You probably saw that we revamped the subscription pricing for LGS Net Income to $7.77 per month, discounted for annual and multiple-user subs as well! I immediately saw a spike in subscriber growth, which paints a pretty clear picture of how well that move has been received by you, my readers. Thank you so much. I am so glad to have you on board.
I was immediately reminded of another “777” process from my store that I think may solve a problem for a lot of you: How to move Magic bulk more efficiently and profitably. And I thought this would make a nice free article, a much simpler example than our usual analysis offerings here, but one that can make you money so that you know LGS Net Income is for real and that the paid-exclusive articles will be crunchier in general and full of more good info to bolster your, well, Net Income.
It seems like not a month goes by without seeing “what should I do with all this bulk” asked multiple times in the Facebook game store groups, the MTGfinance groups, the various tabletop subreddits, and so forth. Everybody has tons of bulk and feels like it shouldn’t go to waste, but struggles to find a way to flip it without losing a king’s ransom in time and effort sifting sand from one pile to another.
The most common responses to that question are for people to build bulk packs with specific content structures, selling them on Amazon or eBay or what have you, promising some number of bulk rares, some number of uncommons, the rest commons, and some kind of jackpot in some cases.
And those responses are all wrong.
After extensive trial and error, learning from everyone I could ask, analyzing every resale offering of bulk or repack or similar product, and iterating constantly as I went based on results, I deployed a bulk product at DSG that, once refined a bit, has been so successful that I couldn’t keep it in stock. It sold literally faster than I could make more, and making more was not a difficult or slow process, and it was unequivocally profitable, while also being a good value for the buyer! The best of all worlds!
Allow me to present to you: 777 Random Magic Cards boxes.
I’ve made two packaging refinements since that photo was taken: A printed barcode on the end out of Square, and using wafer seals on the long sides rather than the half-page label stickers, since the wafer seals do a better and cheaper job of keeping the box shut.
So, what is this product and, like magnets, how does it work?
I reuse empty draft booster boxes but you can also use the 660-count white cardboard to do this, and it’s about the same either way, holding an unsleeved total of around 810-820 cards. This number is important because these get put together in a way where lands and tokens and sometimes a few foreign cards might get thrown in there, and you want to be able to show that it’s overfilled and the buyer still got at least the promised 777 cards.
Presumably the forthcoming play booster boxes will be about the same size as draft booster boxes and can be used the same way. Also you can fit four boxes in a USPS Medium Flat Rate box for shipping, though with the ~$16 shipping rate on those, you’d have to charge a bit more than I did to make it worth it — more on that in a moment.
But in terms of what’s in there? Beyond the promise of 777 random Magic cards, nothing. No stated rarity. No stated collation. No stated duplication or lack thereof.
It works like this. You, the reseller, get boxes of cards in collection buys. You pick them once (or let your robot do it). Then the rest of the cards get thrown into these boxes and sealed up and sold as 777 Random Magic Cards. The end. It’s fast, it takes very little work, it’s consistent, and it moves cubic meters of cards for real.
“But what if something worth a little more ends up in the box?” The labor savings overwhelms this, and even when it does happen, now you have a super happy customer who will buy more bulk from you. The entire purpose of this offering is to get rid of bulk as quickly and easily as possible. The overriding prerogatives are low labor, easy presentation, and an enticing gamble for the buyer. It’s OK if a lightning bolt or whatever ends up in there from time to time.
And you don’t have to hide anything, you can be 100% up front about what these are, and they still sell. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Tell the customer outright the box could have 800 Chimney Imps. Tell them you promise nothing except that they will get at least 777 playable Magic cards and that basic land will be minimal. (You want the basic land anyway for your drafts and sealed deck events, so let your robot separate that out, or if you are picking by hand, keep large swaths of basic land and ignore occasional instances.) The customer will buy it anyway just to see. Just to find out.
How much do we sell this box of 777 Random Magic Cards for?
Of course it’s up to you how you price it, but I’ll explain my pricing history and rationale for you to assess and you can make your own decisions.
I started it off at $5 because that number made sense at the time, circa 2014-2015.
During the pandemic I increased it to $7.77 because I saw that it become harder to keep up with demand, and that price made for some great symmetry too. I started seeing groups of players come in monthly or even weekly buying up boxes for their grab-bag drafts and so on.
Post-pandemic, and especially with the Booster Fun era making a lot of normal rares and even most foils worthless, I’ve been able to increase the price to $9.99 per box and they still fly. I’m not sure how well things will go in the two-digit price range, and I never got as far as to try it before selling my store.
For the past couple of years I became even less and less concerned what ended up in the boxes, because it became such a directly profitable way to move bulk. It’s possible to use the tools we already have on TCGplayer’s admin panel, various aggregator websites, and so forth, to figure out what cards of a given set or rarity sell for greater than bulk value. For those of you with robots, it’s even easier.
I even spot-tested this a few times when I was seeing foil rares in the “777-ready” bins in my office as I was building the 777 boxes. Without exception, when I looked those cards up, they sported market prices in the sub-20-cent range. Foil rares! Truly for an old guard player like me this was an awakening. The bottom line was that nothing else I did with those cards would produce more money with less resource expenditure than simply letting them fill the 777 boxes as expected. And buyers would jump right out of their seats at finding foil rares in their “bulk” purchase, never mind that those particular cards were not valuable. They still loved it.
If I haven’t emphasized it enough already, and feel free to ask my former employees, now staff at Amazing Discoveries Chandler: These 777 Random Magic Cards boxes, at $9.99 plus tax, sold so quickly I couldn’t keep them in stock. I would build a bunch at a time out of whatever inbound singles we had, one pick pass, seal up the rest and add labels, and within a couple of days, gone. Sold. Money in the bank. All it took was a few cycles to train up customers on what to expect, and they liked what they experienced.
I will feel pretty great about helping stores everywhere make money out of nothing — better than that, in fact, since you’re freeing up cubic meters of storage space, so you’re literally turning an ongoing cost into fresh revenue — if I see this exact product, or riffs on it, appearing everywhere. I release this to the ages. I gift it unto all of you. Go forth and do likewise! Iterate, develop, and master this in your own way too!
And hey subscribe to the blog it’s extremely affordable kthanx :)