Card Market Blues Got You Down?

So you swung by the market the other day and picked up 200 nice, new cards to go dump on the rental side of things and now you’re over here with me trying to figure out why that same $30 worth of level 1 starter deck cards hasn’t cleared out all of your student loan debt and sprouted a shiny new gold foil lambo. Well grab a drink and pull up a chair because you’re about to learn a thing or two.

Kobold Bruiser is a popular choice included in the starter cards. Ironically, this card is free to use, however there are still over 1400 of these level 1's for rent in the market and probably 95% of those are listed for 0.10 DEC. This scenario presents a serious problem for your student loan debt!

In a sea of over 1400 cards all priced the same, your card is NEVER going to stand out from the rest of them in any way. This means that if your card is ever rented, it's going to be rented far less frequently than you'd probably like, and every day your card goes unrented is lost income that you can't get back.

If we scroll down the listings to the start of the 1 BCX cards, we're met with a never-ending wall of 0.10 DEC cards. In this situation, your best option is to increase the BCX of your card so you can offer it for rent at a better price per BCX. The lowest price a card can be listed for is 0.10 DEC irregardless of the card's BCX, but increasing the card's BCX also increases the card's value, which will allow you to ask a lower price per BCX and a higher price overall. Sounds obvious, right?

If we scroll back up to the top, we'll find single level 1 card amongst roughly 20 other cards, but this card is separating itself from the rest of the pack by sporting a BCX of 4. This allows the card to be listed at the same price as the other level 1's, but the price per BCX is lower so the card is listed closer to the top. You don't even have to upgrade it all the way to the next level to stand out! Just keep an eye on your price per BCX to better determine where you're listing will be placed.

In 10 days, if this card is able to hold it's position in the listings, it will be rented out every day and bring in a total of 1 DEC. Those same 10 days for a BCX 1 card at the same price will be lucky to see the card rented more than once or twice, if it's even rented at all.

"But if we all start offering higher BCX for lower prices, isn't that going to drag the prices down?"

That's an excellent question, but what do you think is happening when there's 1400 cards listed for the bare minimum already? If forces you to upgrade your cards in order to keep listing and profiting off of them. Those upgrades aren't free either and you also have to remember that when you're combining cards, that card's supply is decreasing. Sure, we might see some cards for what we may think is lower than they should be sometimes, but the truth is, when money is involved, everything is elastic. Over time, those cards will become more and more scarce and we'll see them less and less in the market, and when we do, those prices will be notably different.