Tracking what you paid and what you sold
A collection is worth something, and most people have no idea whether it has made them anything. This is where you find out, without pretending to know more than you have told it.
Recording a purchase
- In the tool, search for the card and fill in what you paid, how many, the condition and finish, and where it came from.
- Or select cards in your collection and use Log a Purchase in Bulk Actions, which applies one price to everything selected. Good for a stack bought at the same price.
- Condition and finish matter here. A near mint foil and a played regular are two different things to have bought, and they are costed separately.
A precon, a box, or a bulk lot
You did not buy those cards individually, so do not try to price them individually. Select the cards, choose Split a Total Across These, and give it the one number you actually paid.
- Weighted divides in proportion to what each card is worth now, so the chase rare carries most of the cost. This is usually the honest answer for a precon: its value was never spread evenly.
- Even divides by card count. Simpler, and what some people prefer for genuine bulk.
- Either way the parts add up to exactly what you paid, to the penny. A forty pound deck never comes out as thirty nine ninety nine.
Selling
Logging a sale removes the cards from your collection. That is deliberate: a sale that leaves them on your shelf makes the collection a lie, and the whole point is to keep both true at once.
- Select the cards, use Log a Sale, and give the price each. It tells you how many cards it is about to remove before it does anything.
- Undo puts both halves back, the cards and the record, so a mis-click is one action rather than a re-entry job.
- Selling a card from the search box that you do not own records the sale and removes nothing, and says so, rather than pretending to take something off a shelf it was never on.
What a card is counted as having cost
Bought the same card three times at different prices? It counts at the average of those purchases, not the first or the last. So selling two of four banks half the gain rather than all of it or none.
A card with no purchase recorded has an unknown cost, which is not the same as a free one. Those cards show a dash rather than a zero and are left out of the figures entirely, because counting them as free would quietly flatter every total on the page.
Reading the summary honestly
The summary shows what you have spent, what you have received, what you have banked, and what your collection is worth now. It also says how much of the collection those figures actually cover.
That last line is the one to read. If you have logged purchases for two hundred of three thousand cards, the return is over those two hundred and the page says so. Unrealised gain compares the cards that have a purchase recorded against what those same cards are worth today, never the whole collection against a partial cost, because that would move with how much you had bothered to log rather than with anything real.
Highest Movers
Two different questions, so two tabs:
- What you own is a selling question. Cards on your shelf that have risen, whatever they cost.
- The market is a buying question, across every card, with a price floor. The floor matters: a common going from one penny to three is up two hundred percent and is not a deal.
Pick a window from a week to a year, filter with the ordinary search syntax, and every row shows its working: what it is now, what it was, and over how long. A percentage you cannot check is a percentage you should not act on.
If there is not enough price history to answer the window you asked for, it says so rather than quietly comparing against something older.
Paid and ROI in the card table
Both are available as columns beside Price, turned on in the column picker and sortable like everything else. Sorting by ROI is the quickest way to see which shoebox purchase turned out well.
Getting the numbers out
Your buys and sells travel in the Excel workbook on their own sheet, so exporting and importing does not lose them. You can also type a purchase history straight into that sheet and import it, which is far quicker than entering years of history one card at a time.
Importing from ManaBox, TCGPlayer or Deckbox picks up a purchase price column if the file has one, so a history you already kept elsewhere comes across with the cards.