The information I’ll cover today provides a baseline look at the fundamentals of buylisting, what buylisting accomplishes, and how buylisting fits into the bigger #mtgfinance picture.

I’ll provide some guidelines for selecting cards to buylist and I’ll identify situations where other selling avenues may be preferable to buylisting.

The Value of Information

When I was a teenager, I did a lot of trade grinding and speculation, alongside trading for constructed cards, but the #mtgfinance world was quite different back then. These days, the speed of information exchange is lightning fast, but this wasn’t always the case.

When trading ten years ago, card prices were negotiated on the fly. Cards were priced by memory or perhaps by an outdated store buylist printout taken from a recent event. The nearest cardshop priced their singles from last month’s Scrye magazine.

In the world of finance, information is king, and in a world of hidden information, there was much edge to be gained.

I discovered buylisting during that era. The internet connected me to a world of independent retailers each living within their own bubble. I was amazed at some of the high prices being paid for cards, and some passes over my collection allowed me to pull together sums in the triple digits for extra cards or those that I considered competitively worthless. Buylisting became a way for me to turn value gained in trading into actual cash in hand.

What was even more impressive about buylists in that day was the ability for arbitrage. In one case I was able to buy an assortment of singles locally and buylist them at a tidy profit. Some of the prices were simply absurd, the most memorable being the $13 dollars each I received for a few Mercadian Masques Bribery that I paid just a few dollars for locally.

The rate of information exchange was glacially slow. Today this sort of massive arbitrage is hard to come by, but some research on Trader Tools 3 shows that some minor arbitrage opportunities are still sometimes available today.

Today there are smartphones involved in nearly every trade, and the savvy local brick and mortar store synchronizes singles prices to TCGPlayer prices in real-time. Converting information into value is harder than ever before.

Today, trades seem to be based more on speculation, collecting, and deckbuilding than on grinding value.

Economies of Scale

The Magic card singles retail market online is defined by efficiencies, and the top retailers have honed their business models into a well-oiled machine able to buy and sell cards at a high enough volume to offer market-competitive rates, maintain or gain market share, and remain profitable. Their great size gives them the benefit of economies of scale.

These retailers sell their cards primarily through both a significant online presence with their website and through physical presence on the competitive tournament circuit.

These retailers obtain their cards through the efficient process known as buylisting.

In the current age of #mtgfinance, we should look to capitalize on the efficiencies of retailers by utilizing their buylists. Buylists allow us to sell our cards to these retailers at a wholesale price, allowing them to profit on the margin known as a “spread”. When high efficiencies allows a store to live off of a small spread, that leaves room for our profit.

While buylisting may seem like a losing proposition, the reality is that the major retailers are uniquely positioned to sell their cards at a high retail price--a price that the consumer, without a comparable selling channel, will be hard-pressed to claim themselves.

Buylisting is the most efficient, quickest, and surefire method for turning cards into a realized profit.

The Spread

The key to buylisting is determining an appropriate spread that leaves enough profit for you. The appropriate spread can depend on a lot of factors, including the cost to acquire the card the particular card to be sold.

I do business selling on TCGPlayer.com, and when buylisting cards, I compare the spread to what I would be able to sell for on TCGPlayer and decide accordingly. Selling on TCGPlayer comes with a flat fee around 11% plus a $0.50 fee on an order. The $0.99 shipping covers the added fee and the shipping costs, so that leaves an 11% spread to cover.

Any buylist spread less than that is a clear sell to buylists. The same process applies to other outlets like eBay or Amazon.

When a card has a very high spread--50% or more being an extreme example--and the absolute dollar amount makes it worth while, it may be good idea to seek other selling outlets. These are cases where selling on TCGPlayer is a great option if the extra profit outweighs the extra work it requires.

A more demanding outlet is through social media or trading boards, which is a less efficient out for cards but one that comes with the greatest potential gain by bypassing the fees associated with selling through a third party

Card Handling Efficiency

Another thing to consider is time.

Buylisting is the quickest and most efficient way to convert cards to cash because it requires minimal card handling, and the transaction can cover many cards in one fell swoop a given point in time.

Alternatively, selling on TCGPlayer or another store requires cards to be priced, uploaded, then eventually pulled, protected, packaged, and shipped. The minutes, hours, days, and even weeks spent working on selling a collection through TCGPlayer adds up to a real cost.

And while buylisting does come with its own labor, it’s more efficient and expedient process, especially with the use of Quiet Speculation's Trader Tools 3, and this is something to be weighed in any selling decisions.

Locking in Prices

Buylisting locks in a price immediately upon processing an order, and barring an extreme outlier event, buylists will honor that price if the cards are sent within the appropriate timeframe--usually two days.

Selling on TCGPlayer or ebay comes with a guessing and waiting game that has no guarantee to sell. It’s possible to list a card for a competitive price, only for the price to drop and the card eventually sinks from view and never sell, meaning missed profits.

Card prices can be quite volatile, and holding a card always comes with some level of increased risk compared to selling it now. One way to hedge between the two options is to list a card on TCGPlayer for the lowest price--which will likely lead to a quick sale--as a way to realize a profit higher than the buylist alternative.

Condition

Perhaps the most important factor in buylisting is condition. In the typical case, buylist prices are for cards assumed to be near-mint.

To claim the true buylist price, the card must meet the standards laid out by the buyer. Cards that don’t make the grade will be discounted by some degree, likely ranging from 25% to 50%. Some stores offer the ability to enter cards for a lower price, others lay out their own condition/price chart, while others may do it on the fly.

This is clearly a huge cut into the spread and profit, so it’s not something to take lightly.

Stores will typically review a received buylist order and offer a new adjusted price to reflect any condition issues, which comes with the option to cancel this portion of the buylist and return it at the seller’s expense.

Cards that are clearly well-played should likely be excluded from buylists, which leaves some other alternatives. Perhaps the best alternative is to sell on TCGPlayer, which allows for cards of any condition to be priced as you desire. eBay allows the uploading of images of the exact card to be sold, which may be particularly useful for higher-end cards in varying degrees of played condition.

Another option is to simply put these played cards into the trade binder, allowing them to be moved near or at retail price to players who simply want the cards to play with or to speculators who simply want the card however they can get it.

Up Next: A Practical Buylisting Case Study

Over the last few months I have acquired a significant amount of cards through buying collections, and through buylisting I aimed to seize profits and clean out my stock.

I also have have a ton of cards I have obtained over the years that I haven’t done anything with aside from shuffle around, so I went through my card collection in an attempt to convert the chaff and some extra tournament staples into cash.

I put every card through Trader Tools 3, checking the spread and buylist price, and organizing cards accordingly. I ended up selecting a great number to buylist, some to sell on TCGPlayer, and even some to put into my trade binder.

Next week I’ll be back with a deeper look at the process I went through and the outcome of my experience. I’ll be looking for feedback on my strategy and hope to generate lots of great questions and conversation.

With that, turn to the comments with any thoughts or questions you have, and see you next week!

-Adam