The other option is to pay a knowledgeable dealer to appraise the value, with the clear understanding going in that you will not be selling to said dealer. The negative is you have to pay for the assessment, yet with the dealer not having any incentive to lie there's all the more reason he won't, thus resulting in you getting perhaps the most realistic sense of what they truly might be worth. You could even have part of the appraisal cover ideas on ways to sell them both in general and based on what you specifically have.

that appraisal idea would be an interesting one if you had the ability to make it happen, but unfortunately, the dealers that actually know what they are doing would be very unlikely to do such a thing...So anyone who agrees to those terms is either not really qualified for the job, or looking to angleshoot you/rip you off in some way. You'd be incredibly unlikely to find someone with the skillset to do that, who would think it was worth their time.

This thread made me look up prices for Urza's Legacy/Destiny since that was the block where I actually had money to buy a ton of cards. Wow turns out a bunch of them are worth $15-40 bucks and I must have 4+ copies of them and some foiled. Need to spend some time finding and sorting some of them one day!

I think unopened packs are rarer because usually the first thing people do when they buy a pack is they open it. It is similar to people who kept their action figures in the packaging and unwrapped, so they remained in mint condition. Therefore, you could open a pack and have a mint condition black lotus etc. I think there's value in the possibility of having a great card in the pack. People pay for the risk.

If I were you, I would sell asap and spend time categorizing and look up which ones are the most desired/most valuable.

while we are on the topic of cards, what should i do with my sports cards?

I have a ton, nothing to crazy, last time i looked my best one would be like $50 in a beckett, 5 years ago time. i have like 250+ michael jordans(again nothing to crazy). some sets and stuff. atleast two "crash the game" sets. got a pretty nice rookie collection of over sized cards(c webb and penny hardaways class, maker of those is Classic)

um just a bunch of other random ****, some weaker brand Kobe Bryant Rookies, just random inserts that may have value of various players(more football and basketball than baseball)

My best card was a jerry rice rookie which got yanked when i was a kid . my second best card was a reggie jackson autograph that i traded for two curtis martin inserts as a kid at trade night , i was pry 8 and traded an adult aged 30+, ****ing ******* lol.

hang on to them or start selling them? although i dont look at them or collect anymore, i am fond of my MJ's

and for those magic cards man, i had atleast like 250 of those at some point. hard to believe the game is just now kind of booming it sounds or a few years back. i got the magic cards 16 years ago, i would have been in elementary school, pry had some sick ones in that stack but who knows ha, not sure where those are at

I buy and sell mtg cards as a supplement to poker income. I strongly suggest quietspeculation.com. It's a site for profiting from Magic cards.

Unless you have cards from pre-1980, probably the best way to sell most, if not all of them if you're not pressed for time is to go the route of comc.com. If you have some "chase" type cards that are rare/numbered/autographed, then maybe those would be worth selling individually or in lots on ebay. Or you could just say to hell with it and go to a major card show in your area to try and get maybe 15% of value for the whole collection from a dealer.

But long story short, you won't get rich; and to try - emphasis on try - to get anything close to "booke value" you'll have to put in a good amount of time and effort.

Out of curiosity how much would my ~200 magic cards from '94-96 be worth. Mostly bought starter packs.

edit: ok, not that much. they mostly looked like these cards: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Magic-the-Gat...-/161659558131

sports cards have gone down in value a ton. I used to collect them in the late 80s/90s. I remember some cards being worth a couple hundred bucks. Now they are worth maybe $10 at best.

This is probably my most valuable card:

They probably aren't worth much but MJ's are something at least. Depends on how much you value the space they're taking up mostly. I definitely didn't want to move mine, they weigh a lot if you have a lot of them.

Late 80's/90's are rough value wise for sure. I had enough complete sets that I got something from them when I sold my collection.

Unfortunately, you're not going to get anywhere near beckett price.

yeah with magic lots are going to be nothing but maybe you got that one good one in a set... never know till you look it up. Sometimes it's just a common or an uncommon that took off in the value because of what it did in the game. Some sets were much better than others with chances there obviously.

