I recently purchased a huge collection of YuGiOh trading cards and wanted to share the process I went through to generate the most revenue. The whole process took me about a week or so and was very educational. First of all, I have some background here, I’m kind of a nerd, while I have never touched on the world of YuGiOh, I have played Magic the Gathering a game that echos many similarities, off and on for most of my life. One of the important things to remember is not everything is a gold mine, where you might have heard of individual cards going for thousands of dollars there are plenty of cards from that game that are entirely worthless, not to mention games that have no value entirely. Like anything else, research is key. A simple eBay search of completed listings the name of the game and the term “single” will usually tell you pretty quickly if there is any value in the game you are looking at. I had already known that YuGiOh cards had some value, so I jumped at the opportunity to pick up a massive collection of YuGiOh cards for around $150. What sold me on buying this collection was the fact that I saw a significant amount of sealed product.

When I say sealed product, I’m talking about what you purchase at the store, booster packs, booster boxes, theme decks. Any sort of item packaged up and sealed with original factory shrink wrap. Sealed product has a couple of advantages, one it’s much easier to look up, and two it has a higher value. When people buy sealed product, part of what they are paying for is the utility of opening up that pack, the mystique, the chance, the spin of the wheel for that extra special rare card that is worth $30 dollars and makes someone’s day. This is why sealed product is important, and why you should always take a glance when you see a sealed pack, box, or even case of some random game.

I got home, unloaded the 4 boxes of cards, a little overwhelmed, a little excited. I’m a task oriented guy so my brain was excited to break down this collection and make the most possible money. Sure I could throw everything on my table, put up a $.99 auction and make a nice profit, however I think I can do better than that! The key to my method is the existence of Buy-lists, a giant list of cards that a retailer is buying and what they will pay, which I’ll talk about a little bit later. The first step is to pull out all of the sealed product as that is easy to look up, quick to list and should help me recoup my initial investment within the first week. One of the important things here is making sure you get the keywords correct, make sure you know if you’re selling a booster pack or a box that contains 24 packs. Most sealed product has bar-codes which when typed into Google will help develop a perfect string of keywords. Again, the advantage of the sealed product is the ease of listing, so I did that first so I could make some money while I worked on the dreaded individual cards! An afternoon later all of the sealed product was listed! Nearly $1000 worth of sealed product up and ready to go. Sales have been slow and steady.

I start the prices on just the high side of the recent solds, and wait for things to move! If things start to slow down i’ll run a 20% off sale. Finally either listing them on Amazon (which proved to be much lower in my research), bundle and auction, or drop to 50% off. However, I expect most of the product to move at the full price, best offer or the 20% price point. Again, we’ve already gotten our $150 out, and are now just sitting a mountain of profit. A slow bleed of profit is exactly what I’m looking for when I buy a large collection of something. Still have a lot left, these cards will help pay bills for the next few months!

Next, we have to roll up our sleeves, this is where weaker men and women perished before us. Where many would throw everything up at a .99 auction because it’s more “work then it’s worth.” Not us! We’ve got this! So now that all of the sealed product is listed we have all sorts of stuff left, instruction booklets, individual cards, tins with both cards and papers inside, some cards in sleeves (little plastic card protectors), some in binders, some in sleeves and in binders. I made this flow chart that breaks down what I believe is the ideal way to sell a valuable collectible card collection. In addition, I want to show that this process doesn’t have to be daunting or intimidating, as when broken down into basic steps it’s actually a fairly relaxing way to spend a Sunday afternoon, with a game on and a beer in hand.

So now we’re at the Non-sealed portion of our collection’s parting. Which mean’s we have a bunch of crap that is opened, we don’t know much about it, we have cards, tins, boxes, old sleeves (plastic protectors), all of that. So, we need to pull out all of the cards from the binders, take the sleeves off of all of the cards and leave us with two big piles. One pile of loose cards, and one of just plain stuff. Most of that stuff isn’t worth too much, the binders can be sold in small lots, I’m going to sell all of the tins together as it looks like people have had some success there. The amount of time you want to spend on this step is really up to you, my suggestion look up the nicest couple items, see if they are worth selling by themselves, if not just move on. For example some play-mats (giant mouse-pads) of various games can fetch hundreds of dollars, the ones in the collection I purchased were mostly useless. My suggestion here it look for craftsmanship as well as items that reference championships, specific events in cities and other “limited edition” type items when looking for individual items to sell. Anything that is not worth selling individually will go into our “Ebay Played Condition Auction” where we are going to unload cards that are slightly damaged as well as all of our leftovers.

We know need to pull out any and all cards that are not in NM or “near-mint” condition. This is a great website that discusses what qualifies as near mint: http://www.starcitygames.com/pages/cardconditions . These damaged cards will not be accepted by the companies that we are going to sell our cards to and will instead be listed in our “Ebay Played Condition Auction.”

