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The Communist Manifesto

Is it possible to share a Magic collection successfully? And, if so, is it worth the stress? Magic finance expert Chas Andres investigates.

There are two easy ways to end a friendship very, very quickly.

The first is to mess with your friend’s family or romantic life. If you, shall we say, intrude on your friend’s intimate partnership, you can probably kiss that friendship goodbye.

The second is to get in a disagreement over money.

Back when I was in college, one of my friends decided to make a short film in his hometown. I took a bus south and spent two weeks living in his basement. As part of the camera crew, I was in charge of buying all of the incidental materials: gaffer’s tape, lens cleaner, and other consumables that added up to about $500. He was supposed to reimburse me for the cost after we were done shooting, but he never did. That was seven years ago now, and our friendship never recovered from that slight.

To put it another way, there’s a reason this Google autocomplete exists:

Google

While some people can make a family or friend-based business work, it’s a relative rarity. In fact, I’m pretty sure if you have a successful family business, A&E is probably in the process of contacting you about their next big reality show. More often, mixing business and friendship leads to resentment and frustration. Heck, the divorce rate for spouses that work together is up over 80%. That’s five times the national average.

Which brings me to the subject of this article: collection sharing.

I’ve been telling people for years that sharing a Magic collection is a terrible idea. For whatever reason, people don’t seem to get that sharing cards with someone is no different than entering any other business arrangement with them. Like it or not, you are entrusting one or more of friends with an asset that is potentially worth several thousand dollars. Can the bonds between you bear that weight, or is your friendship in danger of tearing itself apart like in the classic Simpsons episode Three Men and a Comic Book?

Simpsons

When I decided to write this article, I went into it with the mindset that collection sharing was impossible. Quite frankly, I’ve heard so many horror stories that I felt it was safest to just recommend steering clear of the practice altogether.

After putting it out there that I was toying with collection sharing as an article subject, though, I was contacted by several people who have been successfully doing it for years. I was intrigued—could collection sharing actually be possible? Even if it is, is it worth the stress? Let’s find out.

Why Share A Collection?

Starting with the obvious, Magic is one of the most expensive games ever created. A good Standard deck costs about $500, Modern decks are generally in the $800-$1000 range, and Legacy builds can easily hit $2000 or more.

Of course, competitive players rarely pick one deck and stick with it—they need a large pool of available cards with which to attack multiple ever-evolving metagames. Now that every card that makes the slightest blip on the tournament radar sells out to speculators within minutes, it’s even more important for actual tournament grinders to have a large standing collection. Otherwise, they risk being shut out on the morning of a big event.

Collection sharing is alluring for casual players as well. Most non-tournament players love variety, and the prospect of doubling or tripling a collection for free is incredibly appealing to someone who just wants a giant cabinet full of Commander decks to grab at will. It’s also an easy way to build something like a cube, where an entire playgroup can help defray the cost of something that everyone can use together equally.

Most often, I see people try to use collection sharing as a way to break in to Magic. If a group of friends all start playing at the same time, sharing a collection makes the quest for that first $500 deck feel much more attainable. Collection sharing also tends to pop up when someone who has been playing forever partners up with someone who is relatively new but committed, allowing both players access to Standard and Eternal staples.

When you think about it that way, sharing a collection makes an awful lot of sense. After all, most people don’t actually plan on using more than a couple hundred of their Magic cards in a given weekend. What’s the harm in letting someone else use a few of the thousands of others you have lying around in exchange for access to all of their cards as well?

How It All Goes Horribly, Horribly Wrong

There used to be a group of three friends at a local store who shared a collection. In order for any one of them to make a trade, all three would have to agree on the deal. This usually ended up with the one value-conscious member of the group shouting at the other two a lot before the guy or gal on the other end of the trade left in disgust. On the weeks where one of the three friends couldn’t make it to FNM, they couldn’t trade at all.

