Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Guess what? I'm DONE!

I actually finished the great relisting project! It's amazing! I don't know what I'll ever do with all of my free time now...

Oh, that's right - catch up on all my new backlogged inventory - that's what!

You really should have seen my happy dance yesterday afternoon when I got the last of the cards put up in the branch store. I'm sure I mortified my whole family. But this thing has been keeping me busy every night for ~3-4 hours, most days on weekends, and any other available free time for the last several months. I am SO relieved to finally have it done!

Now pretty much all of my uncommon cards are now available at http://www.donsmagicandsundry.com/ along with the commons and basic lands, and quite a few cheaper rares as well...I have a much decreased single card inventory available at the eBay store compared to just three months ago.

Oh, by the way - the solution to my inventory limit problem (see my last post) was to pay ProStores more money every month and upgrade my store level. I now have an inventory limit of 50,000 items, which I hopefully won't hit for quite some time!

I can now get back to listing a whole bunch of foils I have sitting around ("Lot 46") as well as some new cards I've never had available before (so they need the full photo-taking treatment). Then I need to tackle the remains of "Lot 47" which is now nothing but basic lands and common cards that I want to make Complete Basic Land sets and Complete Common Sets out of.

Then I have a large number of non-English cards that will need to get processed - a bunch of Japanese, Russian and Portuguese in particular, but many French, Italian, German, etc...including a lot of 4th Edition cards in Japanese that should prove popular due to their black borders (reminiscent of the Chinese 4th Edition I wrote about long ago).

My biggest business lately has been in unopened packs. I now have booster packs available for every expansion set except Arabian Nights and Antiquities (which sell for ~$200 and ~$50 each, respectively), including the almost as popular Legends boosters that I have listed for $57.50. I'm hoping the demand on all of these will pick up as the holidays approach us. I can see the effects of the economy crisis in my sales - most of my really big purchases lately have been from outside the US, rather than in.

That's all the news that's fit to print right now...more as it happens. Hopefully I'll now have some free time to right a few more Blog entries focusing on individual cards and the like soon...

Saturday, October 11, 2008

I may have a MASSIVE problem

Just a quick one today...

I have gotten up to the Mirrodin block of cards in the great relisting project, and hit a major snag. As I was uploading the Uncommon cards for Mirrodin, only 14 of the 84 cards I was uploading were processed.

When I read the report to determine why the others didn't load, I was greeted with the message: "Reached maximum number of Products (10,000)".

Holy $#!+ - I'm not sure what surprised me more...the fact that I have a limit to the number of cards I can put up, or that fact that I've now got 10,000 cards listed!

I have an email in to ProStores, the company that hosts my store. I vaguely recall a message in the opening documentation from them that said there was a limit (which I never thought I'd reach at the time), but that I could contact my ProStores agent if I would need a higher number. Hopefully something can be done here, or else I don't know what I'm going to do with the remaining cards I still need to list from before, not to mention cards in future sets.

Why is nothing ever easy?

Monday, October 06, 2008

Shards of Alara is up!

The newest expansion to Magic, Shards of Alara, has finally arrived. On Friday I received my pre-order of one case of booster pack boxes and one box of tournament decks. I opened up all of the decks and 4 of the 6 boxes worth of boosters.

All of the regular basic lands, commons and uncommons are up at http://www.donsmagicandsundry.com/ and the rares, mythic rares, and foils are up in my eBay store.

The best card I opened was perhaps the most popular card in the whole set: a foil version of the most popular Mythic Rare card, called Sarkhan Vol. Here's what the card looks like:

Copies of this card have sold for as much as $70+ at auction recently (some were available before the release date), and there was only one available in an eBay Store when I went to list mine. They were asking $69.95 for theirs. I had listed my non-Foil version for $32.50, so I doubled the price to $65, keeping mine under the other seller's.

You may be wondering why I haven't included a link to the listing for this item, as I usually do. That's because it sold less than 12 hours later to a customer in Greece!

What makes this card so popular? Well the card itself is very useful, as you can use it to add a nice dragon Creature to your side of your magical battle. But from a rarity standpoint, look at it this way...the card is a Mythic Rare. Mythic Rares shows up in 1 out of every 8 booster packs. There are 15 different mythic rares, so based on odds, you'd need to open 120 packs to be sure of getting a copy of Sarkhan Vol.

But now consider the Foil part. On average you'll get one Foil Rare in every box of booster packs (or 1 in 36 packs). If a Rare is replaced with a Mythic Rare every 1 in 8 packs, this means (theoretically) that you'd need to open 8 boxes' worth of boosters to get a single Foil Mythic Rare. To get the specific Foil Mythic Rare you're looking for, then, you'd need to open 15 x 8 or 120 boxes of boosters.

Essentially - I got VERY lucky! First of all that I got a Foil Mythic Rare in only the equivalent of 5 boxes, and that the one I got was the most popular one.

Well, now it's back to the great relisting project. Wish me luck on that one!