f13.net

This is unrelated to the digital format.

I saw you mentioning getting boxes of boosters and managing to recoup your costs.  How are you accomplishing that?  From everything I've seen, the individual values of the cards in a box never quite add up to the expense of a box.

If you get the boxes at wholesale prices (buying by the case), you can make a profit selling off the valuable rares, foils, etc.

I get boxes at wholesale. Also, since I frequent competitive events, I have TONS of outlets for moving shit. If you aren't constantly in a community, moving this shit would be impossible. If I moved to another city, my network would crumple. Also I'm not looking for an actual profit. I'm just looking for it to break even/support itself.

I'm also really, REALLY good at speculating. As in, knowing what will be good. Not to mention I went from zero to 100 in terms of what I bought. I skipped buying paper cards altogether and moved straight to foils. So 3 years ago I was buying foils for about $10 that are now $100+. I done good.

As said in the boardgame thread, w/o the network/community you really cant be that good at MtG.

If you had any specific questions, you can always ask them.

My hope was that there was a magic bullet for playing on the super-cheap, as I frankly can't afford hundreds of dollars every couple months per expansion.  And getting away with buying just a few boosters per expansion is a way to have a perpetually shitty deck that goes nowhere.  So if it was actually feasible to buy some boxes, get what I needed, sell the rest, and wind up getting the bulk of my money back, it would've been grand.  But I definitely lack any sort of local network for working out sales of cards, so schild's approach is pretty guaranteed to not work for me.

Oh, no. There's no way to play on the super cheap. I mean, compared to the rest of Magic's formats, draft is likely your best option. But at $12-$15 a pop, it's anything but cheap when compared to other games. Sorry. :(

What you can do with draft is reduce the cost quite a bit below $12.

The cards you draw are an average of maybe $4, then you need to win a couple more packs to break even.

You won't profit consistently unless you get really good, but an average $4 cost for a few hours entertainment is a reasonable goal even for a mediocre player like me, and suddenly seems much more reasonable on the wallet. You can probably do even better if your packs are coming wholesale.

Plus draft is the only fun way to play limited.

You can play on the super cheap, you just can't expect to ever win on the super cheap.

What is the 'wholesale price' of a box of boosters? Just the $100 bucks most websites sell them for, or is there some magic way to get them for $50?

I don't know what the prices are anymore since I've been out of that market for more than a decade but yes the wholesale price is generally around 50% - 60% of the retail price.

The normal way to get these prices is to have a reseller's license from your state. Then most distributors will sell you cases at wholesale prices. I say most cause back in the day there were some that would only sell if you had a "bricks & mortars" store as well.

You can also find distributors or resellers who will sell to you at steep discount if you buy in "bulk" (e.g. 1 case minimum) which is how I got started. I went through all the distributor ads in trade publications and found one locally who was willing to sell cases to me without a resellers license* (but then I had to pay state sales tax) and then I broke those cases down and sold Revised singles over Usenet (this was pre-Web). Later I got a reselllers license for a business I never finished and bought cases from other distributors (the ones that would sell to resellers without a physical presence).

Edit: * cases at a steep discount, that is, I think I paid about 60% of retail on those Revised cases

Wholesale is 48.2% less than retail on average.

Don't know if people are still curious about this but I thought I'd reply since I'm catching up around here.

One thing I like doing is just scouring ebay.  It is possible to get playsets of cards at a discount if you can catch auctions at the right time.  Competitive decks will always be expensive but this is one way to chip away at the cost.

So just out of curiosity.  Any value in old digital cards at all? They can't be used in tourneys, right?  I've got 1,711 cards spread across a bunch of 2005 sets like Kamigawa and Vanguard but no idea if it's going to be worth it trying to dump them.

http://www.mtgotraders.com/

Click sell collection, follow instructions.

Excellent, thanks.

Browsing their list I might get a whole $60 for everything.  Seems even the highly coveted rares from those days like Ink-Eyes are only $.50 or so today. The uncommon foil cards I have from 8th ed sell for more.  Heh.

If a card isn't played on MODO, it is effectively worth Zero.

If a card is standard heavy and not currently drafts, it's generally worth more online than on paper. MODO is a weird market.