All the Good News — June WRITTEN BY Chris Powell

Hey traders!

I'm Chris Powell and I'm back with more good news!

Time has been flying by lately (at least for me). I mean, it's already June and GP Vegas has come and gone. Were you there? If you were, I hope you had a blast like I did! I played in the Modern GP on Friday with my Naya Evolution brew featuring Eldritch Evolution. It's something I've been working/iterating on for some time. I went 3–3, but have high hopes for future tournaments. I love toolbox-type decks that allow you to find the answer you need when you need it. With any luck, at some point, I can write up a deck tech for it.

Puca News

Product Releases

Battlebond

Battlebond was released on June 8 and everything is tradeable on PucaTrade! I had the chance to play a casual sealed with friends and enjoyed the gameplay. There are some sweet reprints in this set too, such as Doubling Season and Seedborn Muse. Now is a great time to promote and pick some up, especially all those Commander players out there.

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Commander Anthology II

This flew a bit under the radar, but this was released on June 8 as well.

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Signature Spellbook Jace

This set has also been released. Each Signature Spellbook pack contains nine cards: Eight nonfoil cards and a foil version of one of those eight cards at random. These are all tradeable now!

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Upcoming Releases

Core Set 2019: July 13, 2018

Hard to believe the prerelease is a few weeks away. More awesome reprints and Elder Dragons are one the way.

There has been so much product in the last couple months that it's hard to keep up. We will have cards and pricing up before the prereleases!

Send Send Send!

I've been noticing promotion prices going down and trading going up. I personally think this is a great time to pick up PucaPoints and have been sending as much as I can. I may not be on top of the leaderboard, but I'm in the top 40 for the last month and 234 cards is more than 15 Boosters worth.

Every day the number of points in the economy is going down, which in turn drives up the value.

Here are some awesome notables that I've received in the last 30 days: Thoughtseize, Kolaghan's Command (2), Kess, Dissident Mage, Temporal Mastery, Metallic Mimic (Prerelease Promo), Goblin Lore (2) (helped me finish Hollow One in Modern), Collected Company, Devoted Druid, and Squandered Resources.

Top Trades

May was a big month for trades on PucaTrade! There were 67,029 completed trades in May vs. 48,030 in April. That's quite a jump by almost 20K! These numbers are exciting and I would love to share more with you. I will, however, leave that to Medina for his "PucaTrade By the Numbers" article within the next few weeks.

Check out what was traded last month (including a Mox Sapphire?!):





Old School

Mox Sapphire (CE) Collector's Edition — 60,000 points

Tropical Island Revised Edition — 28,325 points

Volcanic Island Revised Edition — 34,578 points

Ali from Cairo Arabian Nights — 120,000 points

Chains of Mephistopheles (3) Legends — 74,082 points

Ring of Ma'ruf Arabian Nights — 52,260 points

Island of Wak-Wak Arabian Nights — 39,216 points

Shivan Dragon Limited Edition Beta — 39,675 points

Wrath of God Limited Edition Beta — 35,020 points

Survival of the Fittest Exodus — 30,928 points

City of Traitors Exodus — 29,355 points

Force of Will Alliances — 26,258 points

Gaea's Cradle Urza's Saga — 30,220 points

Masterpieces (all foil)

Sol Ring Masterpiece Series: Kaladesh Inventions — 131,750 points

Ancient Tomb Zendikar Expedition — 95,000 points

Chalice of the Void Masterpiece Series: Kaladesh Inventions — 50,000 points

Staff of Domination Masterpiece Series: Kaladesh Inventions — 28,891 points

Wurmcoil Engine Masterpiece Series: Kaladesh Inventions — 44,492 points

Booster boxes

Eternal Masters Booster Box Eternal Masters — 67,864 points

Masters 25 - Booster Box Masters 25 — 45,900 points

Dominaria - Booster Box (2) Dominaria — 30,650 points

Modern

Tarmogoyf Foil Modern Masters 2017 Edition — 47,000 points

Liliana of the Veil (2) Innistrad — 39,964 points

Cavern of Souls (5) Avacyn Restored — 33,796 points

Jace, the Mind Sculptor (2) Masters 25 — 30,000 points

Karn Liberated New Phyrexia — 27,272 points

Eternal

Imperial Recruiter Masters 25 — 32,000 points

Mana Drain Foil (2) Iconic Masters — 46,500 points

Promos (all foil)

Temporal Manipulation Judge Promos — 30,000 points

Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite Judge Promos — 26,264 points

Liliana of the Veil (3) Pro Tour Promos — 25,745 points

Here are 15 most traded cards for the month of May. Rat Colony was overwhelmingly the favorite, but also not surprising since a deck can have any number. I'm also noticing a lot of BFZ tokens which seems likely this was one trader scooping all these up.

Bug Fixes

May brought about some pricing issues, on both specific cards and sometimes even entire expansions not updating. We've taken a number of steps to resolve these problems and get things running as normal. If you'd like more info you can read about it here.

PucaTrade has a lot of tools to administrate the site on the backend, everything covering cards, pricing, expansions, users, blogs, cases, promotions, images, sweepstakes, etc. Often it's never heard or seen when updates are going on there. I thought I would highlight a few things that were worked on last month with regards to the backend.

Pricing Flags

On every card page there is little gold flag next to the price. If you click that we will get a pop-up asking if you think the price is too high or too low. This will alert us to a problem and allow us to verify whether that price is incorrect.

Often we would look at these spikes, but the backend tools for resolving the flags were not as useful as they could have been. We've done some work to focus the alerts and allow for easy update/resolution. This gives our admins the ability (at a glance) to resolve any potential issues very quickly.

Price Spike Emails

A while back we built spike protection into the pricing index. If a card's price had gone up more than four times, we would freeze that price update. The reason we do this is when a crazy spike happens it's often not totally representative of the actual price and senders start acting on that, which can result in cancellation issues. Then our admins need to step in and resolve the disputes.

There was a way to see these update freezes, but again it wasn't that meaningful and easy to act on. We now receive daily digest emails of any cards this is occuring on.

The most recent updates to the site can always be seen here. This link is on the version number in the footer of the site (currently v3.5.7.2). I agree this is a tad hidden on the site and most people don't know about it, so I will do my best to give updates in these posts going forward.

Wrap Up

The set releases are coming fast and furious! We are doing the best we can to keep up and allow the community to keep them swapping. We will have some more updates for you soon!

Let's talk soon, and as always, give and let give!

Chris Powell is one of the Founders of PucaTrade and now serves as an Advisor. He started playing Magic in 1994–1995, but took a 17-year hiatus. Fellow developer Mitch Trale got him back into the game in 2012 with Return to Ravnica. Shortly after that, they teamed up to build PucaTrade.





