Introducing the Cardsphere Autotrader
Efren Abrego • March 3, 2026
Solemn Simulacrum | Art by Dan Murayama Scott
Hello, traders!
Today, we’re excited to announce the arrival of a new feature on Cardsphere, the Cardsphere Autotrader. The feature will take existing Marketplace listings and match them with active Wants that meet the asking price of the Marketplace listing.
There’s a lot to discuss, but first a quick TL;DR for those interested:
TL:DR
- We have created a feature to automatically match Marketplace and traditional CS users.
- The Automatcher runs only once per day with no plans to increase frequency.
- Auto trades are documented in the user ledger
The Long Quest for an Auto Trader
Anyone who was around for the first couple of years of Cardsphere probably remembers the founders talking about how we wanted to create a "bot" to automatically snap up trades for people as they became available. The bot was to be the crown jewel of Cardsphere Premium. But once it came time to plan the feature, we quickly learned that there wasn't really any fair way to do it, and that the bot would be the equivalent to "pay to win."
With the launch of Marketplace a few years ago, we noticed a real opportunity to revisit the Autotrader idea when we started noticing stuff like this:
Two Cardsphere users, each using one of our two different workflows to trade cards, but there is clearly an opportunity here for both users, and Cardsphere, as the matchmaking service, is not doing all that we can to make trades happen.
The Autotrader looks to bridge that gap.
How It Works
The Autotrader runs once each night and compares Marketplace listings with Cardsphere user Wants. If there is an active Want from a user who has the funds for the card, and the offer is at least the price of the Marketplace listing, the two are paired, and the Autotrader, essentially, visits the Send page, and commits the package to the receiver.
Of course, technically, it’s not visiting any page, but I felt it’s important to point out that it does use the Send page mechanism to build the package, which means if your offer exceeds the Marketplace listing price, the card will trade for the greater price.
The Autotrader also respects the country restrictions of both users and the shipping threshold for the Marketplace participant. All value limits work the same as they always have, and only the active offer price is ever considered. Both users receive the same email as they normally would, and “auto matched” is noted in your ledger for each card matched this way. Since the Autotrader is working only with open offers and listings, all the usual shipping and transit timelines apply.
In the event of two eligible matching Wants, the Autotrader will fill the Want that was created first, which is determined in the back end by an internal id, which is not visible to users, but is created for each existing Want on Cardsphere. Once the Autotrader begins building packages, if anything about the package changes, the trade is skipped and the Autotrader moves on to the next package.
The Autotrader in Practice
Surprise! We’ve already been running the Autotrader after extensive testing in our staging environment. A fun game I like to play is waiting to see how quickly our users notice changes on the site that we haven’t spoken about publicly yet and (spoiler alert), y’all are fast!
We fired it a single time last week to watch the trades that were made with the Autotrader to see how the users responded. It was a little concerning because some users had very large orders committed, and others had dozens of small trades created, but we watched as the cards changed from Committed to Shipped, and now many are arriving at their new homes!
Here are the stats from the first time the Autotrader was run on our production site:
Total packages: 196
Total unique users (S+R): 193
Total number of cards : 927
Total value: $724.88
We expected these values to be somewhat greater than normal, since running for the first time should catch all possible matches ever created. The Autotrader was officially launched last night, exactly one week after the test fire, and, as expected, there are fewer matches:
Total packages: 62
Total unique users (S+R): 193
Total number of cards : 388
Total value: $402.20
This is still probably higher than normal, since this is a week of open offers, so we'll see where the Autotrader settles in as it runs nightly and will be posting frequent updates in our Discord.
Bridging the Gap
As mentioned above, the Automatcher runs only once per day, with no plans to increase the frequency. Most of the fun of Cardsphere is clicking the Send page to see what comes up, and we don’t want to remove that experience from the user. If it’s to exist at all, then I believe that “survival of the clickest” should be a PvP scenario, and not PvE.
The dial does exist for good reason, though! Even as Cardsphere exists today, there are users who choose to only use their preferred workflow. Many users engage with only one half of the site, either Marketplace or Traditional, but not both, and so the Autotrader also exists to engage disparate users as much as it does to simply get cards moving.
With this in place, Traditional users will always receive cards, even if the day comes that a majority of our users begin to prefer the Marketplace workflow. The opposite is true now; Traditional Cardsphere users dominate card flow by a wide margin, and the Autotrader ensures that Marketplace-only user still see purchases from those don't engage with Marketplace regularly.
Final Thoughts
The arrival of the Autotrader kicks off what is to be a flurry of site updates and enhancements coming over the spring and summer months. We'll be posting a State of the Sphere article soon to give a sneak peek of all the big changes coming this year, but for now, we're asking for your feedback on the Autotrader!
Reach out to us through our usual channels linked below, or in the comments section.
Thanks and happy trading!
xoxo,
Efren
