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Back in the day, I would check Scrye magazine to figure out how much my Magic cards should sell for, but they folded two years ago. Where's a good place to price my collection these days?

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are you looking to sell the whole collection? Just a few cards? Or are you just curious as to the relative worth of the cards? Also, how old are the cards? Are they an old collection from the 90's, some of the more recent sets? Or a decent mix? – Pat Ludwig♦ Apr 11 '11 at 0:34
@Pat Looking to value a collection of 90's cards, most likely for sale. – abeger Apr 12 '11 at 15:51

4 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

If you want to know what you can actually sell individual cards for, I think you can't do better than ebay. If you look at price indices like Scrye used to have, you run into the problem that what a shop can sell a card for is typically much higher than what you, a private individual, can achieve.

Bear in mind as well that prices for individual cards are much higher than buying in bulk. In other words, you might work out that your collection is worth thousands of dollars, if you were to sell each rare individually. But if you tried to sell the same thing to a shop, or in a single lot on ebay, it would sell for only a small fraction of this.

The only other caveat is if you have many extremely rare old cards from the first days of Magic. In this case, the wear and tear of the card has a very large impact on the potential price. Again, ebay will give you an excellent guide to how much these can vary (try doing a search for "Black Lotus" for example).

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up vote 5 down vote

Another great and reliable source is http://sales.starcitygames.com/spoiler/spoiler.php which has a nice search engine and rather stable prices.

Just reduce the prices by something like 20 or 30% to account for the money they want to make on the cards. The important thing is the relative value of the cards.

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+1 for the reminder to mark down their values 20-30%; they do like to over-inflate their prices. – LittleBobbyTables Apr 10 '11 at 23:53
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well, Bobby. They do need to make a profit on their sales... So you probably get 20-30% less selling to them than they do selling to you, and that's the same 20-30% you'd not get selling directly to consumers. That's the way things work in all used goods markets. – jwenting Apr 18 '11 at 19:34
up vote 5 down vote

magiccards.info has a very nice price chart that compares prices at various conditions across many online retailers for every card. It's also 1000x more useful than Gatherer for searching for and browsing through Magic cards.

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up vote 3 down vote

While you can search for only 10 cards at a time, the Apathy House Trade Evaluator is a nice way to find reasonable prices.

When I've traded in the past, others have requested I use Apathy House to value my cards, and when I've sold on eBay, the prices I have received have been close to what Apathy House suggests.

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