Sehnbon debunks myths about the business of buying and selling Best Of cards after each Regional Qualifier.
Flavinger·May 13, 2026·10 min read
Robert “Sehnbon” Stanley has brokered 85% of all English language Best Of card sales. After the Riftbound Regional Qualifier in Atlanta last weekend, there are now 128 of these cards in the world. Earlier this month, he transacted the 1/1 Miss Fortune, Buccaneer Houston champion prize card sale.
Senbohn, who dances ballet professionally, is currently at Azara Ballet in Sarasota, Florida. He recently performed theworld premiereof The Woman in White, a contemporary ballet choreographed by Martin Flowers as a modern interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s life. He has previously danced for New York State Ballet and United Ballet Theatre.
Sehnbon and I spoke over a Discord call. His profile picture features a rat with a crown, a nod to his zodiac animal, his Twitch stream, and the Rat King from The Nutcracker—a role he has performed many times.
FLAVINGER: What brought you toRiftbound?
SEHNBON: My uncle got me into Magic: The Gathering when I was 13, so I played Magic for the last 15 years. I played professionally for the last 10 years. I have a bunch of Grand Prix Top 16s. I played in a couple of Pro Tours. I have some Star City Games Top 8s—SCG is an East Coast tournament series with about 1,500 players per tournament. I’ve just played every card game. I was semipro in Hearthstone. Then I had a quick stint playing One Piece Card Game. I played three One Piece tournaments and went Top 64 into Top 16 Nats, stopped playing after that, and played since Set Two. I’ve been high Challenger, around 1100-1400 LP every set since Set Two. I played in all the lands.
Teamfight Tactics
When I went to the 2024 TFT Macao Open, Riot Games soft launched [Riftbound, codenamed] Project K. While the TFT portion of that event didn’t go as well, we were still playing until almost two a.m. on Day One. I spent almost all of Days Two and Three hanging out with the Riftbound team, [which included game developers David “Plinq” Smith and Frank “Vriss” Skarren]. I had done my demo, and some Rioters came up to me afterwards and said, You clearly have played a lot of card games. You should go talk toPlinq andFrank. I knew Frank from Magic. They answered all my buzzword questions of, What are you guys? What are your plans for competitive? People hate the art—are you going to fix that? Are you going to fix this line of text? They were ready and snappy on the responses. I had a great time talking to the devs about their hot new card game. After Macao, I preached Riftbound to every single person I knew until it came out.
FLAVINGER: What was wrong with the art?
SEHNBON: The Project K art was white border art that was just copy and paste of League of Legends splashes. It was the biggest backlash that the game had. Everybody hated it. They were like, This looks lazy. It doesn’t look polished. Riot was trying to copy One Piece or Pokémon with the white bordering, but everybody said, This looks terrible. They fixed that pretty immediately and [restored the] community’s faith in the game.
Riot loaded me up: I was one of the few non–content creators or -influencers that had a full set of English trial decks. I went around to all my Magic tournaments. I would play my event and be like, All you guys should come learn this. This cool new game is called Riftbound. Let’s play.
FLAVINGER: It’s awesome that you’ve been involved since the beginning.
SEHNBON: This is one of the first games I’ve gotten to be on the absolute ground floor of.
FLAVINGER: Does it give you a sense of loyalty toRiftbound?
SEHNBON: Not really. I’m not a shill. I’m perfectly happy to say This game is terrible if it’s bad. But this game brought mechanics from the best parts of all the card games. Even now, the game is still rough around the edges. The thing is, the devs are actively trying to improve every single event and set. It’s a learning process because this game wasn’t made to be good—which is a crazy thing to say. They made this game in six months. Their team was 10 people, and they only made it to be popular in China. They never planned on doing a worldwide release. The reason that the language on the cards isn’t right is because they don’t have a syntax person. They only just hired one.
Why didn’t they think of this? It’s because they literally didn’t think of this. Why are all the cards splash arts? They just used the art they had. They didn’t think the game was going to be popular enough to have commissioned art.
FLAVINGER: It must be wildly more successful than Riot ever thought.
SEHNBON: For sure. They never thought it was going to blow up nearly this much.
FLAVINGER: In my experience,Riftboundis undeniably fun. It doesn’t matter what level you’re playing at.
SEHNBON: The game is great. From a competitive aspect, it is one of the hardest games I’ve ever played. It’s so deep and complex but also relatively easy on the surface.
