 shot that is allmost guaranteed to cost you money.
If you want to open product you have to buy A LOT in big numbers, so you get them cheaper as you order so many and you have ways to get rid of them cheap aswell (only big stores can really do that and make a profit).
Opening a single box of expensive set is horrible way to go. There's 95% chance that you loose money out of it and 33% chance that you turn most of your initial investment into bulk. Opening 16-20 cases of the new set and selling singles would work, as one can get the average value of the cases when opening lot of them, but even that needs 8-10k cash to start. But that is lot of work and one needs a really good way to sell the cards.
The way most small time 'floor dealers' start is to purchase completet collections from people quitting Magic. That way you can usually get cards for store buy prices, and get good supply of staples, medium value cards and few bigger ticket cards, so you can cater to larger audiences. That collection is then traded into few expensive cards, which are sold to fund the next collection purchase. Initial investment is 300-2k$ and lot of time.
Unfortunately as it's the easiest way to build your trading stock, it's also the most competed area. Good collections go very fast and people have had to cut their margins quite a bit by now. Luckily there are some niches where most people are not willing to go, but those often either need larger start-up capitals or lot of elbow grease at (often below) minimum wage.
I'll use my own dealings as an example. I used to buy small collections, around 50-200$ each, In 1998 to 2001 that meant the collection had just few (1-12) dual lands and few thousand cards from alpha to Urza's block. These days those same collections would start at 500 to 1k$ and some of the stuff is still pretty unsellable, even if it has virtual value (Unpopular Legends commons with 16+ copies or common-sets of the Dark etc.) I then sold the cards through web auctions with minimal fees (not like feebay these days).
Then I moved to bit larger collections and at the same time values had gone up. Now I had to pay 1k$ for collections with a piece of power, piles of duals or playsets of Bazaars and Workshops. By 2006 the collections I bought were 2-6k$ and had up to full P9 and several complete vintage decks and lots of staples. Some sellers even flew in to sell their cards. Today I'm considering helping an former player to sell his complete Ul-set, and try to help him get 10k out of it. So I have found a good niche, collections which are too large for most private buyers. The big problems are where to sell cards, how to finance the initial buys and why should I do this when I can just spend time with my family and friends?
The third way to earn money is also something that has become harder these days: investing in sealed product. It has always been the most risk free way to earn money from this game, but interest rates were really bad until about 5 years back, when old product prices started going up fast. Now so many people do this that it takes forever for the market to churn through the supply of newly OOP product, so making money out of Return to Ravnica is much harder than from Innistrad and Khans will be even slower to gain than RTR. But if you are patient and have the funds, the profit is there. The big problem is usally how to unload your boxes (and cover postage), but if you can solve that, you are golden.
One good way remains unmentioned: Start writing popular and well thought out finance articles to one of the big sites. Use the credit you earn to bankroll your speculations and use that to play the game for free. There's room for few more really good writers out there.
Do we break rule #2 or just wait for stupid or inexperienced card buyers?
Which is still breaking rule #2 in my mind. Your advice basically constitutes lying or begging and starts you off with a $500 entry fee to boot.
My "theory" doesn't constitute any lying or begging. At more than few LGS I've been to, there are always people who are willing to trade slightly more value for convenience.
If you have a sensei's divining top (about $28) that I really want, there are a few options I have.
*I can pay the full price at my LGS.
*I can sell twice as many cards at my LGS to get the money needed.
*i can sell a playset of Sorin, Solemn Visitors ($32) at a slightly cheaper price so as not to wait too long for a sale, do some waiting, then end up with $28.
*I can right there, right then choose to trade them to you for a $28 card.
That's the biggest reason the theory stated expensive staples, as I've seen people easily trade away a playset worth slightly more than a card for the convenience, especially if it's a playset of a card they don't have any use for.
My apologies, I'm glad to hear you'd rather play the long game than take advantage of anyone.
I still don't think your theory is a good way to make money in mtg. Your entry price is higher than the total I've spent on mtg. As others have said you stand to lose money on average in your opening play. Trading up will take you longer than just working a minimum wage job. IMO.
The problem with this idea is that your goal is mostly infeasible. If I replace the "1/6" in your plan with "2/9", I've made a plan that pays out more profit and just as ambiguously likely to result in real gain.
We can break down your plan as:
1. Buy a box.
2. Open packs.
3. Sell things for more than their value via being more convenient than walking ten feet to the counter at your local LGS.
