8 Smart Alternatives to Buying Magic Singles You Never Thought Of

Last updated on December 26, 2024

Booster Tutor | Illustration by Heather Hudson

Buying singles is sage advice to Magic players and collectors. Far too often do Magic players invest money into buying boosters or buying booster boxes seeking out very specific cards, or hoping to open “value” with no particular goal in mind, just to walk away disappointed because they didn’t get what they wanted. When you buy singles, you always get what you want. Pretty straightforward, right?

But what if you wanted to acquire cards without buying anything outright? What if you wanted to add a little sizzle and crackle to your card-collecting ways? There are methods out there you can use – some experimental, some less consistent – to acquire cards without loading a shopping cart online.

Let’s explore some of the off-beat ways you might build your collection through alternative methods.

What Are Alternatives to Buying Magic Singles?

Lord of Atlantis | Illustration by Billy Christian

Basically, we’re discussing any method of obtaining Magic cards that doesn’t involve directly buying individual cards or sealed product from game stores or popular online vendors. The “I give you money, you give me Magic cards” paradigm works for many people, but sometimes you just want to see the other available options.

Note that some of these methods still involve exchanging money for cards, albeit in a slightly different manner than you’re typically used to. Consider it “broadening your card-collecting horizons,” which sounds like a terrible working title for the inevitable Modern Horizons 6.

Boxed.gg

Let’s start off with a close look at our sponsor, a site I wasn’t familiar with before looking into this subject and that we recently reviewed. Boxed.gg offers a unique and intriguing alternative to buying singles outright. The idea behind Boxed is that instead of paying for a single Magic card (or Pokémon/One Piece), you’re paying to essentially spin a roulette and receive cards at random from within a small subset of themed cards.

The site revolves around an in-house gem currency that can be purchased via credit card, PayPal, or various cryptocurrencies. The standard conversion rate is $1:100 gems (from time to time they have great deals that offer a discount on gems), and you can buy in multiples up to $250 for 25,000 gems at a time.

Once you have gems in your account, things get interesting. Navigate to the “Boxes” tab to find all your different options for themed boxes you can open, with an associated gem price. Each box contains preselected cards with percentages attached to them. If you purchase the box, you’re awarded a random item from that box, with those percentages showing the chances you open each card. You aren’t equally likely to open every card in the box, but the drop rates are fully transparent before you make a purchase.

Note that each box has a “spice level” from 1-3. The higher the spice, the more variance there is in that box. That usually means a shot at much more expensive cards, but with a lower rate of actually hitting them. Let’s look at a box of each spice level.

Spice Level 1

This Level 1 box title “Lotus Garden” costs 741 gems (~$7.41) to open, and features various “Lotus” cards. The big-ticket card here is obviously that beautiful Jeweled Lotus, but the chance of hitting it is a tenth of a percent, so highly unlikely. There’s a 1-in-100 chance of hitting a Lotus Vale, the next highest-value card, followed by some other reasonably valuable cards, all the way down to the “duds.” A Lotus Bloom or Gilded Lotus isn’t worth the $7 outright, but at least they’re somewhat playable and you have a shot at much more expensive cards.

The highs are high here, with the lows being disappointing but reasonable cards, hence the low spice level. To put it in Scoville terms, it’s like a green pepper.

Spice Level 2

“Rise of the Eldrazi” is a Spice Level 2 box, which ups the risk/reward ratio. This particular box costs 776 gems (just under $8) and features a bunch of Eldrazi cards. You’ll notice this box contains 19 cards total, eight of which have a value lower than what you’d spend to open the box. The other 11 cards have a higher value than the box itself. However, you’ll open one of the eight lesser cards 77.5% of the time, which roughly translates to a 1-in-4 chance of getting something worth the box’s cost or more. The lows here are pretty low, with cards like It That Heralds the End and Artisan of Kozilek being big “whomp, whomp” hits, and some marginal hits beyond that. High highs and low lows, but the lows are more frequent, so you’re playing the odds.

Probably a habanero in terms of spice here.

Spice Level 3

And for kicks and giggles, I wanted to check out a max-variance “Spice Level 3” box. I went with “Hunt for the Ring,” which is entirely themed around The One Ring. I’ll definitely give Boxed credit for the theming, it’s kind of spot-on.