After a few months, it became clear that one of the three friends had amassed the majority of the good cards in the collection. The second member of the alliance was still attending tournaments, but he was mostly coasting along and buying cards at his leisure. The third friend headed toward casual play and stopped going to tournaments altogether.

At this point, the first friend decided to buy out his partners, but finding a valuation on their shares of the collection was pretty much impossible. Should he get more credit for the cards he bought or traded for himself? Should he have to pay retail, buylist prices, or something in between? Does he have to take on the casual cards he doesn’t even want? They ended up settling on some nebulous figure and calling it a day. I can’t vouch for whether or not the deal affected their friendship, but I do know I haven’t seen the three of them together since it went down.

While most people go into it with a little more foresight than this, some mistakes are made by nearly everyone who tries to share Magic cards.

Suggestions for Collection Sharing

If you do decide to share your collection, I suggest sticking with the following rules.

Limit Your Group

Sharing a collection with a roommate is the easiest route because all of your cards are still in one space. Sharing between two or three people who live in separate places is trickier, but it can be done. Four is the absolute upper limit. With five or more people sharing cards, even good accounting will prevent you from figuring out who actually has a card on a given day. Further, you will probably have to drive around for hours in order to track down every card you need for an upcoming tournament.

I suspect that the odds that something will go wrong doubles with every new person added to a shared collection group. At a certain point, then, you are basically just setting yourself up for failure.

By the way, this includes randomly lending out cards to people. I’m pretty sure about a third of the cards I’ve lent to people were never returned. If you do lend a card to someone, snag something roughly equal in value from their binder so that they’re incentivized to give you your cards back. I recommend taking a photo of them holding the cards as well.

Whenever you decide to share cards with someone, ask yourself the question, "Would I be comfortable sharing my ATM card and PIN with this person?" If the answer is "no" or "dear lord no," you might not want to give them unlimited access to hundreds or thousands of dollars’ worth of your cards.

Create a Comprehensive Shared Spreadsheet

I cannot stress this enough—keeping a clear record on every card is essential. The following categories are important to track:

Number of each card owned. This way, you can use the spreadsheet to easily find out what you have and what you need to target in trade. I know I only have one copy of Jace, Architect of Thought in my personal collection, but if I had a shared collection, I might not know that Eunice opened one in a draft last night and I can take it off my trade target list.

Condition of card. Was that crease always there, or did Bob forget to use sleeves again? Either way, it’s important that everyone knows. Otherwise, blame and doubt can seep in and threaten to mar your friendship.

Card Location. Who has the last Inkmoth Nexus you need for FNM tonight? Raymond thinks he does, but you’re also pretty sure you saw it in Martha’s Modern deck last week. Or maybe you traded it at the GP last weekend? If it is actually missing, who had it last? If you keep track of nothing else, keep track of this. Otherwise, you’ll spend so much time looking for cards that you could have just worked a second job at minimum wage and bought the extra cards yourself.

Ownership. Ideally, a shared collection is owned equally among all of you. Unfortunately, this rarely works out in real life. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a neat philosophy in theory, but in real life it tends to breed resentment very quickly.

Keeping track of ownership is a great way to settle disputes when one member of the collective wants to cash out of their part of the collection. It also helps settle disputes when two different people both want to use the same cards in a given weekend as well as disagreements over missing cards.  

Tradability. The only thing worse than being unable to trade from a shared collection is finding out someone else just traded away that rare foil that you spent months tracking down. Keeping track of this on a spreadsheet will help prevent confusion and allow you to mark certain cards as untradeable.

When starting a shared collection, fire up something like Google Drive and create a spreadsheet that all of you can modify in real time. Use it as a living document and update it constantly. Here’s an example of what that might look like:

Google Drive

I suggest keeping track of every rare on the spreadsheet. Even bulk rares can become useful, and it’s important to know where they are and who owns them. I’d also suggest putting staple commons and uncommons on the spreadsheet: Ponder, Burning-Tree Emissary, and other staples that are always needed for decks.