(1) and (2) almost always lose you money by necessity (if a box ever became less valuable than its contents, the price of the box would go up or contents would go down). So in order to break even, before even making a profit, you have to do (3), which as people have said is unrealistic at worst and incredibly time consuming at best.
Short of scamming people, or having a card massively spike in value, you don't. Ever.
As you pointed out, you are not a store. When its time to convert your cards back to cash, you're going to have to sell them to a buylist or through Ebay, so best cast scenario you'll lose 20% of the value in doing so. That should quite easily wipe out any of your, "profits."
The problem with this idea is that your goal is mostly infeasible. If I replace the "1/6" in your plan with "2/9", I've made a plan that pays out more profit and just as ambiguously likely to result in real gain.
We can break down your plan as:
1. Buy a box.
2. Open packs.
3. Sell things for more than their value via being more convenient than walking ten feet to the counter at your local LGS.
(1) and (2) almost always lose you money by necessity (if a box ever became less valuable than its contents, the price of the box would go up or contents would go down). So in order to break even, before even making a profit, you have to do (3), which as people have said is unrealistic at worst and incredibly time consuming at best.
It's like you completely missed my entire post about *why* it's a better option than buying the cards straight up.
5. This post isn't about a way to make a lot of money, but the best way to make the most money possible. This means that a really, really poor profit for a lot of effort could be the best method.[/b]
Almost everyone who has posted on this thread has completely missed this point.
One good way remains unmentioned: Start writing popular and well thought out finance articles to one of the big sites. Use the credit you earn to bankroll your speculations and use that to play the game for free. There's room for few more really good writers out there.
How would one go about getting in touch with one of these sites? It sounds like a fun hobby; I'd like to look into it more so long as the site isn't SCG.
You might as well ask people to give you cards for free. Also, just join a Magic buying/selling/trade group and buy cards with cash there. You'll easily be able to find cards you want for less than TCGplayer low.
First you need to have a good reference library and/or name recognition. Consider it as if you would like to get a guest column on a major newspaper. If you just contact a busy editor, who already has his rota of guest columnists and tell them that you are the new writer, you get laughed out of the office in a blink of an eye, but if you have already made a name as a good writer or are widely known in the demography of the readers, the editor will at least think about it and while you most likely won't get an instant offer, you will be considered when the spot opens.
So 1) start cranking out content. Publish trough free channels. Reddit, Youtube (if videos) blog-services. Ask other active writers for tips on the channels. People love to talk about themselves and how they have managed to do something, so there's bound to be good tips there.
2) get a good following. Use Twitter, Facebook and every other channel you know to get more readers. Be ready to advertise your work. It's unreal how many readers will find you from a single Tweet. IT's also always a good idea to have a basic traffic following software collecting data on your visitors: Where they came from, what terms they used in a Google search, how much traffic you have, when are the ruh peaks etc. This data really helps to identify what interests people and where your fanbase is.
3) Contact the content managers of the sites you are interested to write for. If you don't have contact info, use the webmaster's address and ask him/her to forward the mail. If you did the previous two things well, you will get serious consideration and a possible job.
If you have a way to gain a small advertising cash flow from the preliminary site you use (Youtube-channel, few of the blog-sites) that will help to keep you in the game for the time it takes to get the name recognition. But always keep your own content free and make certain that you are not trying to give yourself an edge on market. People are pretty good at noting hidden agendas.
I've been writing a lot of content over the years for few sites in both finnish and english and even few magazines when there were more of them. It's not a gold mine, usually writing covereage for a weekend's event gets you free food for the weekend, travel expenses and lot of friends. There are always more people willing to do coverage and commentary than there are room for and there are already lot of good writers, who have a steady following out there, but if you really are good at it, willing to spend the time and effort and like what you do, there's always room and opportunities for it.
A year ago several of the finance websites had open writers spots, which have since been filled. You should propably also contact those sites and other similar sites. They advertise on Twitter under hashtag mtgfinance and can be found through readMtG's finance-category.
For someone just starting up in that arena I'd recommend MTGO. There you can get ahead by timing the market right, and the overhead/time costs involved are dramatically lower. Being a really profitable trader IRL involves travel and paying more to intermediaries...to the point that if profit is your goal you'd almost assuredly be better off with an actual job.
Almost everyone who has posted on this thread has completely missed this point.
