Hey, judges – we’ve got a special opportunity for you to ask a vendor everything you ever wanted to know about how they buy judge foils. What are your questions?

I tried to sell my Avacyn, Angel of Hope to you for $200 and you only would give me $100 for it.
Yes, well, there’s a whole bunch of other judges who will sell them to me for $100.

But it’s a great card and I want $200. You really should recognize how good a card it is.
It is, but so are all of their copies. Why should I bother with yours if I can just take theirs?

Well, why are they selling for $100? It’s making it hard for me to get $200.
Honestly, doesn’t really matter to me. But I imagine some of them care about different things than you do. Some of them probably just want the convenience of a quick sale so they can get back to trading, or something.

That’s not fair, I have to take less just because they undervalue this card?
Yup. Though I don’t know if you can really say “undervalue”, there’s a bunch of them who are selling for that price, that kind of sounds like the value. But you’re right, if you could convince everyone to sell for more, then I’d probably pay you more.

Soon as everyone realizes how much they could get for this card if they held out, I’m going to change all their minds.
Good luck. I suspect you won’t. Even if you do, maybe I’ll give you all $120, but you’re not getting $200.

Just wait until everyone demands $200 for them.
Doesn’t matter, I can’t sell them to anyone for $200, so I can’t pay you that much even if I wanted to.

But I have to fly across the country to sell you this card, doesn’t the effort count for something?
I appreciate your effort, but there’s a guy down the street that will sell me his for $100.

If it’s not worth $200, then the work I put in to get this card wasn’t really worth it.
Sounds like it probably isn’t worth it. You should probably consider putting your time and effort into doing something different that is worth it for you.

But last year you paid me more for a card just like this.
Well, it wasn’t actually just like that, but whether it was or wasn’t, it doesn’t really matter. You need to understand that we pay what we need to get the cards that we need – we’re not actually trying to make sure we can buy every single person’s copy.

Wait a second, you just paid this other guy $120 for his.
Oh him? Yes, I did.

What gives?
His copy is better than yours. Yours is scuffed on the edges.

It’s still the same card, it plays just the same.
Sure, if you look at it just from the perspective of being the same card. Not every card of the same type has the same value, though. Shouldn’t I pay more for the better ones?

Yeah, but how do you know how good mine is?
Well, we know your track record of grading your cards based on what you’ve sent us before, so we have an idea.

So if something went wrong once, I’m never going to have a chance to sell you a card again?
Depends. If it was egregiously bad and we don’t need the card, perhaps not. But we need a lot of cards, so you’ll have your chances, as long as you accept that we’re not going to take your word for it that you deserve more money right off the bat.

So if you won’t take my Avacyn, will you give me a detailed breakdown of why you won’t, with illustrated diagrams?
No.

Why not?
We have a lot of people trying to sell us cards. We’ll work with you within reason, but sometimes the answer is just, we have enough cards from other people who have been better sellers for us in the past.

But I’ve written a lot of articles about cards in the last year, shouldn’t you buy my card for more because of that?
I’m sorry, I thought we were talking about you selling me a card?