Review: We Tried Out MTGetsy – Is it Worth It?

Trading Post | Illustration by Adam Paquette

Long-time MTG players know that the cards are just the tip of the iceberg. Once you have some cards, you better get sleeves to protect them. And how will you carry your deck without a nice box? And that Atraxa, Praetors' Voice deck really uses a lot of counters, shouldn’t you get a bunch of differently colored dice to differentiate between them? And you gotta have a playmat because Jerry doesn’t know how to clean his table….

You could spend hours scouring the web and hunting down a dozen different sites that offer various products, and I have! But there’s a new website that promises to bring together multiple sellers in a single marketplace that meets all your Magic needs, for both accessories and proxies!

The website is called MTGetsy, but is it any good? Let’s find out.

What Is MTGetsy?

High Market | Illustration by Carl Critchlow

MTGetsy is a brand new marketplace for Magic proxies and accessories. Notably, the site has no connection with Etsy.com; it’s its own, separate entity.

The site focuses on “custom creations and accessories themed around MTG,” per their FAQs. Proxies take the Savannah Lion's share of the site, but other products include sleeves, themed counters, and deckboxes along with more niche products like aluminum-etched cards. The offerings are rather sparse right now, but we can credit that to the site being new; no doubt it’ll soon be flooded with prospective sellers.

It’s worth noting that while this site sells plenty of proxies, it does not sell custom proxies. There’s no option to type in Black Lotus or whatever and get exactly that; it’s a store with sellers offering specific proxies, often in bundles, with pre-selected art.

This review has two parts: One where I review my experience using and ordering through MTGetsy, and one where I review the cards I ordered from one of the sellers. The distinction is important because of how MTGetsy works. As a marketplace, flaws with the website don’t necessarily reflect upon a seller; likewise, any qualms I may have about the seller’s cards don’t make MTGetsy a failed experiment.

Why Buy From/Use MTGetsy?

Stadium Vendors | Illustration by Sidharth Chaturvedi

The biggest draw to MTGetsy is the product diversity. As a marketplace meant to attract sellers and small businesses, you find a greater range of products than you might if you just go to a deck box site, or a proxy site. That gives you decent efficiency as a one-stop shop to pick up Magic stuff. Having so much Magic-themed product on one site also appears handy for non-players trying to find a gift for the Magic player in their life.

Because the marketplace brings together multiple sellers with similar products, you might come across one that strikes your fancy, even though you didn’t know about them before; it’s like perusing Google and finding an unexpectedly cool site.

Ordering from multiple sellers under one site is also convenient. You only need to enter your information once, you don’t need to bounce around a bunch of sites, you can compare similar products in one tab instead of six… I won’t pretend the other options are pushing boulders up hills, but I appreciate the cleanness.

MTGetsy: Is Ordering Worth It?

Navigating the Site

MTGetsy‘s site navigation works reasonably well, though I have small quibbles with certain elements. Something that becomes apparent rather quickly is that many of the tabs and categories are empty or near-empty; this is easily forgiven as the site’s pretty new, but be aware that you might not find precisely what you want.

I also noticed that the main web page has buttons to bring you to select categories, which is handy, but right-clicking doesn’t have an option to open the category in a new tab; it only allows you to open the image in the same tab.

Beyond those admittedly small issues, I like the site. It has ample categories I expect to see filled within a few months and I like that the main page displays a variety of new, popular, and interesting products. You come to a marketplace site like this to see a wide range of offerings, so having them on display makes that experience much easier. All of the categories break down further, so you can find exactly what you want once it’s posted.

Browsing Product

When browsing products within a site like this, I’m mostly interested in finding what I want with ample information and ease. Unfortunately, this was the low point of my experience as I had the most issues with browsing products. Nothing site breaking, but I feel like this is where the site could improve the most.

The first hurdle I hit came from simple searches, like this one for fetch lands. It pulls up multiple options and bundles and stuff, but no information about which sellers are selling which bundles or rating. I would just like more information on the product, like we have on the main page.