How is yours the best method? It's not time efficient. It's not high gain. It's not even the best method if you measure it as a product of the two.
Mine perhaps isn't the best all around, but it's one of the few posted so far. What I am getting at is the rules stated that, by only acting as a player and not a shop, it might be a fruitless effort to begin with, so the best option might be one that is really poor profit for a lot of effort, because there might be nothing better than this.
If something is bad, but there is nothing better than it under the context, then it is the *best*. If I decide to play an arcade game from home, and I get a high score of 2, that is the BEST high score in the house, even though it isn't good.
Anyways, the point being missed was that "most" people were calling out the method without actually providing a better one within the rules. This isn't the point of "theory crafting". The point of theory crafting is asking "what if". In this case, "what if someone actually wanted to try and do it this way?"
In this case, it's going to be a generic $500 box. Purchase that box, crack that packs. The hope is to crack at least $400 worth of cards that cost more than $2-3. From here, take those cards and find someone in person to trade with. The goal is to get at least 1/6th more than their value, to 1/4th more than their value.
Right off the bat, you're hoping to only lose 20% on your initial investment. Taking a 20% hit right from the start and only improving the cards that you opened by 25% puts you right where you started with no profit. Why not spend $500 on singles and get $500 worth of cards that you feel you can trade up with? This way, you don't lose anything on the initial investment.
Mine perhaps isn't the best all around, but it's one of the few posted so far. What I am getting at is the rules stated that, by only acting as a player and not a shop, it might be a fruitless effort to begin with, so the best option might be one that is really poor profit for a lot of effort, because there might be nothing better than this.
If something is bad, but there is nothing better than it under the context, then it is the *best*. If I decide to play an arcade game from home, and I get a high score of 2, that is the BEST high score in the house, even though it isn't good.
Anyways, the point being missed was that "most" people were calling out the method without actually providing a better one within the rules. This isn't the point of "theory crafting". The point of theory crafting is asking "what if". In this case, "what if someone actually wanted to try and do it this way?"
Many people HAVE actually given you a better way; speculating on singles. Or just sitting on sealed product.
I even trivially theorycrafted a better method than yours by changing the numbers.
You can get a higher ROI than a store by taking risks, but you're not going to get anywhere by having an equally diverse but less robust inventory than a store, with the model of luckily bumping into people who can't be inconvenienced to go a little further to a store.
Almost everyone who has posted on this thread has completely missed this point.
How is yours the best method? It's not time efficient. It's not high gain. It's not even the best method if you measure it as a product of the two.
Mine perhaps isn't the best all around, but it's one of the few posted so far. What I am getting at is the rules stated that, by only acting as a player and not a shop, it might be a fruitless effort to begin with, so the best option might be one that is really poor profit for a lot of effort, because there might be nothing better than this.
If something is bad, but there is nothing better than it under the context, then it is the *best*. If I decide to play an arcade game from home, and I get a high score of 2, that is the BEST high score in the house, even though it isn't good.
Anyways, the point being missed was that "most" people were calling out the method without actually providing a better one within the rules. This isn't the point of "theory crafting". The point of theory crafting is asking "what if". In this case, "what if someone actually wanted to try and do it this way?"
That's not really true. I suggested speculating on MTGO and I think that fits your demands. "Best" imo includes the time involved, and working via MTGO is just SOOOOO much less time consuming than working IRL trading.
Mine perhaps isn't the best all around, but it's one of the few posted so far. What I am getting at is the rules stated that, by only acting as a player and not a shop, it might be a fruitless effort to begin with, so the best option might be one that is really poor profit for a lot of effort, because there might be nothing better than this.
If something is bad, but there is nothing better than it under the context, then it is the *best*. If I decide to play an arcade game from home, and I get a high score of 2, that is the BEST high score in the house, even though it isn't good.
Anyways, the point being missed was that "most" people were calling out the method without actually providing a better one within the rules. This isn't the point of "theory crafting". The point of theory crafting is asking "what if". In this case, "what if someone actually wanted to try and do it this way?"
Many people HAVE actually given you a better way; speculating on singles. Or just sitting on sealed product.
I even trivially theorycrafted a better method than yours by changing the numbers.
You can get a higher ROI than a store by taking risks, but you're not going to get anywhere by having an equally diverse but less robust inventory than a store, with the model of luckily bumping into people who can't be inconvenienced to go a little further to a store.
