General How to buy cards in bulk for Cube?

[Erik Twice]

There are some incredibly expensive cards in the average Cube. However, there are also many cards that are very cheap or that have next to no demand. In fact, I was surprised at how cheap cards like Wildfire, Cruel Ultimatum or Reveillark are.

The issue is that, even if the card themselves are cheap, it's easy to rack up a lot of money on shipping costs or in the slight overpricing of your local card game shop. So I wonder, what do you do to try keep the cost of cheap cards down? Even if you only spend 50 cents per card, that's 200€ for a 400 card cube. Thoughts?

 

[Onderzeeboot]

• Test cards (extensively) before you buy them. I use Forge for this, and it really helped me bring down my expenses.
• Test cards before the prerelease, so you know what to trade for. Locals around here use magiccardmarket.eu as the benchmark for card prices, so if you trade smart at the prerelease, you can cut a lot of shipping costs.
• Buy at magiccardmarket.eu if you live in Europe. I don't know what the alternative is for other regions, but prices on mcm are markedly lower than in online shops. In fact, a lot of shops are on mcm and the competition with random players selling their prerelease haul drives the price down.
• Try to gauge what cards are too cheap and buy them early, wait a few months before buying the rest. You can save a lot of bucks if you wait a month or three for the prices of new cards to come down.
• Lastly, accept that MtG is an expensive hobby if you are going to curate a cube of your own.
• Bonus: one way to cheapen the cost of maintaining a cube is to share costs with other players and make a community cube. This requires a lot of bookkeeping, because someone has to keep track of which card belongs to who, but if one of your regulars "donates" a Snapcaster Mage, and another lends their Liliana of the Veil, that's over a 100 bucks you don't have to cough up yourself.

 

[Aston]

If you're doing an order from a retailer, see if you can join it with someone else to split shipping costs.

I mostly use Magic Card Market as well now, and I think TCGPlayer is the equivalent in the US.

 

[GalacticTraveler12]

Yup, TCGPlayer is awesome. If you shop smart you'll never have to pay extra for all those $.25 or $.50 cards at normal retailers. I also use Card Kingdom because their physical stores are near me and you can both buy and sell at their Seattle location. Basically I trade shipping costs for gas money and the feeling of supporting an LGS (though with the number of channels they sponsor, perhaps CK doesn't really deserve to be called that). I might have to stop driving there to reduce carbon emissions, but it's a great excuse to go to a nearby noodle house that's really good.

 

[Dom Harvey]

In my experience a lot of players will be happy to donate cheap cards that they don't have a use for any more if you ask on public FB groups