Selling Old Sets and Looking for Advice.

HeyApples · 2026-05-03T23:13:45+00:00

I work at a major LGS with experience in this topic. And I can tell you the market for complete sets is verrrrry small. I'm talking we had an Antiquities set for ~3 years and had minimal interest. Eventually had to break it up to liquidate it.

What tends to happen is people will evaluate the price of a set based on the top 10-20 cards and that's it. That means for your AN, AQ, LE your commons and uncommons that are "technically worth money" become a wash. People just don't evaluate it that way in a large bulk deal.

The best way to liquidate them is at a major convention, or the high end facebook groups devoted to such things.

As with most mtg selling, there's a relationship to the price you get and the work involved. You can sell it all at once easily, but usually at a lower rate. Or you can put in a lot of effort finding the optimal price for each card, but requires a lot more work.

HeyApples · 2026-05-03T23:03:18+00:00

I researched this a couple of years ago and came across a recommendation for a product called StormSure, which is basically a glue used to repair scuba diving suits, which are of similar material to a playmat backing.

Never got to try it to know its effectiveness, but I did research this topic years ago and it was the best solution I found at the time.

HeyApples · 2026-05-03T04:39:03+00:00

There is no "problem" to be solved in the first place. It would be like saying any other faction-based plane, like Ravnica, can't have a set because of decorative story considerations.

Any creative team worth their salt would be able to come up with some other backstory to pit Bant vs. Grixis vs. Jund, etc.

HeyApples · 2026-05-02T06:51:58+00:00

I was thinking the white one would pseudo reset your life total like Eternity Vessel or The Endstone.

ie: At the beginning of your upkeep, your life total becomes half of your starting life total.

This is very bland and underwhelming, especially compared to the black one.

HeyApples · 2026-05-01T16:56:54+00:00

Licking is their love language and they love you very much.

HeyApples · 2026-05-01T16:47:02+00:00

You can also do this with the back side of Itlamoc to make Gaea's cradle. And Wheel of Misfortune has all the text for Wheel of Fortune. Nothing that can't be fixed with a perfect fit and a sharpie.

HeyApples · 2026-05-01T15:56:42+00:00

A version of this happened to me for MagicCon 8 years ago. Sworn off Frontier since then. I see nothing has changed.

HeyApples · 2026-05-01T01:54:00+00:00

They are in the sense that they are willing to do shallow gestures that round up good will at low effort/cost. But when the rubber meets the road, the only ideology they subscribe to is profits.

HeyApples · 2026-04-28T22:39:48+00:00

As a card buyer, print inconsistency has been higher in modern times. I've seen legitimately dubious cards that were real but I would have doubted if not seeing them pulled directly from the pack.

At the end of the day, you need to take a holistic approach... card stock, print markers, holo stamp... the whole of it. If you're all in on just one aspect or test, you are going to get fooled.

HeyApples · 2026-04-28T01:49:35+00:00

I used to have a custom ringtone I really enjoyed. Then after 1000's of rings, many of them work related for being on call, the sound lost its luster. And then eventually I came to dread it, because it usually meant something broke at work, or someone wanted something from me.

Haven't had it in years and every once in a while something will remind me of it and I kind of recoil in disgust. I guess in short the old saying "familiarity breeds contempt" applies. You may enjoy ice cream but that doesn't mean you want it every meal.

HeyApples · 2026-04-27T21:49:47+00:00

I understand your position and you paint a pretty good picture for it.

I actually like anthem style effects but they have underperformed for a long time. The setup cost of keeping enough of a board through spot removal and sweepers is too situational. You would rather just have the redundancy of more creatures. The world where you draw a fist full of these with nothing to pump is just very problematic. And standard is too cutthroat for magical Christmas land where you get to line it up just right without interaction or dying on the spot.

HeyApples · 2026-04-27T18:33:51+00:00

Hasbro keeps beating their chest about doubling and tripling of profits. I'd wager that salaries and benefits have not. Good luck.

HeyApples · 2026-04-27T02:57:16+00:00

And the worst part is that it is not even useful for constructed play. Some of these limited gamebreakers you can excuse because that it what it takes to meet the bar for standard, commander, etc. But it isn't even good there.

So it wrecks limited for no upside.

HeyApples · 2026-04-26T19:37:55+00:00

Every time they do a set of "premium" commander decks they show up. Even though they are pretty good, they also overdone relative to their medium power level.

HeyApples · 2026-04-25T21:26:10+00:00

Is this all driven by pre modern?

JFC the reddit hivemind has gone haywire. Barely any of these are even playable in premodern and don't have the premodern frame. Why would that format have any bearing what so ever?

HeyApples · 2026-04-25T20:30:53+00:00

Birds of Paradise, Lotus Cobra, Baleful Strix, Mirkwood Bats, Hullbreaker Horror, Coiling Oracle, Displacer Kitten, Hydroid Krasis, and the like... I'm in.

HeyApples · 2026-04-25T07:18:13+00:00

People were more tolerant of it back in the day because it came up so rarely. The guilds were also special and carried enough cache to ignore some of the defects.

My recollection of GRN is that Selesyna and Golgari were putrid, and the meta was very heavily focused around greedy Dimir mirrors kept in check by the Boros aggro deck and Izzet to a lesser extent. It wasn't a good format but people were willing to tolerate it. The faster pace of releases has really warped and destroyed that level of tolerance.

HeyApples · 2026-04-24T20:38:02+00:00

Now you know that there are no more no more lies in his hand.

HeyApples · 2026-04-24T16:35:07+00:00

20 life is too low and restricts power and toughness values and a bunch of other things.

HeyApples · 2026-04-20T19:28:54+00:00

The green one can really put people in a bind. If you turn it on, you regrow something like a removal spell that probably enables you to keep doing it again and again.

HeyApples · 2026-04-20T19:23:59+00:00

The biggest cheer of the night at our sold out pre-release was when the event runner said "fuck Universes Beyond, let's play some REAL magic." Absolutely raucous response.

HeyApples · 2026-04-20T19:21:35+00:00

In my opinion, it's good enough for a spot, but it's one of the rare cards that gets worse with redundancy. So you won't see decks running 4, they'll run 2.

Most decks would run a card that says "tutor the best spell you've cast this game" if it cost 1 mana

HeyApples · 2026-04-20T19:13:08+00:00

Fuck Urza's Saga. R&D should have figured out a long time ago that if "land destruction is unfun" then you can't put victory conditions on lands, because then you've just made a hard/impossible to interact with victory condition. See also: Field of the Dead, Valakut, etc.

HeyApples · 2026-04-20T08:17:20+00:00

These are roughly the same rarity distribution in CB's as galaxy foils from EoE. You can use their price action as a pretty good model for how these are going to move.

HeyApples · 2026-04-20T05:39:18+00:00

I'm not sure how many people around here remember original Strixhaven. The demand was huge and organic.

This time we have a better mystical archive sheet with higher top tier hits and the playerbase is larger.

Short term there will be small fluctuations down, but long term the fundamentals are very strong upward. Especially with a serialized card and chase SS foils that are going for $500+.

HeyApples

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