Magic: The Gathering

Play Booster or Collector Booster:

the two packs look alike on the shelf and are bought by different people. A Play Booster is the ordinary pack, made for drafting and for opening, with at least one rare and one foil inside. A Collector Booster is filled almost entirely with foils, borderless art and extended frames: dressed-up versions of cards that also exist in plain printings. Bundles box several Play Boosters with basic lands. Commander decks, ready-built around one legendary creature, are how most people who play at home with friends get started. Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and the other trading card games are listed separately.

Commander players and Standard players:

they put different values on the same card. Commander is the casual multiplayer format, a deck built around one legendary creature with no duplicates beyond basic lands, drawing on the whole history of the game, so old cards keep their place. Standard allows only the most recent sets and drops the oldest as new ones arrive, which is when a player’s price for those cards falls away. A Commander player wants one copy of the right card in any printing, a Standard player wants a full set of copies of whatever is legal, and a collector wants one particular printing whether or not anyone plays it.

The Collector Booster premium:

is where new Magic gets expensive. A Collector Booster box of a new set runs from about $450 to $700 in Panama, roughly three times the price of a Play Booster box of the same set, and holds less than half as many packs. Prices here are in dollars, so players compare directly with the figure they see online: sealed boxes cost more locally because they have to be brought in, while singles tend to change hands close to their online market price. The extra money in a Collector box buys finishes and frames, not different cards: a borderless foil plays exactly like the plain copy from a Play Booster. That is why a player who needs one card buys the single.

The set code on a used Magic card:

sits in the bottom-left corner, beside the collector number and a language code, and the price belongs to that printing rather than to the card’s name. Sol Ring has been reprinted in Commander deck after Commander deck and is worth little in most of them, while its rarer versions fetch many times more. Match the code to the listing before you pay: photographing one printing and handing over another is the easiest swap there is. Fakes go after the expensive cards. Under a jeweller’s loupe or a phone’s zoom, the colour on a real card breaks into small circular rosettes and the black of the name and rules text is solid; a counterfeit shows flat colour, streaks or fuzzy edges. Gold borders or square corners mark official reprints such as Collectors’ Edition and the World Championship decks: genuine, but not playable in sanctioned events.

A built Commander deck, kept whole:

sells best that way, with the commander’s name in the title, because that is how players search for it. Say whether it is the precon as it came or one you upgraded, and list the cards you took out. Any single worth listing alone gets its name, set code, collector number, language and finish, photographed out of the sleeve, front and back. Sealed boxes stay in their wrap, since a torn seal turns a box into a gamble on what is left inside. The people with Magic to pass on are mostly players who have moved formats or left the game, and fans who opened a Final Fantasy box for the art; sort their commons by colour before a Commander player comes round, so they can find the cards for their deck without tipping the whole box out on your table.