This is awesome, just signed up! I love it when hobbies collide :)
Some context for others: Magic: the Gathering has grown enormously over the past 30 years, and it has an enormous secondary market, which covers several segments: highly collectible early cards, newly playable cards (“staples” across a variety of formats), and unopened packs of cards (“sealed”). Early sets had print runs that totaled 2-40 million cards in total, nowadays sets have billions of cards printed.
Interestingly enough, early cards are relatively counterfeit-proof mostly due to changes in printing technology, although the counterfeits are getting better each year.
The biggest players in this secondary market are TCGPlayer, which was recently acquired by eBay, eBay itself, CardMarket in the EU, and lots of local game stores (LGS) that have built up online market share (CardKingdom is the biggest of these) or niche.
Fees drive revenue for most of these sites, and those fees are variable across different products each platform offers to sellers.
Interestingly, although this market does not have derivatives, there are several companies and APIs that attempt to offer some market advantage for buyers or sellers: indexing the lowest available price, providing historical price data, allowing comparisons across markets for arbitrage opportunities, plus more complex analysis. There’s some manipulation that goes on in these markets, but nothing as bad as crypto that I’ve seen.
CardSphere, a smaller player in the market (and my favorite) just announced their closure. They mostly inverted the typical market dynamic by letting members “trade”— buyers would offer their desired purchase price while sellers would select the best offers to fill.
A couple Q’s for the founder(s): What’s your fee structure like? How do you plan to take on the TCG/eBay giant? Do you have concerns for the future of the secondary market in general, given Hasbro’s desire to fuel growth of the property?