Rags to Riches: Week Eight – A Fork in the Road

Greetings fellow gamers!

As we are slowly approaching ticket amounts that give me some room tomaneuver we should see some more exciting jumps in ticket counts. As I am trying to utilize all my trade tricks in this series we will see something today that is rather outside of mainstream trading again (remember Squee from last time?). Generally speaking trading up makes sense the most with items that have a wide spread of evaluations from different players. Cards that work extremely well are usually either very rare, new in circulation, or both. The more common a card is and the more it is traded the faster we approach the priceequilibriumand the less chance you have to profit.

Now you will not always have the opportunity to find cards in the first category that you can sell easily. A situation that works is the release of new high tier promo cards; especially the foils. It justhappenedthat Wizards of the Coast introduced “Player Life Time Rewards” that gives out promo cards for players depending on their life time spending in the store. The tier 1 card was a foil promo Fork and you would have to spend over $10,000 total to get it. That was far more than I ever spend in the store so no chance to receive it, but why not try to snag it cheaply if possible and resell to a foil collector for more? I immediately posted a buy offer for the foil Fork and was willing to pay 10 tickets. It took a bit of time, but finally someone replied and sold me his shinny Fork for 10.

It was risky of course, but I was certain that there are players out there willing to pay more for it. I posted the card on classified for a price of 20 (yeah, I know – pretty nice margin if it works). It did not take too long and the Fork doubled my tickets (that’s what the card does anyway, right?).

Not a bad start I guess Now I wouldn’t be a good trader if I would not try to repeat my successful stories and after searching and chatting with some fellow players I realized that there is one account that should have plenty of foil Forks… Some dealers buy and sell a lot of value and when I was checking a popular bot that sells foils – Bingo! He had 2 for 2.25 each!! Oh happy day! I immediately purchased both and posted another ad, “Selling foil promo Fork for 20.”

This time it took a bit longer but I found another buyer that paid 20 for the card. I actually think that taking the rarity into account 20 tickets is a pretty good price for it.

As you might have noticed I am trying to repeat a successful method as often as possible before it dries out. If you intend to trade up for value there is no bonus given for creativity or diversity. If it works do it over and over until the opportunity is gone! Of course I was looking to get more foil Forks, but I was only able to get one more for 2.25 before the supply dried up. I am not going to complain too loudly though. This was a very successful session for us (I did not include a screenshot for the last buy, but, rest assured, it happened).

Next I visited a Freebot again that resets every month so you can get your 64 cards each month instead of only once per account. Not a huge gain in value, but it’s always nice to have a few extra commons to smooth out a trade.

And the last action was redeeming some bot credit I had left from previous sales. I grabbed solid cards I believe will help me to balance some trades or maybe even gain a bit in value.

This leaves us with the following collection for this week with an approximate value of 74 tickets (counting each Fork with 10):

As indicated last week I also include a progress chart that shows the collection value over time:



Not bad considering the time limit we set. I am curious if I will be able to spot opportunities like this in the future.

Finally an apology for everyone that is waiting for the undervalued foil list I was talking about last time. Time constraints made me push this part to next week’s installment so make sure to check it out next time!

Until then,

Marin