| Total Value |
Calculated as the sum of the low values on FindMagicCards.com. Why this and not, say, the MOTL eBay price lists or CardShark prices, you ask? The MOTL price lists don't list every card; they are weak when it comes to commons. The prices are misleading for low-value cards: even if a playset is sold on eBay and shipping is a low $0.99 for the auction, you need to add a theoretical $0.25 to the price of each card sold. And, too frequently, the MOTL prices show dramatic sample errors, like when I was told for one repack that my most valuable card was a Rootwalla from Tempest, a common that is actually worth a nickel. As for CardShark, some vendors are unreliable fly-by-night outfits (determining which are and which aren't is something people are pretty good at but Perl scripts really lousy.) Also, the website is hard to crawl with a script. FindMagicCards prices are prices you can pay now, at this moment, for the card from a reputable dealer. Granted, most of the cheaper dealers don't have the range of stock that some of the more expensive dealers do, so you'll probably have to buy from multiple sellers to get your lowest price. If there is interest in a web application that would assemble an optimized shopping list for the FindMagicCards.com site, taking shipping costs into consideration, let me know and I will think about launching one. |