I have been away from magic for a while now, and it is time to try to sell my collection, but I am unsure of a fair price to sell for (either through ebay or otherwise). I have gone through the trouble of cataloging the whole thing into deckbox. Most of my cards are vintage (Homelands and before) but I have several cards since as I went to pre-release tourneys and opened packs. I am not really looking to sell via this posting, only hoping for some feedback on a fair price to list it at.

Here is my collection: http://deckbox.org/sets/381680?o=d&p=1&s=j

Some Key items: I have several dual lands (~8), several alpha/beta/revised/Legends (and a few Arabian knights/antiquities). I have complete sets of Ice Age, Chronicles and Homelands, as well as an unopened box of Chronicles (and 4 packs of Unhinged - if that matters :p).
Anyway I am struggling with a fair price to try to sell the whole thing at (and i dont think i want to try to sell individually). Any comments on how to sell the collection would be appreciated. Thanks!

(Deckbox Ave value is about $6k; my thought was perhaps listing for $2k on ebay, would that be fair to where I might get some interest, or is that to low (or high)?)

I think $2k is far too low; if you sort your inventory by price the sum of everything over $10 is $3,275. To me a $10 card is easy to sell, so you shouldn't knock any percentage off those cards. I don't have much experience selling on eBay and such though, so my $10 comparison might be too high or low.
-varble

Well, most people when paying cash go by the TCG low price minus something to make it a deal for them. So set your Deckbox to low and then take off X amount and put it on Ebay or Craigslist.

varble wrote:I think $2k is far too low; if you sort your inventory by price the sum of everything over $10 is $3,275. To me a $10 card is easy to sell, so you shouldn't knock any percentage off those cards. I don't have much experience selling on eBay and such though, so my $10 comparison might be too high or low.
-varble

Good point, but a lot of the older stuff is flagged as "heavily played" and will have a hard time finding buyers at more than 30-50% of an NM copy.

Thanks for your responses :)

So my TCG Low price is on everything is $3,815.95. The low price down to cards for $4 is about $2k. (But I do not think I am going to get $400 for the Alpha Nightmare, something is off with the TCG price, that was one NM one, while the LP ones were like 70$)

I flagged everything legends and older pretty much HP as the default while I was loading them in. I would say that most are probably more like MP, but to be safe set the default to HP. For instance the Beta Wheel of fortune is more like LP (The Thunder Spirits are more HP since I played a white deck). I had planned to take pictures of the cards with average value of more than $10 with the posting.

I also priced all of the cards based on posted buy list prices , adjusted for condition (to HP) and that price was about $1200

The way I and other people I know who buy collections, price collections is normally something along the lines of

60-80% of the price of all modern/legacy staples
50-70% of the price of all format playables
40-60% of the price of all 5$+ cards not played in competitive contrstucted formats
everything else is a throw in.

For less valuable collections, its sometimes easier to do 60% of everything $5+
40% of everything 1-5$
everything else is throw in, such as when buying standard collections and whatnot.

This does vary from collection to collection, for a collection with a high amount of staples that are easy to trade or sell on, you will get closer to 80%.

This makes it a good deal for the person selling the colletion, as they are getting a good price with minimal effort for selling cards, as well as a good deal for the person buying, as pricing and selling as singles takes a long time to make your monies worth.

This assumes all cards are NM. Expensive but hard to ship cards (unplayable alpha cards for example) you will not get lots of money for as part of a collection. Damaged cards will likely not be counted when pricing a collection.

If the person buying the collection is buying for personal use, and not to trade/sell on, then they are probably more likely to give you more money for it.

Hope this helps.

If you want to sell cards on ebay i would suggest just doing 2$ shipping and start each at 1$.

This how i have always sold my cards.

A new option that has popped up recently is TCGplayer now allow people to sell cards through their site. A lot of people frequent this site, but it will take longer for each to sell then to ebay them all off.

Good luck!

Thanks for the input. I was thinking that $2k is probably a fair price, including other comments. I figure as-is it will be about $100 shipping, then selling fees and such take another huge bite, (So if I sold for $2k Id be looking at really netting like 1600$ or so, ugg).

EDIT: LOL the first time I did this check I did not include multiple copies of cards
However per HansonWK's suggestion, if I adjust the "older" cards to say 50% based on condition (and making that alpha nightmare base 50$ condition adjusted), and then total all of the cards over $1, it is in the $2450 ballpark, so 60% of that is about $1500 (cards down to $0.5 is 2700$). Then the box of Chronicles and few unhinged packs might get me to $1650. That's not too bad, or too far off from the $2k :).

Based on HansonWK's comment, perhaps it would be a better idea to try to sell all of the cards that are $1+ TCG Average (or even $0.50) as a lot and then give away the rest locally to save on shipping (The buyer probably does not care about the less valuable cards anyway). So realistically perhaps the commons/uncommons that have little value really are a net negative value to try to sell... Hmm, more to consider :)

Deadonersising: I checked out TCGplayer selling, but the $0.50/card paypal fee is killer (for low volume sellers) for all lower value cards, it will be something to consider though for the more expensive cards :)

$1/card bid and letting the market determine the price is not a bad suggestion :) Thanks

If you want to sell in bulk I don't think most people will drop 2k on the cards like that. You'd have to sell to a store or a 3rd party card dealer like SCG.


Selling individually is probably the way to go.

Alternately you could try Craigslist. Just be careful of scams, of course.

Thanks for everyone's input. Your right, I may have to sell individually. It is free to post on ebay, so I might as well try the whole collection there and see what happens. :)

If anyone here was interested on the general condition of the cards, here is a link to the pictures of those cards over $10 TCG Ave. http://imgur.com/a/TXxop

Thanks again! :)

If anyone was interested the collection did not sell on ebay for $1920, will be listing the cards individually on ebay (or groups). Some day I will post how much I netted from this en devour... (So Far negative 34$ for packaging supplies, lol)