Update:
I've begun cataloging the cards. Appears I have closer to 200k total cards. I've been using mtgprice.com to upload and view individual boxes (each box ~1000 cards) and so far the 4 boxes I've uploaded price in the 500-600 range. Allegedly at that price I can click a button that populates several online buylists from which I can click another button that sells at those prices by card and prints me out a shipping label. TBU on that front. Going to set aside any card worth $X or greater to try to move it on ebay. X might end up being $10, about 2-3 of those in each box as per the buylist.

Thanks everyone for the advice.

Whats the long story of coming into these cards?

How big a box do you need to store 200k cards? Trying to extrapolate from a set of 300 hockey cards I've had for decades and am having a hard time wrapping my head around it....

Well 1 card weighs .064 ounces.

200k cards weigh 800 pounds.

So basically... the kind of box you would hold a gorilla in.

why didnt you just call a friend who plays to look through them? for almost anyone whos played any length of time they could go through the entire collection and pick out the valuable ones in like 5 minutes max.

It's a closet full of 200 boxes, about a thousand cards per box

I have no friends who play magic

You think there are people who can accurately look at and sort over 333 cards per second?

This would be more like a 30-40 hour job minimum if you want someone to actually look at every card, and even that would include mistakes and is a low end estimate. Assuming 100,000 cards it would take over 27 hours looking at 1 card per second (this does not include breaks or sorting into different piles, opening different boxes, etc...), and we know there are more than 100,000 cards.

go thru 200,000 cards in 5 minutes?


You do realize going thru 200k cards would take DAYS right?


also lol@ number of ppl thinking he has $100,000+ in cards when its the actual number of cards and not the value.

the magic player would know which series has which valuable cards. he/she wouldn't have to actually look at 100,000 cards, just find the series/sets where the good ones are.

That assumes the cards are already sorted/organized well.

indeed, which they most certainly arnt

im not going to go through and argue against all the responses to my post but wiper is the closest to correct. if theyre sorted by set its gonna be super duper easy for somebody who played to pick out the valuable ones in almost no time at all. it has a lot to do with how magic cards are sorted and their rarities. im not going to get into the minutiae. '5 minutes max' was clearly a bit of hyperbole on my part.

if the cards are completely randomized it will certainly take a hell of a lot longer, but thats almost never the case. first of all he said they were organized. second that just isnt how mtg players/collectors store cards. theyre generally sorted by set then either color or rarity.

surely somebody around here has played a bunch of mtg before and can confirm what im saying. either way though, BY FAR the most efficient way to pick out the valuable ones is to find a long time mtg player that you trust to go through them for you.


edit: fwiw i could easily go through a box of 1000-2000 cards from a set im familiar with and pick out the valuable cards in like a minute.

Well besides the power nine there really arent any cards that are "valuable". I would just go through each set and sort out the "rare" ones with a gold set symbol and try to sell those separate. Nothing from the newer era will be overly valuable since the cards usefullness is alot more balanced and thus not as sought after.

Most of those cards are barely worth even trying to sell in terms of hourly from what I know of MTG, retail yes, second hand no. You might get 10c from the basic, a buck from the med rare and 5-10$ for the rare ones. And the ratio is probably around 85-10-5 per 100 cards if they are original sets.

I'm sorry, but this is just blatantly wrong. There are hundreds, if not thousands of incredibly valuable cards spanning across the history of Magic. Uncommons from mid-era MTG (ex: Ancient Tomb from Tempest) can hit the $20 mark. Anything from Alpha or Beta can fetch significant value. Not to mention rare staples from new sets can hit $50-$70 (ex: new Gideon and new Jace), as well as the $100 staples from mid-era Magic, such as Force of Will and Lion's Eye Diamond.

as a follow up here, scooped about $80k, mainly through mtgprice.com. Still sitting on two black lotuses, mint, and what i think are another $10k of similar vintage cards. Was a great haul. In the end, so much went for pennies, but the overall average held up by the frequent $1, $5 or even $12 cards.