My column is generally dedicated to strategy, with financial advice based on cards I believe are worth buying into for their Constructed potential. The chief reason for me to be interested in Magic finance was to make my hobby affordable. A couple months ago a friend of mine reached out to me with the opportunity to invest in making Magic my livelihood.

With hindsight to pull examples from, we can easily see that if we took all of our money a couple years ago and threw it into Snapcaster Mage and Blood Moon that it would be rather academic to turn large profits. It might take you a little time to move them, but these cards were available for $6-10 not all that long ago. Even buying them at market value was a good move for a very long time.

Even making calls like this though, it's difficult to make your way as a backpack speculator. You have to tie up a lot of money in specific cards, and lord knows that we've all missed on a spec. If you want to invest in Magic professionally, then as I'm sure you're aware, you'll want to be selling cards from a booth or a store. Buying at buylist price and selling at market price is always profitable. If you have to work for your money, just getting a store overnight isn't realistic, so you'll probably have to start off by vending events.

In order to be successful vending you'll need some mix of all of the things that you need in order to be successful at anything--skill, discipline, luck, etc... But on top of these things you'll need a team, a bankroll, an inventory, and a place to put your table.

Inventory and Bankroll

These two things go hand in hand. You need money to buy cards, and you need cards to make money. Furthermore, the best way to get people to sell you cards is by having things in your case that they want. Even by offering a bonus on trade-ins, you're just growing your inventory with every transaction, and they get a little extra value by trading over taking cash, so everybody wins.

My first outing as a vendor featured two cases with a few Standard chase rares and some random cards worth money that we used to fill space. We weren't exactly ready to go. People are going to ask you for commons and uncommons. People are going to ask you for rares you wouldn't think to bring if you had to inventory everything before you left for a tournament.

The way to be the most profitable in a booth is to have as many sorted cards as you can reasonably get your hands on. You'll be able to get by with only chase cards, but the best rates you'll ever get on buying cards is when somebody unloads their collection to you. If you pick it for high-end cards and sell them it's pretty easy to make money. You'll make more money and gain more notoriety for sorting out cards that are above bulk and having them in your booth though. You want to be the people who have everything.

Make no mistake, utilizing every part of a collection is a lot more work that just picking it for $1+ cards, but trust me when I say the long-term effects will be a net positive. If you can get past your living room table looking like this sometimes:

While the principle idea of vending is to buy cards more than to sell cards, you'll be able to turn a much higher profit selling things like Lingering Souls in person than you will paying fees and postage moving them online. You'll certainly make more on them at a booth then you would moving them as bulk to some other store. You'll also make a higher premium selling high-end cards at a booth than online, but making money on the high-end cards is easy and obvious. The idea is to maximize profits.

Over time you'll find that you're taking in a good amount of cash at events in addition to paying out more credit than cash, but for your first few events you'll want to have a good chunk of change with which to buy cards. Depending on the attendance that you expect, you'll want to have at least $1-2,000 available. You won't necessarily or even likely spend it all, but you'll definitely want to be able to buy everything that people bring you to sell.

Keep in mind that there's going to be an indeterminate amount of time that you'll have your money tied up in growing your inventory and your business. I can tell you now that I have a good chunk of change tied up in my business, and while our inventory is growing at a great rate we're only now getting to the point where we would consider starting to take money out. The transition won't happen overnight. It's an investment of both time and money, and it's important to understand that from the onset.

Building a Good Team

Currently, I'm working with Mike Hawthorne and Forrest Ryan, both of whom you might recognize from older QS articles. Forrest is great with price trends and keeping everything organized, Mike is great at customer service and building our brand, and I help.

Obviously you'll want to work with people who are skilled, but more importantly you need to work with people you can trust. I've been traveling with Mike and Forrest for years now, and we all recognize what the others bring to the table and know that none of us are looking to scum the others. I've been playing Magic for a long time and over that course of time I've seen and heard a lot of stories about both people managing their business poorly and going into business with people whom they shouldn't have trusted.

As of now, the three of us all own a percentage of our business based on how much we invested. The three of us are the only ones who work in our booth, with the rare exception when we need to ask a friend for help. Since we're all invested and don't want to screw things up for the other guys either, we do quality work for one another.

I don't have a ton of specific advice with regard to the type of people that you should and should not go into business with, because I think that a lot of what goes into a decision like that is obvious, yet people still partner up with losers every day. If you're ready to make Magic your job, don't rush it if you don't have the right people to build your business with.

Finding a Place to Put Your Table

The fact that we are all ambassadors of the game gets reiterated a lot in Magic articles. Hopefully you were all already taking this into account with regard to your behavior at your LGS, but it becomes even more important when you're trying to forge business partnerships.

Mike and I were working on growing our TCGPlayer store when we first started talking about getting a booth. We figured that nothing would happen overnight in the finding-a-place-to-get-a-table department, so we put some feelers out before we were necessarily ready to set up shop.

The long and short of trying to find a place to vend, is that some store owners just have no interest in renting out their space to "competitors" and others would be interested if and only if they had any idea who you were and liked you.

If I like a store, I usually end up having a good rapport with the people who work there. Ultimately, it was an existing friendship with a store employee that landed us our first booth. Once there, we were respectful to the store and started promoting their events via social media and by designing fliers for them--it's important to offer as much as you can to the stores gracious enough to host you. Vendors come and go, but mutually beneficial business partnerships are something else entirely.

In the age of PPTQs, you'll either need to find a number of stores willing to host you for their larger events or one or two stores that will host you often and have good turnouts. We were lucky to forge a partnership with a store that hosts large FNMs and a ton of SCG IQs regularly, making our schedule easy to manage, but this won't be the case for everyone. No matter how many stores you need to reach out to, you'll only ever be successful by being professional.

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There's a ton that goes into launching and maintaining a successful vending business. This article was a little unfocused, but I wanted to talk about some of the more general principles and needs of getting started, and there's just a lot going on in that department. Going forward I'll be publishing some more focused pieces on specific aspects of managing the business, but this is a good starting point for anybody interesting in starting to vend.

Thanks for reading.

-Ryan Overturf
@RyanOverdrive on Twitter