Review: We Checked Out Journey’s End Games’ Online MTG Store – Is It Worth It?

Far Traveler | Illustration by Alix Branwyn

Show me a Magic player who doesn’t love cracking open a package of freshly acquired cards. I’ll wait. Even as much as I play with proxies, cracking open a fresh pack or opening an envelope on mail day just hits different.

But I generally avoid the fresh packs unless I’m actively playing Limited. Buying singles is just far more cost effective and leaves you with way, way less chaff laying around then you would have if you decided to buy a box of Tales of Middle-earth to get the Troll of Khazad-dûm you need to finish off your Legacy deck. And the best way to get singles? Online retailers have a convenience that can’t be beat. Today, I’m reviewing Journey’s End Games to see how their online storefront stacks up against the rest!

What Is Journey’s End Games?

Journey’s End Games is a game store based in Moscow, Idaho, close to the University of Idaho. In addition to selling Magic cards, their digital storefront offers Star Wars, Lorcana, and Pokémon cards. If you’re in the area, you can order online for in-store pickup or have your items shipped.

Why Buy From Journey’s End Games?

Because you want the ease of ordering from one place, and to support a small business. Ordering from a single retailer as opposed to a marketplace like TCGplayer comes with its pros and cons. A single retailer won’t have as wide a selection, but you also don’t need to worry about a dozen packages trickling in with different shipping costs applied to each. I appreciate the convenience of having everything come from a single seller with a single tracking number.

Journey’s End Games also has a big presence at Magic Cons, so you can support them in person whenever you go to one of the events. The scrolling banner on the front page of their website shows dates where they'll be attending in-person events as a vendor.

Journey’s End Games: Is Ordering Worth It?

Navigating the Site

The site navigation is really simple. You hit a big banner advertising the new Magic set, then a smattering of product offerings, including sealed products and the more interesting singles they offer, plus a calendar of events. It does a little of everything, encouraging you to search for the product you want.

Illustration by Justyna Dura

From there, you can navigate to pages that offer singles or sealed product or what have you with plenty of sorting options and view options. I mean, it’s a Magic singles store. It looks exactly as you’d expect and it works great. I have no particular qualms nor praises to sing.

Except for the autofill on the search bar, that is. I’m a sucker for a good search bar and I really like how this one auto-populates a ton of options based on what you’re searching for, with pictures to make it easy to select the card you want, down to the printing/art.

Browsing Product

Card prices are about what you would expect from an independent seller—that is, slightly more expensive than you might find on TCGplayer. The cheapest card goes for $0.35, which is on par with Card Kingdom and Star City Games.

In the least formal study of its kind, I pulled up some random cards on all three sites to check the prices against each other and found that its pricing was pretty close to Star City Games, and trended towards being cheaper than Card Kingdom’s. Overall, I’m quite content with the prices. Nothing really made me raise an eyebrow.

As far as the selection goes, I plunged pretty deep. I purchased a wide assortment of Pauper cards and noticed that the store can be pretty hit or miss with cards from older sets. It’s not that they don’t have any, but that stock isn’t nearly as reliable as anything from the past five years or so. That said, I was quite pleased with what I found when looking through those more recent sets, and they have deep collections of cards with dozens of reprints, like Duress and Counterspell.

Ordering Product

Ordering product is ordering product. You fill your cart and get a little preview as you add stuff:

Beyond that, you have an average checkout page that takes your information for payment, shipping, etc. Once I placed the order, I got a swift tracking number with good information. I don’t expect innovation here, just functionality, and this is functional.

Product Delivery

The first thing I noticed when I got the package was the unique packaging itself, which comes with a custom print:

My stack of cards came inside a bubbled envelope, locked within a plastic cage with a few shipping peanuts. They had very little room to move and seemed quite secure; I have no complaints with how they were shipped.

I ordered a variety of Pauper cards to construct a few decks, which allowed me to sample a wide range of cards. Here were my spoils:

This isn’t quite everything I purchased, just what comfortably fits my desk mat. As you can see from the Revised Power Sink, the Ice Age Pyroblast, and Invasion basic lands, Journey’s End Games has a fine selection of older cards, just not as deep as the newer.

I ordered cards with a variety of conditions to evaluate what they looked like. The big thing I care about here is unmarked cards. These were purchased to play with, so I want to make sure there are no discernable issues once the cards are sleeved.

