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Note: I want to thank Target Acquired and Graveyard Games for bringing up the idea for this article in the forums (found here).
The Basics
The goal of a buylist is to acquire cards at the price listed. Sounds obvious right? More pitfalls may be involved than appear at first glance. Let's look at some of the important factors we need to understand before we start listing prices for stuff to buy...
It's critical to understand that you are competing with everyone who sells MTG cards nowadays. In the pre-internet days a store had almost complete control over the prices they set--sure people could open up their copies of Inquest/Scrye and see what the prices should be, but without a large player base chances are your LGS was the only place you could get that card you wanted.
Now there are tons of websites that buy and sell MTG cards and you need to understand that you're competing with those same stores. There are some players who wouldn't even think to look online, but that group is becoming smaller and smaller as MTG grows and new stores push to get their name recognition.
If understanding the amount of competition out there is critical it's even more important to understand what your local players want. If you're an online-only store you get a bit more of a pass on this one because you're population isn't likely to be more skewed one way or another.
What I mean by this is that different areas have player bases that focus on different formats. One area may have a strong Standard player base, whereas another focuses on Modern, or casual/EDH, or Legacy. You don't want to trade a bunch of highly desirable cards that your local player base might want for something they likely won't.
Case in point, I watched my LGS owner at a big GP a year or two ago trade a bunch of liquid Modern staples for a Candelabra of Tawnos (I advised against it when he asked me if he should go for it) because he was "trading up" and felt that was always the way to go.
Meanwhile that Candelabra is still sitting in his case and the cards he traded off likely would have moved. He didn't understand that our local Legacy player base is quite small and none of us (I include myself in this group) were trying to build High Tide or Cloudpost.
Determining Your System
Most stores (and most of us MTG financiers) can't afford to pay someone full time to monitor and adjust our buylists based on daily market fluctuations. For this reason most stores and individuals like to use an existing system, whether that be Trader Tools or TCG Low/Mid times a certain percentage or another store's buylist.
Let's look at the pros and cons of those three systems:
Trader Tools
| Pro | Con |
| Gives you a general idea of what you could immediately resell the cards to another store for | Doesn't factor in the grading specifications of said store |
| Gives you a list of multiple store buylists to compare | Some stores only want small quantities of a card at the price listed |
| Allows you to gauge your competition's interest in the card | Doesn't include cost to ship to the store |
Percentage of TCG Low/Mid
| Pro | Con |
| Easy to calculate | Has no relation to local demand |
| Easy for others to calculate | Doesn't let you know if you could resell to other stores if you needed to unload quickly |
| Costs nothing to use |
Using Another Store's Buylist
| Pro | Con |
| Easy to calculate | Has no relation to local demand |
| Easy for others to calculate | Factors in store's local player base bias (which may not match your own) |
| Costs nothing to use |
Those lists aren't all that extensive, but they do highlight the major factors to consider and some of the dangers these strategies entails.
Some of these dangers can be very costly to a store.
When you purchase cards without understanding or ignoring your local player base's wants then you sit on them, and lose out on other potential purchases due to limited cash flow.
When you purchase cards without understanding the grading specifications of the store you plan to send them to, you can lose money if they are downgraded.
When you purchase too many copies of one card you can end up losing money if it starts to drop and you aren't able to unload your copies quickly enough.
Creating Your Own Personalized Buylist
Now that we understand the potential pitfalls of using a rudimentary system, it's time to look at creating one of our own. My system is designed around the idea that I don't have the time or resources to spend constantly monitoring buylists and demand. The basic idea is to divide cards into categories and allow those categories to dictate what you pay.
I am still a big fan of letting someone else (in my case TCG Player) gather all the pricing data and simply using that data to determine what I should be picking cards up at.
For me personally, any equation-based system I use will utilize TCG Player Mid pricing, for the sole reason that TCG Player Low is often heavily manipulated by sellers with high shipping costs. TCG Player Mid is the average price for the card taken over a (usually) large range which means that the really low and really high are basically averaged out of the price. It also seems to be relatively commonly accepted "real value."
Here are the categories I use:
Red - The hottest cards, the most liquid cards that I can get. Right now that would include Khans fetchlands, Thoughtseize, Snapcaster Mage, etc. They aren't likely to be reprinted in the very near future and I can offer more on them because I can resell them with relative ease. They are often sold out of the cases at LGS's and are constantly asked for by other traders/stores.
Orange - Still hot cards, but a bit less liquid than our red category; these may include Standard cards that fit in a proven archetype that has a relatively constant demand. Something like Siege Rhino or Ugin, the Spirit Dragon.
Yellow - These are cards I'm happy to pick up, but accept that they might sit for a month or so. I also tend to put my longer-term speculation targets into this category when I have a low quantity of them (and then move them into a lower category if I've got a decent supply built up). Something like Tasigur fits in this category.
Green - These are cards I have an okay supply on already. I don't have a strong demand to pick more up, but they may have potential moving forward. Something like Crackling Doom might fit here.
