What is your best purchase? What is your worst one? Have you ever found expensive cards or misprints in a collection that looked bad at first glance? Have you ever been in a weird situation when buying a collection?

it had a bunch of picture of lose cards strewn across a floor.

no one wanted the collection for 120$

I can't recall any particularly bad collections, as I'm very wary of buying unless it's in person, or I have a pretty extensive list of cards.

As for a weird situation...

Recently, my roommate asked if I would put a bid on a collection, with a maximum of $70. An hour before the end, it passed $70, and I let him knw he wouldn't be winning it. I put my own bid on it for $96 and won and it just came on Saturday. My roommate and I looked over the collection and noted it seemed to be worth more than I paid for it. He even ended up trading for some cards from it that he wanted when he first saw it up for sale.

It had a few dozen bulk rares plus this:

foil Chain Lightning
foil Fireblast
foil Jackal Pup
foil Price of Progress
foil Darkslick Shores
foil Drowned Catacombs
foil Blightsteel Colossus

Bought and sold a few other collections over the years, but most were just people who heavily discounted their cards to sell them in one chunk on MOTL/MTGS, and I got to them first. Usually somewhere around 33% profit (e.g., buy collection for $500, sell individually for $750).

To continue....over the years, I think I have done a little of both: buying to add to my collection as well as selling for a profit (mainly to get my money back from the purchase).

Paid $3200 for 10 power cards several years back. Six were beta that I didn't have(set of moxes and twister). Sold an extra set of UL Power I had at time to pay for the purchase and still have the beta upgrades. Three of the moxes are "perfect" so even though I paid good money, the cards I got were very nice and I was happy with the transaction.

Two years ago picked up a very old collection that had cards from Alpha to Urza's Saga. Agreed to pay $2200 based on 5 power cards that the guy had (sight unseen - but I could back out if there was a miscommunication) and the bulk collection I saw (all good cards were to be brought in next day) - Lotus was one. Estimated value is well over $13,000 and I have kept a lot of the Alpha and Beta stuff for my collection other than a bunch of duals and some duplicate Power to get my initial cost back. I knew the guy back when MTG came out so he gave me a good price just because he was happy a MTG fan would get the cards. He knew he could sell them for more.

I picked up a "cheapie" bulk collection for $50 recently which had all the P3K commons in it. I have very few cards of this (one of my Magic lapses) so was happy to pay for the bulk. Had a few cards in it (Foil Gush) that I could get my money back. It's fun sorting through this stuff sometimes, but then what to do with all those commons - ugh.

Worst purchase - probably a small collection for $75 bucks when I was more of a novice and trusting of folks. Guy put a few "catch" cards on top so I bought without digging through. OMG the guy had marked on so many cards to make proxy decks. I pretty much gave away the money. I never buy a collection sight unseen anymore or rush before I look through a collection. Valuable lesson learned.

I have passed on many collections over the past 3 years that I could of "turned" for a profit, just because as I have gotten older I would rather ADD to my collection the cards I still want/need to finish up sets or obtain interesting cards perhaps for an EDH cube I am building.

One that was truly epic was from a guy in Ohio who I actually ended up meeting by chance. At a flea market, this lady I'd sometimes buy some tabs of paper off of had some comics in a box so I decided to go through, saw a bunch of Magic comics and decided to ask "do you have any magic cards?"

She said no, but said that her husband has a bunch and that she'd put me in touch w/ him. The process took a while, but one day in late December a few years back I ended up going to meet up w/ them at a casino just outside of Pittsburgh. When I called and spoke w/ him we kinda had a short conversation on how long it would take for me to get there, was sort of a negative tone to it. After a minute he put his wife on and the first question she asked me was "Did you bring money?" Needless to say I was a bit unnerved by the question, considering that I had never actually met this guy and I'm driving a good ways out to see them by myself. Even though it was at a public place, there was enough involved to make anyone uneasy.

Anyways I get there and call him up, we play phone tag for a bit and finally meet inside. He asks me "do you want to come out to the van and see the cards?" I immediately answer "no, I would like you to bring the cards inside and that I don't want to do anything outside (not only for safety, but I think it was like 20 degrees outside or something freaking cold)". There was a moment of hesitation, then he said "okay, I'll be right back".

