Hallo! I hope you’re doing well wherever this reaches you from.
Have you ever wanted to sell your old Pokemon Cards? Your old Yugioh cards? Perhaps your old collectible baseball cards? Maybe your brand new Digimon or My Hero Academia cards and you keep getting explodey-face Bakugan and want to rid your house of his kerchan energy?
Well, that’s how I was led to this Mini-Experiment! Selling my old (and sometimes new because I’m a fiend for them) trading cards! I have a box of very old Pokemon cards from roughly the base set up to 2007/8 with Diamond and Pearl and I pretty much stopped buying them since then. I have old Yugioh cards hidden somewhere in an okay condition in my house here. I have yet to skim through any of them and put them up for sale for a reason I will explain in a moment. And lastly, after finding a Giga Green Digimon Starter Deck in the New Bedford, Mass Target when I stopped in to take a leak after we unpacked one of my friends for his grad school, I was absolutely imprisoned by my own desires.
Mind you, I am a huge nerd about Digimon. I have a blanket that I’ve always slept with since I was little, I recognize most of all of the Digimon that appear in the card games, I love Digimon World Dusk and Dawn and the silly little thing that is World Championship a little too much. I have a very old hard plastic Growlmon card that is hidden somewhere in the house or in a book that I have used as a bookmark ever since I rediscovered it in 2014 or 2015. I watched the first four seasons straight through top to bottom before stopping because those were the shows I grew up with.
And suddenly the universe hands me a pack of Digimon cards…in a target nearly 300 miles away from home…in a time when I can do whatever I’d like with my money and nobody can tell me not to.
So I bought them because I was so excited!
Then….nothing for months.
Then two OTHER starter decks popped up at the Target at home. Then a gift box. Then booster packs. And recently I bought my first booster box ever. I’m just so happy to have them now. Even if I don’t sell them and only collect them. Even if I just played with them.
And to top off on this, my friends and I have had a near weekly tradition of buying at least one booster pack of Yugioh or Pokemon cards every week just for the gambling of the pulls. And a couple times that has literally paid off.
This is all to tell you that I not only had a ton of trading cards, I now have a ton more, and my interest lies in collecting, playing AND selling them. And because I had the stock of cards already, it’s what led me to try to sell them in the first place. I didn’t HAVE to go out and buy more to try to make this mini-experiment run – but I do just like them so I buy more lol.
But anyway, the experiment has been a little slow. I literally started trying to sell my cards on TCGPlayer.com last year around March, so as of late May 2022, I have been trying to sell cards for nearly a year and 3 months now. The problem came in that when you start off, you can only put a few items up for inventory, and as you sell more and level up, you can put more items up for sale. So I once could only upload something like 50 cards.
At that point I wasn’t trying to upload every card I had, because I couldn’t even upload a whole deck of nearly anything I owned! Then I got to level 2 after a few sales and could upload 100 or so cards. So then I tried to add more cards, the ones that were worth a little something, not just big bangers of 15, 20 nearly $100 even. And then after only 11ish sales, I got to level 3 and now I can upload 50,000 cards. So that means to ramp it up.
Another issue I only recently noticed I had is that I cannot directly link anyone to my store to have them shop only for items for sale from me. So I looked into seeing if it was possible, because that would get me to more sales SOOOOO much more easily if I can blast it at anyone I want and link it on social medias. But first I must fulfill 50 orders. And that ain’t going to happen unless I sell me some more cards.
So that led me to buy about 20 packs of Digimon cards about two weekends ago (when I was looking for a booster box) and a booster box (containing 24 packs of Digimon Cards and some guaranteed super rare cards) last week for the new booster that just came out.
I did get some great pulls like an Omnimon Zwart (~$7.5), and Omniomon Alt Art (~$12), a Diaboromon (~$14.5) an Ogremon Classic Alt Art (~$9.5). And I don’t necessarily want to use any of those in a deck or keep them for collection purposes so I have them up for sale. As of this point it’s been about two weeks, I used photos and I think I set the price reasonably yet they still haven’t sold any of them, unfortunately. If I did sell the big hitters I would recuperate my costs, if I sold nearly all the cards I bought, I would return a profit. But that requires selling tons of smaller items that go for cents on the dollar.
It could happen, but it seems very hard to right now.
And the other reason I bought the booster box was that it was brand new, and there’s always a lot of hype around new cards (and I did want to be a part of that) but the cards will always have a huge increase in price due to demand the week they are for sale. So I thought maybe I ought to try to see if it’s worth it to keep up to date with the new boosters and sell the cards. I haven’t analyzed the ones I have but I do think I can at the very least recuperate the costs of my buying the booster box (of $80) and perhaps sooner than later since I will be among some of the first to sell the cards on TCGPlayer. But we will have to see how that goes.
And my final thoughts about my min-experiment right now are that I started a spreadsheet for those 20 or so packs I bought earlier to check to business viability of selling the great card hits to recuperate my costs then to turn a profit (and it wasn’t pretty). So then I decided to just keep track of ALL of the Digimon cards I had for sale on it as I uploaded and indexed them. The total potential profit of every single Digimon card I have for sale on my store at Colossicus Cards on TCGPlayer.com right now is $376.78 cents. That’s absolutely liquidating everything I have when it comes to Digimon besides the new packs I just got.
It would be great to get all that money. But then I’d have to buy more stock. And even then I only made about $300 on possibly $200 worth of card packs.
I don’t quite know how well this could turn out, but I will update you on anything new for this mini-experiment as I go further. Because I do really likes the cards and learning about them and seeing them and playing with them. And at the very least, I will not be stopping until everything I have in my house is safely in my customizeable binder so that it is safe and maybe I could pop up at a flea market and sell them.
Anyway hope you have a good day.
Godspeed,
Colossicus