Cart Wizard: buy your whole list for the lowest total

Buying ten cards from ten different sellers means paying ten times for shipping. The Cart Wizard does the arithmetic nobody wants to do by hand: you tell it what you want, it checks every seller on CardNexus, and it comes back with three ready-made carts — including shipping and fees, not just the sticker prices.

Use it for a deck, a want list, a full set, or a single expensive card you would like to pair with something else to make the postage worth it.

Where to start it

• From your cart — if your cart is empty, Build a cart opens the wizard. If it already has items, you can pull them in and see whether the same cards can be had for less.

• From one of your lists — Shop this list, or Shop what's missing if you only want the cards you don't already own.

• From an expansion page — Shop this expansion starts you with the whole set.

You can also open it and start from scratch. You don't need an account to search and compare — you only need to be signed in to load your cart or your lists, and to add the result to your cart at the end.

Step 1 — Build your selection

Your selection is the shopping list you hand to the wizard. There are five ways to fill it, and you can mix them freely.

Pasting a decklist

The usual formats work — a quantity, then a name, one per line:

4 Lightning Bolt 2 Counterspell 1 Sol Ring

If you want a specific printing, add the set code in brackets: 4 Lightning Bolt (M10). The Set codes panel lets you search every expansion and tap one to copy its code, and Apply to all pins every card in your selection to the same set in one go — handy when you are buying a single set's worth of cards.

Lines we can't match are not thrown away: they stay in the box so you can fix a typo, and you can download the failed lines as a CSV if there are a lot of them.

How big can a selection be?

Up to 400 items, and up to 200 of those can be set to Any printing — those take much more work to compare, so they are capped lower. If a set you add is bigger than we can handle at once, we add as many cards as we can and tell you.

Step 2 — Say what you'll accept

By default the wizard looks for exactly what you picked. Loosening that almost always saves money, because it lets a cheaper seller answer the same line.

Each item in your selection has its own controls:

• Qty — how many copies you want.

• Expansion — a specific printing, or Any expansion.

• Printing — Exact printing sticks to the one you chose. Any printing means "any version of this card is fine", which is usually where the savings are.

• Language — a specific language, or any.

• Min condition — the worst condition you will accept. Anything better also qualifies.

• Finish — normal, foil, holo and so on, depending on the game.

Changing lots of items at once

Tick the items you want (or tick the header to take everything) and a bar appears at the bottom with Printing, Min condition, Language, Finish and Remove. On a phone or in a narrow window, the same actions sit behind the More actions button.

Two things worth knowing:

• Anything can be undone. Every bulk change offers an Undo right there in the confirmation.

• We won't apply something that cannot exist. If you set 30 cards to Japanese and 4 of them were never printed in Japanese, those 4 keep what they had and we tell you: "4 items aren't printed in that language — left as they were." The same goes for a finish a card doesn't come in, and for sealed products, which have no condition or finish to choose. This matters, because an impossible requirement would otherwise quietly knock those cards out of the results with no explanation.

If an item is set to Any printing, we check every printing of that card before deciding — so asking for Japanese still works when some printing of it is Japanese, even if the version showing in your list isn't.

Step 3 — Delivery and seller preferences

Above your selection:

• Deliver to — the country the parcels are going to. This drives shipping costs and which sellers can actually reach you.

• Where sellers ship from — Global, Europe or North America. Narrowing this to your own region usually means cheaper postage and no customs.

Under Advanced options you can be pickier:

• Sellers — Exclude specific sellers so they are never used, or Only these to shop from a chosen few.

• Pro sellers only — restrict the search to professional sellers.

• Minimum seller rating and Minimum completion rate — ignore sellers below the bar you set.

• Seller countries — specific countries rather than a whole region. Leave it empty to allow every country in your region.

• Only show results that include everything in full — off by default. Left off, we source as much as we can and tell you what is missing; switched on, we only show carts that cover your whole list.

A summary line always shows which restrictions are currently active, so you are never guessing why results look thin.

Step 4 — The search

Press Optimize and we go to work: matching your selection to real listings, checking every seller who stocks them, comparing the shipping combinations, and building the carts. It takes a moment — there are a lot of combinations to weigh.

What goes into the totals we show you:

• the price of every copy;

• the shipping for each parcel, based on how big it is (a single sleeved card and a booster box don't cost the same to post);

• the CardNexus buyer fee;

• and each seller's minimum order — if a seller won't ship an order that small, we account for it rather than proposing something you can't actually check out.

Import VAT is not included. When a group of items crosses a customs threshold we flag it: the carrier collects that from you on delivery, and we show an estimate so it isn't a surprise.

Step 5 — Your three carts

You get up to three options, side by side:

• Lowest price — the absolute cheapest total, even if that means parcels from five different sellers.

• Fewest packages — the smallest number of sellers, so fewer parcels to wait for and fewer things to go wrong.

• Balanced — marked Recommended. A near-lowest total without splitting your order across half the marketplace. This is the one most people want.

If two of them come out identical, we merge them and say so.

Each option shows its total, the number of packages and the coverage — "92% of your selection found" — plus the full breakdown: every item, which seller it comes from, the condition, the language and the price.

Putting it in your cart

• Add all to cart takes the whole plan. Note that this replaces what is currently in your cart, and we ask you to confirm first.

• Each seller group also has its own Add to cart, so you can take one seller's parcel now and leave the rest.

Then it's a normal checkout.

When something can't be found

Almost every large list has a few items nobody is selling today. We never silently drop them — you get a "3 items couldn't be found" notice with the reason for each:

Missing items stay in your selection, so you can try again later without rebuilding anything, and you can download the list as a CSV.

The fastest fix is Tweak & re-run, which loosens printing, language or condition in one step and searches again.

Saving your selection

Save as list keeps the selection for later. One catch: a list holds a single game, so a mixed selection has to be split before it can be saved.

Tips

• Start loose, then tighten. Set everything to Any printing and Any language first to see the real floor price, then add restrictions and watch what they cost you.

• Watch the package count, not just the total. Three parcels from three countries can arrive across three weeks.

• Keep it in one region unless you are chasing something genuinely unavailable at home — postage and customs eat the savings quickly.

• A near-miss list is normal. Coverage in the 90s on a 300-card want list is a good result, not a failure.

• Re-run it later. Stock changes daily, and the same selection can produce a very different answer next week.