What do I do with my Khans cards?

Hi Everyone!

I know a lot of you out there use Magic Finance as a way to allow yourself to be able to play Magic without having to pay for new cards and tournaments. I'm sure there are many of you who are want to get them and hold them because they are going to be valuable someday. That's true, in the long run you'd make money that way.

There is a way to make even more money. I recommend unloading the fetches, mythics, and highly anticipated rares as soon as possible. If you open them at the pre-release, sell them right away. Then buy them again during the window between 2 and 6 weeks where the prices are lower until you see a upward trend if you really need the fetches. If you don't really need them for business or pleasure, wait a little longer until the low point in December.

I know I usually stick to finance in this article, but I wanted to talk a little about business strategy today. I just wanted to use the Khans release to make a point about buying cards when they're new. I know the rule is to stay out for a little while until the prices get reasonable.Critical thinking suggests that we should avoid this time even though there is a chance for profit. There is a much bigger chance for loss so the expected value of a new card is negative almost regardless of the purchase price.

How about this idea? What is the value of having the card in stock at your bot when no one else does? I haven't done the research yet on this, but I think it's completely possible that there is significant value in having things in stock. It can draw people into your shop and potentially earn you a reputation of having "everything" in stock.

This all reminds me of a time when I used to play paper magic at a card show every weekend. There were five magic vendors. It was a great place to find fair prices on cards and trade with vendors who had literally everything. Four of the five vendors seemed (relatively) normal. There was one vendor that almost never had any people doing business. One day I had several cards I was looking to sell or trade. The owner asked if I wanted to sell or trade, I said trade is what I preferred assuming he would give more in a trade than in cash and I was right. He offered me double what any other vendor offered on all my cards. I was excited. I had him give me prices on all my cards I wanted to trade. I asked about the cards I was looking for and found that his sell prices were triple what the other vendors asked. I asked about packs and he quoted a price but said that they were double for trade. Needless to say, I knew why no one dealt with him and I took my business elsewhere.

When I first started on Magic Online I would go to bots with the best sell price for cards, when the card was more than advertised I left and didn't even bother to look at what else they had. Bait and switch is completely unacceptable and it costs goodwill.

The relationship is that while having all the new cards is great, I find that many bots use it as a lure to get me to go to their bot and overpay for everything else. Magic Online isn't perfect competition, but it's very close. There's a lot of easy access to information so cheating customers like that is pretty unlikely to work and certainly not likely to work more than once.

So, it's a good idea to have the new cards, but don't use it as a "profit" tool (as in make more money per card sold), it's for making more transactions. Ultimately, it will make your customers happier and more likely to return.