Rags to Riches: Week Seven

Hello everyone,

Let’s jump right in this week and see what trades I was able to make to increase the value of our collection. If you have missed the previous articles of this series feel free to use the search bar and look up “Rags to Riches.” You will find the other parts there. As indicated in earlier articles, I do believe that with growing ticket count I will be able to turn some trades into higher profits. The first trade I made includes the sale of the foil Hellcarver Demon I bought last time for 2 tickets. As can be seen here, I bundled it with the Oracle of Mul Daya and sold it to a bot.

This turned some nice profit for us. The Arid Mesa deal we did last time is worth repeating so I checked and the card was available again for a rather low price. I couldn’t refuse the bot’s offer and took it again – twice! I paid 7 and 7.2 for it.

After this ratherpriceypurchase I was in dire need to flip cards to get some tickets back. I put an ad on classified and tried to sell the card for 9 tickets. I settled with 8 to get my tickets quick. One important lesson when trading is that being less greedy often leads to more profits, not less. If your resources are tied up in cards you are not able to sell because you insist of certain margins then you might get stuck with them for too long. The opportunity you are missing is to make more profits with the tickets you get!

My next trade is rather on the strange side. I believe of all trades I have made so far this one will be the hardest to understand and to master. Curious what I am talking about? Check it out:

Take your time and do a bit of research such as checking the popular dealers etc. and then tell me why this is a good or bad trade. Done? You might jump to the conclusion that this must be pretty horrible for me. The big dealers are listing this card at around 2.5 – 3 tickets and I just paid 7 for it! Now I will introduce you to an important concept that probably most people miss to often. Cards are NOT worth what a dealer pricelist is telling you. A dealer price tells you one thing and one thing only – what a dealer would like to have for the card. Nothing more. Combined with another important concept that most people are not aware of – dealers do not update prices on cards they do not have in stock, you are close to solving the riddle. A foil Squee, Goblin Nabob is nearly impossible to find anywhere. Check the dealers, check the bots, ask around. No one carries this little bugger. I was 100% certain that this would be the best deal I made so far and while 7 tickets is 300% of the list price I was sure I can flip the card for more. Putting it up the next day led to this…

That was sweet, no? To be frank there are about two dozen of cards (foils mostly) that are priced completely wrong at all bots and dealers. I might add a list of the candidates if there is enough interest next time so you can organize your own treasure hunt.

My time was already running out so I scanned the classified for a solid deal and found it in the following purchase:

I firmly believe that all the fetchlands are currently under-priced and will go up steadily in value. They are just too good to be only worth 3 tickets!

That’s it already for today. My only item for concern is the foil Phyrexian Negator that is very hard to move as expected. We shall see if I succeed in the future.

The total value of our collection currently is around 33 tickets. We still have a long way to go but I am confident that we will make it.

Take care everyone,

Plejades