Today we’re very excited to announce support for serialized Magic: The Gathering cards on Cardsphere! This has been an often-requested feature especially when members of our community hit the jackpot and crack one of these themselves, and we’re happy to finally allow these cards to be traded back and forth among the community! Here’s how it will work:
Serialized Versions
Because of both the highly rare nature of serialized cards and the fact that most specific serial numbers are worth approximately the same value outside of meme numbers, we will only have one listing for each serialized version of a card.
Each card will have an image similar to what you see above, which is just a generic XXX for the serial number to represent any available number that users may have in their inventory. So please be aware that if you are adding one of these cards to your wants, a sender may send you any serial number for that card, and not liking the number or preferring a different number will not be a valid reason to dispute the send.
Conversely, if you are buying a serialized card from Marketplace, the sender is free to send any serial number of that card and a receiver may not dispute over the particular number they receive.
What if I Want a Specific Number?
There is not and probably will never be enough data for us to support trade listings of specific serial numbers. The nature of these cards just makes it all but impossible, since unless there is public knowledge of the price history of each specific serial number, the data is just not there to support it.
Instead, chasing a specific card number should be handled in the same way signed or altered cards are handled on Cardsphere currently. If you want to arrange for a specific number at a specific price, you will have to do so 1 on 1 with your trade partner and this should be done in Cardsphere messaging, with photos so the admins have a full view of the agreement in case any problems arise.
Remember, this negotiation should only be done before committing to send or receive a trade.
A Note About Pricing
As we touched on earlier, the fact that only a couple hundred of each of these cards exist makes pricing much more difficult to track. We do have dynamic pricing online for each card listed, so this is not because of a technological limitation of Cardsphere, but rather that the prices are only going to update whenever a card is publicly listed or sold, and with so few in existence, they will just not update as often as most cards do.
Anyone with open offers or marketplace listings should keep this in mind as there could be large swings in value between each pricing update and each transaction. Keep your price limits and floors set correctly and make sure they are a number you’re comfortable with. The rarity means there will very likely be at least some variance between the transaction price here and listings elsewhere. It is just the nature of these cards and not a problem that can be solved with development. As always on Cardsphere, buyers/sellers remorse is not a valid reason for a dispute.
Availability
Now for the fun stuff! Here are the sets for the new serialized cards:
The Brothers' War - Retro Artifacts - Serialized
Doctor Who - Serialized
Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth - Commander - Serialized
March of the Machine - Multiverse Legends - Serialized
We Are Aware of the Missing Cards ™
Currently not available are the serialized versions of the Poster variants for the holiday re-release of Lord of the Rings Tales of Middle-earth. Like other types of promos and variants, they will be added as soon as pricing is available and we will update this post and send a ping out to any users with the @newcards role on discord when we get them added.
Thanks and have fun!
XOXO, The Cardsphere Team
