Hey, I'm Matt.
I've been buying and selling things in one form or another since I was a teenager.
What started with trips to the flea market with my grandparents eventually led through a career in the United States Air Force, real estate, more than 25 years of selling on eBay, and ultimately becoming a full-time reseller.
Somewhere along the way, I ended up back with one of the things I enjoyed from the beginning — trading cards.
Today I operate MSG's Cards in Columbia, South Carolina, as a DBA of MSG's Treasures LLC, combining decades of selling experience with modern technology that allows me to efficiently manage thousands of cards.
Flea Markets, Baseball Cards & Bad Cardboard Investments
Learning to Buy & Sell
When I was a teenager, my grandparents were retired and spent their weekends as flea market vendors.
They introduced me to buying and selling — and more importantly, to the idea that you could buy something low, sell it higher, and make a few Benjamins along the way.
As a teenager, that made perfect sense to me.
Before Magic, There Was Baseball
I was also into baseball cards and spent plenty of time chasing the cards everyone wanted.
Like a lot of collectors, I wanted the Griffey's rookie .
And at one point I was pretty convinced my Todd Van Poppel rookie were going to make me rich.
They did not.
Then Came Magic
A few years later, I got into Magic: The Gathering with a couple of friends.
We pooled our money together in high school to buy our first booster box.
Of all the sets we could have chosen, we bought Homelands.
If you know, you know.
Apparently I Needed Practice
Looking back, my early track record for cardboard investments wasn't exactly impressive.
Todd Van Poppel didn't make me rich, Homelands wasn't exactly a home run, and somehow I still kept buying, selling, and collecting.
Turns out the part I really enjoyed wasn't trying to predict the next big card — it was the buying and selling itself.
Buy low. Sell higher. Make a few Benjamins.
Just maybe don't bet the retirement fund on Todd Van Poppel rookie cards or a box of Homelands.
From the Air Force to Full-Time Reselling
A Career in the Air Force
After high school, I joined the United States Air Force.
I eventually retired from the military, but the buying and selling I had learned as a teenager never really went away.
Four Years in Real Estate
After retiring from the Air Force, I spent about four years selling real estate.
It was another chapter built around sales, negotiation, customer service, and helping people work through transactions from beginning to end.
Selling Just About Everything
Along the way, I kept buying and selling on the side.
Over the years I've sold DVDs, electronics, tools, collectibles, clothing, shoes, trading cards, and plenty of random items that don't fit neatly into any category.
If somebody was looking for it, there was a pretty good chance I'd try selling it.
Going Full-Time
I've been selling on eBay for more than 25 years.
In 2018, I decided to make reselling my full-time business.
Since then, buying, listing, pricing, selling, packing, and shipping inventory has been what I do every day.
Back to Trading Cards
As trading cards became a larger part of the business, I expanded beyond general merchandise and gained hands-on experience selling cards through multiple online marketplaces, including time as a TCGplayer Direct seller.
Combined with decades of selling on eBay and other platforms, I've accumulated thousands of positive feedback across the marketplaces I've sold on over the years.
That experience goes well beyond simply creating a listing. It means managing identification, pricing, condition, inventory, storage, customer service, order fulfillment, packing, shipping, and everything else that comes with actually getting an item from my hands to a buyer's.
After years of selling just about everything, I had somehow ended up right back where I started: cardboard.
One Person. A Lot of Cardboard.
The Tools Have Changed
Selling trading cards today is very different from when my friends and I opened that first box of Homelands.
Modern scanning, inventory, pricing, sorting, and fulfillment technology has made it possible to operate a card business at a scale that used to require a much larger team.
I've invested in the software, equipment, and systems that allow me to efficiently process, price, list, organize, and fulfill thousands of cards while operating the business myself.
Built to Handle Volume
Technology doesn't replace the person behind the business. It lets me spend less time manually typing card names and prices and more time actually managing inventory, sales, orders, and customers.
That's what allows MSG's Cards to handle large inventories while keeping the operation personal.
When you consign cards here, there isn't a mystery warehouse or anonymous department behind the scenes. I'm the person running the operation.
So Why Consignment?
The idea came to me pretty simply.
I had already built the systems to identify, price, list, store, sell, pack, and ship large quantities of cards.
Then I started thinking about how many collectors have cards worth selling but have absolutely no interest in doing all of that work themselves.
Photographing cards. Checking prices. Creating listings. Managing inventory. Answering buyers. Packing orders. Printing labels. Shipping everything out.
I was already doing it every day.
So I decided to build a service that lets collectors hand off the work while still keeping the majority of the proceeds from their cards.
That's how MSG's Cards Consignment came together.
The tools have changed.
The basic idea really hasn't.
Buy low. Sell higher. Make a few Benjamins.
Today, MSG's Cards operates in Columbia, South Carolina as a DBA of MSG's Treasures LLC. After decades of buying and selling just about everything imaginable, somehow I ended up right back where I started — buying, selling, and talking about cardboard. And this time, hopefully, a little less Homelands.