Tag Archives: buying collections

Facebook Acquisitions, Part 2

October 15, 2015 Douglas Johnson 5 Comments

My definition of when I buy a “collection” has always been loose at best. I classify pretty much everything as a collection, because it’s just easier to have a category in place for when I mark it on my spending spreadsheet for the month. Even if I just buy someone’s EDH deck at buylist prices, I label it as a collection. Four thousand commons and uncommons that a Legacy player was looking to move from his basement? Also a collection in my book. Maybe I should start to refer to the smaller pickups as “acquisitions,” because I’m not buying out their entire accumulated (or collected, if you will) lot of cards. I’m just buying what they don’t need at the moment.

Lik Dis If U Cri Evertim

Back in May of this year, I wrote about my first few lots that I had purchased through Facebook at buylist prices. I’m not referring to that guy from high school on your friends list who happened to see one thing in his feed about Magic, so he sent you a private message reminding you that he still lives in the area and has a collection of cards he wants to sell you from 2003 to 2005. While those are nice and lucrative (albeit rare), I’m talking about having someone from California ship me two of her tier-one EDH decks at buylist prices. You don’t have to spend time sorting through bulk, and you just get to immediately throw the cards up on TCGplayer, eBay, or another buylist that you know will pay just a little higher than what you gave the seller.

Are these acquisitions an every-day occurrence? No, definitely not. I will say that they’ve been a more frequent find than Craigslist nowadays, and I find myself sending messages to sellers at least a few times a month on average (compared to less than once a month of finding a Craigslist ad worth sending a reply to). Not every seller is willing to take your offer of approximately buylist prices, and that’s okay. We’re there to give them options, not force-feed them our Cutco knives.

I’m going to go through my most recent ~~collection~~ acquisition step by step, and try to show you how both sides can leave the conversation and transaction without being ripped off, and without feeling like you’re being ripped off.

Where Do I Find Them?

Well, you want to be a part of a lot of Facebook groups, for one. Does this result in a somewhat unsettling amount of garbage posts that you really couldn’t care less about? Yeah, definitely. Thankfully, you quickly learn who’s a frequent poster, who to “hide” posts from, and how to immediately recognize if a post is worth your time in the first few words. To get started, I recommend joining all of the groups that I listed in the first article. All of those groups are still active, and I’ve picked up (or sold) cards in every one. In the past several months since that article has gone live, I’ve found a couple of new groups that you can also find some value in:

MTG SICK deals (Magic: The Gathering)

Magic: The Gathering (Buy, Sell, & Trade)

The SICK deals page doesn’t have nearly as many “buylist”-esque posts, but I highly recommend joining it if you’re a player who still occasionally wants to buy cards for personal use. The prices are always cheaper than TCGplayer or eBay, and can be very close to buylist sometimes.

Although these are the most prominent groups that don’t correlate with a specific region, I still highly recommend networking with your local area and joining most of the region-specific groups on Facebook. Finance aside, they’re good ways to make friends, carpool for events, learn about new sales your LGS might be having, etc.

However, certain areas might have your juicy Facebook acquisitions on lockdown without you even knowing it:

Derek bought up an excellent point that I had never really run into (at least that I know of): some area Facebook groups may be moderated by the same people who buy and sell collections as a source of income. If the group settings require posts to be submitted to an admin before they’re accepted, then we may very well be missing out on a lot of the sweeter deals before they even go public. While there’s unfortunately nothing we can really do about that, you’ll probably notice eventually if there just don’t happen to be any good deals at all on your local Facebook group.

Fool Me Once…. Or Not At All

Any of you who were previously aware of the Facebook MTG market are probably familiar with horror stories of players being scammed out of cards, not being paid, or their trade partners blocking them and never getting the cards they were supposed to. It sucks and it’s definitely a risk that we take anytime we deal with someone who we don’t know personally through an unregulated, third-party channel like Facebook. I’m lucky enough to have never been ripped off throughout my experiences buying on FB, but I believe that’s partially because I’ve learned to be very cautious in the steps I take before a transaction.

