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.
Storage Units, Flea Markets & Cardboard
Before the Flea Markets
Before my grandparents were flea market vendors, they lived at and managed a storage facility.
That's actually where some of my earliest memories of collecting started. I got my first real baseball card collection there: complete 1979 and 1980 Topps sets.
At the time, they were just baseball cards to me. I loved looking through them and learning the players.
Looking back now, I kind of wish I'd held onto those sets.
1979 Topps Ozzie Smith rookie or 1980 Topps Rickey Henderson rookie, anyone?
Then Came the Flea Markets
Later, my grandparents were retired and spent their weekends as flea market vendors.
That's where they introduced me to another side of things: buying and selling.
I learned the simple idea that you could find something for the right price, sell it for more, and make a few Benjamins along the way.
As a teenager, that made perfect sense to me.
Then I Started Chasing Cards
Like a lot of collectors and kids my age, I wanted Ken Griffey Jr.'s Upper Deck rookie card.
Opening packs, looking through cards and chasing the ones you really wanted was just fun.
And at one point, I was pretty convinced my Todd Van Poppel rookie card collection was going to make me rich.
It 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.
It Was Never Really About Investing
I wasn't buying baseball cards or Magic cards because I thought of them as investments.
I bought them because I loved cards. I loved the artwork, opening packs, finding something cool and chasing the cards I wanted.
But some of my favorite memories weren't about the cards themselves. They were about sitting around with friends, comparing what we'd pulled, trading with each other and trying to track down whatever cool card we just had to have next.
Apparently cards and buying & selling were going to keep showing up in my life.
Although Todd Van Poppel and that box of Homelands weren't exactly early signs of financial genius.
A Few Careers & A Whole Lot of Stuff
First Came the Air Force
Life eventually took me a long way from baseball cards, booster boxes and flea markets. I joined the United States Air Force and made a career of it.
But the interest in buying and selling things never really disappeared.
Then I Sold Something A Little Bigger
After retiring from the military, I spent about four years selling real estate as part of a great team.
And I really did love it. I enjoyed working with people, putting deals together and, of course, making a sale.
But eventually I realized something about myself.
As much as I enjoyed selling houses, I liked buying and selling random things on eBay even more.
Different inventory. Same salesman.
Remember Storage Wars? Yeah... I Did That.
For a while, one of the ways I found inventory to sell on eBay was by buying storage units at auction.
You'd buy a unit and then start digging. Sometimes you found something incredible. Sometimes you quickly realized you'd just paid money for the privilege of hauling somebody else's junk away.
And I've seen just about everything.
That was the fun of it. Somewhere inside all those boxes, bags, furniture and junk, you were always hoping to find the treasure.
I'd take the things I found, figure out what they were, research what they were worth and sell them on eBay. Storage units were just one source of inventory — over the years I've sold DVDs, electronics, tools, collectibles, clothing, cards and just about anything else I thought someone might buy.
And that's a big part of where the name MSG's Treasures came from.
There's also something pretty fitting about the whole thing. Long before I ever bought a storage unit myself, my grandparents had lived at and managed a storage facility — the same place where I got those 1979 and 1980 Topps sets all those years earlier.
In 2018, I Went All In.
Eventually I stopped buying storage units, but I never stopped buying and selling.
In 2018, I made reselling on eBay my full-time business.
The storage units may have gone away, but the treasure hunting never did.
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.