Starting a TCG Business with $0 and THIS Is What You Deal With!

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Ladies and gentlemen, we are being treated this morning to Timothy's presence. What do you think, Tim? You coming in to say hey? He doesn't like the upstairs very much. Don't know why.

[00:00:09]He keeps going over to this box and tries to bite it. So, last night was really fun. We had a live stream and people were coming in and and joking about me being a scalper and we always joke about me being evil or whatever it is because of all the hate that I get online. And realistically, I get a lot less hate than I kind of show. You know, I show kind of the bad stuff. I don't show all the great things. Most people enjoy my content and aren't haters. But regardless, I do get hate online. You're going to. Everyone who does content online is going to get hate. If you do anything in life, you're going to get hate for it. It doesn't matter what you do. But somebody came in the live stream last night and said, "I want to start doing this, but I don't want to be labeled as a scalper."

[00:00:50]What do you think, Tim? What was that meow? I heard that meow. I didn't see you. And I thought, "Why are you letting other people decide what you want to do in life? Because ultimately, you're never going to do anything in life if you think that you're going to get hate for it, because I promise you you are.

[00:01:08]It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter who you are. If you do literally anything, I'm sure somebody will hate you for it." In fact, I was talking about this last night and people really seemed to enjoy this moment in the live stream.

[00:01:21]>> ugly you know a scalper, evil, awful human being like I've gotten it all. All I'm doing is buying and selling Pokémon cards and you would Some of the comments you'd think I was Hitler incarnate. It's It's ridiculous. You're always going to have haters. You're always going to have people that literally It doesn't matter what you do. You could literally be I mean, what's her nuts? Uh [ __ ] uh Mother Teresa gets so much hate. You know, like Uh you COULD BE JESUS. THEY KILLED JESUS.

[00:01:54]THEY [ __ ] KILLED THAT [ __ ] SO, YOU just can't win. You just can't win. So, I want to talk about that a little bit today. I want to talk about not allowing others to decide what you want to do, and you deciding what you want to do. Before we jump into that, if you are new here, my name is Phantom, and we started a TCG business with $0 in the bank, regardless of what some other people will try to convince you that we didn't. Got plenty of hate for that one.

[00:02:18]Every video we go over the ups and downs of running a TCG business, and at the end of the videos, we go over all the sales that we did from the days prior.

[00:02:27]And if that sounds interesting to you, consider subscribing. We also have a really cool Discord channel where we talk about everything TCG business. It's a place where everyone can come together to help each other grow. Discord link will be in the description. So, in middle school, I remember the year that you were no longer allowed to like Pokémon. For me, it was sixth grade. In fifth grade, everyone liked Pokémon, everyone liked Yu-Gi-Oh, everything nerdy was totally fine. But, sixth grade, that's when we were obviously all adults age of what, 11? So, we were no longer allowed to like those stupid kid things like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh. But, I still enjoyed it, but I was told I was not allowed to enjoy it. And you weren't allowed to like those video games, you had to like sports video games and basketball. And while I did watch some sports, I could give two shits about how much yards so-and-so ran last week. But, you best believe I'm trying to figure out where to get a bag on so I can have a Salamence for myself. But, that wasn't cool, and that wasn't allowed. So, unfortunately, and in middle school and going into high school, I cared too much about what other people thought of me, so I had to hide that aspect of me. I had to hide this love I had for Pokémon and for Yu-Gi-Oh and for everything nerdy. I really enjoyed nerdy things, but that wasn't manly, and that wasn't sports and the things that you're supposed to like. So, I felt like I was supposed to like sports, and I was supposed to like these other things that weren't nerdy. So, I fell into this like trap of just being told what I'm supposed to like and what I'm not supposed to like and I wasn't allowed to be a nerd. I wasn't allowed to be the person that I actually was. I had to put on this front. It wasn't until college where we start to really be adults and we get to decide who we want to be that I started to realize, "Wait a minute. I can be a nerd. I can be dumb and goofy and stupid and and enjoy nerdy things and I don't have to conform to this idea of what people think I should be. I get to choose what I want to be." That was a very eye-opening moment and a very exciting time in my life in college were some of the best years of my life because I stopped letting people tell me who I had to be and I stopped letting haters decide what I should do. If you want to start a TCG business, if you want to start turning this hobby into a business, if you want to do something in life, you can't let others decide for you. You want to start a TCG business, but you're worried that people will call you a scalper? Welcome to the world.

