The Jitte
A Magic the Gathering Blog

A thread over at paupermagic.com turned me onto 1:1 trading and boy, am I excited.  One of the hardest parts of maintaining a collection is efficiently converting leftovers from drafts or leagues into usable tix or cards.  The easiest strategy is to sell them to a bot or buyer at a loss.  128 useless commons is still a tix right?

Really, its not. Thats 128 commons you failed to exchange for another common of the same value. Tsk, tsk. 1:1 has a poor selection, but with enough persistence you can get those cards you need.

When I first started gathering up a collection I wasted a lot of money buying staple rares like sac lands and the hot Ravinca duals and regret those purchases now.  My skill at Magic the Gathering is still pretty abysmal and I’m sure not going to waste tix entering 8 mans or premier events at the moment. I still have this fantasy of playing tournament T2 or EXT magic one day but it will undoubtedly be months or years away as I work on my chops.

I’ve been slowly selling off my staple rares, usually at a loss. 

Today however I managed to actually make a return on my cards.

Sold 3x Watery Grave for 37 ( bought at 7 ) tix and 3x Birds of Paradise ( bought at 4 ) for 18 tix.  Now I have 55 tix to spend on PDC cards or I could start getting involved in Time Spiral block.  Enduring Renewal + Slivers looks like fun. Since I already have most PDC staples like Terminate, Armadillo Cloak, and [card]Goblin Legionnaire[/card] I don’t know if I could possible spend all 55 tix on it.

Block seems easier and should definitely be cheaper, especially if I can avoid buying Damnations.

My first trade with MTGsalvation happened today. My: Voidslime for 2 Giant Solifuges and 2 UL Might of Oaks. To make myself more comfortable with the trade I PM’ed him my phone number only to receive a response 2 hours later. He needed the cards for regionals so I rushed to the post office and sent them out. I threw in some extras for him and made sure to package up the card nice.

Very exciting to finally have it happen. Knowing I’m one step closer to having a physical deck to play is nice.

I’ve been finding that online trading is a lot of work. Maybe because of my lack of references other traders don’t do a damn thing besides tell me they want cards on my list. I took time to declare my trading specifications clearly in the hopes of not wasting my time or anybody else’s time but it seems my effort is wasted.

I refreshed vigorisly for the last 10 minutes hoping to find a response from somebody and get some negotiations started. What I got was a reply in my thread from somebody who lives in the UK and has 0 of the cards I asked for.

Not impressed so far. :(

I’ve started my first experience with trading my physical magic cards for the first time in over 7 years. Although I’m trading online it’s still a step in the right direction to get me off this lonely MTGO experience and into the real world. Hopefully everything goes well and I get my first physical deck up and ready for FNM before the summer really starts kicking.