While I bow down to the Magic financial genius that is Kelly Reid, I thought that I would offer my thoughts on how to make the most of your card collection from a marketing point of view.
Most Magic players that have been in the game long enough to amass a collection of cards have a trade binder. And almost just as many put every mythic, rare, and uncommon they own in it. Not only does that make for a heavy load to take to your local FNM or tournament, it also overwhelms the eyes of potential traders or buyers. What I have found most effective as a trader and seller is to analyze the metagame, and to see what uncommon, rare, and mythic cards are popular and thusly in demand.
Another step you could take in making your binder more easily accessible to potential customers is to organize your binder by color and rarity. While yes, this does take considerable time to implement if your collection is as vast as mine; the upkeep of the system is fairly easy. When I reordered my trade binder my trades and sales soared without me putting any new cards in. Just the organized nature of my binder allowed people to find the cards they wanted without the hassle of scanning page after page trying to find the ones they wanted.
If you wanted to go one step further down the trail to simplicity you could weed out the cards that are no longer in the dominant format of your binder. For example, my binder predominantly consists of cards that are in the current Type II Standard format; however, I have a separate organized section for my cards that are in Extended, so that there would be less confusion while perusing my cards.
We all know the people who sit down with your binder and look at it for a solid 5 minutes thinking and thinking about what cards they might like to buy off you. These people reduce the precious time that your binder has for circulation amongst the seething masses that want to take a peek and thusly REDUCING YOUR POTENTIAL PROFIT! This can all be prevented! Enter the final step in organization, simplification, and accessibility, the spreadsheet. Herein lies the ultimate answer to your Magic binder needs. It is, however, very time consuming to create. It took me well over a week to catalog all of my cards into the database. I myself chose to create the following columns in my spreadsheet: card name, number of copies, rarity, foil (?), price of card, and price of card (foil). Is all of this necessary? No. Is it tedious? Yes. Will it help you in your goal in moving more cards? YES! Having a quick reference sheet of your stock and your prices will help with customer traffic and sales due to the accessibility of the information and the swiftness in which cards can be bought and sold.
Again, these are just my thoughts on the subject. All of these plans are those that I have implemented and have found successful. I hope that you too can benefit from my methods and succeed with a more organized trading system.
For more financial guidance in the world of Magic: The Gathering, check out Kelly Reid at www.mananation.com.
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My biggest problem with keeping up a binder is time. I have taken to just keeping extra rare or mythic cards I own in it. I focus on standard as most folks play that. That and the time it would take to pull out my older cards would kill me.
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