Vincent, I’m glad your experience with Card Kingdom was acceptable. Mine have been as well (though I did just look at their site and they are now sold out of Innistrad booster boxes :(). Oh well, like you said I hope to use store credit for other boxes or to speculate on Modern after MM hits. This sounds like a solid plan.

Thanks for the comment. You definitely went a bit further than I had anticipated as I was just using round numbers to emphasize a point. Yes 30% on top of $70 is only $91 :-P. Sorry if that confused anyone!

I enjoyed the article. One thing that caught my attention was this statement ” Having $100 in store credit on hand from selling $70 of cards could mean you can go deeper on a new speculation target than you otherwise would have.” You get 30% more of the $70 dollars, i.e. $91 not 100…take your credit in cash * 1+0. in store trade in credit (for example $70 * 1.3 (30% trade in credit)=$91. Otherwise you might have some confused readers expecting more than they get.

Yeah, I often forget about Channel Fireball because they aren’t in mtg.gg. When you go to sell cards, do you just always check CFB in addition to mtg.gg to see if you should be sending cards to CFB instead? Seems like twice the work at that point.

Regarding Jace in Standard, I remember when Ben Bleiweiss made a point to highlight the fact that you could have traded in your 4 NM Jace’s for credit to get a MP Unlimited Time Walk. Maybe I should have done that trade after all…

I think I will look to getting store credit more often. Cash is so nice because I can see my account increase as I profit. But to maximize value overall, trade-in credit must be the way to go.

Regarding Card Kingdom: I get dinged sometimes too, but I find they pay rather high on many cards and they buy a lot of random worthless stuff for $0.20 to $0.60, so I figure that helps make up for the dinging on the bigger cards a bit.

If I am going to spend the cash on cards anyway I might as well get more by taking credit.

Great add, Justin. Thanks for the comment! I haven’t tried Coolstuffinc before, but I have lots of casual goodies to unload. Maybe I should check it out.

Jonathan, thanks for the comment and insightful feedback. In this specific case I mainly stick to vendors listed on mtg.gg. Personally I’ve now sold to Troll and Toad, Star City Games, Channel Fireball (not on mtg.gg yet), AdventurersON, Card Kingdom, and ABU Games. If you’re interested in hearing others’ experiences with various vendors check out the vendor assessment thread in the forums. There you can read about the experiences of others (though be careful, as most are negative).

You think Shock Lands will drop even further? I can definitely see that being likely for Gatecrash Shocks…but Steam Vents is already below $6 on TCG Player. You think it will go lower than that? Eventually they’ll return to their pre-Modern levels, at which point they really shouldn’t decrease further. Granted supply is much higher, but now these are actually seeing play…in two formats even! I’m not buying more copies at the moment since I already have money invested here, but I will continue to trade for them.

I am sitting on 1 box of Zendikar myself, and I am kicking myself for not purchasing more. That being said, I have to agree with David – $300 is a bit too bullish for me. For the longest time, Onslaught boxes could be had for around $150 even though the Onslaught Fetches were getting very expensive. The price on Onslaught has since risen, and Zendikar is legal in Modern. These two factors have bumped the price ceiling on Zendikar. But I think $250 is more reasonable in the next year or so unless Magic really continues to explode. Even if it does, are people really going to crack boxes of Zendikar for the Fetch Lands?

You are correct on bulk rares (though it’s more rare than you’d think). What you need to keep in mind is that bulk rares have a “set price” that most stores will give you for them, so it’s worthwhile to sort out the really bad ones (thoughtlace anyone) and unload those. I have a smaller box of bulk rares I keep to allow casual/edh players to trade out of. I think you may be overvaluing the zendikar boxes (unless they are from the first wave) a bit.$350 seems quite high for a largely printed set. While there are the possibilities of foil fetchlands, most of the other cards are considerably cheaper…I could see the boxes going for $275-300, but there’s a strong possibility of WOTC reprinting the old onslaught fetchlands in the time frame you’re discussed which would drop the value of the Zendikar ones somewhat (as there’d be more fetching options for modern)