Next you need to become a mini-expert on sets and how they are identified. In Magic there is a symbol on most cards that will identify it by set, yeah they are kind of a lot:

Where as in YuGiOh, there is a four letter symbol for each name printed in black in very low contrast in approximately size 5.2 font between two borders. I’d like to thank the designers of YuGiOh for the multiple tension headaches:

So this is the part where you employ your children, loved ones, roommates, foreign exchange students, whoever. Bribe them with pizza, beer, or sponge-bob, but this is a repetitive task that can go incredibly fast with some help. We’ve gotta sort all of those cards into sets. When I talk about a set, I’m referring to the booster pack, limited edition or wherever it originally came from. My suggestion is one big table or floor! Many of the cards were already clumped in sets which made the process a bit eaiser and I don’t think is terrible uncommon, this process only took a couple of hours. Or a couple episodes of the Wire, it’s really however you want to look at it. So now we have all of our cards organized by set, with each set having a stack of varying size it’s time to look into buy-lists.

Buy-lists are truly the cornerstone of this whole system. Buy-lists exist for games like Magic the Gathering, YuGiOh and other games that are very popular, and where a demand exists for individual cards. A buy-list is a list of individual cards that a given store will buy and the price they offering, think of it as a nerdy cardboard bounty list. These buy-lists normally offer between 50-70% of the actual value of a card, but they pay cash, they pay immediately and you don’t have to buy 30,000 bubble mailers. Buy-lists are magical way to turn what you just bought into instant money, and a pretty good percentage at that. When you’re sending in a buy-list order to a store, you’re selling them cards but more so you’re selling them the work that it took you to use their buy-list and organize the cards, for the company will be able to very quickly file away all incoming shipments if they are in the order that they can control. These companies will also make major deductions to your total bill if your cards are out of order or damaged.

A quick google search revealed a bunch of places that buy cards. However it will take us forever to check every buylist for every card, so my suggestion grab a random stack and look up 25-50 cards on all websites, see who pays the most, see who is buying the most cards from each set, then pick three buy-lists. For YuGiOh I used Troll and Toad, Core TCG, and Cool Stuff INC, as they all seemed to be paying top dollar and overlapped each other on particular sets, meaning I could sell more cards via the selected buy-lists.

Next is the biggest step, as we are going to get set by set and figure out how to get the most money for each card and let me tell you those nickels add up when we’re talking about thousands of cards. Once you have a set, it’s going to need to be alphabetized, again my suggestion is to pawn off this work on your loved ones with or without OCD, a six pack of beer and a pizza goes a long way. Once a set is alphabetized you can go through each buy-list and see who is paying the most,I would be to insert quantities into buy-lists as you go, but it really depends on the actual format. For example with the ones I was using it was easier for me to add the cards to CoreTCG and CoolStuffInc’s carts and then to go back and do the few higher value cards that were going to Troll and Toad, do what works for you. Depending on the collection you have, you might have a lot of valuable cards and you might not, so of course you’ll have to adjust accordingly. If you’re not finding cards on the buy-list this is probably not the ideal method! While filling out the buy-list make sure to keep the windows open, don’t clear your cookies and you should be fine.

This is gonna take a while, find a good tv show, a good audio book, and get going. I will forever associate YuGiOh with The Wire. This part is fun and rewarding because you get to see your cash growing slowly, it certainly helps with motivation, I was telling my lovely girlfriend more then she probably wanted to hear about how much the total on each buy-list was up to. After you’ve gone through all of your sets and you’ve sold the cards that are valuable what you have left is “bulk.” Bulk is usually bought based on rarity (a quick google search of rarity and whatever kind of cards you’re selling should help here), again check for the highest price and add it to your cart. Once your buy-list is completed you will need to print-off a list of all the cards you’re selling and confirm the condition and order and make any changes. Luckily we alphabetized things and sorted them by set so we are way ahead of ourselves on this step. Package the cards carefully so they can’t shift during shipment, my recommendation is to pick up a good number of baseball card boxes from a card shop, they look like this:

For the YuGiOh cards that are slightly smaller I just padded the box with some cardboard, and they are off! You will have to pay for shipping, but trust me I think it’ll be worth it in most cases. We are now packed and ready to go!

About a week later:

I made over $750 after supplies and shipping off of the three buy-lists, one of my orders was dinged 10% for being slightly out of order, luckily that was the smallest one. All in all it was a lot of work but I think made me a lot more money on the collection than I would have otherwise. Between the $750+, the roughly $1100 in sealed product and the “Played Condition Collection” auction up on eBay I expect to clear just around $2000 once everything is sold. I hope you learned a little something about buy-lists, and selling a big collection. Thanks for coming by!