Greetings Spheroids,
We're settling in well to the new calendar year here at Cardsphere. The team spent some time over the holidays going through all of the feature requests we've received over the years and set our priorities for 2019. More and more we're seeing recommendations to use the service from names we don't recognize, and we feel like Cardsphere will go mainstream in 2019.
As such our focus is going to be on leveling up the education and training for new users, offering greater value for Premium Membership (and advertising premium better), and continuing to incrementally improve every Cardsphere feature and product.
Brewster's Millions
On January 10th sometime after I had gone to sleep, Cardsphere passed $2,000,000.00 worth of Magic cards sent. We're very happy to be solidly in our second million, and are optimistic about where we'll be at our two-year anniversary in May. Thank you to everyone who tweeted and passed along congrats.
Even if that's a big, impressive number we're even more excited thinking about the fact that it means we've saved people close to a million dollars as well. That's not chump change.
Welcome to Youtube, I Love You
From the stuff-we-should-have-done-a-long-time-ago department, Cardsphere has finally started setting up our Youtube channel. This will be a keystone component of our education and marketing strategies, but right now it's a bit sparse on our own videos. Happily, Efren has set up playlists featuring our sponsored creators, interviews with Cardsphere staff, and videos from the community about Cardsphere, so it's not a complete ghost town.
What's that thing all the kids are saying? Oh yeah, please like and subscribe!
Ravnica Allegiance
We also got to experience our first full spoiler dropping as the curators of a draft simulator this week, and we're pleased to report that we were first to market with the set, and people have enjoyed thousands of drafts so far. Over the weekend, we continuously improved the ratings by folding in data from the Lords of Limited (Ethan Saks and Ben Werne) and the community review from the Limited Resources subreddit.
That's a lot of expertise baked in! Extra special thank you to /u/cricketHunter for providing direct access to the data from www.mtgcommunityreview.com.
Of course, we'll also be waiving trade fees for the first two weeks #MTGRNA is available, as we do for all Standard sets. We expect the trading to be brisk given the high quality of the cards in the set (see our picks here) so login and set your Wants now!
Postal Rate Increases
The United States Postal Service is planning an increase for the cost of domestic and international stamps, beginning at the end of the month. Canada Post has also already increased the cost of domestic and international stamps.
Please make sure you are using correct postage! As the sender, this is your responsibility, and if your trade partners pay any postage due, this will be recovered from your sale price or account!
That's all we have for this time, folks. I'll speak with you again soon enough. See you on the sphere.
/ted