Here you have a chance (kind of) to hit one of four different versions of The One Ring, and the price to open is only 27 gems (roughly a quarter). The catch? You have a combined chance of less than .025% to hit any of those cards. To put that into perspective in clear terms: You’ll never get those. But there’s a dream, I suppose. The duds here are Slip On the Ring and Gollum, Patient Plotter, which are complete throwaways. And everything in between is fine at best. This is an absurd gamble offset by an incredibly cheap price to open the box. But still, what if you did hit one of those One Rings?

We’re talking full ghost pepper spice on this one.

Other Features

Boxed.gg has some other intriguing features, like “Box Battles” that allow multiple users to pull from the same box, with the user who accumulated the most value taking all the spoils. It gives me a “Pack Wars” vibe tailored to this website. There’s also an on-site Marketplace featuring some pretty impressive cards (Power 9, original Duals, etc.). According to the website FAQs, any items you open in a box that you don’t actually want to receive can be placed on the marketplace for potential other users to buy.

The last unique thing I stumbled on was a feature called “The Forge.” Here, users are allowed to sculpt their own boxes, which can then be offered to other users to open. If someone opens a box you created, you get 3% of the gems used to open that box. That’s a pretty cool way to put some player/collector agency behind the types of items you’re engaging with, though I didn’t get a great sense for what kind of restrictions there are on creating boxes.

Final Verdict on Boxed.gg

Boxed.gg offers an interesting alternative to buying singles online. I’m not strictly against gambling, and there’s some fun gamification going on here if you’re okay with a little randomization in your card acquisition, but I feel compelled to say this is only something responsible adults should partake in. If you have anything even remotely close to a compulsive gambling addiction, this isn’t the site you want to spend time on. But if you’re fiscally responsible and you want to take a shot at some big-ticket Magic cards, there’s something cool going on here.

Think of it like Magic’s version of taking a trip to Vegas: If you go in with a plan, a budget, and set expectations, it’s hard to walk away too disappointed. And some people walk away hitting the jackpot. Let me know in the comments what your experience with Boxed.gg has been like.

Proxy!

I don’t care much for proxies myself, but I’m a huge advocate when it comes to other people proxying. We all want to play with the cards, and it sucks that so much of the game is locked behind a paywall of sorts. Magic’s not cheap. But if you’re only playing casually and you’re among friends, why not just proxy the cards you want to play with?

For one, proxying is totally legal as long as you don’t intend to sell your proxies. Two, it’s highly encouraged in some formats, and all but necessary if you ever wanted to play Vintage or optimized cEDH decks. This is all assuming the events you’re playing in allow for proxies, since they’re not tournament-legal. But that’s something you can discuss with the people at your local game store (LGS). And if you’re playing tabletop Magic with friends at home, it just comes down to your playgroup’s thoughts on proxying (all part of a healthy Rule 0 conversation!).

Check out our friends at MTG Proxy and Printing Proxies to learn more!

Trade Your Way Up

Dark Bargain | Illustration by Tyler Jacobson

I couldn’t quite find it, but I recall a story from many years ago where a player attended a Grand Prix, or MagicFest, or something along those lines, and traded their way up to an original dual land (my mind says it was a Taiga, but I’m unsure). In fact, if I remember correctly, the person started off with something like a clothespin, or some other useless item, and continued swapping it with other people at the convention until someone eventually traded him a Magic card for said item. After that, he gradually continued to trade the card in his possession for slightly more and more expensive cards, working the entire weekend to eventually end up with a dual land.

Is this practical? No, not really. And if you have info on that story, please let me know. The point: Look for opportunities to trade up in value. I’m not saying try to trade your $1 bulk rare for a $50 Standard staple, but maybe you can convince someone to trade their $1.50 or $2 rare for your bulk rare. Then maybe you can trade that $2 card for a $3 card someone has no interest in. And you see where it goes from there.

I’ve encountered tons of players who don’t quibble about the $0.50 differences between cards in a trade, which leaves opportunities to come out of a trade with the higher-value cards. Of course, I’m not telling you to intentionally try to rip people off or persuade them to take a hit on their trade, but opportunities will come about when you’ll “profit” small amounts from the trade. Can you turn a clothespin into a Taiga? Probably not. But maybe you take a pile of useless rares and walk away with that $5 staple you needed to complete your Standard deck.