[00:04:58]They're going to call you a scalper. You can literally be the most generous person ever in the TCG space and people will still call you an evil disgusting scalper or whatever other thing they've made up in their head to decide to call you to bring you down. I've made messages on Facebook Marketplace saying I'm buying bulk Pokémon cards and gotten messages from random people saying I was an evil scalper who was ruining their hobby. My guy, I'm buying bulk Pokémon cards that nobody wants and making some money off of it and you don't even want it. Shut up. I've got someone to respond to my post saying that I was evil for not telling you all the really good items that are in your bulk and you should sell it yourself. I responded to that comment saying, "Here are all the cards that you can pull out of your modern bulk. Take it out. I don't care.

[00:05:48]I'll still take it. I think Pokimane, I think Brian has said this in one of his videos that it doesn't matter how good of a person you are, you will still always get hate. Even the good ones get hate. So, this idea that you shouldn't do something because somebody might label you as something that you don't want to be labeled as is something that seems reasonable to think, but you can't let others decide what you do. You need to decide what you want to do. Do you want to do a TCG business? Then do it.

[00:06:15]You're going to get hate for it. It doesn't matter. Do you want to start any business? Do you want to do literally anything in life? Just do it because if you stop yourself from doing it and think, "Oh, well, what if somebody hates me for doing this thing?" then you might as well not do anything because you're always going to get hate, especially if you decide to post something online about it. But, I see it so prevalent in this space specifically. You see it worse at times when the market is booming like it is now than when it's dead because people don't care about the hobby as much when it's dead and they care about it a lot when it's hot. Like, this idea that like, should you sell your products if you get them from distribution at MSRP or should you sell them for market price? And if you sell them for market price, you're evil. But, it doesn't go the other way because if the prices go down below MSRP and you want to sell at MSRP, you're also going to be labeled as evil. So, it doesn't matter how good you are because when you have to have that price set at a normal price, nobody wants to buy it at that price. So, then you should be at market price. But, when the market price is really high, no way you should be at market price. You should be lower.

[00:07:14]There's no winning. There is literally no winning with people online. And it's not like you have to put out like hot takes and that's the only time you're going to get hate. I get hate on just random ass videos of me talking.

[00:07:24]Somebody will always find a reason to dislike you and you're going to have that in your life forever, no matter what you do. So, stop letting other people decide your life. Start taking control of your life. If you want to do something, then do it. Don't not do it because somebody else might hate you for it. Especially if you're posting content, there is always going to be somebody hating you for it. On my other channel, I literally make videos showing people where to get Pokémon in a game.

[00:07:54]So, the latest one was Legends ZA, so I'd say, "Here, you want to catch Tyrant? Here's how to catch Tyrant. You go here and that's where you get it."

[00:08:01]And there have been plenty of hate comments in those videos of me literally just showing somebody how to find a Pokémon. I don't know how more docile and innocent a video could be, but there are people that will still hate on it because that's the internet. That's the world we live in. Hatred is spewed everywhere and no one cares about the person behind the screen. They just care about making the point that they had made in their head that's just genius and it needs to go into a YouTube comment to hate on a person online.

[00:08:33]Don't let others decide your life.

