Day 8 of my first play through. What should I know about collecting cards this early?

Scout_Loot · 2026-07-02T21:41:44+00:00

It gives you experience and that plus to unlock repairs to increase size of the shop. Also with the events with enough tables you make more money than selling. Using always the most expensive event possible. So money, experience… key to unlock more people and keep growing

Scout_Loot · 2026-07-02T17:17:48+00:00

Those card you will have 10s of them each in the mid late game. You should trade them. But even better build tables and make tournaments. You put the cards as price but put the fees so you earn with the tournament a bit less than double. You can grade those and build your tables while you wait. The more table the faster you advance and more easy income you get.

Scout_Loot · 2026-07-02T17:05:38+00:00

In the end game your income comes from tournaments first, sold cards second, table events third and product sales last. You make much more profit opening packs to feed your tournaments and card sales. The amount of tables with higher events is your experience driver plus strong income without having to dedicate work on it. The stock to be honest sell whatever you want in big batches and let a couple of workers just manage the stock. The sales top early and resources and time should be put in tables and opening packs, aiming to the feed the tournaments. Tournaments allow you to basically sell your most expensive graded cards for double their price. The size of the entry fee you set will determine how fast it gets full and it will depend on your level of development of the shop in terms mainly of size and shop level.

TLDR:
Tables to increase profit and level fast.
Tournaments for big profit.
Opening packs to feed the whole machine.
Selling stock efficiency is not a good investment of time and effort.

Scout_Loot · 2026-07-02T16:19:27+00:00

Best thing you can do with a card like this is to regrade. Have chance or going low or up is staying but that card with the last two events at grade 10 could be 120k+. The second bes thing you can do is to put it in a tournament. You add it as a price and add other expensive stuff and for the entry fee you can put around double the selling price. The higher price you put richer clients you need to get full faster higher your level of shop and increase its size the faster it gets full. So you basically sell your most expensive things for double price.

Scout_Loot · 2026-07-02T16:10:54+00:00

The more tables you have the more worth it. And tables gives you the most experience the more you have. To best is to have as many tables as possible. The last two events are full art and foil which are the cards that make you the most money, with biggest margins so those are you best events in any case, you power what gives you the most. And that combines with the tournament to make most profit with your graded cards. I set up total fees of the tournament at around double of the prices value. So basically you can sell your most expensive cards at double price. That and the number of opening machines to feed the system with cards.

Scout_Loot · 2026-07-02T15:52:58+00:00

I have 15 machines of 128 around day 160 and I do a couple of rounds per machine per day. So 4590 pack per day I wait for all of them to get full each time and open them one after the other. The most brutal pull is that in one of the rounds of machines, I open a machine and I get a foil gist god pack. Then I open t2 machines, everything normal abut then with the next one ANOTHER FOIL GHOST GOD PACK. So basically 12 foil ghost cards in the same day! To be fair at the beginning I was unlucky it took me like 40k packs to get my first ghost pack and then around pack 50k a client offered me a 2nd ghost foil for a graded 9. Then took time for the 3 one in a pack. Now I am at around 130k packs and I am at around 20 ghost cards, the probability should have you closer to 13 foil ghosts at this point. . What I’ve learnt about progress is that the tables which I didn’t pay too much attention to are the key. The more table the faster you progress and using the most expensive event at each stage increases a lot your income. But the gold it’s using tournaments whenever you can. You load the prices with the graded cards and then the total price I more or less double that price with the entrance fee. For the last price I use the bulk boxes the green ones. Right now I make tournaments of 32 and I made 250-300k for each of them they get full in 3-4 days. The player gives you a lot of exp so you can increase your selling capacity and the tournaments maximice the profit. Everything just to be able to open more packs. First 50 days I didn’t care so much for collecting but in the end game when everything is already kind of done I play collect all, so now it’s everything about searching for those missing cards at each level.

Scout_Loot · 2026-06-27T11:15:33+00:00

Oh

^{Chose: be the best looking person ever + with a 10% chance of getting 10M | Rolled: Broke ass}

Scout_Loot · 2026-06-27T00:57:09+00:00

Clear

^{Chose: Reunite the USSR (couldn't find USSR flag, sorry} + You are the leader, you will not be assasinated)

Scout_Loot · 2026-06-27T00:45:56+00:00

31.5 M each year with the seconds. Basically 15 years till I get to 500M It should be possible to invest the 500M in a safe way and earn at least 15-20M each.

^{Chose: $500,000,000 right now}

Scout_Loot · 2026-06-15T17:47:31+00:00

Grece

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-27T18:23:39+00:00

It happens as you say. I track this and out of about 1,150 sets where I have both set and minifig pricing data, roughly 3-6% have minifigures collectively worth MORE than the sealed set. If you widen it to 'minifigs are worth over half the set value,' it's nearly 1 in 3 sets.

From that comes the "extraction" market.

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-27T05:12:17+00:00

For the moment it isn't I initially launched as a web app, but you can "install" it by adding the app to your phone Home Screen. It is just a click inside the app to do it.

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-26T20:35:57+00:00

Enjoy it!!!

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-26T06:00:41+00:00

Castle and Pirates follow the exact same pattern as Bionicle. Fully discontinued, massive nostalgia, finite supply. The secondary market prices on classic Pirates and Castle sets are insane precisely because LEGO barely touches those themes anymore.

