Guides

Writing about the parts of selling cards that are decided badly most often — what to price carefully and what to price by rule, what a buylist actually costs you, when grading pays for itself, and how to keep condition and cost meaning the same thing twice. Written for anyone running a table, whether or not they use our software.

• Pricing

  Pricing a collection before a convention without losing three days to it

  A tiered approach to pricing hundreds of singles for a weekend show: what deserves individual research, what gets a rule, and what should never have been priced at all.

  8 min read

• Buying

  Running a buylist without losing money

  Buy percentages are the easy part. The hard parts are cash flow, sell-through, and knowing which collections to decline — and declining is a skill worth practising.

  9 min read

• Money

  When grading a card is worth it, and when it quietly is not

  Submission is a bet with real costs: fees, shipping, months of waiting, and the chance of a grade that loses money. How to work out which cards clear that bar before you send them.

  9 min read

• Operations

  Grading raw condition consistently, so your listings mean something

  Near mint, lightly played, moderately played — the labels are only useful if you apply them the same way twice. A repeatable inspection routine and the flaws people miss.

  7 min read

• Operations

  Working a convention table: layout, flow, and the failures you can prepare for

  What to put where, how to keep a queue moving, handling cash safely, and the practical failures — dead signal, dead battery, a busy Sunday — that decide how a weekend actually goes.

  10 min read

• Money

  Cost basis and margin for card vendors, including the awkward case of trades

  Why a card's cost has to be recorded when you acquire it and never recalculated, how to split a collection price across cards, and why valuing a trade at the agreed price invents profit that does not exist.

  9 min read