Magic Greeting Cards: Products, Pricing and Customers

 In one sense my list of core products is a simple one, if you disregard the sheer amount of Magic The Gathering (MTG) cards. I will simply be selling a set of decks, and single cards. However, MTG has over 27,000 cards, and hundreds more are added each year. It will be impossible to keep every card in stock, and much like a comic book store, my stock will differ in the collectibles it holds from other similar stores. My core product listing will be:

  • Single cards
    • Official MTG Singles - $0.30 - $800
    • Custom made "proxies" - $4
  • Decks
    • "Starter" decks - $20
    • Custom decks - $140- $10,250 
    • Proxy decks - $200

As you can see, MTG can be a very expensive hobby. To buy all the cards individually, a tournament deck can cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars. It can cost even more if you try to get the cards for a deck the old fashion way, by opening booster packs. This makes "proxies" all the more attractive for newer players. Proxies are stand-in cards that can be played in place of the official version, and are allowed in many tournaments. An entire market has cropped up around making custom printed proxy cards, and they avoid getting in legal trouble with Wizards of the Coast by modifying the cheapest available MTG cards to have new text and custom artwork. Proxies are also much more profitable to sell at lower price points -- as the material costs are so much cheaper, versus official cards that have to either be acquired by luck or haggling to get them cheaper than market prices.  

Looking at some ebay stores, the average store from my sampling sells around 2,500 items per year. This means that I will need to average $12 per item to hit a $30,000 sales target. This is doable, but I have a feeling that I might average more sales than my competitors by offering proxies -- as these other stores are only selling official cards.

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