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[Background: this was previously part of a longer question which has been edited into multiple smaller questions. I’ve already researched selling Magic cards, including reading through How do I find out a fair price for my Magic the Gathering cards? and Where can I sell my Magic: The Gathering cards?, and am getting into finer detail.]

Question: I’ve divided my cards by rarity and I'm now deciding between selling the Rares individually or in small groups. My plan is to start with individual sales and then group the unsold Rares. Any suggestions for what these groupings should be, such as Color or Expansion?

Community
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Justin Whitney
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Primarily, you need to judge how much your time is worth. In the general case, you can get more money per card by selling them as singles, or as small groups (such as playsets of 4). However, that will take a lot of time, especially for a large collection. Dumping your whole collection at your LGS for a bulk price is extremely quick and easy, but you're not going to get anywhere near as much money as selling each card individually online... but making all of those online sales will take a long time and require a lot of effort. (Shipping costs should also be considered.)

Rares and old desirable cards are more liquid, meaning it's easy to find someone willing to buy them, which means less time and effort spent selling them. Foils may or may not be liquid, depending on the cards in question.

I do not recommend trying to sell loose old packs over the internet. In the very oldest sets, it is possible to determine the exact contents of the pack before opening it, meaning the savvy buyers will refuse to purchase any packaged old cards unless they're in a factory-sealed box/case. (The assumption being that the seller has determined the pack contains nothing of worth already.)

Even in the sets new enough where that isn't possible, box mapping has been a thing for years, so a seller could pull out all of the worthwhile packs from a box before selling the rest; Wizards has made efforts to counteract this over the years, but they have only really been effective in the most recent sets (roughly Avacyn and onwards -- mapping is still possible, but it is no longer financially beneficial). The possibility of repacks also makes online buyers wary of purchasing loose packs from older sets.

Brian S
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It really depends on how much time you want to spend on this. Selling the cards one by one is the best way to get the more money out of your cards. But if you have for example 2000 cheap commons, it would take a lot of time to list those to maybe get only a few more pennies out of each cards (which may still be worth it for you at the end).

Personally, I like to just split up my cards into 3 piles: cheap (< $1.00), average and valuable (> $10.00). I usually only take the time to list the most worth cards (cards that are actually either played a lot or rarities) and sell all the others for a bulk price.

It would probably be a great idea to do a separate pile for your foil cards (especially the cheap foils) because some players/collectors really look for those and you could get a better value out of those by selling all your cheap common/uncommon foils together.

dan
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