Before I first send money to someone else over the internet, there are a couple of basic precautions I take:

I want them to name me at least four out-of-state references, who I will then message and confirm the legitimacy of the person I’m trading with. The reason I try to specify out-of-state references is because it’s not too terribly difficult for any old Scamming Sammy to be a fine and upstanding citizen at his LGS or be well-known as a great guy at his local PPTQ, but turn into a ruthless shark on the pseudo-anonymity of Facebook. Sammy can easily ask his Facebook friends from the LGS or PPTQ to be his references for his online trades, and they wouldn’t be the wiser to his cheating. I want references who have dealt with Sammy through the mail, preferably those who are unbiased and have never met him in person.
I want physical pictures of the cards themselves before and after packaging, a tracking number, and/or shipping label receipt before I send any money. It’s easy for someone to ask Sammy for a tracking number, and he types 5479678564156469896 (or something that actually looks similar to a legitimate Paypal/USPS tracking number), and have the number “not work” during the first day or so before it gets processed. Can they still technically get around my request by taking pictures of the cards, packaging up a bag of rocks and shipping them to me with no return address? Sure, but then you’re getting into mail fraud territory and I think the number of people who are willing to go through all of that trouble is a lot lower than you’d expect.
Lastly, I really recommend paying through the PayPal Goods & Services option if the cards you’re buying get to be in the hundreds-of-dollars range. At that point, you’re always better off protecting yourself, even if it is an extra three percent out of your own pocket. If I’m paying $850 for a small pile of cardboard being sent through the mail by someone that I’ve never seen before in my life, I want the support and dispute resolution of PayPal on my side.

Options

Now we’re getting to the part that you probably hoped I would start out with. Negotiating a price to buy other people’s cards at buylist prices from the comfort of your home or smartphone. Let’s look at my most recent Facebook acquisition, and how I broke the ice with my seller.

Unfortunately I didn’t save the initial post before I got the idea to write this article, but he provided a list and initially said that he was looking to get $1000 for the entire lot.

First and foremost, I always take everything to a private message discussion. I don’t want to start a bidding war in the comments section, and I don’t want to get a hundred notifications from other people commenting their offers. I comment with “PM sent” (or “PM me” if their privacy settings are too high) to ensure we can discuss everything between the two of us.

Thankfully this seller was very realistic about the options he had, and was very pleasant to deal with throughout the entire process. It’s not always this easy, and some sellers don’t take kindly to offers, either due to delusions of grandeur or refusing to accept the true cash price of their cards. You don’t want to message someone who’s selling organized singles at 10-percent off of TCGplayer mid and try to offer buylist—you’ll just be wasting your time. You want to look for a post similar to this one;

Although this particular person ended up wanting way too much and was expecting an unrealistic price, you want to look for those types of key phrases. “Getting out of the game,” “need to sell soon,” “$XXX or best offer on the lot,” and “have to sell for X” all immediately set off green lights in my head.

When you’re negotiating and presenting your initial offer, you need to present yourself as an option, and make it clear that you’re not necessarily their only or their best option.

Let’s make up an imaginary scenario to demonstrate how I go through these situations. Jason has $500 TCGplayer mid worth of singles that he wants to move on Facebook as a lot and makes a post asking for $350 OBO. He gets a few comments on the thread asking for prices on certain singles, but Jason would really just rather avoid the hassle altogether and ship one package. That’s where we come in. Once we get confirmation on the important card conditions, potential foils, and other information that wasn’t visible in the initial picture, we present our offer.

“Thanks for helping to clarify with that information, Jason. $350 is a really good price and I’m sure someone else will probably pick it up at that number, but it’s just a little too high for me personally. I was going to offer $270 for the entire lot, and I can PayPal today if that makes a difference. If you end up changing your mind, you’re always welcome to message me. Good luck with the rest of your sale :)”

Instead of shoving a number down his throat, we gave him an option. A price of $350 isn’t too bad—someone might actually decide to buy at that number, and that’s okay. We didn’t want to bid against that person, anyway. However, it’s more likely that the seller won’t get another offer over the next couple of days, even if he does bump his post. We gave him the power to make a choice between taking our immediate offer, and holding out to try and get more from someone else, with no pressure or strings attached.

Sometimes, I’ll take it a step further and outline all of a seller’s other options to them as well, especially if I get the sense that they’re trying to maximize their value in selling off their collection. Explain to them that if they want to squeeze the most value out of their cards, they should probably list the higher-end singles on TCGplayer or eBay, or price the cards out individually to sell on Facebook at ten percent below the cheapest matching condition copy. Let them know about other buylists like Card Kingdom, ABU Games, or Strike Zone, and explain the process of buylisting to them if they’re foreign to the concept.

The key is to be blatantly transparent, and present them with as many options as possible. Most of these options involve getting paid more than you would pay them, but that’s fine. Fortunately, this transparency has two advantages for you in addition to giving your seller information to make their decision. The option you gave them is probably the only one that would pay them within the next day or two, and cash in hand is king. If they list their cards on eBay, they won’t reap the full benefits for multiple weeks, or even months. Buylists can take a while to process, but you’re a buylist with a very quick payment process.