FLAVINGER: What does it take to complete at a high level in TCGs?
SEHNBON: A lack of employment. But no, seriously, it’s just reps and knowing how you study. People have one of two issues: either they do it mindlessly or they don’t play enough. They spend too much time thinking and not enough time executing.
In our preparation for Riftbound, we played for four or five hours every single night. We spent even more time thinking past that. It depends on how you learn and how you study.
FLAVINGER: Do you have a unique regimen or study habit?
SEHNBON: No, not particularly. I let the smart people tell me what deck is broken, and I go in from there and tinker with a little bit. I’m not the idea guy. I’m the tuner.
For the Las Vegas Regional Qualifier, we played a unique deck that my buddy made. It was a take on Miracle Draven, but he had this idea in January, and everybody thought it was bad. Then he started winning with it. All of a sudden, we had nine heads all come together being like, Let’s flesh out exactly what this needs to do because this deck is crazy.
The group is composed of a bunch of my buddies who have played Magic, One Piece, and all games. All pro-level players. One of the biggest advantages a study group has is since there’s no online client and no readily available ladder, just having bodies to play games is so valuable. A couple of newer friends like Frodan, Scarra, Robin, and Peter Park have joined as well. We’re honestly just a bunch of friends. We play games. Some are more analytical than others. I’m not really the big spreadsheet guy, but we have some spreadsheet guys. They’ll write out all their thoughts from testing sessions.
FLAVINGER: How did you get started with the Best Of market?
SEHNBON: I didn’t start selling expensive high-end promos until the Pro Tour Magic: The Gathering–Final Fantasy where they gave out Cloud, Midgar Mercenary promos to the Top 32. These cards were worth $16,000. My friends were willing to sell them to dealers for $6,000. I was like, You guys shouldn’t do this. You should sell them yourselves. Give them to me, and I’ll see what I could do. I sold three of my buddy’s cards for $20,000 and got a little bit of a commission out of it. I mainly started doing it because I was tired of people getting taken advantage of by dealers. It’s not necessarily that dealers are trying to take advantage of people. It’s that when you’re going into a market that has a ton of risk because these prize cards don’t have any market data, there’s nothing to compare them to. You have to pay next to nothing to safely make a profit. And they don’t want to do the elbow grease of getting down and talking to a bunch of people to try and close out deals in back-alley channels. They’d much rather let people come to them by posting it in their store and TCGplayer. But TCGplayer fees are 12%, and eBay fees are just as bad. If you undersell your card, you end up with not much. I really started doing it to get the players paid.
At Houston, one of my buddies called me and went, I have Best of Yasuo with me. Do you want to come talk to him? Then it was like, I have Best of Teemo with me now. It just kept going on and on. I was running back and forth. I was talking to Diana [DiMicco, community and influencer manager for Riftbound] for two seconds, and then I was running all over the convention center, talking to a whole bunch of different people about commissioning their cards with me.
My commission’s low compared to what stores would commission at. There ended up being a weird rumor that I was running around purchasing all these cards for absurd amounts of money. There was a large wave of misinformation at the start of the whole Best Of series that cards were selling for 50 grand or 100 grand.
FLAVINGER: What are some myths you’d like to debunk?
SEHNBON: Some of them I’ve debunked publicly already. The pop on these cards is weird because these cards are cool. They’re much cooler in person than online, and they’re obviously valuable.
We know now that there’s going to be nine copies of each Set One Best Of. That’s it. But every single time a new set comes out, there’s a new Best Of, and everybody wants the shiny new toy. People aren’t going to want to buy Miss Fortune when they can buy Irelia. The exceptions are the champs that transcend the game or have been a mainstay of League. Jinx for Arcane (2021-2024). Teemo is Teemo. Ahri.
There starts to be market saturation at a certain point. The collectors that are interested are either going to wait for the one they really want or stop spending money entirely. That’s why there’s been a trickle-down effect on the price of the cards. In my original charting, Ahri was $40,000, but I sold the Vegas Ahri for $30,000. It’s not because the card is worth significantly less. It’s just that card can’t always be 40 grand. It has to be less once we have more information. Nine is a small number in terms of population, but it’s a big number too because it means everybody who wants one can get one.
FLAVINGER: What has changed between Set One and now regarding what people are looking to buy these for now?