[00:08:35]Decide your life yourself. Let's jump into some cards we sold and go over our final numbers. This lighting right now makes me look I've got an angel above me. I had lunch with a friend in this space recently and he said something that really stuck with me. He said some people make life happen and others let life happen to them. I don't want to be someone that lets life happen to me. I want to take control of my life and I think you should, too. Here are sales for the day. We got our magic store and then we got our main eBay store. For the magic store, we had a bunch of offers to send out, so we sent them out yesterday and we actually got a lot of people to accept those offers, so we did sell a lot more cards, which was nice. We turned on promoted listings on the store. We finally were able to add promoted listings. We got a high enough rating on eBay to add promoted listings, so we did add, I think, a 5% promoted listing rate. I don't think we've sold anything through the promoted listings yet, but that is cool that we finally got to uh add promoted listings to the store. But regardless, Geo bought Reconnaissance Mission for three, bought Fire Diamond for two, Grapeshots for two, and Wild Magic for three. Ryan bought two-handed axe for 284, Shaman of the Pact for 189, Leadership Vacuum for 189, and Dialist Provisioner for 332.

[00:09:46]That was the 5% off that they bought all that from. Then David bought Shaman of the Pact for two, and Jerry bought Collective Resistance for two. I will gladly take seven different orders in four packages on that eBay store right now. Definitely helpful. Hopefully we get some more reviews from this. I think we're up to like five reviews on that store now. Next up for the main eBay store, we sold Zapdos to Ian for 250.

[00:10:07]Ashley bought this Chansey for three.

[00:10:10]Craig bought Cubone for 13, and it's actually a heavily played Cubone. I don't remember exactly what was wrong with this one. Um I think there's some kind of crease that I can't see. Um but still a cool card. Colton bought Scoop Up for eight and Double Colorless Energy for four. Michael bought Ariados for two, Sock for two, Shaman for two, Whiscash for two, and Rapidash for two.

[00:10:31]Eric bought Mawile for three. Bennett bought Slowking for 550, Vivian bought Minun for two, Plusle for two, and Phanpy for three. This bought our biggest card, Mew, Ancient Mew for $80.

[00:10:45]It is in moderately played condition. I thought it looked pretty good. There's just a crease right here that makes it moderately played. So a pretty good card though for moderately played. You really even can't see it on the front. Perfect binder copy. That sold for 80. Tyler bought Scyther for 250, Ethan bought Dark Weezing for eight, Dark Gloom for 450, Wigglytuff EX 13, I Oran Berry Tadbulb for two, Dark Rapidash for 450, Paldean Clodsire for two, Jigglypuff for two, and Houndoom for seven. Actually this is this card I think the market price is really like $3 and I listed it for like over double and it sold. I think this card is criminally underrated and it should be such a higher price.

[00:11:24]And then lastly we sold Chansey to Jimmy for 250. We'll get these packed up.

[00:11:28]Let's go over our final numbers. So yesterday we did 13 orders on the main eBay store and seven on the magic store, but some of them got combined. Somebody bought like four different cards in four different orders, which is unfortunate cuz it's a buy two get one free, so they could have gotten a card for free doing it that way doing it the normal way, but I think they did it through offers, so I don't know exactly how that works if you can combine them. But, regardless, all that came out to $135 on the main store and $13.95 on the on the magic store.

[00:11:56]That brings our inventory up to 14,812.16 1905.05 on the hardware. Total expenses is $19,314.61.

[00:12:05]Total sales minus fees is $14,765.91.

[00:12:09]Affiliates is 34.35. YouTube is 27.66.

[00:12:12]And our grand total is $1,652.98.

[00:12:16]So, this weekend's going to be a pretty busy weekend for me, so we actually already have everything scheduled out to list online. I don't have any more listing to do, and it's going to be probably a little slower sales this weekend because of it. We do have listings being added to the stores, but they're not going to be like really, really good inventory or anything like that. So, I just kind of have something going every day regardless even though I'm going to be super busy this weekend.

[00:12:36]So, I expect our uh sales numbers to be relatively lower this weekend. But, regardless, if you made it this far and you haven't already, consider subscribing. Check out the Discord, and we'll catch in the next one.