Monthly Update: September 2018

Before Cardsphere launched, I did a weekly update to let all the traders waiting in the wings know what we were doing. This happened on our subreddit, and the back and forth with the growing community was key in keeping us energized for that first 8 months. Soon after launch, maybe because we were developing such an active community on Discord, I let the updates kind of fall off.

Now that I'm beginning to see a lot more recommendations to use Cardsphere from users who I don't readily recognize, it seems like a good time to pick up the practice again. Not everyone pops into Discord, and we need to share information with the users who don't.

Of course, for feedback, we'll have to rely on any of the ten thousand ways for the community to get in touch with us.

Trading Posts Changes

The first piece of news is that we've contracted some regular writers to cover various topics on Trading Posts. Having columnists with planned release dates for articles makes things a little more manageable for me. No more panicked late night editing when I should be sleeping.

We're still going to be offering some of the less typical articles as often as we can. We love hearing Phil Morris' takes on what he and Rhino are up to, we love MrLuBuFu popping in from time to time to cover Arena's economy, and we may even offer up more book reviews if the opportunity presents itself. I'm still taking submissions from all sources, but the amount of non-columnist articles we can publish per month has decreased. So, a bit of a queue.

Many of the people who have already written for us can attest to my being a bit of a Frazzled Editor, and I'd like to thank everyone for being patient with me. This is what we're aiming to fix.

Our columnists:

• Joe Dyer will continue writing The Eternalist for Legacy and Vintage.
• Tier Fun's Andrew Johnson covering Modern.
• Darrin Keener will cover Standard.
• Ethan Saks from Lords of Limited will handle Limited.
• Johnny Slivers (John Humphrey) will write about Commander and variants.
• Jordan Smith will be covering Cube.
• Cliff Daigle will handle finance.
• Markus Leben will cover Magic design and theory.

Recent Development

As always, you can review our complete changelog here.

Michael has been hard at work refactoring Cardsphere with newer technology that will make it easier to layer in more features, and has most recently done a pass on the Send page. While upgrading it to the newer tech, he added the ability to show tags inside the packages, and filter packages using tags.

The updates also included noting cards that are not tournament legal on their card pages, and a bunch of smaller tweaks and fixes.

Upcoming Development

Currently Michael is busy with Sending and Receiving pages. We are going to get some new features:

• collapsible packages (great for high volume traders to get packages out of the way)
• a better way of acting on just a few cards from a package (big juicy custom checkboxes are coming our way)
• tags (great for people using tags to track location of their cards to send or decks where the new cards go etc.)
• tracking numbers for packages
• a few other small sweet things that I will keep under wraps to keep you intrigued

We've also been having a lot of discussion around ways to help traders get busy with higher end cards. Cardsphere does not currently offer the best experience in this regard, because either receivers need to keep a large balance for big ticket items or arrange trades on Discord. Arranging trades on Discord is fine if that's what you're into -- we know some people enjoy the dealmaking. But it does not have to stay like that forever. Our vision is a still a haggling-free efficient market no matter the price tag of the items. We are seriously considering improvements in this area.

We also recognize that Cardsphere's learning curve is something of a barrier to growth and adoption. There's a lot of power and features in the system that most users are not aware of or scared by, and that's something we need to fix. Even with the massive amount of help we get from our community, running Cardsphere with two people is often a challenge of Bolasian proportions. Eldrazian proportions. So while we're working on making the system easier for newer users by offering better help and instruction, this is going to be a somewhat slower process. But we're ever mindful of the need.

Postal Disruptions

We have two upcoming events which stand to disrupt cardflow by mail. The first, Hurricane Florence, is about to hit the East coast of the USA some time later in the week. Please consider the location of your trade partner when mailing your items during this time. It is best if you contact your trade partner about their specific situation if their address is in the affected area. CS admins will not penalize delayed sends to and from affected areas (to a reasonable degree).

If you are in an affected area, it might be a good time to put your account into vacation mode, and save up for some of those big ticket items.

The second potential issue is a possible strike looming by Canada Post. Canada is the second largest Cardsphere market, so if the strike goes through, this will definitely have an impact. As Canadians, we're keeping a close eye on things and will provide updates as they become available.

Ho Ho Ho

We're getting ready to launch the second annual Cardsphere Secret Santa. Last year's was a great success and we look forward to even more pariticpants this year. Our wonderful moderators will be running the show for us again, and Michael and I will just be along for the ride. Watch this space for more details soon -- lots of packages shipped globally last year, and we want to make sure everyone gets their goodies in time for the holidays!

Arbitrary Milestones

We passed $1.5 million dollars worth of product changing hands on 2018-09-11. We also passed 100,000 packages mark a short while back. Not bad considering we're only just expecting to come out of the infamous "Magic Summer Slump" this month with Guilds of Ravnica's release. But we want to see more, much more.

Also, our very own Woadworks and DogonSiereht have been trading some power, making the value leaderboard look very nice. Note also that a Mox Pearl also traded but is not shown due to a minor bug! To celebrate, Woadworks has lowered prices on all Cardsphere merch at txcp.store.

Guilds of Ravnica

As always, we will add the Guilds of Ravnica cards to the database as soon as possible, once all of our pricing sources have them. This is usually the Monday before pre-release, with the promos showing up a little bit later.

And of course, we'll waive the 1% trade fees for the first two weeks as we do with all Standard sets.

GP Montreal

Michael and I are planning to go to GP Montreal and will be looking to meet up with any Cardsphere users out there. We're still firming up details, but we'll be avoiding the main event, mostly focusing on side events and meeting people.

There's even talk of a few giveaways if you can hunt us down on the GP floor.

Thanks for reading, people.

/ted