Last updated on January 5, 2026
Lord of Atlantis | Illustration by Billy Christian
Trading cards has been part of Magic for as long as we’ve played the game. You get all sorts of stories from it, like old-school players who remember (and sometimes regret) trading their moxen for a Shivan Dragon in the schoolyard.
Trading can be a great way to flesh out your MTG collection without investing extra money. Maybe you need a Liliana of the Veil for your Commander deck but don’t want to spend the cash. Go to the LGS, come out a few rare cards lighter, and you have the black planeswalker you want!
But trading can be daunting if you’re new to the game and haven’t traded before, so I’ve written up some tips and tricks to make trading easy. Let’s get into it!
How to Trade Magic Cards
Spellbook Vendor | Illustration by Scott Murphy
This guide is for new players who might not have traded before but want to put their collection to use. Maybe a friend gave you a bunch of cards, or in those first couple of Drafts you got more cards than you know what to do with. Sounds familiar? Then you're in the right place. This guide is for you.
What Is Trading?
Trading is when two players exchange cards for cards, rather than using money or another form of currency. It happens all the time in the LGS and at other gatherings of Magic players.
Many LGS's exchange cards for store credit, which is similar to trading, but this guide focuses on interpersonal trades between two players. It should be noted that LGSs often give you more store credit than straight cash for any Magic cards you sell to them.
Most of the time, you'll be trading from a binder full of the cards you're looking to swap. You have complete control over what you put in the trade binder and what you want to keep for your collection; don’t let anyone convince you that you need to trade your cards or nonsense like that.
Where to Trade
Most trading happens during events at your LGS during Commander Nights, Friday Night Magic, and any other time many players gather together. You might meet with players at other locations to play cards—my playgroup flipped between our LGS and a nearby café, and somebody I knew hosted semi-regular drafts at different bars and breweries. Any place where two or more players meet can be a place to trade Magic cards.
If you’re interested in trading online, which involves connecting with people over the Internet and shipping cards in the mail (you will want some hard card sleeves to protect them), you should check out cardsphere.com. Cardsphere is the best online trading card site.
Who to Trade With
Anybody and anyone willing to trade!
If somebody seems extra sketchy or like they’re trying to pull a fast one on a new player (I have some examples of that below), then you might want to hold off. Otherwise, go for it.
Pricing Cards
Pricing your cards ensures everybody gets a fair trade since monetary value is almost—and should be—the core factor that makes players decide whether a trade is worthwhile. Most players I’ve interacted with use TCGplayer‘s market price to find the value of their cards. You can do this manually, but we have technology, which means apps!
MTG Trades is a great trading app for Apple users. It costs $6.99 on the app store, and it has pretty much every feature you could want. It has prices for every card (sourced from TCGplayer), lets you create a wishlist, and has a trading calculator that adds your cards on one side and the other person’s on the other, so you always know how much everything’s worth.
I recommend Manabox if you're using an Android device. The app has all the collection managing tools you could want, including prices from multiple markets and a trading tool. It even has a deck simulator to test your decks wherever you are.
What Cards Are Worth Trading?
In general, I wouldn’t include cards worth less than $1 in your trade binder simply because most players won’t have a particular use for them. Dollar rares are often only used to even out a trade.
If you’re new—and even if you’re not—I recommend manually checking card prices to determine what’s worth adding to your trade binder. It can be hard to tell what’s worth what at a glance without familiarity of multiple Magic formats, and even then, a few cards can slip past you.
You also need to consider your goals with what cards are worth trading. If you want to build a typal deck in the future, you might not want to throw that Roaming Throne in the trade binder. This also applies to trading staple cards. If you intend to play nothing but Commander, should you really get rid of cards that can go in multiple decks, like Lightning Greaves, Three Visits, and Smothering Tithe?
The future value of cards also factors into this. For example, Standard is a rotating format, so MTG sets leave Standard a few years after release. If you have some Standard staples that will be rotating soon, you should try and trade them before rotation: Their prices will usually drop post-rotation. The prices of some cards may stabilize—for example, The Meathook Massacre barely saw a price dip after its banning, and I doubt the New Capenna Triomes will lose their value for long since so many Eternal formats want them—but others will drop and stay down once they lose relevance.
Just like cards can decrease in price, they can go up. I have a friend who dislikes trading lands because they tend to retain or climb in value since fixing will always be in style, regardless of the format.
The simplest way to decide what cards are worth trading is whether or not you’ll use them. That’s basically my entire criteria; I trade to offload cards I don’t want in favor of cards I’ll play with.
I would focus on this as a newer player as you learn about the staples of other formats, which can help decide what you value in trades and which cards are worth trading.
What Counts as a Fair Trade?
Fair trades should be calculated off prices. The fairest trade possible would be an even exchange, like $5 worth of cards for $5 worth of cards, even if that means one player trades a single $5 card for two cards that cost $2.50 each. Trades rarely line up perfectly even, but I’ve never met a Magic player who gets stuck up over a couple of dimes in either direction.
You should also consider how you value the cards. Personally, I’ve never minded trading down a bit if it means exchanging cards I won’t play for cards I will. While I’m “losing money,” that’s outweighed by offloading something I consider a waste of space.
But always default to price!