SEHNBON: People in general wanted to pay less money than they did in the first set, but they were taking a risk and we had to make the market. We had nothing to go off. People wanted to compare these to Lorcana golden mice or the One Piece serials. The thing is there’s just less of these. The pops don’t compare. The other thing is that these tournaments are in different places.
Also, not everybody sells. The Irelia from Bologna didn’t sell, so that’s one less Irelia on the open market. The Azirs are both owned by the same person. If you want Azir, you have to pay his price. If he keeps winning, then you have to do that.
There are collectors that are trying to get a whole set of the Best Ofs. When you get to the last one, if the one guy [who has it] hasn’t been giving you the price that you wanted, that guy’s going to put the screws to you at the end.
There was a big decline in what people were expecting to pay because in Set One we had no information, whereas in Set Two we have more information. Also, the Set Two legends are less cool. People don’t want to pay $20,000 for a Rumble.
There is also a misunderstanding that these cards are undesirable. A lot of people want to buy them. They just don’t want to overpay, so they’re waiting for the market to flesh out.
I’ve tempered the expectations of players [and potential sellers] because they saw the big numbers and want that sale now. Well, it took me about two months to sell all those cards from Set One and find the right buyers.
FLAVINGER: Does buying and selling super rare cards differ from the way you would buy and sell a regular card?
SEHNBON: The process is honestly similar to selling lower value cards. It’s just a bigger number. There is some level of trust that has to be put into it. One of the biggest selling points to transacting through me versus doing it yourself is that I have already garnered that trust with people. People know that if they’re buying for me, it’s the real thing. I am going to middleman properly. The buyer is going to give me the money, and I’m going to give the money to the owners. Everybody’s going to get paid. Nobody’s getting scammed.
The one thing I wanted to make sure I did in Set One was hand deliver the cards. I could have put them in a mail, but it sent more of a message that I was doing it myself and getting on a plane. I wasn’t going to put all this in FedEx and be like, Alright. Good luck.
There are two scales of negotiation. You talk with the buyer, but you also talk with the owners and get them to come down and understand where their money is best acquired. Some people are splitting hairs: they want $18,000, but I have an offer for $16,500. Would you like to gamble to try to get an extra $1,500? The difference between 16.5 and 18 is much less than the difference between zero and 16.5. That happened to a couple of people. They got stuck and lost out on even better deals because they didn’t say yes fast enough. It’s easy to get greedy because it’s your one shot. You spiked the tournament and you want to get paid as much as possible. But sometimes you have to cut your losses or recognize what’s reasonable.
FLAVINGER: For the folks who are stuck, will their cards hold value and get another chance at a successful sale?
SEHNBON: For sure. Stuck is a relative term. It just depends on how bullish you think you are. If Riftbound pops off in two years, all these cards triple. You’re looking at League of Legends history. It’s Set One. If the game fails, I honestly don’t think the risk of holding is that high because, again, it’s League history. There’s enough of a fan base that the cards might even become more expensive if the game shuts down.
That’s obviously not going to happen. All these venues [for Regional Qualifiers] are booked out. As it stands, I think the game is going to be successful. It really depends on if these potential sellers want money now or if they’re willing to wait and get money later.
You’d be surprised by how many software developers play card games. A lot of these people aren’t hurting for money. You throw around big five-figure numbers, and they don’t really care.
FLAVINGER: To playRiftboundcompetitively at all you must be willing to spend money on cards.
SEHNBON: That’s a card game problem. But Riftbound, as expensive as it is currently, is still cheaper than games like Magic. The amount of money matters so much differently to people. For example, I had an offer at $30,000 grand on Ahri. The first Ahri [owner] goes, Whatever, I’ll just keep it. I could never imagine keeping a card for $30,000. Then I have another owner who was like, Yeah man,$14,000 changes my life this year. It would mean that I get to take a year off work. I get to do a lot of things. They’re happy to take the money now, while others are willing to put the card in a drawer.
FLAVINGER: What’s in it for you? What keeps you going?
SEHNBON: The money doesn’t suck. Even at 5%, it’s a good amount of money if I sell all the cards. I work in the arts, so I don’t make a ton of money. Right now is probably the most money I’ve had in my bank account at any given moment. That’s kind of cool.
It honestly is fun talking to a bunch of people, moving the cards, and whatnot. At the end of the day, it feels like an “everybody wins” situation.
