Selling a Collection

Archivist card art

Interestingly, last year I was blogging about inventorying my collection. This month, I sold 25% of my cards. This post looks at selling your collection and de-inventorying it.

My Magic collection ebbs and flows. I buy cards or get them from friends, and sometimes, things get out of hand. Since I've been inventorying my collection, I looked recently and was astounded at how many cards I had accumulated: about 42,000. That's way too many. When you have that much, most of your collection goes unused. In addition, I had a number of valuable cards that never saw play; it makes sense to sell them. I wanted to minimize. Here's how I did it.

Deciding what to sell

It all starts with 1) what you use and 2) what you like. What I used was fairly obvious: I have a number of decks or cubes ready to go, and I know which ones I favor. What I like was trickier. I guess it is better to ask "what do I like the most?" or "what do I actually like vs. think I like?" That took some thinking.

Though I love exploring Magic, there are some formats I just don't play. Pauper, for example. I like pauper in theory but never actually play. Or Commander draft. Basically, I like:

- Limited constructed (building decks in the Standard pool or from blocks of sets, when those were a thing)

- Cube drafts

- Commander constructed

- Casual constructed (building fun decks, probably not competitive, but amusing)

- Exploring (encountering lots of cards)

I already had decks for those first four categories. For the last, I realized that I can do this through singleton formats (where you can have only one copy of a card). That is satisfied in Commander and Cube drafts. 

I typically collect 4 copies of a given card, but when I realized my 'exploration' focus, I decided to go through a lot of my cards and go down to 1 copy (or 2, if I really liked it). That was the bulk of what I sold.

The other thing to consider are high-value cards. I sorted my inventory by market value and realized I had some valuable cards that I never used. That is where the money is when it comes to selling (see next section), so I chose 276 of those to sell.

Expected price

Selling Magic cards can be done individually or in bulk. 

If individually, you will get the best price, but prepare to spend your life putting cards up for auction, mailing them, etc. That was out for me. I would sell in bulk.

If selling in bulk, many Local Game Stores (LGS) operate as follows:

- use TCGPlayer low prices (my inventory app shows low, mid, and market prices)

- list cards worth $3 and up based on TCGPlayer low price

- the store will offer 60-70% of TCGMarket low based on your cards' conditions

- the rest is considered bulk, and stores will offer $2.50-$3.00 per thousand cards for that

To give you an idea of what that means, consider the cards I sold.

- Total sold: 10,000 (almost exactly)

- Total market value: $4,600

- High-value cards: 276

- High-value cards market value: $3265

- High-value cards TCGPlayer low value: $2480

The store gave me $1500 for the lot, based on the fact that some of my high-value cards were in poor condition. I accepted. It was fair.

The big thing to know when selling is that your bulk cards are worth almost nothing. Even those worth $1-$2 each. Stores will not bother including those in offers, and unless you want to spend dozens of hours selling them yourself, I wouldn't fret about it.

De-inventorying

What a pain. I'm not going to lie . . . this took a long time. You have to navigate your app to the card in question, adjust its quantity (or delete it entirely), and do that for (in my case) 10,000 cards. I found, based on the app I use, that the ease of doing this really depends on how you inventoried your stuff in the first place. In cases where I created folders by set, it was pretty simple. Go to that set, sort by set number, and if you stuff is also stored by set number, you can go down the list pretty fast. Where it got hard were those places where a given card had been inventoried in another folder (because it was in a deck or in my binder when I did my inventory). That wasn't so fun. In all, I probably got through most (8,000?) pretty quickly, but then spent hours on what remained based on folder placement. It wasn't fun. And makes you think, to be blunt, if inventorying cards is worth it in the first place. In my case, I think it was, as it enabled me to identify and sell the top cards. But when you add up the hours I spent last year (inventorying) and this year (removing) . . . oi.