This is awesome, just signed up! I love it when hobbies collide :)
Some context for others: Magic: the Gathering has grown enormously over the past 30 years, and it has an enormous secondary market, which covers several segments: highly collectible early cards, newly playable cards (“staples” across a variety of formats), and unopened packs of cards (“sealed”). Early sets had print runs that totaled 2-40 million cards in total, nowadays sets have billions of cards printed.
Interestingly enough, early cards are relatively counterfeit-proof mostly due to changes in printing technology, although the counterfeits are getting better each year.
The biggest players in this secondary market are TCGPlayer, which was recently acquired by eBay, eBay itself, CardMarket in the EU, and lots of local game stores (LGS) that have built up online market share (CardKingdom is the biggest of these) or niche.
Fees drive revenue for most of these sites, and those fees are variable across different products each platform offers to sellers.
Interestingly, although this market does not have derivatives, there are several companies and APIs that attempt to offer some market advantage for buyers or sellers: indexing the lowest available price, providing historical price data, allowing comparisons across markets for arbitrage opportunities, plus more complex analysis. There’s some manipulation that goes on in these markets, but nothing as bad as crypto that I’ve seen.
CardSphere, a smaller player in the market (and my favorite) just announced their closure. They mostly inverted the typical market dynamic by letting members “trade”— buyers would offer their desired purchase price while sellers would select the best offers to fill.
A couple Q’s for the founder(s): What’s your fee structure like? How do you plan to take on the TCG/eBay giant? Do you have concerns for the future of the secondary market in general, given Hasbro’s desire to fuel growth of the property?
I actually had no idea there were markets for this. I have a huge box of cards from the mid 1990s here. I bought them from an actual shop in Cambridge, UK or traded them in person. I haven't even thought about the game since I stopped playing it in 2000 or so.
Edit: holy shit the second hand prices on ebay. I'm going to spend the weekend on this! I even have a couple of sealed decks somewhere. These: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/334960782977
Congratulations! There are lots of apps that will let you scan your collection and get valuations. ManaBox, Helvault, and Dragonshield are some I’ve used.
Selling a collection as a whole will likely get you 60-70% of market value, piecing it out will get you closer to 90 after shipping and fees. Sealed product of that wera has a much higher valuation being sealed. There’s not much left.
Of course, if you don’t want to sell, the apps will still let you track valuations and deltas.
Magic has recently had a downturn, retracing from 2020-2021 peaks )some might even call a bubble). Collectors for your era of cards are reaching peak purchasing power, though, so there likely won’t be a crash until they die off (if at all).
Everyone I know who exited said selling their early stuff has always been their biggest regret.
3) I think Hasbro is doing the right thing and what's good for Hasbro is good for Mana Pool. MTG is all of Hasbro's profits now and 30% of its revenue... the rest is almost margin-free. MTG is going to grow a lot further... pandemic brought forward revenue but collectibles will keep growing forever.
I did think about doing climate change stuff, but Magic is in my blood for better or worse.
I hope we don't destroy the planet, and I hope we get to space, and then I think there will be at least a solar-system-sized economy of collectibles. Physical ones will be extra rare because of distance issues too.
Some context for others: Magic: the Gathering has grown enormously over the past 30 years, and it has an enormous secondary market, which covers several segments: highly collectible early cards, newly playable cards (“staples” across a variety of formats), and unopened packs of cards (“sealed”). Early sets had print runs that totaled 2-40 million cards in total, nowadays sets have billions of cards printed.
Interestingly enough, early cards are relatively counterfeit-proof mostly due to changes in printing technology, although the counterfeits are getting better each year.
The biggest players in this secondary market are TCGPlayer, which was recently acquired by eBay, eBay itself, CardMarket in the EU, and lots of local game stores (LGS) that have built up online market share (CardKingdom is the biggest of these) or niche.
Fees drive revenue for most of these sites, and those fees are variable across different products each platform offers to sellers.
Interestingly, although this market does not have derivatives, there are several companies and APIs that attempt to offer some market advantage for buyers or sellers: indexing the lowest available price, providing historical price data, allowing comparisons across markets for arbitrage opportunities, plus more complex analysis. There’s some manipulation that goes on in these markets, but nothing as bad as crypto that I’ve seen.
CardSphere, a smaller player in the market (and my favorite) just announced their closure. They mostly inverted the typical market dynamic by letting members “trade”— buyers would offer their desired purchase price while sellers would select the best offers to fill.
A couple Q’s for the founder(s): What’s your fee structure like? How do you plan to take on the TCG/eBay giant? Do you have concerns for the future of the secondary market in general, given Hasbro’s desire to fuel growth of the property?