I ordered one card specifically for its tag of heavily played, a Mercadian Masques Counterspell:

Shapewise, the card is totally fine. It’s not torn or bent or crooked or anything that would mark it within a sleeve. The borders are scuffed but within reason, especially on the back. It seems that the heavily played condition largely came from the presence of black dots speckling the front and back of the card, but sleeves don’t care about freckles, so I’m content with it.

Next up is another Counterspell, this time from Revised with a damaged condition:

This card is quite similar to the HP version, except with greater scuffing around the edges; but it’s frankly in much better condition than I would have expected from a damaged card given that it lacks bends, creases, tears, and anything else that would compromise the card’s ability to fit in a sleeve. I feel like I got away with a steal on this condition.

I also wanted to do some more direct comparisons, so I ordered copies of the same card with different conditions, like these Lórien Revealeds from LTR. The one on the left is lightly played, while the right is near-mint.

What’s the difference? Well, the LP version has a very slight scuff along the back border. It’s minuscule enough I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t specifically looking for defects.

Most of the cards I ordered were near-mint; they came in the condition I expected them to. Here’s a smattering of images for you to inspect yourself:

Overall, I’m quite happy with the condition of my non-foil cards. The near-mint and lightly played cards met my expectations while the heavily played and damaged ones exceeded them as they passed my bar: fitting into a sleeve without becoming marked.

That said, I didn’t want to just judge the cards on their condition; I also wanted to check out their foils. Foils have a reputation for ‘pringling,’ or becoming curled. I ordered a handful of foils to see what quality I would get and received a mixed bag.

Some of them were perfectly flat. The playset of Deem Inferiors and the pair of Pulse of Murasas I picked up look perfect, as do two of my Tolarian Terrors.

But a notable number of the foils I ordered came in with varying levels of curvature, as pictured below:

The worst offenders were absolutely Thorn of the Black Rose, from Commander Legends, and the full-art Islands from Modern Horizons 3. It's worth mentioning that Commander Legends was notorious for having extremely curled foils in general, and it's possible that the two cards from that set warped some of the other cards surrounding them in packaging. But like I said, I care most about what these look like in sleeves, so I sleeved them up and shuffled them into a random Limited deck I haven’t unsleeved.

Some of them were clearly curled within the sleeves; I even felt the gap in my deck when I picked it up to sort out the foils. Not all the foils curled so severely that I can’t use them, but I absolutely cannot justify using the Thorn of the Black Rose, either of my Islands, or one of the Tolarian Terrors. This is especially disappointing given that the Islands and Thorn of the Black Rose were marked only as lightly played.

While the condition of the foils was disappointing, I’m overall satisfied with the cards I received. Four misses within some 120 cards isn’t perfect, but foils always have the risk of curling. All of the non-foil cards met or exceeded my expectations, so I’m not super cut up about it.

The Verdict: Is Journey’s End Games Worth It?

My overall verdict is yes, Journey’s End Games is worth ordering from. The site was pleasant to navigate and I was happy with their selection. Though I only ordered Pauper cards, I poked around for staples in other formats like Standard and Modern and was satisfied with what I found.

My order fell a little short with the foils, and with some of the older cards. If you’re gunning for a very specific card art that’s 20 years old, you might need to inspect the conditions closely, and I would prefer checking out the foils in person. But for general needs, you should find whatever you need for your next brew or competitive deck here.

Can You Sell Cards to Journey’s End Games?

Yes, you can! They have a special page where you can describe your collection and send them a few pictures to get a quote on what they expect the collection to be worth. You get two choices of payout: You can get cold hard cash, or store credit, with store credit coming at a slightly higher rate than the cash, as explained by the chart below:

Does Journey’s End Games Have Sealed Products?

They do! They have a wide variety of sealed products, mostly bundles, preconstructed decks, and booster boxes. They even have a decent selection of Collector boosters if you want something flashier.

Wrap Up

Voyage's End | Illustration by Chris Rahn

I’m quite happy with the cards I got from Journey’s End Games and look forward to using them to get into Pauper with a couple of decks. Buying from them was certainly a better experience than ripping through Innistrad Remastered and Dominaria United to find the threats for my Delver deck!

How do you feel about ordering singles versus buying sealed products? Are you planning to order from Journey’s End Games? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!

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