The other benefit of this transparency is that it smooths the air between buyer and seller, and tension goes down. You’re no longer seen in their eyes as the “guy who’s trying to lowball me and rip me off,” because you’re the one who just told them about all of the other ways they could make more money instead of selling to you. You’re just one of their options, and you have a serious advantage on all of the seller’s other choices as long as you follow the steps to protect yourself as mentioned earlier.

I hope this helps. Happy hunting!

End result of the list earlier in the article :) — End result of the list earlier in the article. You can do this too!

Conjured Currency

Nothing is Sacred

June 18, 2015 Douglas Johnson 20 Comments

I used to be like you. No, not you. You. Over there. With the funny hat. Yes, you.

I was a player at heart, instead of a cold-hearted, finance-focused individual. The endgame of value trading was putting together my Tezzeret control deck for Standard, rather than selling cards on eBay. I didn’t even know that “Magic finance” was a thing, much less that it was possible to use it as a primary source of income. I’m sure that many of you are in the same boat: you’re players that don’t really buy or sell collections on a large scale, don’t try to make hundreds of dollars through speculating, and just want to trade cards away when they’re high and trade for them when they’re low.

So What Changed?

I don’t remember the exact card that I first bought at a buylist price when I didn’t need it for a deck, but it happened because my old LGS doesn’t buy singles for cash—it just has a trade credit list that can be used for other singles. Someone had shown up to the store looking to unload a few random cards and been disappointed to find that the owner was not willing to pay in dollars and cents. He walked into the game room and started asking if anyone was willing to buy his cards. I had a tiny bit of personal spending money from a part-time job at K-Mart, and thankfully, being a high-school student comes with having zero actual real-life bills.

For theoretical argument’s sake (since I don’t actually remember), let’s assume that it was a few copies of Mox Opal. Back in the day, Opal was a $20 card, and Modern was a format that only existed in the minds of those that worked at Wizards of the Coast.

I had my Standard deck completed, Modern didn’t exist, and I sure as hell wasn’t getting into Legacy anytime soon. At the time, I had no idea what EDH was or why I should care about it, because nobody at the store played it. I had enough store credit to keep running drafts back every week, and I knew that booster packs were a money pit. So the question was always there: what should I buy with the minimal amount of money that I had to spare?

When this person was asking around if anyone would buy his cards from him, what went through my head? Well, it’s more than likely that I considered the future possibilities of how I might use those Opals. What if I needed them for a future Standard deck? At the very least, it would be a great deal if I could get them for $10 each and then trade them out at the full retail value of $20 in the future. So, I bought them at half of the TCGplayer mid price. I wasn’t planning to resell them l online, nor was I speculating on them with intent to sell for $50 each four years later. I resolved my cognitive dissonance of, “Don’t buy cards that you don’t need,” with the argument of, “But I got a really great deal, and I might need them in the future.” I wasn’t ready to make the jump to selling cards online (though if I was offered full retail for a card I wasn’t using, I was more than happy to oblige).

Majoring in MTG Finance

As I graduated from high school and moved to a college town with a new job at a local videogame store, I started to have more and more disposable income, and was also learning about the various outlets of moving my cards for cash. I discovered individual seller TCGplayer accounts, the dozens of online buylists that weren’t Star City Games or ChannelFireball, and the Brainstorm Brewery podcast, which I started listening to religiously.

I wanted to catch the big cards before they spiked and make money speculating. After all, that’s where all the money was, right? I wanted to be the Speculator King™. Meanwhile, I started to attend the weekly Magic night at our college. I mainly just went to play EDH, test Standard, and hang out with new friends, but I also happened to be one of the only people there who brought a reasonable amount of cash. Players would stop by with their winnings from FNM, their off-color shocklands that they didn’t need, and their bulk rares. While they found plenty of trade partners, I was the only one paying with actual currency.

I started accepting pretty much anything while quoting buylist numbers that I would look up on my phone. I paid $5 on shocklands, 10 cents on bulk rares, whatever—I started to just buy everything, assuming I could afford it, and since I was at a college campus with a lot of newer players, I didn’t have to make any too backbreaking purchases. The worst-case scenario would be that I had to buylist cards back to an online store and break even, so why not? I could eventually out the bulk rares to a vendor at a GP for at least what I bought them for, and sometimes more. Throughout my freshman year, I ended up leaving my flag in the ground as “that guy who will buy your cards, no matter what they are.”

That being said, my buylist prices differed depending on how easy the card was to move and how many copies I already had, just like any other buylist. I paid less on Hallowed Fountain number 15 than I did on Fountains six, seven, and eight.

