A New Addition and Magic Profits.

It has been a little while since i wrote my last post, and it has been a very busy time. My son was born on October 15th and so my time has very much been taken up looking after him in his first few weeks of life, assisting his mum and doing my best to pretend to be useful! This has rather curtailed my two favourite hobbies of table top roleplaying and playing Magic: the Gathering. However as my wife and I now settle into a new day to day routine, I am once again able to find time get back to gaming.

My son Billy

One of the things that I have had the time to squeeze in over the last month or so is getting into the secondary market for Magic cards. I have been trading away over Ebay with some of the cards that I pulled from my first booster box, and this generated me a decent amount of capital to go and expand my collection by getting hold of some other booster boxes from the previous block, Theros. To further fuel my Magic spending, and to clear some room in the house, I have been putting up much of my old Warhammer 40k collection. It seems that GW's pricing strategy has made people look to the second hand market a lot, and I have managed to shift a good percentage of my Imperial Guard, and turned them into some Journey into Nyx boosters and assorted singles for various projects that I have on the go.

Having started out selling cards for profit I have quickly learned a few things about the market. First off I realised that the prices for cards close to the pre-release are crazy-high. A great example of this would be the cycle of sacrifice lands from Khans of Tarkir: Bloodstained Mire, Flooded Strand, Polluted Delta, Windswept Heath, and Wooded Foothills. These five cards were the cash cards from Khans and were eagerly anticipated in the run up to release: Polluted Delta was selling for up to £25; now it is selling for around £12.50 on Ebay. The other four lands have similarly fallen in price since prerelease. Having taken the advice of a couple of sellers, I sold off all of my sacrifice lands as soon as I opened them, due to the cash value I could get for them and the fact that for the decks I am playing I don't need them.

Polluted Delta: a prerelease cash cow.

The second thing i have learned about selling is that the prices you see on Ebay are certainly not always a great guide to how much things sell for. I have seen some auctions or Buy it Nows where the price is a good 25% over what the item commonly sells for. Some people seem to think that they are the only seller out there and I wonder if they ever sell anything?

The third major thing I have realised is to be aware of upcoming sets. With Wizards of the Coast putting out new products quite regularly, and announcing them around 3 months in advance, a seller needs to be wary of what they are putting out, as a reprint of a card you are selling can quickly tank the price, and leave you with an unsold card at too high a price. One of the cards I was selling was a Kiora, the Crashing Wave. As a planeswalker, she commanded a decent price, with some folk looking for around £20 a copy. However as i kept my eyes peeled, I saw that there is an upcoming duel set: Kiora vs Elspeth. This would mean that the price for Kiora was about to take a significant hit, with a number selling at between £12 and £16 today on Ebay. I decided to get out quite quickly on her so made sure I was in the lower range of that bracket, and it worked as I was able to move her out quickly.

I am hoping to try an catch up with myself a little and get a couple more posts up over the next week. I have got a couple of Commander/EDH decks that I would like to write about, along with some other stuff to talk about, so those will be in my next few posts.