Yes, many people have, and those are not the ones this is directed at. This is directed at the people who are commenting only about how it's too time consuming, or they completely ignore the things I have said.
Ex.:
Short of scamming people, or having a card massively spike in value, you don't. Ever.
As you pointed out, you are not a store. When its time to convert your cards back to cash, you're going to have to sell them to a buylist or through Ebay, so best cast scenario you'll lose 20% of the value in doing so. That should quite easily wipe out any of your, "profits."
They for some reason assumed that I would have to use ebay, even though the original post listed puca-trade, not ebay, in which case I can usually retain value at the end.
Almost everyone who has posted on this thread has completely missed this point.
How is yours the best method? It's not time efficient. It's not high gain. It's not even the best method if you measure it as a product of the two.
Mine perhaps isn't the best all around, but it's one of the few posted so far. What I am getting at is the rules stated that, by only acting as a player and not a shop, it might be a fruitless effort to begin with, so the best option might be one that is really poor profit for a lot of effort, because there might be nothing better than this.
If something is bad, but there is nothing better than it under the context, then it is the *best*. If I decide to play an arcade game from home, and I get a high score of 2, that is the BEST high score in the house, even though it isn't good.
Anyways, the point being missed was that "most" people were calling out the method without actually providing a better one within the rules. This isn't the point of "theory crafting". The point of theory crafting is asking "what if". In this case, "what if someone actually wanted to try and do it this way?"
That's not really true. I suggested speculating on MTGO and I think that fits your demands. "Best" imo includes the time involved, and working via MTGO is just SOOOOO much less time consuming than working IRL trading.
Wasn't directed at you. The original quoted post I made was created before you even commented. You're doing exactly what the thread was intended for. This was directed at the people who are dismissing it without actually reading any of the posts I made.
ex. Someone earlier completely ignored the valid reasoning I gave for people who choose to trade $15 worth of cards for a $12 card. Someone replied "that's not more convenient than walking 10 feet to the counter", even though in the same exact post I made, it pointed out that a lot of times people don't want to spend cash when they have cards they aren't using, and that stores only offer 50% value.
Does money laundering count? I've considered hypothetical ways of making money illegally, and it seems like buying Power Nine cards then flipping them at cost on eBay would be a pretty good way to wash dirty money through Paypal.
Hands down the best way to make profit in MtG:
Develop/Discover a viable deck in modern that doesn't currently exist. Buy out one of the important cards in the deck. Place in a tournament. Sell the cards during the frenzy that follows.
It's happened several times within Modern. Just look at the prices for Fist of Suns or Slivers or Merfolk. After they placed for the first time in a large tournament, the cards climbed in value.
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Current Decks:
Modern
Modern Warp / UR Control / UR Storm / Naya Breachshift / ElectroBalance
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Solidarity / Lands / Sneak and Show / Grixis Delver / Reanimator / Belcher / Storm / Dredge
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Rules:
1. You may deal with cards only, and only like a player would, not like a store would. This means "open a store" and "sell cheap boosters" are not valid answers.
2. No scams, no stealing, no misleading.
3. If luck is a factor, it's still valid. Sometimes you have to crack a pack to make money.
4. Mention "startup cost" and maybe even total time in your post. Sometimes the richest method isn't always the fastest, the cheapest, the most efficient, or the safest odds of success.
5. This post isn't about a way to make a lot of money, but the best way to make the most money possible. This means that a really, really poor profit for a lot of effort could be the best method.
That being said, I'm going to give my theory, please feel free to share yours!
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Essentially, the idea is trading up, up, up.
Start out with buying a booster box of an expensive set that has a lot of staples. In this case, it's going to be a generic $500 box. Purchase that box, crack that packs. The hope is to crack at least $400 worth of cards that cost more than $2-3. From here, take those cards and find someone in person to trade with. The goal is to get at least 1/6th more than their value, to 1/4th more than their value. A lot of people have no problem trading down for good cards, as it's easier than simply trying to sell the cards individually. The goal is to get 4-5 cards worth, total, $85 dollars for a $70 dollar card.
Then from here, repeat the process again. Get 4-5 cards worth $25 dollars for a $20 card. Then, repeat this once more, getting 4-5 $7-8 dollars worth of cards for a $5 card.
After doing this a total of three times, you can then take them all to puca-trade and wait, In the end, what was once $400 worth of cards is now worth $640, with a profit of $140.
