Dies to Removal

I once through 5 dci stps in the garbage.

Shark that bitches, fuck your cardboard.

my friend left one in his backpack and then threw it out when it got all wrinkled. i sold one for $0.50 because i didn't play formats it was legal in and neither did anyone else because no one even know what legacy was then and they would buy any of your promo cards for $0.50.

Let me put this another way:
Someone buys a pack of gum with a $100 bill.
There's a big difference between them saying "keep the change" and you taking their money and not realizing someone would willfully take the other $99 without giving them change back.

"I leave commons and uncommons behind" wow gold star left behind your trash for others to pick through, I'm sure that offsets the $60 you made out in just one of those trades.

You are literally being a parasite to their ignorance of current fiscal values purely for your own profit and advancement. You know the cards you're offering are priced adventageously to their own and you do nothing to balance that, not even saying "hey the cards you want are nowhere near what I have value wise do you want to take some more cards so the trade is more even?"

I'm not even saying you have to lay down a card by card value breakdown, but your example doesn't even show a token effort at not literally robbing these people. That's scum behavior, and by extension makes you a scumbag.

I just explained why what you're doing means you are an asshole. You're doing the magic card equivalent of trading the island of Manhattan for some turquoise beads.

I'm not trying to justify being an asshole, I'm just making a point that we've all been in that position and more often than not there is at least one time where we let the greed get the better of us and conduct a slimy deal for profit and hope that we won't get caught being complete scumbags. But don't lie to yourself by lying to me saying you are not a scumbag in that situation.

Trying to put an amoral spin on intentionally taking advantage of another person in a trade doesn't make it less sharking, it just makes you look like an asshole for not owning up to what you're doing.

It isn't sharking, you offer person a card for their card and they say ok. You did nothing wrong the agreed to it, they wanted to make the trade

When you take advantage of the fact that one party does not know card prices and leverage their lack of knowledge against your knowledge, which I assume is what you mean by "offer person a card for their card and they say ok" that is the literal definition of sharking.

and don't get me wrong, we've all been in the position to trade 3 rares for a peak-value foil primeval titan and just shaken the other guy's hand and walked away. what i'm saying, though, is that those types of trades should be your outlier rather than your goal every time you open up someone's binder. you want the person you're trading with to feel satisfied rather than violated. this is true in life in general as it is in exchanging magic cards for other magic cards or money.

i'm just like you, i put my cards in a binder one card at a time. i'm just also not like you because i get texts from people like a drug dealer trying to give me money for magic cards.

sharking people is generally bad for the community because it makes people not want to participate or have trades/binders because the fear is that they're constantly being stolen from in some shape or form. while in my heyday i would totally rob someone straight up if given the chance, it's far more profitable to not make everyone wary of you as a trader by just knowing where card values are headed and doing the research and reading the runes for long-term value than it is to steal from people.

what's good for the community is good for your bottom line in a game that thrives on demand generated by a community of paying customers. you should consider the long-term financial ramifications of your actions before gutting someone and pouring their blood in the water. i say this as someone who literally functions as a store to the communities i participate in.

it's usually better to pay a fair market price and have your
customer saying "man i used to have that card and now it's a hundred dollars i was so stupid" in 10 months than having them come back to you 10 minutes after your trade and you having to pull the "no takesies backsies" card on them.

i paid fair market value for a playset of foil tarmogoyf at $70 a copy and now they're $400 a copy. i paid fair market value for hundreds of zendikar fetchlands while they were legal in standard and now they're $40 a copy. i don't have anyone raising eyebrows at me, i make my money, and people want to come back and trade with me after the fact -- people explicitly ask for me. i've created a sustainable business model for myself as a result.

these business practices have paid for two dealer tables, glass cases to display my products in, a car, and two apartments' first and last month's rent + broker fees, plus reinvestment into the game every set over the past 4 or so years as a "job" i only worked one evening out of a given week because
i have too much shit going on to possibly invest more than one day a week on it. in addition, i haven't had a need to trade out of need in 4 years, and also have three formats worth of cards almost completely foiled out to compliment an all-encompassing constructed format collection.