Whether you’ve been playing Magic: The Gathering for years or if you have just started, odds are, you have some cards lying around that aren’t being used. These cards may be unwanted, having been acquired when buying boxes and booster packs in search of other cards, or they may be old cards that you don’t play with anymore as you acquire the newest sets to construct decks.
In either scenario, it's quite easy to find yourself with lots of cards that aren’t being used and taking up space. One option is to sell them, but should you? Here are five pros and five cons to selling your old Magic cards.
10 Pro #1: Money
Obviously the first and foremost pro of selling your cards is the monetary reward. Whether you do it yourself and sell each card individually or if you sell your entire lot to a game store for a lump sum, you’ll get money out of the deal and naturally, that is pretty great.
Some cards are worth more than others, so a little research is necessary to determine their value. This allows you to haggle from an informed position at your local game store and get a fair price or price your stock competitively if you sell them yourself.
9 Con #1: Game Stores Will Undercut You
While going to your local game store is the quickest and easiest way to get rid of your cards, it might not get you the most money. Game stores buying cards from people off the street are taking a bit of a gamble. They have to turn a profit on anything they acquire.
If someone brings in a collection of hundreds upon hundreds of cards, they won’t have time to sort through every single card to determine value. So, most often they will glance over what you have and offer a flat rate. If you’ve done your research and know what your collection is worth, you’ll know that the offer is not up to scratch.
8 Pro #2: Sell Them Yourself For More Money
Some cards are worth quite a bit and if you sell them yourself, you can keep the profits. There are several online services and websites that allow you to sell your cards. You can put your cards up for sale on Facebook, use TCGPlayer.com (which we’ll talk about in a bit), or make your own website.
You can price your cards at market value or get them to sell quickly by pricing them at less than what others are offering. Regardless of the way you do it, by selling the cards yourself, more money is collect than by selling your collection to your local game store.
7 Con #2: Selling Them Yourself Takes Time
If you decide to sell your cards yourself, then you best be prepared to have them sitting around for a while. No matter what service or method you use, it will take some time to sell what you have. If people aren’t looking to buy the cards you have, it could take months to get rid of them, if at all.
This means that you’ll still have tons of cards taking up space for goodness knows how long so this is an important factor to consider when you're deciding how to go about selling your cards.
6 Pro #3: Sell To A Game Shop; Quick and Easy
Even though Magic: The Gathering cards are small, thin pieces of cardboard, when you start getting large amounts of them, they start to take up quite a bit of space. If the cards have sleeves to protect them, they double in thickness, thus requiring more space.
If you're simply tired of having boxes and boxes of cards laying around your home, hauling it down to your local game shop will be your best bet. They’ll look over your collection and give you a flat rate for the whole lot. Then it's up to them to handle hundreds of cards and you get to walk out with money in your pocket.
5 Con #3: Selling Them Yourself Has Extra Cost
If you're going to be selling your cards yourself, there are extra costs to consider. For example, if you sell your cards online, people from around the country can view what you have and purchase it. This means you’ll have to mail their order to them.
However, you can’t simply place the unprotected card in an envelope and send it off. You also have to buy sleeves and hard plastic cases in order to protect the card(s) from being bent during shipping.
4 Pro #4: TCGPlayer.com Makes Selling Cards Easy
If you do decide to sell your cards yourself, one of the best places to do it is online. One of the best ways to sell cards online is through TCGPlayer.com. This website acts as a storefront for people just like you that want to sell cards. Established businesses use this service, as well as individuals who sell cards as a side business.
It is free to use and easy to do. It comes in the form of an app and a website so you can manage your inventory on the go. In addition, the app allows you to scan cards and add them to your inventory quickly and efficiently.
3 Con #4: TCGPlayer.com Takes A Small Cut
As previously stated, TCGPlayer.com is one of the easiest ways to sell your cards. They give a storefront for customers to view your inventory and provide a system for creating and managing your collection. The site also shows you data to help you price your cards competitively, showing you what how much a card recently sold for and its current market value, all sorted by the condition the card is in.
The website even handles payments for you. It will collect the money from the customer, hold it until they get their order and then transfer it to you. While all this seems pretty great, it comes at a cost. TCGPlayer takes a piece of all of your sales in exchange for hosting your inventory.
2 Pro #5: You Never Know What You Could Find!
One of the most exciting parts about deciding to sell your Magic: The Gathering cards is that you never know what you're going to find. Cards that you might not like or that you don’t think are particularly useful, might actually turn out to be worth quite a bit of money!
If your collection is full of older cards, then there is some serious potential for money as older sets have a variety of valuable cards and some sets are valuable simply due to their age. The scanning function on the TCGPlayer.com app will tell you what a card is worth so you know instantly if you’ve struck gold.
1 Con #5: Many Cards Aren’t Worth Much
The biggest, most glaring con to selling your Magic: The Gathering cards is a simple fact that the majority are not worth much. Common cards get reprinted every few sets, therefore they are worth pennies, with some individuals only favoring a particular edition for personal reasons.
These common cards make up most of the cards in the game, leaving a scant minority of valuable cards. In addition, you are bound to mostly have land or mana cards, which are worthless. Everyone who plays the game gets bountiful amounts of each. Some lands are special and rare, so are worth something, but the majority are not.