A lot of effort for little reward, but I imagine that if your luck is right, you could work your way up to cracking some alpha edition magic and praying for the big dogs. It's like the lottery, except if you fail, you still have some sweet cards to play with.
Do we break rule #2 or just wait for stupid or inexperienced card buyers?
Which is still breaking rule #2 in my mind. Your advice basically constitutes lying or begging and starts you off with a $500 entry fee to boot.
I think you pretty much nailed it.
Link to Discord server where anybody from MTGS can keep up with thread topics while everything is being sorted out with the new site.
My "theory" doesn't constitute any lying or begging. At more than few LGS I've been to, there are always people who are willing to trade slightly more value for convenience.
If you have a sensei's divining top (about $28) that I really want, there are a few options I have.
*I can pay the full price at my LGS.
*I can sell twice as many cards at my LGS to get the money needed.
*i can sell a playset of Sorin, Solemn Visitors ($32) at a slightly cheaper price so as not to wait too long for a sale, do some waiting, then end up with $28.
*I can right there, right then choose to trade them to you for a $28 card.
That's the biggest reason the theory stated expensive staples, as I've seen people easily trade away a playset worth slightly more than a card for the convenience, especially if it's a playset of a card they don't have any use for.
That's a bit different. Our goal is to obtain at least 1/6 more than the value, while you obtained 2.5x more than the value (what a trade!)
There are a lot of people who don't mind the extra few bucks lost compared to the hassle of their other options.
Also you end up with so many junk cards that its completly unrealistic to carry them around all the time and trading cards becomes completly nonsensical.
Imagine someone has a binder with high value cards. Its easy and convinient to trade with that person.
If someone has a giant box of cards, all low value, people wont most likely not even care to look at that card box and spend lots of time just looking for something they want. In addition it will damage your cards in a box in the long run, further decreasing value and its much more effort to find a card.
All in all, its short sighted, as the "cost" that comes with trading down can by far outweight the profit.
Getting 1$ money isnt worth the effort to search the giant box of cards.
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Trading and investment in general are something you cant really count on.
You start with an investment of say 500$ and the cards you get for that money might trade you "potential" value of say 1000$ of junk cards. Keep in mind that your junk only has a "potential" value, you still need to get the money from someone (which is fairly unlikely). In the end you want to have some quality cards and the low value cards you stock should be cards that can be potentially much more expensive, but thats quite a gamble.
You could put all your money into 0.01$ cards and if they go up to 0.02$ you would "potentially" double your money, but realisticly thats not the case, as you cannot get rid of all the junk cards, as nobody wants that many, unless you find just another more stupid investor that buys your junk (something that "can" work, but more often than not, such an investment turns out to be a major bad decision and you have to sell your cards at a much lower value than they would be in singles, like a box of 1000+ cards for 1$ or something, even then its hard to find someone that is actually interest in buying boxes of junk).
If you sit on cards and they go up in price its a good investment. Especially if you are not a player, you can buy lots of cards that end up in "pro-player" decks early in the season and hope they end up with good results.
Especially a winning Grand prix deck with some new cards has an impact on the prices of that cards, as people jump on them and you have to act quick to catch that up-trend.
Also if cards leave a format due to rotation, you have to get rid of them quickly, as its best right after the last bunch of big events, do not wait till the very last event. Thats also a time to get the most value out of your cards and you can "shift" that money into long term investment from older formats (especially allstars like Duals, Wasteland, Forces and such), which will keep or increase in value.
These "high value" cards you can then trade against lots of new fresh cards from the upcomming set to catch the up-trend of these cards again.
Rinse and repeat, buy, sell and trade cards to get the most value out of your collection ; this is quite an effort and you have to keep a constant check what cards might be hot or not in the future, so tournament results are important and trending in card prices are also important.
In short, it ends up just as a stock-market, with magic cards instead of other goods , and thats exactly the "job" you are doing to get any meaningful profit.
To increase the margin you want to go big and make a shop, let some lesser workers do the physical work , but that also means you need much more starting money, like allways in making a business.
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Cracking packs is a really bad investment. Ofcourse you can open insane value foil mythic cards or Expeditions, but thats so unlikely and especially unlikely to repeat that doing so is a poor decision if you want to make a "guaranteed" (or at least a very high chance) profit. the topic here is high-risk vs spreading-risk, you really REALLY do not want to put all your money on 1 outcome, and buying a box is exactly that, a 1 shot that is allmost guaranteed to cost you money.