A few minutes later he comes back w/ a small box and brown bag I believe. I take out the cards and check everything out and it's all good, it was actually more than all good because as I first started looking he says "threw in a bunch of extra cards I thought you might like". Needless to say, I liked them.

After I got done going through, and while, we BS'd about a variety stories magic related and it was a quite a trip. He told me about all the cards he had, and I could very well believe it w/ what was in front of me, plus different things he did. The one that was really cool was that he always went to gencon/origins and went to the gencon when magic was first being released. He met Garfield there and actually got some cards from him. Once he got back it was his goal to go and get more so he called up every store w/in a 2 hour radius and asked to see if they had them, only a few did but he'd venture out and go see them.

One store he called up and asked if they had any and the guy says "yeah we have a box" so he tells them to hold onto it he's coming right over. He drives a fair distance, think it was 45 minutes he said, gets there and says "I'm the guy that called up about the magic cards and had you hold the box of them you have". The guy says okay and grabs a starter deck and puts it on the counter, and he's like "I thought you guys got a box?" The guys says back "yeah, this is the box, I only got one."

He had some great cards and stories beyond that too, he said, as all that collect get rid of things do, "if I could only go back and just put a little bit of that stuff away!"

When I went through the collection and broke it down, I ended up getting in touch w/ him and asking for his mailing address. I then proceeded to send him a money order for a good bit, was actually quite fair w/ him. He was more than thankful too. Moral of that is don't reward your good fortune w/ bad grace.

Hope you enjoyed the tale. On another note, just finished up a deal w/ a guy for a bunch of Alpha's, was pretty cool to hear about them and their origin too so thanks Mike if you see this.

.50,
Jesse

a guy walks in with a binder full of sinkholes. mostly UL, but probaly 3 playsets of alpha betas.

he said he stopped playing magic long ago, and sold everything, execpt for these sinks that he had been collecting.

the LGS didnt want to buy 200 sinkholes, since it was an all or nothing deal. -So the guy asks the room if anyone wants them, and since im the only one there with money, he sells them to me for cheap - as far as i can remember it was roughtly 8 dollars pr sink.

I've bought about 10 collections from friends around me who'd had enough though. Usually with a collection, I'd turn to eBay and sell off stuff until I made my money back and a little extra for the time and put away the rest of the stuff in boxes. Depending on the era (lots of people stopped during Masques), I have a high surplus of good commons/uncs. I still have a 100 Blastoderms and Accumulated Knowledges... stuff like that.

At one point I turned to selling 5000 count 'collections' on eBay itself, just to get rid of extra rares and commons/uncs. I was too honest about the contents and didn't make much money, but at least the cards were gone. I still have about 30000 sorted extra cards in my basement that aren't bulk but also aren't 'hot sellers'. Not really sure what I'll do with them but keep sitting on them.

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Originally posted by Hooskdaddy:
About 5 or 6 years ago I was going to buy a gaming store from the owner who was going to get out of the business. This was a fairly large business as the owner wanted $60000 for it. I moved my life(my brother and I) up 3 hours from where we were living to work the store for a year to get a feel for how things ran and to "learn" from their manager, even though at the time I already had 10 years in the business. I rented a house, made commitments for being there at least a year. After about 3 months the owner decided he didnt want to sell anymore and "fired" me leaving me stranded in a strange town with no means to support myself or my brother.

Later i learned that the manager from that store decided to move away and the store was going to close down. I saw the owner at worlds in NY later that year and we got to talking. He expressed interest in selling me the stock from the store (close to 2 million cards) for $40000. My brother, a friend and I rented a uhaul and bought the inventory a few days after Christmas. At the first of the year, after massive amounts of sorting and taking cards out of binders, I made a trip down to Coolstuff and liquidated $30000. All of the bulk com/unc got distributed to various places including one of my former coworkers who opened a store to replace the one that closed for the remaining $10000. After 3 or 4 other months worth of extensive Ebay auctions I had cleared $60000 worth of profit. I considered this my severance pay!!!

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Originally posted by Alexisonfyre:
Woah! Talk about karma! Did you keep some cards?

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Originally posted by Hooskdaddy:
No i didnt keep any cards that i know of. I still had parts of the collection almost a year later. Good times.

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Originally posted by Harmless:
$60,000 is severance pay for working 3 months at a gaming store? Seems excessive. That guy must have been desperate.

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