Why? Well, checking prices keeps things fair. Some Magic players think nothing of scamming new players out of cards because pulling one over on people helps compensate for their inferiority complex. A common scam they’ll pull is exchanging cards for something other than price. For example, a player might offer to trade a mythic for a mythic. That sounds like an equivalent exchange, but it can often work against you. Let’s set the stage:
You just wrapped up a Dominaria United flashback draft at the LGS. One of your opponents approaches after the last round, offering to trade that cool mythic you played in the match for a mythic they opened. Your mythic happens to be Sheoldred, the Apocalypse—a multi-format staple that’s hovered around $60 since printing. The trouble is, DMU's second most valuable mythic rare is Liliana of the Veil at $14. It would take four copies of Liliana to come close to breaking even, and you’d still lose out on a few bucks. And that assumes they’re trading the next most valuable mythic in the set, and not one of the less valuable mythics like Jodah, the Unifier ($3.81), or Ajani, Sleeper Agent ($1.87).
A similar scam would have these players offer multiple worthless cards for one pricey one to make quantity look like value. For example: “Why don’t you take these four rares I opened for that Sheoldred?” Except most rares in Limited sets go towards the bulk bin. Even if you get rares worth a couple of bucks, the trade will almost always be detrimental.
Lastly, some players may pull a fast one with cosmetics. Why not trade your boring traditional mythic for my showcase or foil? While foils can be worth more than the standard version, it rarely makes enough of a difference. Borderless treatments, extended arts, showcases, and all the other flashy Booster Fun promos Wizards has thrown at us might not even impact the price of a card—that happens on a card-by-card basis.
For reference, the borderless version of Liliana of the Veil from DMU and the foil printing of the base art have slightly lower market price averages than the plain Jane card. If you prefer the foil or the borderless art, great! That can factor into what you consider a fair trade. But being shiny or having special art doesn’t mean a card is inherently more valuable.
How to Organize a Trade Binder
There are lots of ways to organize a trade binder. How you want to go about it can vary on a couple of things.
The most critical is the size of your collection. I maintain a relatively small collection. All my tradeables, plus a few cards that aren’t worth much but look cool, are in one binder, organized by color.
But I’ve met players with large enough collections to have multiple binders organized by price—this binder has cards valued between $5-$25, this one $25-$50, that one only exceeds $50, this one’s all foils, and so on. You probably don’t need to worry about multiple binders if you’re just starting, though this could be useful if you have a large collection and haven’t traded before.
Finding some organizational system does help. Throwing in your cards willy-nilly doesn’t hurt anything, but both players engaged in a trade will find things easier if you have some sorting method. I sort by color, which is convenient since many players (in my anecdotal experience) look for cards for specific Commander decks, so they might want to skip entire colors. You can also group your cards by rarity, card type, or price.
Having some organization makes it easier to browse the binder, both for anybody looking through and for yourself if somebody asks for a specific card. Either way, it also makes it easier to tell if something’s missing because somebody got enchanted with Sticky Fingers.
Trading Singles vs. Bulk
Singles and bulk are two different worlds. Everything I’ve referred to above counts as trading singles—that is, one or two of my cards for one or two of your cards. A bulk collection is a collection composed of many, many cards worth relatively little—think the vast majority of cards you get out of a Draft or Sealed pool, all those commons and uncommons that might see niche play but cost well less than a dollar.
People don’t often trade bulk, but that doesn’t mean it’s destined to gather dust in your closet. You can check out Draftsim’s guide for buying and selling bulk to learn more.
Trading on MTGO
The card economy on MTGO is a startlingly accurate simulacrum of the paper card economy, though the prices vary wildly. Most cards are cheaper on MTGO than on paper, except for some random staples that are worth more. Card prices also change quickly, especially around release day for new sets.
The online currency on MTGO is tickets, which are worth $1.
Trading With Players vs. Websites
Most trades on MTGO occur between the player and websites like Cardhoarder and Goatbots. These websites are digital storefronts that typically trade cards with players via bots. Trades with sites happen in two ways:
- You either pay the store directly with cash, and the bot sends you cards, or
- You trade tickets for cards, in which case the bot opens a trade with your card and tells you to insert X tickets. You can’t split tickets; if your order is worth 4.55 tickets, the bot asks you for 5 tickets and stores .45 tickets in store credit. Because of this system, it’s often worth picking one site to buy from (I use Goatbots).
Trading with players works the same as in tabletop. The big difference comes from finding players. While MTGO has a trade page filled with classifieds, almost all the posts are from various botchains. Your best bet for player-to-player trades is probably meeting other MTGO players in another location, either online or in your LGS, and then initiating trades there.
Pricing cards
Since the card economy on MTGO mirrors the paper economy, I would price cards the same way: Find an agreed-upon site to base prices on. Again, I use Goatbots.
Any of the scams I mentioned before can apply to MTGO trades, so be careful. And make sure to use digital prices when trading digital cards! The prices on MTGO can vary a lot.
Can You Trade on MTG Arena?
You can't currently trade cards on MTG Arena, and the dev team hasn't announced any plans to add that feature. MTGA is officially promoted as a CCG, rather than a TCG.
Currently, the MTG Arena economy lets you obtain cards in four different ways on Arena: crafting cards directly from wildcards, opening booster packs, drafting in non-Phantom events, and as random individual card rewards (ICRs) from daily wins and events like Midweek Magic.
Wrap Up
Lord of Atlantis | Illustration by Billy Christian
Trading cards is vital to Magic. Many players flesh out their collection via trades, but trading also helps create the community bonds that make the game so special. You get the occasional bad apple hoodwinking new players, but most players, like most people, are decent folk looking for a good time.
The most important thing to remember when trading Magic cards is to consider what you want out of your collection and the formats you want to play.
How often do you trade? What’s the best trade you’ve made? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!
Stay safe, and keep trading!
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