Card trading - lost art?

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Posted By: jay behrens

I always loved to trade at shows. The biggest problem is that people were looking at dollar values involved, whereas I looked at how easy it was replace what I was trading. As someone else pointed out, I was not about trade vintage cards for new stuff. You need be offering me something equally rare or unique. Now if someone came up to table and wanted trade a bunch vintage cards for new material, I was all over it. And it did happen few times. The silliest example was a guy who traded me a bunch of nice Sports Kings for a box of 86 Donruss, back in '87 when some guy named Canseco was hot.

When I had my gaming and comic store, we sold a collectible card game called Magic:The Gathering. The vast majority of the cards changed hands between players via trading and it was a blast. My most memerable experience from that was talking to a kid that was bemoaning the fact that he never own the "Power Cards" in the game because he only had a few good cards.

The "Power Cards" were worth about $1,000, his cards were worth about $50. I told him I could turn those cards into the Power CArds that he wanted. Several store regulars were around and made a bet with me that I could not do it and that all trades had to be made outside the store so that I wasn't getting the house advantage on trades.

It took me about month, but I got the cards he wanted, plus a few extras and get a couple of very rare beta cards from the guys betting against me

Jay

Jay