A 41,000 card junk haul, my biggest yet!

Yesterday I bought 41,000 junk cards for a very cheap price. I just simply couldn’t resist. What is junk to most people is usually littered with nuggets for me. I do buy and sell Magic the Gathering cards but I tend to shy away from Rares and Mythics.

Why? The regular price for a bulk rare card in the UK is 10p (13c US). So I can get 10 for £1 or 40 for £4 (plus shipping)

I can get 1000 junk cards (Commons / Uncommons) for the same £4. A lot more card for the same price. If I can get these from a local source then all the better, the shipping is then negated and replaced with a little of my time and some fuel costs to go and collect the goodies.

But surely Rare and Mythic cards are more valuable than Uncommon and Commons cards, it simply stands to reason?

Sure they are, but you can be certain the seller will have not put any decent Rares or Mythics in the bulk cards he’s selling, probably true!

But in the case of Commons and Uncommons, people tend to overlook these and discard them as ‘junk’. However some Common/Uncommon cards are more valuable than Rare/Mythic cards. This is simply because they are not perceived to have any value.

Look at ‘Swiftfoot Boots’, this card is valued at $1. Probably more valuable than any bulk rare card, as it is usable. It may be a hard sell at $1 but 2 of them for $1.25 will sell quite rapidly.

Here’s another example, ‘Kalonian Tusker’. This very cheap to cast card has only had a single printing and for GG he’s also cheap to cast for a 3/3. He may look as if he’s not valuable, but the casuals love him. I can move these in sets of (2) for $1.25.

You might think after umpteen printings that nobody wants ‘Doom Blade’ anymore. You would be wrong, this is cheap removal and Doom Blade’s sell in sets of (4).

I had a quick look though the collection and right away found some of these ‘minor nuggets’. Doom Blades, Kalonian Tuskers and Gladecover Scouts are cards I have sold before and will again! I did spot at least one 'Swiftfoot Boots' and this is just picking up a random handful. What else is in there god only knows.

As well as cards we have boxes. Fat pack boxes have value, collectors ones too. There’s also a bunch of pre-release boxes complete with the discarded cards intact. More goodies that are worth more than you may think.

I’m referring to $ prices more than £ as www.mtgstocks.com values the cards in dollars.

What happens to all the ‘real crap’ once it has been through my internal siphoning process? I will sell the rest off in lots of around 2000. There is an amazing demand for these if they are priced correctly. You do need to have some morals of course and state, ‘there is nothing of any monitory value contained in this collection’. New people to Magic the Gathering just love a lot of cards and don’t really care for the value.

Of course, all this takes time and effort. Just like Steemit, you don’t get something for nothing. You also need to know what is real junk and what should be siphoned out of these collections. All that comes with experience, which thankfully I do have!

How long will it take me to use my siphoning powers on 41,000 cards? Quite a while actually, and I wont do it all in a single session. That would likely drive me insane.

Buying collections can be fruitful and rewarding if you get them from the correct sources. If they have already been siphoned I can always tell after a very short time and it does happen, albeit infrequently.

Thankfully this one looks quite bountiful, and that means I'm like a kid at a sweet shop. I can’t wait to get stuck in!