In the past week the second phase of the Altered POD and Marketplace beta ran. From April 8th till April 14th selected members of the community had access to both the Print on Demand service as well as the Marketplace for buying and selling Altered cards and I was one of the lucky people with access. When I learned of the extended period for this Beta (after a one day and two day trial earlier), I decided this was the best time to go “all in!”. So this week I bought a card, placed a POD order for two packs, one with regular cards, one with foils and I listed every single rare, promo and alt-art card I had in surplus for sale.

The first day I price-matched the cards (I was listing at the lowest for sale price currently on the marketplace) and quickly learned what the potential impact of having a marketplace with multiple currencies could be. Lets face it, humans like round numbers, so initially a lot of rares were listed for 2 euro a piece. That price soon dropped when US citizens woke up and started listing their rares at 2 dollars a piece (about 1.83 euro at the time). This in turn made the Europeans lower their prices to 1.50, and as expected, soon almost all rares were listed well below 1 euro, some going as low as 5 cents. Luckily I never got into Altered with the idea of making money from it, and these were only rares, so I really couldn’t be bothered with the lower value of the cards and as such, I price-matched once more on day 3. In the end I managed to sell 147 cards in 117 transactions (a transaction can only be for multiples of the same card), grossing me €56.67 before costs (which are a very reasonable 5%), way more than what I had spent on that single card I bought and the POD order I placed.

By far the most cards I sold were from Trial by Frost, despite having way more Beyond the Gates cards listed, the second set proved to be the more popular one and 111 out of 147 cards, or 75.5%, came from this set. 19.7% came from Beyond the Gates and 4.8% were promos from wave 3 that I sold.

In terms of factions the most popular factions were Axiom (24.5%) and Bravos (21.8%). This, of course, makes sense, a lot of buyers were buying cards to try the marketplace out and cards from these factions are listed before cards of the other factions on the website. If you’re just looking to buy a card to try it, you would find these before any others. That being said, another faction that proved popular, which, based on the reports from tournaments is not surprising, was Yzmir. In total I sold 25 Yzmir cards, meaning 17% of all sales were Yzmir. A counter-argument for the popularity of decks could be made by looking at the worst selling faction, Ordis, with only 8% (13 cards) sold.

Overall my experience was fun and exciting. The system can use some improvements for searching uniques, there have been great suggestions in the official discord for those, but overall I was impressed with how well the market functioned and happy with making my money on POD back well before my order was even at the printers (which only happens at the end of April). So here’s hoping for a quick release of this feature to a larger number of buyers AND sellers in the near future!

The picture at the top shows some of the cards I sold in the past week.
Of course all these numbers are based on a small sample size of only 500 cards listed for sale, with a limited amount of players having access to the marketplace and some factions definitely had a bigger amount of cards on offer from me (most noticeably, Lyra which I seem to have twice as much rares of compared to any other faction).

For more information on how to list your cards for sale in the marketplace check out this post.