Before you get in touch

65% of TCGplayer market value for cards worth more than 50¢. Market value is the price TCGplayer publishes based on actual recent sales, not the cheapest listing and not the highest. You can look up any card yourself and do the math before you contact us.

Cards over $100 are negotiable. Big cards move differently than the rest of a collection, and it's worth a conversation rather than a formula.

Below 50¢, cards are priced as bulk at flat rates:

• 7¢ per rare
• 10¢ per mythic
• $2.50 per 1,000 commons & uncommons

Foils aren't a separate category. If a foil is worth more than 50¢ it gets the 65%. If it isn't, it's bulk at its rarity's rate.

The gap covers what happens after we buy: sorting, grading, listing, storing, marketplace fees, shipping, and the time between buying a card and someone finally buying it from us. Some cards sit for a year. Publishing the number up front means you can decide whether that trade is worth it to you. Plenty of people would rather take a fair number today than list 400 cards themselves.

Rares and mythics under 50¢ are bulk, at a flat 7¢ for rares and 10¢ for mythics. It's a small number per card, and it's honest about what those cards actually do: they take just as long to sort, list, store and ship as a $20 card, and most of them sit for a year before anyone buys one.

Commons and uncommons go by the thousand rather than by card: $2.50 per thousand. No need to count them. A thousand cards weighs roughly 4 pounds (a bit more with foils or older cards) and stacks about 12½ inches tall. A bathroom scale or a tape measure gets you close enough.

If you'd rather keep the bulk and only sell the good stuff, that's completely fine. Say so and we'll price just the cards over 50¢.

Yes, and it happens all the time. Collections get inherited, or bought in high school and left in a closet for fifteen years. You don't need to know what any of it is, or what it's worth.

Just tell us what you can see: roughly how many cards there are, what they're stored in, and any years or set names printed on them. A binder of about 300 rares from 2011 to 2013, or a large box of maybe 4,000 cards from the nineties, is enough for a ballpark. Photos help too. We'll explain what we're looking at, and go through it properly with you when we meet.

Estimate. If you want to get closer, a thousand cards weighs about 4 pounds and stacks about 12½ inches tall, so a bathroom scale or a tape measure will get you in the right neighborhood. A binder page holds nine cards a side.

No. Send it however it comes out: a decklist, a spreadsheet, a rough typed list, a link to a Moxfield or Deckbox collection. If you know conditions, include them. If you don't, don't worry about it.

You don't need a list at all, either. A description of what you have is plenty to start with, and we'll go through the cards together when we meet.

These are the standard TCGplayer grades, and condition matters most on expensive cards:

• Near Mint (NM): looks like it came out of the pack. Maybe the tiniest edge wear.
• Lightly Played (LP): minor edge or corner wear, small surface scratches. Still sleeve-playable.
• Moderately Played (MP): visible wear, minor scuffing or whitening on the border.
• Heavily Played (HP): significant wear, creasing, or scratching, but structurally intact.
• Damaged (DMG): water damage, tears, heavy creasing, writing.

Cards in sleeves inside a binder are usually in better shape than people expect. Loose cards in a shoebox usually aren't. Either is fine. We just price what's actually there.

Cash or Venmo, whichever you'd rather have, paid when we meet and you've handed over the cards. No waiting on a check and no store credit.

Your favorite coffee shop. Pick the one you already like around Franklin & Nashville, Tennessee and we'll come to you. All we need is a table, decent light, and people around.

There's no storefront to visit; that's the whole model. We'll sort out the specific place once you've accepted an offer.

No. Everything happens in person locally, so your cards never go in the mail and you're never waiting to hear whether they arrived.

Not right away. We wait until two weeks after a set releases. Prices swing hard in the first days and often settle a long way from where they start. Waiting means the number we quote you is one that's actually going to hold up.

Usually a day or two, depending on how much there is. A shoebox of bulk takes longer to work through than twenty specific cards.

That's fine. Tell us what you have and we'll tell you. There's no obligation to sell, and no hard feelings if you'd rather list the cards yourself once you see the numbers.

Magic: The Gathering only, for now. Everything we buy gets listed on Mana Pool, which is a Magic-only marketplace, so there's nowhere for us to sell Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, One Piece or sports cards. If that changes, it'll say so here.

They get cleaned up, graded, and listed on our Mana Pool storefront. Nothing disappears into a vault. Most of it ends up back in someone's deck.