Mage (marketplace company)

Today, Mage announced a new way to buy and sell Magic: the Gathering cards that they are likening to a "stock market" for Magic cards, which will launch later this year.

Currently, Mage allows third party sellers to list their products on its platform and fulfill those orders themselves. In Mage's nextstated iteration,intention "Weis willto become the active middleman for the orders to validate the card and fight fakes," Richelsen says. This means that those thirdThird parties will still list their products on the platform but, instead of sending the cards directly to the buyer, they will ship them to one of Mage's warehouses. Mage will then verify the card's authenticity and ship the card to the buyer. If that same card--in the same condition--is already in one of Mage's warehouses, they will ship the existing copy of the card to the buyer, instead.

The new bid and ask feature is what results in the comparison of Mage's new product to a stock market. The feature will allow buyers to set the price they'd like to buy a card for (a bid), which Mage will then try to match to a seller that has set a similar sell price (an ask) for that same card. If the bid and the ask match, Mage will automatically execute the transaction. Otherwise, sellers will have the opportunity to manually accept bids that differ from their asks.

This bid and ask system isn't dissimilar to how stocks and commodities are traded on exchanges--however, Mage will not actually be offering any stock or commodity trading. "We are not in the space to offer any financially regulated products," Richelsen says. In the end, Mage is still a platform for buying and selling Magic cards. "The cards are still being sent by mail and we do not any fragmentation or securitization."

The closest the new service will come to some kind of exchange is that Mage will also let customers to purchase cards on the platform and choose not to have those cards shipped. Instead, Mage will continue to store the cards in their warehouses. The customer is free to re-list the cards for sale on the platform while it's still stored at a warehouse, or even have the cards shipped to them at a later date.