How to Pimp #1: Using eBay

If I made a Frequently Asked Questions about my Commander deck, number one would be "How much is it worth?" The answer to that is, "A lot more than what I paid." I was fortunate to get in ahead of the curve - for example, I paid less for my Foil Japanese Urborg than the price Star City is currently selling English foils for, and that's one of the more tame price jumps. Pimping a deck these days can be very expensive, especially if you are a fan of tapping for blue mana. Even worse, the cards can be nearly impossible to find depending on their obscurity - I have a great example of this later on in this post.

Which brings me to the second most frequently asked question - "Where the hell did you find these?". This is a topic I'm going to address in a series of posts, focusing on different places you can go to find the cards you want and some tips I've picked up that have helped me get the deck to where it is now.

Part 1: Improving your eBay Mileage

Ebay is the first site that nearly everyone is going to check for their pimp cards. If you are new to the market, you'll perhaps be surprised to find that a number of sellers have huge inventories of Japanese foil cards for sale, so it can be pretty easy to find a number of the cards you are looking for. But how do you know you are paying a fair price, and how can you find the cards that aren't listed? Check out the tips below for the answers!






1. Completed Listings

I'm always sort of astonished when people don't know this button exists, but I shouldn't be. Working in a card shop, using Completed Listings to find prices for obscure foil cards, older comics, and out of print board games and RPGs is something I do nearly every day, and if not for the need to find secondary market value, it's a relatively useless feature that most people really don't NEED to know about.

I would love to tell you where exactly to find this option, but eBay has been shifting their interface a lot lately, and I can't guarantee where you will find it in the future. Sometimes it is right above the item listing, and other times it is to the left in a "Show Only" checklist. It seems to vary depending on the computer you are using, though that may be a bit silly. I've at least provided a screencap of where I can find it right now, so hopefully that remains valid for a while.  In 2 years, it might be a popup box in the lower right corner and this picture could be totally useless. I can tell you this, though - it's called "Completed Listings", and it's your friend.

Someone get going on an all Portuguese foil deck. That would be pretty slick.

First, perform a normal search - for example, Portuguese Foil Catacomb Slug. Then, find the button. Once you click it, you'll get the idea pretty easily. It shows you the same search that you had just performed, but for items that have ended in the past 6-or-so months. Red prices are unsold, green are sold. This is a great feature for finding out whether a card you want has even been on the market here (it is not uncommon for random pimp cards from a decade ago to never be listed), determining the fair price for a card (which you may want for Best Offers, bidding wars, or use on other sites), and finding out when you barely missed seeing the one card you need to finish the deck (I feel your pain!). I encourage everyone to use this feature when dealing in "normal" cards as well - but keep in mind, card shop pricing schemes are typically higher than ebay due to other factors such as customer sale volume and selling fees, so I don't recommend haggling with your local shopkeeps for "normal" cards with Completed Listing prices.

2. Saved Searches

While you could spend every day scrolling through newly added items or hitting up each main seller, there's a much easier way to stay up to date on what has been added to eBay. You can set up saved searches for all or most of the cards you are looking for - then eBay will send you an email any time someone lists an item that matches your search criteria. For example, I have one for "Japanese foil divining top". I see when Sensei's divining tops pop up on eBay and have a good laugh at the idea of buying a Japanese foil for their ludicrous $500 going rate (though it would be pretty cool...).

Saved searches have been more than just humor for me, though. I've found a number of the cards I was looking for because I made searches for most items and let eBay do the work for me. I now use the searches mostly to keep up on pricing as many Commander foils continue to rise in price. If you've got a list of cards you are after, I recommend putting each search in eBay and save it so you don't miss out when one pops up. The only downside is that the emails go out at a certain time of day, not immediately when the listing is up, so it is still possible to miss it if someone else manually found it first. To find the button, right now it's directly to the right of the search bar. Again, your mileage may vary depending on when you read this and what mood eBay was in with your account.

3. Contacting Sellers

This may be the one tip that gets you the farthest. Some sellers - the aforementioned Japanese foil sellers - have huge stocks of these cards. They have binders full of cards that they don't even bother to put on eBay because very few people will want to buy them. If you are looking for an obscure card, don't be afraid to contact these sellers and ask if they have the card. If you can't find an email address or you can't message them, just ask a question through one of their items. The key to finishing the pimping of deck is being resourceful - these cards are out there, you sometimes just have to prod around until you find them.

Case in point: The very last card I needed to finish pimping the deck a while back was Hide // Seek. This card was being a real pain to find, so I finally said, "These sellers have to be shops like us, so maybe they've got stuff they don't care to list or have players who have these cards. I might as well ask." I contacted all the main sellers I could find, and one got back to me with great news - they had SEVERAL in a binder and were happy to arrange a sale for me. Through contacting the sellers, I'm now also on a mailing list for one seller who lets me know when they put up hot stuff on eBay and who I contact to ask about random cards I'm looking for - which is how I found a sweet card that's showing up next week (ish) as well.

That's all I've got for eBay tips, so I hope this helps you find some more of the cards you are looking for. In future segments of How to Pimp, I'll be going over some various privately owned but reputable trading websites and some more expensive desperate measures you can take to secure the last cards you need. See you then!