Blue - These are cards I have enough supply of that I don't really want to pick up excessive copies, but I still feel like I could probably unload them if I absolutely had to.
Black - These are cards I have a ton of or don't think I can move. Right now, these are things like my Theros temples that proved to be a bust.
The next step is determining what pay rate I want to assign to each category. These are the percentage of TCG Mid that I'd pay on each category.
| Category | Pay Rate |
| Red | 80% |
| Orange | 70% |
| Yellow | 60% |
| Green | 50% |
| Blue | 35% |
| Black | 0% |
Now that I've got my categories and pay rates assigned, the last step is figuring out which cards you want in each category. It's critical to keep your cash flow in mind, so you'll likely want the smallest card pool in the red category, the next smallest in orange, etc.
It's also perfectly reasonable (and almost expected) that cards will move from category to category, based on local player demand, quantity on hand, reprintings, etc.
Would it be possible to link tcg prices to a spreadsheet that could update daily? Has anything like that been done before? If we could get that, we could add functions that would create a buylist for us.
R = price x .8
O = price x .6
I haven’t used excel functions in over 10 years, but it’s possible?
I’d imagine so….I’m not a programmer though…and you’d likely want a macro of some sort for that…you’d need to scrap the data (like Kelly does for TT3) from TCG, but his program does ALL the data…you’d only want/need a much smaller portion, so you might need to set up a list of cards you’d want to scrap first…then filter your scrapper via that list…then have your equations link to that list and another list that dictates what equation to use based on a field associated with each card (i.e. your R, O, Y, etc) category.
Any ideas who could get this done? I would pay for something like that. It would be a valuable addition to TT for sure. Most of the components appear to be there. Make a list, select your % for each card, and then print the list. That would be an amazing tool.
It would be pretty simple to do that with PHP. I wrote a PHP script that checks every standard card’s price each day and alerts me to any that change more than a set % based on rarity.
Scraping prices is super simple. All you would need to do is spend a few hours building an interface where a user would select the cards they want on the buylist and set the multiplier for that card.
Another obvious benefit to doing it in php is that you would have your buylist available online.
You would not need to scrape it if you got access to the TCGPlayer API.
Thanks for the shout out David! Yea, we are still working on figuring it out because as a new store the “hot” items seem to change pretty rapidly without having a good couple months of data to look at. The other thing that is interesting to factor in is that for instance, Deathmist Raptor is a very popular card and no one wants to buylist him for less than $20, but on the same token they don’t move very quickly because they are so expensive only the people that absolutely have to have them are interested. It leaves me in the odd predicament of wanting to put them into the “red” pile but can’t because of the cost opportunity associated with them. I try to keep one playset of all standard staples on hand at any time because it’s also a profit loss whenever someone comes looking for something and they have to turn to eBay or TCGPlayer if we don’t have it — for this reason, I pay in the red for any standard or modern staple that I have less than one playset of, then start tiering down from there. There are exceptions such as fetches, which as of right now they are in the “orange” category and as such I have 10 of each or more.
No problem. I’m glad you brought up the subject. I actually disagree with your willingness to take a hit when you have less than a playset, only because while you do lose potential profit when people want cards you don’t have you also lose profit when those cards don’t sell or drop in value…and because you’re paying full price on them you don’t get the cushion of “well I paid 70% on them..so when they dropped by 10% I can still sell them at a profit”…however, this is why understanding your local playerbase demand is soooooo critical (and unfortunately, why it’s so hard)…if your local players won’t buy standard cards that are $20+…then honestly you shouldn’t spend a lot of money stocking them “just in case”….unless they are willing to trade in for them…in which case you’re profit will come from cherry picking the stuff you know you can sell from them and the difference between your “buy/trade in” price and your sale price of said cards will be your profit.
Honestly I’d say 50% or greater of my singles are acquired by people who want to buylist in. My idea behind being able to pay more for stuff I don’t have playsets of is that if I buy card Y at 80% of tcgmid, then someone buylists card X towards regular price card Y , even if it takes longer, i’m double dipping on both ends and convert that to cash through other means. So I made 20% on card Y as long as it hasn’t dropped substantially, and depending on what they buylist in some percentage on what they buylisted to me, to help offset any opportunity costs of sitting on something, or prices fluctuating.
What are your thoughts on creating a personal (non-store) buylist for spec reasons? The way I go about it currently is I try to pay 10%-20% over best buylist from TT3 that way when it hopefully jumps 50% or more then I have the ability to cash out quickly if needed leaving at least a solid 25% return. This also helps to minimize risk as if I need to sell fast I won’t lose too much generally.
I’m not an official store..but I often post a buylist for those exact reasons…buylists are my favorite ways to acquire my spec’s.
> TCG Player Mid is the average price for the card taken over a (usually) large range which means that the really low and really high are basically averaged out of the price.
TCG Mid is actually the median, not the mean, which is why it lessens the effect of outliers in the data set.
You might also want to look at the TCG Market price since that not only takes condition into account, but also tells you what the card actually sold for rather than what people are listing it for.