If you want to open product you have to buy A LOT in big numbers, so you get them cheaper as you order so many and you have ways to get rid of them cheap aswell (only big stores can really do that and make a profit).
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
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The way most small time 'floor dealers' start is to purchase completet collections from people quitting Magic. That way you can usually get cards for store buy prices, and get good supply of staples, medium value cards and few bigger ticket cards, so you can cater to larger audiences. That collection is then traded into few expensive cards, which are sold to fund the next collection purchase. Initial investment is 300-2k$ and lot of time.
Unfortunately as it's the easiest way to build your trading stock, it's also the most competed area. Good collections go very fast and people have had to cut their margins quite a bit by now. Luckily there are some niches where most people are not willing to go, but those often either need larger start-up capitals or lot of elbow grease at (often below) minimum wage.
I'll use my own dealings as an example. I used to buy small collections, around 50-200$ each, In 1998 to 2001 that meant the collection had just few (1-12) dual lands and few thousand cards from alpha to Urza's block. These days those same collections would start at 500 to 1k$ and some of the stuff is still pretty unsellable, even if it has virtual value (Unpopular Legends commons with 16+ copies or common-sets of the Dark etc.) I then sold the cards through web auctions with minimal fees (not like feebay these days).
Then I moved to bit larger collections and at the same time values had gone up. Now I had to pay 1k$ for collections with a piece of power, piles of duals or playsets of Bazaars and Workshops. By 2006 the collections I bought were 2-6k$ and had up to full P9 and several complete vintage decks and lots of staples. Some sellers even flew in to sell their cards. Today I'm considering helping an former player to sell his complete Ul-set, and try to help him get 10k out of it. So I have found a good niche, collections which are too large for most private buyers. The big problems are where to sell cards, how to finance the initial buys and why should I do this when I can just spend time with my family and friends?
The third way to earn money is also something that has become harder these days: investing in sealed product. It has always been the most risk free way to earn money from this game, but interest rates were really bad until about 5 years back, when old product prices started going up fast. Now so many people do this that it takes forever for the market to churn through the supply of newly OOP product, so making money out of Return to Ravnica is much harder than from Innistrad and Khans will be even slower to gain than RTR. But if you are patient and have the funds, the profit is there. The big problem is usally how to unload your boxes (and cover postage), but if you can solve that, you are golden.
One good way remains unmentioned: Start writing popular and well thought out finance articles to one of the big sites. Use the credit you earn to bankroll your speculations and use that to play the game for free. There's room for few more really good writers out there.
Set to default
My apologies, I'm glad to hear you'd rather play the long game than take advantage of anyone.
I still don't think your theory is a good way to make money in mtg. Your entry price is higher than the total I've spent on mtg. As others have said you stand to lose money on average in your opening play. Trading up will take you longer than just working a minimum wage job. IMO.
We can break down your plan as:
1. Buy a box.
2. Open packs.
3. Sell things for more than their value via being more convenient than walking ten feet to the counter at your local LGS.
(1) and (2) almost always lose you money by necessity (if a box ever became less valuable than its contents, the price of the box would go up or contents would go down). So in order to break even, before even making a profit, you have to do (3), which as people have said is unrealistic at worst and incredibly time consuming at best.
As you pointed out, you are not a store. When its time to convert your cards back to cash, you're going to have to sell them to a buylist or through Ebay, so best cast scenario you'll lose 20% of the value in doing so. That should quite easily wipe out any of your, "profits."
It's like you completely missed my entire post about *why* it's a better option than buying the cards straight up.
Almost everyone who has posted on this thread has completely missed this point.
How is yours the best method? It's not time efficient. It's not high gain. It's not even the best method if you measure it as a product of the two.
How would one go about getting in touch with one of these sites? It sounds like a fun hobby; I'd like to look into it more so long as the site isn't SCG.
Link to Discord server where anybody from MTGS can keep up with thread topics while everything is being sorted out with the new site.
You might as well ask people to give you cards for free. Also, just join a Magic buying/selling/trade group and buy cards with cash there. You'll easily be able to find cards you want for less than TCGplayer low.
So 1) start cranking out content. Publish trough free channels. Reddit, Youtube (if videos) blog-services. Ask other active writers for tips on the channels. People love to talk about themselves and how they have managed to do something, so there's bound to be good tips there.
