Major Update to the Collection Import Tool
Efren Abrego • October 17, 2025
Pattern Matcher | Illustrated by Jesper Ejsing
Hello, traders!
Today, we pushed a long-awaited update that delivers a massive improvement to our Wants importer. Like we did back in March with the Haves importer, the Wants import tool now recognizes Scryfall ID to vastly improve the importing of collections from newer collection managers like Manabox, Archidekt, or any other application that includes a Scryfall ID with the card.
Accuracy Improvement
There have been very few improvements to the importers since Cardsphere first went live back in 2017, and we were reminded of that with every import thanks to some of the now-defunct platforms referenced in the old import dialogue.
Here’s a quick comparison of the improvements made importing the same CSV file on the old importer vs. the new:
In addition to testing CSVs from Manabox and other collection management apps, we tested a fairly large CSV from our friends at Star City Games that they have been having trouble with since they were first onboarded back in April. Each of those 649 mismatches were the same roadblocks our new and existing users have been trying to traverse for years.
Extended art cards, Secret Lair reskins, or any garden-variety Booster Fun variant would predictably fail on import and required manually editing the CSV to improve the results.
Here is the same CSV imported with the improved tool:
Huzzah! Also, an important note about the image above is that the single failure seen in the screenshot was actually a problem with a mismatched Scryfall ID in our database. So after correcting that, the CSV imports with 0 failures!
Sample CSV Updates
On the Import Wants dialogue, the sample CSV has been updated to include the newly expected Scryfall ID field, as well as the offer and limit fields that are often requested by our users. The new sample CSV can be found via the link in the Wants import dialogue or by clicking this link.
Exporting the Cardsphere Master ID
A common cause of failure on these CSVs was found to be header names and not the data. If a CSV contained enough header names that exactly matched the header names that Cardsphere exported, it would send it down the code path to import a Cardsphere CSV. This meant that users copying and pasting columns from different CSVs would sometimes still get failures, even if all of the identifying data was present and the column names were all valid.
Starting now, we are exporting Cardsphere’s master ID with every export of either Wants or Haves, and imported CSVs will use the new universal parser unless the Cardsphere ID is present in the CSV. When the CSID is present, our importer can determine the exact card and finish you are importing, which will override the controls on the import dialogue to ensure the cards are imported correctly.
Translation for EU Condition Standards
Manabox support is a frequent ask of us, but applications built outside of the United States, like Manabox, often use Cardmarket/EU standards for condition that were incompatible with Cardsphere. With this update, we've built in logic to translate those to the Cardsphere equivalent, allowing these collections to be imported seamlessly. Here's how the conditions translate:
In some instances, these could not be 1:1, so we went with a combination of how Manabox translates our values and applied that here. Since they consider Lightly Played and Played to be a lesser condition than what we call Moderately Played, the logical conclusion is for us to translate those to Heavily Played. In the same vein, we do not support Mint as a condition, and since Near Mint is our highest standard and includes the mythical "Mint" card, we're translating those cards to Near Mint on import. Cards listed as Poor will not be imported, as we do not support Damaged as a condition.
Welcoming Feedback
We have always welcomed feedback, and now is a great time to let us know how the new CSV importer works for you. While this is a massive improvement that has been tested, because of the sheer variety of different possible permutations of data in a CSV, we expect that some users may still run into difficulties when importing some collections.
Please reach out to us via any of our normal channels found below, or on the footer of each page on Cardsphere:
Thanks, and happy trading!
xoxo,
efren