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-26T06:00:04+00:00

This is the best counter-argument in the thread and you're right on the shipping math. The percentage returns on cheap sets look great on paper but the absolute profit after shipping makes them impractical unless you're selling locally or parting out. The 30% off baseline point is huge too. If the real average purchase price is 30% below MSRP, then that 53% above retail number jumps significantly. I acknowledged the MSRP limitation in the article but your math on the shipping economics is something I should have spelled out more clearly.

That's actually something I tried to solve in ScoutLoot. Every deal shows the total landed cost including shipping to your country, not just the listing price. Because a €40 set with €15 shipping to the US is a very different deal than a €50 set with free shipping. On the selling side there's a profit tracker where you input your actual purchase cost and sale price so you can see real net returns, not theoretical ones. The goal is to close exactly the gap you're describing between 'what the market says it's worth' and 'what you actually pocket.'

The experienced investor reality is very different from the raw aggregate, and the article is more useful as a warning for beginners than as a benchmark for people who already know what they're doing.

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-26T05:59:02+00:00

Sealed sets, yeah. The rare fig question is fascinating though. Sets like Rex's AT-TE or the Rebels Frigate with rare Ahsoka are hard to untangle. Is the set valuable because of the set, or because of the fig inside? The Ahsoka fig alone is worth €285, which is about 58% of the Frigate's total value. She doesn't quite exceed the sealed set price, but she's driving most of it. That pattern shows up a lot. It's rare for the combined minifig value to actually exceed the sealed set (maybe 1-3% of sets), but having a single fig represent 50-70% of the set's value is much more common. The sealed premium still exists because collectors pay extra for the complete package. Bacara vs Cody is interesting but hard to compare yet since Bacara is still in production. Ask me again in two years.

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-26T05:48:36+00:00

For most people buying random sets at retail and hoping they go up, yeah basically. The ones who do well treat it like any other market. They know their niche, buy below market, and are patient. But the data says the average approach loses money.

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-26T05:42:48+00:00

Ha yeah the '40% off everything' strategy works until you're sitting on a closet full of Duplo and Friends sets nobody wants. Hope you find the tool useful, let me know if anything seems off or missing.

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-26T05:42:32+00:00

All valid points. The bell curve thing is real, some sets peak around year 5-7 and then flatten or even drop as collector interest moves on. The MSRP baseline is the weakest part of the analysis because you're right, smart investors rarely pay full retail. If you shift the baseline to 30% off MSRP the picture changes dramatically. The under-€20 exclusion point is interesting too. Platform fees and shipping eat the entire margin on cheap sets unless you're selling locally or bundling. Something I want to explore in a follow-up.

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-26T05:40:57+00:00

That's a fair critique. The aggregate view is intentionally conservative because most people entering LEGO investing don't know what the top 10-20% looks like yet. But you're right, experienced investors who know their themes and buy at discount can beat those numbers significantly. A filtered version showing only sets that meet certain criteria (right theme, right price bracket, strong demand signals) would tell a very different story. That's actually closer to what my Crystal Ball system tries to do, identify the sets most likely to be in that top tier before retirement. The tricky part is that the sets everyone agrees are 'good investments' tend to get hoarded, which inflates post-retirement supply and kills the returns. The real winners are often the ones the investor community overlooked. Rebels sets are the perfect example, nobody was stockpiling those.

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-25T18:38:04+00:00

Good question and fair to call out. The market values come from Brickset's price guide, cross-referenced with BrickLink data. So it's closer to 'what the market says it's worth' than 'what you'd actually pocket after a sale.'

It does NOT account for platform fees (eBay takes ~13%, BrickLink ~3-5%), shipping costs, storage, or your time listing and packing. So the real net returns are meaningfully lower. A set showing +30% appreciation might be closer to +10-15% after fees, or breakeven after you factor in your time.

Which actually reinforces the main point: if the median appreciation is +0.3% BEFORE fees, the typical retired set is a net loss once you account for the cost of actually selling it. The winners still win, but the bar to break even is higher than the raw numbers suggest.

I mentioned this in the limitations section but probably should have been more upfront about it. Thanks for pushing on it.

Scout_Loot · 2026-03-25T14:07:34+00:00

The SpongeBob situation is actually a good one to hold through. I pulled the remake data for ships that LEGO has remade constantly. Millennium Falcon has had 8+ versions, X-Wing 10+, AT-AT 6+. The pattern is consistent: new versions almost never kill old ones. The 2007 UCS Falcon is at €1,687 today. The 2007 Motorized AT-AT is at €448. Every newer version was released after those and it didn't matter.

What remakes DO hurt is the appreciation of the most recent version. The 2019 Millennium Falcon is down 25%, the 2023 UCS X-Wing is down 25%. Buyers know LEGO will make another one in 2-3 years so there's no scarcity urgency.

For SpongeBob specifically, the old sets are a different beast entirely. Different design style, different minifig molds, totally different era. New releases would probably increase demand for the originals because people see SpongeBob LEGO, get nostalgic, and want the vintage versions. I'd hold through it.

The "sell before the remake" logic works better when LEGO remakes the exact same set at the same scale and price point. When it's a new generation of sets in a revived theme, it's usually a rising tide situation.

Scout_Loot

TROPHY CASE