Welcoming Star City Games to Cardsphere

Hello, traders!

Over the weekend we had a couple of people reach out about a new user with a very familiar name that appeared on our front page

While we are still working to confirm the identity of the potato dealer, we are thrilled to confirm that yes, that is actually the Star City Games, and we are happy to welcome them to Cardsphere as they leverage our nearly 60,000 registered users for inventory acquisition. In just a few days, our users have helped SCG realize the value of the platform by sending them over 1000 (!) cards that they would have not received otherwise. Huzzah!

Cardsphere has historically operated behind the scenes of the Magic community at large, but adding a massive retail partner like Star City Games looks to change that, so I thought I’d write up a quick explainer about how this will work going forward and where I hope this will eventually lead.

Cardsphere Retail Partners

Shortly after we were acquired by EDHRec parent company Space Cow Media, we did a large user poll, and the results told us that there was a clear desire for senders to send more. They had the cards, they had the inventory, but they didn’t have enough people to send to. That’s where the idea of the “Cardsphere Retail Partner” (working title) was born, and we immediately began talks with large, recognizable names in Magic.

However, there was an immediate logistical bottleneck about how this would actually work. How would their buylist sync? Whose condition guide would be law? What about packing and shipping standards? What about the dispute process and our transit timelines?

We wanted to welcome large stores but without compromising the customer experience that our users are accustomed to and prefer, so we ultimately settled on putting this onto the back burner until we could have tools developed to help alleviate the bottlenecks, and that meant our best-case scenario was not acting on it until Q4 2025.

Enter: Star City Games

With these bottlenecks, it seemed that this would simply not be possible for a while. But to our surprise, when we approached Star City Games with the idea of helping them acquire inventory, they were more than gracious and willing to work with us to get them on the platform sooner. That meant agreeing to use our existing tools to import their buylist and taking ownership of keeping it accurate, participating in our dispute process, and abiding by our terms of service whenever buying or selling on our platform.

They've even assigned a staff member to handle CS transactions specifically. Agreeing to abide by everything we would ask of any other user removed all doubts for us, and we immediately began work in getting their massive buylist of tens of thousands of cards and sealed products onto the platform.

A Beneficial Partnership for Star City Games, Cardsphere, and Our Users Alike

As anyone who has ever had their hand in running a buy/seller operation, inventory acquisition is one of the most challenging bottlenecks to overcome. So for Star City Games the benefits are quite obvious: an entirely new avenue to engage with users who already have their collection of cards inventoried and graded and ready to be traded at a moment’s notice.

For Cardsphere, we get an established name in Magic to help us develop what will eventually be an enterprise-level feature set and subscription class for large partners, and their desire to buy and sell sealed product gives us an excellent opportunity to work on an area of the product that we can all agree needs some improvement.

Cardsphere users, I believe, stand to benefit most from this partnership. Once SCG makes more of their buylist available on our platform, they will effectively establish a floor and will create open offers for thousands of cards for which our users simply never found buyers. Despite having always had industry-leading user protection in place, having a trusted name like SCG present on the Send page will alleviate the fear that many new users have of mailing a card off into the void to someone they’ve never heard of on a platform they’ve just discovered. They also have a large inventory of products; some being high-value cards and vintage sealed boxes that they are willing to send to our users should an enticing offer show up on their Send page.

Final Thoughts

Enshittification is real. Big changes like this will always lead to justified skepticism and anxiety among users, because we’ve all experienced this kind of shift in tech products we love, only to see it lead to a series of disappointments until eventually the product we love is unrecognizable and usable.

That’s the main driver behind this article, and I’m hoping it’s alleviated any fears that seeing SCG on your send page may have brought. It’s a big change for sure, and may wind up being a canon event in the Cardsphere timeline. We do hope that this will lead to more retail partners joining Cardsphere to see what we have to offer, but I felt the strong need to reemphasize that it will never come at the compromise of the product that has always put community first.

You got us here, and our responsibility to you is one we will never take lightly.

xoxo -efren