You’re welcome david.

Someone once wrote on my MOTL ref list: “Trading as it should be: to mutual advantage”. It’s easiest to accomplish this when both parties have different goals.

Interestingly there is still quite a lot of bulk I am missing. The numbers do include some yet to be received cards for which I have a deal with the shop I most commonly use that basically comes down to them delivering a playset of Mythics of a set at any point before its rotation. Otherwise I was mostly helped by buying a collection 2 years ago that pretty much doubled my collection in size and that contributed a lot of cards towards my goal. It was at this point that I decided to set my goal. As of today there are still 2288 different cards on my wants list.

Thanks for sharing. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a lot more MTG financiers with a similar goal. As the people who enjoyed the game during its early stages age it is likely we will see a lot more people taking more of a backseat and just making it out to play when they can. I honestly see myself slipping more and more into this category especially as I age and move more towards wanting a family.

Thanks for sharing Pi. I love hearing the different reasons people are into MTG finance as it’s important to remember that in every transaction (trade or purchase) both parties have a goal and it’s quite often that both players have different goals. Knowing this helps one so to make both parties happy with any given trade. I would also like to throw out there that your collecting goal is really impressive and I think it’s awesome how well your doing regarding such a Titanic goal.

When I got involved with mtg finance about 3.5 years ago, I had a good collection of cards from roughly Legends through Urza’s block that had been sitting in a closet. My bankroll came from liquidating some of those cards (keeping anything I want for the longterm, such as my set of revised duals). Since then I’ve tried to make it largely cash neutral — I’m not trying to pull out dollars, but I try to avoid putting any in either. I take my earnings in the form of vintage and legacy cards, not so much as long term gainers (though many can also be that) but rather as the cards I want to own long term.

So for me mtgfinance is about keeping tabs on what is happening in a game that I enjoy but rarely get to play, while also improving my collection with an eye toward formats I’d like to play more in the future.

I had always enjoyed trading. I had been in a bit of a lull when it came to Magic as I had no people to play with, but then I was invited to join a casual group that played most Sundays and included a few people I already knew. I found that while I still knew how to trade I was not as accurate on pricing as I once was. I decided to see what I could find online in regard to Magic trading and came across the earlier incarnation of Quiet Speculation (if I remember correctly this was even before it was called Doubling Season). I read all articles on a regular basis and brought my trading game back to its old level.

I’ve always liked discussing Magic and when QS turned into what it is today I quickly became a member, most often found on the forums. I was always a bit of an odd duck as I am primarily a casual player and because of my old school trading experience that few shared. I found I had sometimes to contribute.

Throughout the years I evolved into a mix of casual player, collector and trader. I’ve described how they interact in one of my articles so I won’t go into detail here, but it’s good to know that I fall on the fanatical side. When I picked up a large collection a couple of years ago the collector and player decided that it would be a good idea to obtain a playset of Magic (expensive restricted cards 1x) while the trader was ok supporting that as long as it wasn’t too bad for my trade stock. I aim for the first English printing of a card with normal corners and NM.

At this point I am basically into MTG Finance to make this goal as cheap as possible and in fact have been getting slightly more money out of MTG than I am putting in. I mostly do this by trading for bulk rares and buying collections, flipping both to a store I have an arrangement with after taking out those cards I was still missing, but every now and then I do some minor speculation and I also get compensated for my contributions here on QS.

I’m currently at 91% of the playset and 96% for unique cards and both are slowly but steadily increasing without me having to put in extra money. I own almost everything played competitively in Eternal formats (though for a few cards upgrades to a different set or condition would be welcome).