Do not keep track of random draft chaff. It will clog up your spreadsheet and render it unusable.

If you’re at an event and reception is poor or you don’t have a phone that can edit the spreadsheet in real time, make sure you have a camera or notepad to record any transactions you make with the shared collection.

Have a Trading Plan

First off, it’s essential that everyone in the group has the power to make a trade. One of the biggest advantages of a shared collection is that you can double or triple the amount of trading you can do. With smartphone spreadsheet access, no one should be in danger of trading away a card that the owner is unhappy giving up.

Having a "trade targets" tab on the spreadsheet is a good idea. That way, you can always be on the lookout for whatever cards your group needs to fill holes in the collection.

Everyone in your group should be on the same page in terms of trading philosophy. If you are a tournament player, having someone else swap your hard-fought fetchlands for Death Barons that only they will use is going to hurt. It’s also impossible to share a collection with someone who doesn’t care about card values. Like it or not, Magic cards have a very high cash value, and you will feel differently about your friend if they trade your Underground Sea for three copies of the latest hyped planeswalker at the next Prerelease. Make sure you all talk regularly about trading in and out of formats, the latest hype cards, seasonal rotation, and the other stuff I cover weekly in this column.

One wrinkle that comes up in trading from a shared collection is determining who gets ownership of the new cards. It’s simple if all of the cards belonged to the same person, but it’s much more complex if I trade one of my cards and one of Steve’s cards for a shiny new Dark Confidant.

In a case like this, I’d ask Steve if he is okay switching the ownership of another one of my cards to his that is roughly equal to the value of the card of his I just had to trade away. Otherwise, I would mark the Dark Confidant as having split ownership.

Is keeping track of all of this cumbersome and time consuming? Absolutely. Don’t share a collection unless you think you can handle it.

Have a Tournament Plan

Here’s a conundrum: you have one playset of Sphinx’s Revelation in your shared collection. All three of you want to play a U/W-based Standard deck at the GP this weekend. Who gets the cards?

Card ownership should act as the first tiebreaker, but things get tricky if two of the cards in the playset were acquired by one person and the other two were bought by someone else. There are loads of common sense solutions to this problem, of course. You can see who in the group has a different deck ready to go, perhaps, or you can keep track of favors owed. The important thing isn’t how you solve the situation, but that you have a written and agreed-upon plan for what to do in a case like this well ahead of time.

I know you and your card-sharing buddies are the greatest of friends, but those walls can break down fast at 2 AM the night before a major tournament, especially when both of you were counting on having access to the same cards. Developing a clear and fair tiebreaker rule can prevent this resentment from ever forming.

Have a Replacement Plan

Cards go missing or get ruined all the time. Sodas fall on decks. Binders are stolen from backpacks. Things get left in rental cars. It happens. The problem is that stealing $500 worth of Magic cards doesn’t feel the same as stealing $500 worth of cash. Oh, and fear is the mind-killer.

Again, let me stress to you how weird people can get about money issues. Even if you don’t think you’d ever suspect your good friend of stealing your cards, your gut might tell you something different when a whole deck of yours in his possession goes missing. This is not something you ever want hanging between you and someone you care about.

There’s a simple solution to all of this. You know that "location" tab on the spreadsheet? Whoever is in possession of a card needs to be responsible for it no matter what. If it gets lost, stolen, or damaged, they should be required to replace it—no excuses.

Establish Rules on Cashing Out

People quit playing Magic all the time. I’ve quit twice in the fifteen years I’ve played the game, and I’ll probably quit twice more before I’m done. If you’re good enough friends with someone that you want to share a collection with them, though, you’ll probably want that friendship to survive their leave of absence from the game. This is hard to do if they want to cash out their portion of the collection and feel like they’re getting hosed.

