By Cliff Daigle
Last week I went over some tips for trading with another person. Today I want to give you some alternatives to that sort of trading.
I want to start off with a trade that doesn’t have anything to do with another person: trading cards to a vendor for store credit. This is something that you might hesitate to do, because you won’t get full retail value for your cards. Understand that a vendor lives for their profit margins, so they buy cards for about half what they sell them for. Most vendors offer a bonus if you choose store credit over cash, from ten to thirty percent, depending on the vendor.
You can compare buylists online to find who will give you the most value, and it just so happens that here on MTGPrice you have a tool for that. Just bring up a card’s price, and on the right, you have buttons for ‘buy price’ and ‘sell price’ depending on which you want to do.
The main reason to use a buylist is when there is a specific card that you just haven’t been able to find anywhere else. Trading is imperfect, and sometimes you just need that last card or two. I have done this to finish foiling out a deck, because I was unable to find someone who had spare foil Ravnica bounce lands. I gave up, and went to a vendor.
In the modern age, we don’t have to rely on in-person trades with individuals or vendors. I want to share with you three different online tools that I’ve used to trade via mail. I’ve traded to Hong Kong and to Europe, and I have yet to have a bad experience.
The first you should know about is the oldest, the Magic Online Trading League (MOTL), and you’ll want to check out the forum. This is a place where people post their have/want lists and you see what matches up with yours. The advantage of this site is that since its been around for quite a while, there’s some very awesome cards available. If you’re into early judge foils and FBB duals, this is the place.
The downside of MOTL is a subtle one in terms of layout and organization. It’s a forum. You post what you have and want, and people reply. It’s very static and there’s no built-in tool for setting up a trade or card valuation. In addition, because of the values of the cards available, it seems to have a higher incident rate when it comes to scammers.
An aside about mail fraud: agreeing to trade by mail and then not doing so is exactly mail fraud. It is easy to prove and prosecute, and the mods will help as much as they can. I’ve done more than 100 online trades and haven’t hit a bad one yet. Inattentive people yes, but not evil.
A newer trade site is PucaTrade.com. Instead of directly trading with another user, you add your list of haves and wants, then you fill the wants of others and earn points, which you then use to obtain your own cards. A point is roughly equal to one cent, so if I send someone a Snapcaster Mage, I’m earning around 2400 points and they are spending that many points.
PucaTrade allows for you to get maximum value for your cards. You get full retail in points, and can do so at the height of the market. If you like to buy low and sell high, you can do very well on PucaTrade. The big drawback is that the process of sending cards is a little more luck than anything else, because it is a race to fulfill orders. I put every shockland up as available, and only one pops up to be sent now and again, because others fill those orders as soon as someone does it. I have seen someone pick up dual lands in PucaTrade and not have to deal with someone who insists on getting extra value for ‘trading down’ their Reserved List card.
The third site I want to mention is my favorite: deckbox.org. It combines a built-in price tool from tcgplayer with chat boxes and a cleaner interface than MOTL and yet is a regular trade. Deckbox gets a lot of their traffic from reddit, and there are some awesome people on reddit who like to trade. Trades haven’t been just cards-for-cards either! I have sent magic novels out and gotten cards for my trouble, and I’ve sent out a stack of cards and gotten a brand new iPad.
As I said, I’m a devotee of Deckbox. I like browsing for foils, I like the chat box they offer instead of PM-style messages back and forth. I like the reddit trade page that refreshes weekly and I appreciate the forums that deckbox has, which has boards for different formats, locations, or styles.
For anyone who wishes to trade online, I would also suggest looking into shipping using Paypal to print out a postage label. Of the 90 trades I’ve done, more than half have been high-value enough that I wanted some form of tracking on them. Using Paypal, a first-class mail parcel in a thick envelope (bubble mailer) is $1.69 in shipping, when going to the USPS counter would cost twice that. Save yourself some money, and go enjoy some trades!
Questions? Leave them below, or tweet them to me @WordOfCommander!
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I can personally vouch for Puca-Trade. So far I have traded a Bayou among many other cards, and received Thoughtsieze, Sinkhole, you name it.