The local game store is still the heavyweight.

In a survey drawn from an online deck-testing platform, the most popular source was a physical one: 261 of 350 respondents—74.6%—selected local game stores. Online marketplaces such as TCGplayer came next at 54.0%.

That is a 20.6 percentage-point gap. For this community, the game store is a major part of getting cards into decks.

However, this does not establish where players spend the most money. Someone buying an occasional pack locally and most of their singles online could select both. The survey measures which sources people use, not sales volume, spending share, or preference.

And “both” turns out to be an important answer.

The biggest competitor to one card source? Using several.

150 respondents—42.9% of the entire answering sample—selected both local game stores and online marketplaces. Nearly six in ten LGS users also selected a marketplace.

So the ranking above is not a contest with one winner per player. The same person can support a local store, order singles online, trade with friends, and reach into a collection for the rest.

One source was the most common exact count, selected by 103 respondents. But taken together, 247 respondents—70.6%—selected multiple sources: 62 selected exactly two, and 185 selected three or more. The average was 2.85 options per respondent.

That changes how we should read every finding that follows. Selecting a source tells us it belongs in a player's mix. It does not tell us what they have abandoned. That distinction becomes especially revealing when we reach proxies.

Three in four proxy users also report buying physical Magic cards.

104 respondents—29.7%—selected at least one proxy option. There were 69 people who print proxies themselves and 46 who purchase professionally printed proxies. Eleven selected both, so adding the two groups would double-count them.

Here is the bigger surprise: 79 of those 104 proxy users—76.0%—also selected at least one physical-card purchase source: local game stores, online marketplaces, online individuals, or major retailers.

The survey therefore challenges a simple picture of proxy users as people who have left the physical-card market. In this sample, most report participating in both.

It cannot tell us whether proxies reduce purchases, encourage purchases, or change which cards people buy. We did not ask about spending, purchase timing, or what someone would have bought without proxies. Coexistence is the finding; the financial effect remains unanswered.

There is another wrinkle, though. Some of these players are purchasing the proxies themselves.

One in eight respondents buys professionally printed proxies.

46 of 350 respondents—13.1%—selected professionally printed proxies they purchase. That is 44.2% of the 104 proxy users in this sample.

Proxy use is therefore not synonymous with avoiding a purchase. For a substantial portion of these users, proxies are something they buy.

Among those 46 purchased-proxy users, 35 also selected an LGS and 28 selected an online marketplace. These overlapping answers show customers using both conventional card sellers and proxy sellers.

Buying proxies and buying physical Magic cards are overlapping habits in this community. The 82.6% overlap makes that clear, without requiring assumptions about why people choose either.

“I use what I already own” rarely means “I only use what I own.”

114 respondents—32.6%—selected “I mainly use cards I have on hand.” That sounds like a group building from its existing collection. It is—but most also report using purchase sources.

102 of those 114 respondents—89.5%—also selected at least one purchase source. Here, that means an LGS, marketplace, online individual, major retailer, or purchased professional proxies. Digital platforms and local trades are excluded from this calculation.

A collection can supply most of a deck while a shop supplies the missing pieces. The survey does not establish that sequence for any individual deck, but it clearly shows that using an existing collection and reporting purchase sources commonly go together.

The same question comes up when the collection is digital—or the experimentation is free.

Free digital experimentation and physical-card buying share an audience.

53 respondents—15.1%—selected free digital cards or online deck-building tools. Another option covered Arena or MTGO; 65 people selected at least one of these two digital categories.

54 of those 65—83.1%—also selected a physical-card purchase source. That calculation excludes purchased proxies, so the overlap is specifically with LGSs, marketplaces, online individuals, or major retailers.

Among the 53 selecting the free-tools option specifically, 44—83.0%—also selected a physical-card purchase source. Including purchased professional proxies raises that to 46—86.8%.

That makes digital experimentation a plausible part of a broader card-acquisition journey. It does not prove that a tool caused a purchase. Nor does selecting the free-tools option mean the respondent never pays for anything else.

For Grim.Cards, the overlap is especially relevant: people exploring decks digitally can also be customers of physical-card sellers. But this survey cannot tell us whether a completed simulation led to a shopping cart.

How many players pay for nothing? We cannot put that number on a chart.

We can identify respondents who selected no purchase source. We cannot reliably identify people who spend nothing.

36 of 350 respondents—10.3%—selected none of these five purchase categories: local game stores, online marketplaces, online individuals, major retailers, or purchased professional proxies.

The other 314—89.7%—selected at least one. That is evidence of reported purchase-channel use, not a measurement of current spending.

Local players and community groups can involve purchases, trades, or gifts. Self-printing has material costs. Existing cards may have been purchased previously. Arena or MTGO use does not reveal whether someone pays. And the question specifies no spending period.

Calling these 36 people “free players” would turn an absence of selected categories into a financial biography. The more objective—and more useful—finding is that nearly nine in ten answering respondents report using at least one explicitly purchase-oriented source.

Where do MTG players get their cards? Across the boundaries we keep drawing.

In this Grim.Cards community, the LGS has the widest reported reach. Online marketplaces are also widely used, often by the same people. Existing collections remain central, but collection users frequently report purchase sources. Proxy use is substantial, and most proxy users also report physical-card buying. Some buy the proxies, too.

The article's biggest surprise is how often categories that sound like opposing camps turn out to be overlapping habits.

Paper buyer. Proxy user. Digital deck builder. Collection brewer. A single respondent can be all four. Asking which one they are can miss how they actually assemble decks.

The conclusions are concrete: local game stores lead, most respondents use multiple sources, and most proxy users also report buying physical Magic cards. These are patterns of reported source use within this community, rather than estimates of spending across the entire Magic market.

For now, these answers offer a clear picture of this community: getting cards is a mix of stores, screens, collections, trades, and printers. The deck gets assembled from wherever its builder finds the pieces.

Every source, counted.