The nice thing about commission is that I don’t really care. If they want to sell their own card, that’s completely fine. I never try to bully people into doing things through me. I even give them the information that they need to sell it themselves if they choose to. But I obviously want to get the highest number possible for everybody because the more they get paid, the more I get paid. Many owners are happy to hand me the card and get a text in two months that says, What’s your PayPal address?What’s your bank account number so I can get this wire through? Then they don’t have to do any of the work, and everybody wins.
FLAVINGER: Can you tell me about your first sales from Houston?
SEHNBON: [In December 2025] I had $400,000 worth of metal that needed to not be in my apartment. Then the buyers started showing up. I was turning over the right rocks, and that led to other people coming to me.
We did not sell anything until January 2026. People wanted too much money. People weren’t saying yes on anything. Then the Lux owner sold his card, and I [told the other owners], It’s go time. Everybody sells everything. These are the numbers we have on the table right now. It was time to take the money because we needed to get these sold before Bologna. If they were not sold before Bologna, the potential buyers were going to take somebody else’s price.
Everything went in the course of two weeks. Once the first one sold, everything sold.
FLAVINGER: How do buyers get in touch with you?
SEHNBON: All the normal platforms. Private buyers I’ve worked with before will text me. Otherwise, it’s Facebook, X, Instagram, Discord—all the socials.
You’d be surprised at how many of these deals happen because some guy messages you on Facebook. You jump on a phone call and figure it out. All of a sudden everything’s closed out. It doesn’t matter if your card is $50, $100, or $150,000. It’s just how it works.
FLAVINGER: Do you take precautions?
SEHNBON: I have a good accountant. I make sure that I pay all my taxes. It’s not that complicated. It’s just a 1099.
Lawyers and contracts are something that should be in the future. Again, it’s a growing business that I didn’t really plan on having. All my friends are like, You need to have contracts. My plan is to build out a website with two clicks for commission and a simple contract.
Right now, these people could screw me tomorrow. It’s easy, but it depends. For some of them I have card in hand, so I’m the one accepting the money. They can’t cut me out because they get their money from me. For others, if the money went straight to the owner, it would suck [for me]. But the card game community is so small that you don’t really want to burn people.
Word gets out fast. Your reputation isn’t worth it. Now that I have a rep, more people were willing to hand me their card, which makes my life easier because it’s one less plane to get on. Obviously if they want their card back at any time, I’ll just send it back to them. I know how to ship everything properly and safely.
FLAVINGER: Are you working on any other deals besides Best Ofs?
SEHNBON: Not really. For the smaller market, I don’t charge a high enough commission to have a good margin. If I’m working on a bunch of $100 cards, it’s $5 a card. It gets exhausting quickly because the load adds up. That’s why I enjoy the high-end market. I’m only working on 10 or 20 cards at a time, which is still a lot. If I get those sold, I make a decent amount. Something worth my investment.
FLAVINGER: Do you have any advice for avoiding scams?
SEHNBON: It’s tough to get scammed in today’s era as long as you go through the proper channels. Don’t click on bad links. Don’t send people Cash App. PayPal Goods and Services is your friend. Buying and selling is all confidence. It’s the same as being a car salesman. It’s a game. You have something they want. You have to figure out where their top dollar is and then get there. Make sure you’re always the smartest person in the room. If it seems too good to be true, they probably know something you don’t.
FLAVINGER: Do you think you’ll have competitors?
SEHNBON: Quite likely. I’m currently making $15,000 to $20,000 per tournament if I sell all these cards. But I positioned myself in a spot where it’s hard to beat my margin. 5% is low for high-end. A lot of people charge 10%, so they aren’t willing to do the work for less.
You want to find somebody who’s smart enough to do the job but poor enough to be motivated. The money makes a difference for me, whereas a big store doesn’t really care. They’d rather just buy the card. If I were to buy the cards, for example, in Houston, to turn a profit, I would have had to buy every card at an average median of about $13,000 to $15,000 to have turned the same amount of money I did working commission. Those were numbers that were never going to happen. Nobody was ever going to sell their card for $15,000 in Houston.
People might be more willing nowadays. Dealers are probably going to overpay. I heard that dealers in Bologna were offered 10,000€ on some of the real stinker cards like Ornn. That’s an overpay. That card is going to sit in your case forever. Maybe they’re betting on the future, but they’re certainly not turning it this year.
