MTG Salvation

I just moved to Europe and suddenly find myself able to make use of CardMarket, which seems to be european-only and operates as a marketplace go-between for sellers and buyers. So when you search for a card, you see all the sellers with that card, at whatever price they're offering.

And daaaamn, as someone who's bought primarily from tcgplayer and ebay, the prices are WAY better than anything I'm seeing there. One fairly expensive card I'm eyeing, is over $200 on ebay and even worse on ebay uk. TCGplayer manages to cut that down to a little under $200, and I was able to find a local store selling it for 150 pounds (which is like 195?). I pop onto cardmarket, and people are selling it for 135 euros, near mint, which is just a little over $150.

I dunno, this is blowing my mind. These aren't sketchy first-time sellers either, these are major sellers with tons of reviews, and there are dozens if not hundreds of sellers for most cards, so the density seems legit too. Is this thing really as sweet as it looks? Because I'm starting to feel like a sucker for all those cards I bought on tcgplayer over the years.

CardMarket is great if you can take advantage of it. However, do the math before you start buying a ton - shipping is typically cheap or free on eBay and TCGp, and it's very much not the case on MKM. The last time I did an MKM order (2014) I paid $40 in shipping costs and another $40 in PayPal fees. Now, that was for several hundred bucks' worth of judge foils, from about 7 or 8 different sellers. You want to make sure that you order from as few sellers as possible, you want to try to get sellers from your country as much as possible, and you really want to get high-feedback sellers. One of my cards came through with a bend in it, and bent foils tend to be worthless. It was like pulling teeth, but I ended up getting a partial refund from the seller, but basically had to re-buy the card (fortunately, I met a guy at a GP who didn't care about trading for a bent Sword of Fire and Ice). So that's the other prime consideration - if you run into problems, eBay and TCGp have your back. MKM really does not - if you have an issue it's between you and the seller, full stop.

With those caveats, it's definitely a good place to check out and you can score some real deals. Just don't go crazy thinking that the prices are way lower across the board than they are on other marketplaces.

Good to know, thanks for the info!

I've already got basically all the cards I want (basically everything that's legal in commander) but there are a few that I might replace (I've got an imperial seal with a horrible alter that I bought years ago, because the alter was at a discount). And I need to buy those game night mythics, and occasional BAB promos and stuff. Other than that, I usually draft/trade enough to pick up full sets before the next one comes out. So it would mostly be for the corner-case stuff that doesn't come out of boosters, and maybe a few duplicates if I want to build another deck outside of my collection.

So far my experience buying through Cardmarket has been excellent, zero lost items, unlike the 4x Manamorphoses I sold through eBay and got lost so I had to refund 48€...yay!
I've only used it to buy singles, not boxes mind you, the shipping costs are about the same as eBay but cards can be had for really low prices in comparison to the established shops, I got a Wurmcoil Engine for just 11€ total, and chase uncommons like Pteramander can be found for like 50c as opposed to around 2€.
If you live in Europe in a country with a reliable post system, I definitely recommend using Cardmarket.

CardMarket is brilliant the only thing is that shipping is not free and the buyer pays. Also in the EU you will always see the price of what you are actually paying on the bill, because taxes and everything has to be included by law.

The shipping cost is just an extra item on the bill. CardMarket is essentially the reason I got back into magic after a long hiatus.

Yeah I love that about living here compared to the states. Screw small change.

Used cardmarket twice and been happy with it. More annoying than tcgplayer for buying tons of small stuff (like Feather.dec) but a great service, especially for big-ticket items.