Generally speaking, this column has been devoted to the various facets of the card game Magic: The Gathering. I’ve written posts about various deck builds, talked about cataloging and various online resources, even chronicled my time at various in-store events. There’s one thing that I haven’t touched on yet, and I wanted to do so today. There are various online retailers that will ship cards to you if you are so-inclined to buy singles. I’ve done so for quite some time, but until this week, I had never sold cards to one of these retailers. The retailer I’ve done most of my business is Card Kingdom up in Seattle.

Card Kingdom has a reputation for fast shipping. When you make an order, you’ll get said order within a week’s time delivered to your doorstep. I haven’t had a single order go missing or contain worse quality cards than what I ordered, and they’ve all arrived promptly. There are other retailers out there that I’ve done business with, but Card Kingdom has been very reliable. Their prices are sometimes a bit higher than competitors, but those competitors tend to ship slower or in some cases I’ve seen Excellent condition cards sold as Near Mint. Anyway, in this case I decided to do a test run and see how it would go if I sold off some of my expensive cards that I wasn’t really using. The cards I sold:

The masterpieces and invocations were the big money chase cards from some earlier sets, and I was lucky enough to pull a couple from packs. Both of those sold for around $50 a pop, along with a few extra bucks coming from the other two. All said and done they gave me $149 in store credit for four cards, which opened up a lot of options for purchasing. One of the decks I build recently was Zur the Enchanter, who is supposed to be a Tier 1 general, but I felt that I was missing some pieces that would up his game. These are the cards I picked up for him:

I honestly wanted to trade those cards in to grab a Mana Crypt, which is currently around $100 at most outlets. Unfortunately Card Kingdom was out of stock so I settled for several of the good mana rocks I didn’t have in my collection, along with upgrading to Damnation from some other boardwipe and trading in another enchantment for Rest in Peace. These are all cards that should help the deck push towards its Tier 1 potential. I also put the shock lands into the deck so it’s valued at around $400 which is high compared to most of the decks I usually build.

I picked up some other odds n ends as well to use up the store credit. Seedborn Muse is a busted card and I grabbed the last one they had in stock. I’ve got a deck that’s going in immediately. Squee is going into my Krenko deck and Selvala and Prossh are two commanders I needed for decks I’ve already shared here that are still under construction.

Overall it was a good experience. I turned 4 cards into 10 and spent no money (outside of shipping) in the process. I’m going to comb through my collection again soon and see what other money cards I can trade up for. If you are on the fence about sending your cards to an online merchant like I was, you can rest assured that this one works!