Please do. I just don’t know if SCG feels the need to bargain when it comes to buylists because they have a lot more opportunities to restock, but I’d love to know.

I only ask because I’m going to an Open this weekend, and wanted to know if I should bring the ogred section to sell. I can try it out and report back to you!

I honestly didn’t try SCG. I will next time and let people know.

Pine,
I appreciate the feedback. I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical of the “illegality” of doing things their way, however, it does come off as shady none-the-less. If Anonymous is correct and that they pay their buyers a commission based on what they buy for vs sell then that seems like a very shady way to rip players off and encourages buyers to lowball players as best they can, which means that they’ll develop a bad reputation to sell to and discourage players from going to them. The fact that they then hide that practice with high buy prices (to encourage players to sell to them) is even more disturbing.

Pine

Thomas
CardAdvantage.com

That’s definitely an interesting idea (I didn’t consider it or try it out). The one issue I had with the binder/penny sleeve approach was when I didn’t let the marker dry fast enough and it smeared inside the binder sleeve. I do think that you have a decent chance of wiping off regular dry erase marker, but it’s certainly worth trying out. I do think you not having a direct link to the highest buyer (like I did with the penny sleeves) unless you want to advertise it in the corner of the page) might require you to recheck everything afterwards if you want to unload them to an online buylist. I had a lot of cards to send to AdventuresOn that nobody at the GP wanted, so being able to quickly see which sleeves said AO was a pretty convenient methodology.

Do you think that a dry erase marker on the actual binder page would work? Or might it get wiped away too easy? Might be able to eliminate the penny sleeves. Just a thought.

I wrote the buy price listed on MTG.GG. I did round up/down depending on if it was 0.49 (then I rounded to 0.5) or if it was 0.42 I rounded down to 0.4. My thought process was that I I could pull everything that didn’t sell out and mail it to the buyer (written on the back) so I didn’t want to just put what I “felt” it should be, I wanted to make sure that I had an acceptable buy price that I could point to if anyone was skeptical. As I mentioned the numbers sometimes got a bit tricky, especially when it’s like 0.15 cents on MTG.GG (do you round down to $0.1 and lose 50% of what you could make) or round up and risk nobody being interested. In the future I will likely avoid some of the oddball prices (0.15, 0.2, 0.3, 0.65, 0.8) and try to stick with more common prices. As you mention, that even if I have to round down on a lot I’m not paying shipping fees and they evaluate the cards in front of you (so if there are any condition issues you don’t get stuck with “well I can take what you’re offering or losing money for you to send it back”, however, I will say it’s VERY important to pre-sort on condition and think of this process like you are mailing them so that you only give the dealers cards in NMish condition otherwise you risk them losing interest in buying from you at all)

Fair enough. Looks like you found the same thing I did. Vendors are willing to work with you when you make extra effort (as they realize that you could just sell the cards to someone else).

Just to clarify, he wasn’t using mtg.gg, I just showed him the list on my own laptop and he matched it. Still, utterly pleasant experience and hope to sell to him again.

Brian,
Thanks for working with me. I will definitely sell to you guys again as you were really easy to work with and just as easy to talk to. I hope that this article inspires more players to realize that vendors can be pretty easy to work with and are a great resource for unloading cards that your local player base can’t absorb (which would otherwise just sit in a binder/box doing nothing). I feel as a player and in this instance “seller” I really needed to emphasize the vendors who provided a great selling experience because I wanted to let them know they did a good job, I appreciated it, and that I encourage others to work with them.

Sy,
I am definitely thinking that the box approach would be far less dubious, I used the binder primarily because 1) I got it in a collection and didn’t really have a use for it otherwise, 2) it lets vendors see everything and the price really easily. I may try the box approach next time (especially since I have quite awhile before the next GP in my neck of the woods). I won’t sell cards to anyone but vendors (nor will I buy cards from anyone but vendors) at events. I’ve definitely had people walk up to me and try to sell me stuff, but I’ve had to politely thank them but pass on the opportunity.

Thanks Matt. After reading your comment, I do regret my assumption. While I do think that you can save some time by doing research on vendors ahead of time, the fact that he used MTG.GG (and that’s what I basically used, though I did visit vendors not on MTG.GG to check what they were offering, which is how I knew to bring some of the oddballs that some vendors were paying very well on); I will consider this one a lesson learned and will make sure to give all the vendors the benefit of the doubt.

It was nice meeting you this weekend. I have to aggree with Pasttimes; when I sat down to trade with you and saw the binder with prices marked in it, I first thought you were trying to sell the cards or something like that. I run into that occationally, but sometimes those prices are actually on the pages from a different time when the person was trying to sell them. I think carrying them in a box would be better, and one of these days when I do try ogreing cards I plan to use a box with price dividers. When it’s all seperated by price, the vendor doesn’t have to pay attention to what’s written on the sleeve.

I’ve also come accross Troll and Toad not willing to pay their site prices at events. I tried selling them bulk mythics and bulk foil rares at a GP and they said those prices are only for mailing them in. They still offer the best prices on some stuff, so I’ll just save it up and mail it in.

I do not sell to Strikezone because of issues in the past, and I’ve found Card Kingdom overly strict on card condition. Selling in person is one way to deal with that, but I’ve also had success sending orders to Card Kingdom with a note that they send back anything that they don’t consider NM. It costs a little more in shipping when they send stuff back to you, but as long as you are sending fairly large orders it’s well worth it.