Buying, Selling & Collecting
There are six realistic ways to sell Magic cards, and they trade the same two things against each other: how much you get per card, and how much of the work you do. Buylists pay least and take a week; listing cards yourself pays most and can take months. Which one is right depends almost entirely on what your cards are individually worth.
Every option below is a different point on the same curve. Nothing here pays well, quickly, and without effort, and any page that tells you otherwise is selling something.
Lowest return per card, fastest, almost no work
You send a store a list, they quote you, you ship the cards and get paid. This is the floor on price and the ceiling on convenience: a store has to resell the card at a profit, so the quote is always well under what the card sells for. Two things are worth knowing before you dismiss it. Most buylists pay noticeably more in store credit than in cash, so if you were going to buy cards anyway the effective rate is better than the cash number suggests. And condition matters more here than anywhere else, because a store grades your cards on arrival and adjusts the payout without asking.
Highest return, slowest, and you own every problem
Listing the cards yourself gets you closest to the price you see quoted, minus fees. What the price comparison never includes is the rest of the job: photographing or describing condition accurately, packing to a standard that survives the post, paying shipping on a card that sold for $2, and handling the buyer who says it arrived damaged. That work is genuinely worth it on expensive cards and genuinely not worth it on cheap ones, which is the whole decision in one sentence.
Middle rate, minimal work, only worth it above a threshold
You hand a shop or service a valuable collection, they list and sell it, and they take a percentage. It sits between buylisting and selling yourself on both rate and effort, which makes it the sensible answer for a large collection with real money in it and a bad answer for a shoebox. Read the terms on what happens to cards that do not sell.
Best effective rate if you were going to spend it there
An LGS buying counter usually pays less cash than an online buylist, since it carries the same margin pressure with less volume, but trade credit is a different calculation. If you play at that store and buy singles, sleeves and packs there anyway, credit at a good rate is close to cash for your purposes, and you skip shipping entirely. It is also the only channel where you can hand over a pile of unsorted cards and have someone else do the sorting.
Good rates, no fees, and the highest trust cost
Playgroups, local Discord servers, Facebook groups and regional trading communities cut out the middle entirely, which is why the rates are good. The tradeoff is that you are your own dispute resolution: no platform protection, no feedback system worth much, and a real chance of a bad experience with someone you then have to sit across a table from. Fine for cards moving inside a group that already knows each other, riskier with strangers.
The only sane option for the thousands of cards worth pennies
Commons and low-value uncommons are not worth handling individually at any price, and trying to is how a selling project dies. Sell them by the thousand as a lot, to a store that buys bulk or to another player, and accept that the rate is terrible per card because the alternative is spending twenty hours to earn slightly more than nothing. Pull anything above the threshold first, then stop looking.
Before comparing rates, sort by value, because the rate barely matters on a card worth eighty cents. Set a threshold, somewhere between one and five dollars depending on how much you value your evenings, and treat it as the line between "sell this properly" and "this is bulk." Almost everyone who abandons a selling project abandons it in the middle of the pile below that line.
Above the line, the decision is speed against return. If you want the money this month and there is a few hundred dollars in the box, a buylist quote is a fair deal for the time it saves. If the collection has genuinely expensive cards in it and you can wait, listing them yourself or consigning them is worth several times the buylist difference. Below the line, sell it as a lot and stop optimising.
Condition is where sellers lose money without noticing, because they grade optimistically and the buyer regrades on arrival. The standard ladder runs Near Mint, Lightly Played, Moderately Played, Heavily Played and Damaged, and the drop between each step is larger than most people expect. Edge wear, a soft corner, a scratch visible when the card is tilted to the light, and any bend or crease all count.
For a Commander player specifically: cards that have been in a sleeved, regularly shuffled 100-card deck for a year are usually not Near Mint, however carefully you treated them. Grading them honestly the first time is faster than having a store requote you or a buyer open a dispute, and it is the difference between selling once and selling once badly.
Selling out of a collection is easy. Selling out of a deck you still play is where people get it wrong, because the cards that get cut first are the quiet ones, and quiet is not the same as useless. The card you never think about during a game is sometimes the reason the game went the way it did.
TurnZero HQ does not price cards or track collections, so it will not tell you what anything is worth. What it does track is what each version of a deck did: every edit snapshots a version, every game is tagged with the version that was on the table, and win rate splits per version. If you cut a card and the deck got worse, that shows up as a number rather than a feeling, which is a useful thing to have before the card is in someone else's binder.
Listing them yourself on a marketplace like TCGplayer or eBay gets you closest to the market price, but only after fees, shipping and your own time. A buylist pays less per card and pays it immediately with almost no work. The honest answer is that the highest-paying option and the best option are rarely the same one, and the deciding factor is how many cards you have and what they are individually worth.
Always meaningfully less, because the store has to resell at a profit and carry the inventory in the meantime. The gap is narrowest on cards in high demand and widest on cards a store already has plenty of. Two things move the number in your favour: taking store credit instead of cash, which most buylists pay at a better rate, and grading your own cards honestly before you ship, since a store regrades on arrival either way.
Not individually. Below roughly a dollar or two a card, the time spent listing, packing and shipping costs more than the card returns, which is why bulk gets sold by the thousand as a single lot at a low per-card rate. The useful discipline is to pull the cards above your threshold, sell those properly, and move the rest as bulk without looking at them again.
Price them against recent sold listings rather than asking prices, since a card listed at $30 that nobody buys is not a $30 card. A collection tracker with scanning will value a large pile far faster than looking cards up one at a time. Remember that any quoted market price is what a card sells for, not what you will be paid for it, and every channel on this page takes a cut of that number in either fees or margin.
Only once you know whether the deck actually needs them. A card that has been in every version of a deck since you built it is doing something, even if you cannot name what; a card you added three months ago and never noticed again is a different case. Deck version history makes that difference visible instead of a guess, which is worth checking before a card leaves the house permanently.
Track each version of a deck and see what actually changed when you cut a card.
Create Free Account