It’s important that everyone knows beforehand what happens in the event that someone wants to pull out of the shared collection. In order to keep the group harmonious, it is essential that you give the other people in the group first shot at acquiring the cards owned by the person leaving at a reasonable rate. I recommend using StarCityGames.com buylist price plus 25%.

This means that the card owner leaving has to sell their portion of the collection at this price if the other collection sharers are able to raise the money. This should be an all or nothing deal—they have to buy all the cards at this price or none of them.

If the other owners can’t or don’t want to buy the cards at this price, than the owner who is leaving will simply keep their portion of the cards and do what they want with them.

Sign a Contract

Turn on your TV and flip around a bit. I guarantee you that Judge Judy is there somewhere—she always is. Chances are that she’s shouting at two former friends who are suing each other over an item or an amount of money in the $2000 range. Nearly every episode comes down to the same ruling: "Did you sign a contract when you loaned money to a friend or said they could crash on your couch for $200 a month? No? And they claim it was a gift? Too bad—you have no proof, so they win."

I get it—contracts between friends are kind of awkward. They feel like a paranoid way to begin what should be a shared pursuit of building the greatest Magic collection on the planet. But they exist for a reason.

All of the rules I discussed above? They don’t mean anything unless they’re written down. Even if you know you wouldn’t take your friend to small claims court no matter what they did, getting them to sign the contract pretty much guarantees you’re both on the same page to start out your venture. Signing a contract gets rid of that nagging doubt and gives you clear guidelines to follow that will keep your collection going strong for years to come.

Sharing a collection is no different than going into business together. Even small collections are worth more than most of our weekly paychecks, after all. If you treat collection sharing with respect and do it with a small group of like-minded people, it can be very rewarding.

Otherwise, stay very far away.

This Week’s Trends

Somehow, we managed to go an entire seven days without a weird, unexpected card bubbling up to a thousand times its previous value. In today’s Magic economy, that’s a quiet week.

The market is still very bullish, however, so feel free to keep selling whatever cards you need to. Modern, Standard, and casual are all doing well—only Legacy is lagging at the moment.

Summoner’s Pact and Azusa, Lost but Seeking are both four-ofs in Gerry Thompson Amulet of Vigor Modern deck. The deck is fun and pretty good, so the demand building for these two cards is legitimate. Both cards are currently listed on StarCityGames.com for $15, and we might see another jump for the Pact up to the $20 range. Amulet is ticking up slightly as well, but I don’t recommend buying more than just a personal playset.

Goryo’s Vengeance is still trending upward. It’s sold out here at $10 on its way to $13-$15.

– Remember when I mentioned Paradise Mantle had jumped to $5+ last week? It’s over $10 now. I’m selling my extra copies even though the deck is pretty neat.

– Two cards threatening to bubble over at the moment: Divert and Kataki, War’s Wage. I’d stay away from both.

Hazezon Tamar and Angus Mackenzie are both getting the Rasputin Dreamweaver treatment at the moment and are starting to spike. If you see these cheap in the case at your LGS, there’s probably a little money to be made.

– The most in-demand card at my FNM the past few weeks? Sphinx’s Revelation. No one has them for trade, and everyone wants them.

Tarmogoyf has started to drop a bit in anticipation of Modern Masters, but Dark Confidant keeps rising—it’s up over $60 on the major indexes. If for whatever reason Bob is not reprinted, I could see him spiking to $100 or more as people freak out.

Domri Rade, Obzedat, Ghost Council, Aurelia’s Fury, Prime Speaker Zegana, and Gideon, Champion of Justice have all dropped in price this week. If Domri Rade gets too low, he becomes a very intriguing speculation target. He is a powerful planeswalker who will see major play next season without a doubt.

Omniscience is moving toward $10, but it’s still just $6.99 here on StarCityGames.com. If it isn’t reprinted in M14, you may not see it that cheap again for a long time.

Until next time –

– Chas Andres