Stepping Up

Sophomore year was an even bigger step up for me, and I think of it as sort of the diverging point when I decided to give up on the competitive side of Magic in favor of buying, selling, and trading full-time. At the beginning of the school year, a long-time friend and would-be LGS owner messaged me and let me know that he would be moving across the country at the end of the year. He was getting out of Magic because he knew that taking a job offer he got in Oregon was a much better decision than trying to start an LGS from just a pile of cards and comics.

He asked me if I wanted to buy his entire inventory. I had been buying and moving a lot of stuff over the past year, but was I ready to fully commit to buying a collection like this? It would be a huge time investment to sort everything, learn how to move all of the bulk commons and uncommons, price out the higher-value stuff, synch it into my own collection, and then sell enough to make a profit.

Yes

Long story short: yes, I bought it all. And ever since that collection, I’ve been willing to buy pretty much anything, so long as I don’t dip into my personal emergency funds. I give my phone number out to every player who buys or sells cards with me, and I make myself available as quickly as possible when negotiating to buy a collection. Do you have a playset of Force of Wills that you want to sell as soon as possible so you can afford a car? I am your guy. Do you have 40,000 commons and uncommons in your basement that have been accumulating over the past five years? I’ll be glad to drive over tonight and take them off your hands. Is that a stack of 380 bulk rares? If they’re all NM and English, I’ll be glad to pay cash on them. Being open and willing to buy all types of cards at buylist instead of restricting myself to high-dollar staples or just bulk has been one of my biggest arsenals in becoming one of the most well-known buyers in my area.

(Almost) Nothing is Sacred

Allow me to present you with a scenario that you may have been a part of in the past. You’re trading, you open the other trade binder, and point to the Snapcaster Mage on the front page.

“Snapcaster?”

“Nah, man, sorry. I’ve got to hold onto it, I think it’s gonna keep going up.” You actually really need these for your Modern deck at FNM this weekend, so you decide to be a bit more aggressive.

“Would you sell it? Cheapest copy on TCGplayer at the moment is $76 plus shipping—would you sell yours for $80? I have the cash right now.”

“Hmm…. Nah, I think I’m gonna hold onto it until it hits $90. Thanks anyway, though.” You flip through the rest of the binder to find nothing, defeated. The binders close, and you walk away.

How often has a similar situation happened to you? I’ve personally been on both sides of this interaction. I used to be “that guy” who had stuff in his binder that wasn’t for trade or sale for one reason or another. I’ve also tried to buy cards at practically retail simply because I wanted to play a card in EDH and the other party couldn’t find anything in my binders. It can definitely be a frustrating situation for both traders, and I have a simple piece of advice that can help resolve the situation.

Sell it

If someone offers to buy one of your Magic: The Gathering cards at full retail, there are very few situations in which you should refuse. The only reasons I can think of are either that you need it for a deck that will play in a sanctioned event in the very near future or that you have a very good reason to believe that the card will massively spike in the next few days. Speculating is fine, and I have a spec box myself, but it’s something that I hold entirely separate from my inventory, and pretend that it doesn’t exist except for once a week or so when I skim through it to check for spikes. This is something that took me a while to learn, especially as someone who was ingrained in speculating and being afraid that all of my cards would increase in value the very next day if I were to let go of them.

If it’s in my binders or boxes that I lay out during the weekly gaming night, it’s for sale or trade, no matter what. There’s no need for the customers to ask whether or not something is for grabs—they just have to ask how much something is worth. It smooths over everything, and prevents you from being tempted to move cards that you’ve dedicated to being labeled as “holds.”

If a person wants a card from you so badly that she is willing to pay full retail, make the deal. You can almost certainly just find another copy for a few bucks cheaper on eBay or TCGplayer, ending up a few dollars ahead just for being patient and waiting for your new copy to arrive. Obviously, this goes out the window if you’re using it for an event, but even EDH singles can be proxied temporarily, and your playgroup probably won’t hate you for it.

While it isn’t going to hold true for a lot of players reading this, I treat every card I own as inventory, and I treat every card in every collection as potential inventory. Liberating myself to be a walking buylist exponentially increased the number of purchases I was able to make at low prices, as long as I had cash in hand. Freeing my collection to view the entire thing as sellable made transactions much easier, and resulted in more players willing to come up to me to buy, sell, or trade.

End Step

Is this kind of information going to help you guys make money in Magic? I tried to entwine my own personal experiences a bit deeper this time to show you guys and gals the progression of how I went from “FNM grinder looking to value trade” into “walking local buylist who’s always willing to drive to your house and buy your entire collection.”

I understand that not everyone is going to want to take this step, but hopefully I shed some light on an option you may want to pursue, should you have the right circumstances available to you.

Thanks for reading, as always, and let me know in the comments if you want to discuss this further!

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