Take a Card, Leave a Card

Here’s a fun initiative you can try if you have a stack of rares and mythics you don’t particularly care about. Get yourself a nice binder, fill the sheets with bulk rares, mythics, and other cards you don’t care about, and bring it to your local game store for FNM or Commander night. Leave it on the table next to the people you’re playing with and tell them they can take any card from the binder if they leave a card of equal rarity in its space.

Obviously I wouldn’t expect very much from this in the end, but if the worst-case scenario is that no one engages with it or if they simply replace cards you didn’t care about with others you equally don’t care about, so be it. You didn’t really miss out on anything. Best case scenario, someone actually swaps out a card for something interesting that you might end up using or a card you’ve never seen before.

Estate Sales

Voldaren Estate | Illustration by Richard Wright

Look, I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty of why estate sales happen, but they exist and they’re perfectly fine ways to peruse some random stuff that might be available. The only reason I know about this sort of thing is because my significant other has a minor obsession with checking out estate sales in my area. Do they usually have Magic cards? Unlikely, but maybe!

Estate sales usually have predetermined prices attached to everything, and many go through an auction process. Think of it like a large-scale garage sale, comprising someone’s entire livelihood. Or, former livelihood, as is often the case. A simple Google search for “estate sales near me” should get you started.

Cardsphere

Cardsphere.com is an awesome tool for trading with other people online. The TL;DR is that you can send cards to people on Cardsphere, essentially selling them to other users. Doing so gives you funds on your account that people can use to then send cards back to you. There are very few sites out there that offer this kind of P2P trading in a trustworthy way, with the now-defunct PucaTrade being an older example.

Cardsphere is actually my go-to way to “sell” and trade for cards, and it works wonders for people who can’t make it out of the house too often. Something just feels better about sending to and receiving from actual human beings as opposed to shopping at some giant conglomerate warehouse store. No offense to them, either.

Garage Sales & Flea Markets

Watermarket | Illustration by Simon Dominic

Has anyone ever hit that big-money card from a garage sale that we all dream about? You know the narrative: Magic player goes to a garage sale, finds a box of Magic cards that belonged to such-and-such’s older whatever-in-law and they have no use for it now. You drop a $20 bill, bring it home, and as you’re ruffling through you find a bunch or Reserved List cards and Beta dual lands. I feel like that’s a talking point all the time, but does it ever actually happen?

Well, dream scenario aside, if you can find a garage sale with Magic cards for sale, it’s a bit of a toss-up what you’ll find. You’ll have better luck at large-scale flea markets, where you’ll often find vendors who specialize in game-related hobbies. This is still essentially buying singles, but there’s something more human about buying face-to-face with a solitary person than purchasing through an online marketplace.

Loot Crates / Subscription Boxes

Seems like everyone’s got a loot craft of some sort out there. I watch a healthy amount of Good Mythical Morning and I’m always surprised by the stuff they dig up in their subscription box episodes.

If you’re not aware, a “loot crate”, or a mystery box or subscription box or whatever, is a monthly service offered by tons of companies and small businesses that specialize in a specific kind of product. Each month they’ll send you an assortment of random items, usually tailored to your interests. You’re paying for random paraphernalia, but you’re also getting an “experience” of opening up some mystery items.

Magic loot crates are all over—in fact, we’ve even reviewed a few for Inked Gaming and Tap for Tea. One of the constants with MTG subscription boxes is that you almost always get monthly booster packs and/or singles selected by the senders. They’re never going to send you that fourth Urza's Saga you need to fill out the playset, but if you’re okay with some surprises, it can be a fun way to invest a little into your Magic hobby. Plus, you’ll often walk away with cool playmats, sleeves, deck boxes, and all sorts of other Magic gear.

Play for Ante

I’m joking, I’m joking, calm down. Don’t actually play for ante. Put that Contract from Below away….

Wrap Up

Spike, Tournament Grinder | Illustration by Zoltan Boros

So, have any of these card-collection methods inspired you? Is buying straight-up still the way to go, despite the alternatives? And how do you go about collecting cards? If you have a [legal] method we didn’t mention I’d love to hear it!

As someone who, at this point in my life, collects cards more than I play them, I’m always on the lookout for unique and interesting ways to get my hands on new and old Magic cards. If you’ve got a recommendation, let me know in the comments below or over in the Draftsim Discord.

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