Once you select a seller, I had a similar issue in that I couldn’t search their product specifically. That doesn’t matter much with stores offering two or three products but proxyplaza has 18 pages of proxy decks and bundles, including multiple bundles that vary on a theme or two. It would have been incredibly convenient to just search for dragons and see all their proxy bundles and decks at once, without sorting through a dozen pirate and elf bundles at the same time; while I could just search “dragons” in the search bar up top, that brings us back around to the issue of not seeing seller information. These are admittedly small issues and can be chalked up to the site being pretty new.

Ordering Product

I had no issues ordering my product; once I settled on a seller I wanted to use—for this article, that would be proxyplaza—I could browse the site with each. Proxies are at the forefront of the store’s offerings right now, so there were plenty to choose from. All I had to do was make a quick account, which virtually every site asks of you these days.

Product Delivery

My product delivery was a little rough. It took about a week for the order to process, which the seller contacted me about and explained they simply hadn’t checked their orders. But the person who reached out to me was incredibly courteous and immediately offered to add any product to my order; the speed with which they corrected the mistake demonstrated genuinely good customer service and honestly left a more positive impression than if it had just been shipped.

It took around a month for the cards themselves to reach me, but that can be credited to international shipping as I ordered from a seller based in Germany, and had cards shipped to the USA. Given this, I can’t speak on national shipping to US-based customers, but most of the time spent waiting seemed to be while my cards were getting through German Customs. Once they were delivered, they just came in an envelope, wrapped in some plastic sleeves; they came in good condition, and I had no issues with the packaging.

I got two sets: I ordered a green cEDH bundle and got a cycle of fetch lands as my freebie for the delay; a portion of each are pictured below. Here are the backs, complete with proxy logos:

And here's the front:

I appreciate that the back so clearly indicates that these are proxies and they aren’t attempting to pass themselves off as counterfeits; that would obviously be a hard sell given the front of the cards, but it’s still good to see. The text boxes are rather small, but that’s in service of drawing the eye to the full artwork, making it more of an artistic decision than a defect.

My cards have no visual defects or misprints, which is good, but I found them rather flimsy. They use a different cardstock that’s much more flexible than what Magic cards proper are printed on and you can tell the instant you pick them up. Even in a sleeve, they’re noticeably flimsy. I added a few to a sleeved Limited deck and shuffled it around to test whether or not they would appear marked; you don’t notice them while shuffling, and you can only tell they’re different from a regular Magic card when you intentionally flex the sleeved card. Given that, these aren’t marked but I am rather disappointed at the quality of the cardstock considering the price.

I snagged these bundles on sale at $25 dollars, but the regular price is $43. While that’s technically cheaper than a set of 10 fetch lands or a copy of the cards within the cEDH bundle, I can get higher quality proxies at a far cheaper rate and would be rather disappointed to spend $50 dollars and describe the product I opened as “flimsy.”

Of course, I want to stress again that this is but one seller among many, and disliking this product doesn’t necessarily reflect on the site as a whole.

Is MTGetsy Worth it?

I like MTGetsy and look forward to seeing where the site goes. While my experience with one seller wasn’t stellar in terms of price and product, writing off the entire marketplace for one store would be silly. A few sections have little to no options and the site’s primarily proxies, but we can write that off for it being a new site. Once it's had a few months to gather sellers offering other products, I bet it’ll become a fascinating place to browse for various accessories (I wouldn’t mind seeing some mugs myself).

FAQ Section

How Do You Become a Seller?

Becoming a seller on MTGetsy is as simple as creating an account and offering products. They take a flat fee of 6.5% and offer near immediate withdrawal of funds. You can learn more on their seller page.

Can You Create Custom Proxies on MTGetsy?

No. MTGetsy is a marketplace for sellers to offer proxies and other MTG-related products. If you want to order custom proxies, check out this Draftsim article I wrote reviewing three custom proxy sites.

Wrap Up

Night Market | Illustration by David Alvarez

I didn’t receive the greatest proxies of my life from MTGetsy, but we can’t condemn the marketplace for one seller. The concept excites me, and I can’t wait to see how the market develops over the next couple of months as new sellers come and expand the offerings.

Have you ever checked out MTGetsy? What kind of products are you hoping to see come from a marketplace like this? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!

This post is sponsored by MTGetsy. We will never work with a brand we don't love and trust, and by supporting them you also support Draftsim.