2) get a good following. Use Twitter, Facebook and every other channel you know to get more readers. Be ready to advertise your work. It's unreal how many readers will find you from a single Tweet. IT's also always a good idea to have a basic traffic following software collecting data on your visitors: Where they came from, what terms they used in a Google search, how much traffic you have, when are the ruh peaks etc. This data really helps to identify what interests people and where your fanbase is.
3) Contact the content managers of the sites you are interested to write for. If you don't have contact info, use the webmaster's address and ask him/her to forward the mail. If you did the previous two things well, you will get serious consideration and a possible job.
If you have a way to gain a small advertising cash flow from the preliminary site you use (Youtube-channel, few of the blog-sites) that will help to keep you in the game for the time it takes to get the name recognition. But always keep your own content free and make certain that you are not trying to give yourself an edge on market. People are pretty good at noting hidden agendas.
I've been writing a lot of content over the years for few sites in both finnish and english and even few magazines when there were more of them. It's not a gold mine, usually writing covereage for a weekend's event gets you free food for the weekend, travel expenses and lot of friends. There are always more people willing to do coverage and commentary than there are room for and there are already lot of good writers, who have a steady following out there, but if you really are good at it, willing to spend the time and effort and like what you do, there's always room and opportunities for it.
A year ago several of the finance websites had open writers spots, which have since been filled. You should propably also contact those sites and other similar sites. They advertise on Twitter under hashtag mtgfinance and can be found through readMtG's finance-category.
Hope this helps,
Set to default
Mine perhaps isn't the best all around, but it's one of the few posted so far. What I am getting at is the rules stated that, by only acting as a player and not a shop, it might be a fruitless effort to begin with, so the best option might be one that is really poor profit for a lot of effort, because there might be nothing better than this.
If something is bad, but there is nothing better than it under the context, then it is the *best*. If I decide to play an arcade game from home, and I get a high score of 2, that is the BEST high score in the house, even though it isn't good.
Anyways, the point being missed was that "most" people were calling out the method without actually providing a better one within the rules. This isn't the point of "theory crafting". The point of theory crafting is asking "what if". In this case, "what if someone actually wanted to try and do it this way?"
Right off the bat, you're hoping to only lose 20% on your initial investment. Taking a 20% hit right from the start and only improving the cards that you opened by 25% puts you right where you started with no profit. Why not spend $500 on singles and get $500 worth of cards that you feel you can trade up with? This way, you don't lose anything on the initial investment.
Many people HAVE actually given you a better way; speculating on singles. Or just sitting on sealed product.
I even trivially theorycrafted a better method than yours by changing the numbers.
You can get a higher ROI than a store by taking risks, but you're not going to get anywhere by having an equally diverse but less robust inventory than a store, with the model of luckily bumping into people who can't be inconvenienced to go a little further to a store.
That's not really true. I suggested speculating on MTGO and I think that fits your demands. "Best" imo includes the time involved, and working via MTGO is just SOOOOO much less time consuming than working IRL trading.
Yes, many people have, and those are not the ones this is directed at. This is directed at the people who are commenting only about how it's too time consuming, or they completely ignore the things I have said.
Ex.:
They for some reason assumed that I would have to use ebay, even though the original post listed puca-trade, not ebay, in which case I can usually retain value at the end.
Wasn't directed at you. The original quoted post I made was created before you even commented. You're doing exactly what the thread was intended for. This was directed at the people who are dismissing it without actually reading any of the posts I made.
ex. Someone earlier completely ignored the valid reasoning I gave for people who choose to trade $15 worth of cards for a $12 card. Someone replied "that's not more convenient than walking 10 feet to the counter", even though in the same exact post I made, it pointed out that a lot of times people don't want to spend cash when they have cards they aren't using, and that stores only offer 50% value.
Develop/Discover a viable deck in modern that doesn't currently exist. Buy out one of the important cards in the deck. Place in a tournament. Sell the cards during the frenzy that follows.
It's happened several times within Modern. Just look at the prices for Fist of Suns or Slivers or Merfolk. After they placed for the first time in a large tournament, the cards climbed in value.
Modern Warp / UR Control / UR Storm / Naya Breachshift / ElectroBalance
Solidarity / Lands / Sneak and Show / Grixis Delver / Reanimator / Belcher / Storm / Dredge