All the Good News — January WRITTEN BY Chris Powell

Hey traders!

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

First of all, Happy New Year! I'm excited for upcoming year and optimistic for PucaTrade in 2018. For me personally, 2017 was a tough year filled with some hard choices. As most of you know things have changed a bit here at Puca and I've had to step back my role. I'm still volunteering my time as I can, but had to pursue a steady income to keep up with Bay Area life.

Puca News

Common Dues

On October 15 we implemented Dues to the Common user. We made this change with the economy in mind, and wanted another sink for removing points from the system. At this point we believe this hurt the community more than it helped and have decided to reverse the policy. Dues have been terminated, but that doesn't change being able to receive foils at Common. We have already seen users coming back to the site and an increased amount of trades. Remember to Shield those trades to help us sink some points!

For more information you can read Medina's article.

Rivals Of Ixalan

Rivals is up for trade for both MTGO and Paper! All language cards and Prerelease promos should be up as well.

Hopefully you had fun at the prerelease! I know I did, however I only went 2–2 with my Grixis Pirates deck. I love getting cards into the mail before the set actually releases and commited to send some of my prerelease cards out (Tendershoot Dryad, Dire Fleet Poisoner, Timestream Navigator, Zacama, Primal Calamity). I have some fun incoming sends as well...

Jonathan Medina

We announced a few weeks ago that Jonathan's role has changed to Director. I personally want to thank him for all the hard work he has put in with the community and the positive processes he's created. His suggestions and relentless kindness have brought forward many great ideas from both himself and voices in the community. I have no doubt he will keep PucaTrade on a positive trend!

Top Trades



Let's see what's been flying around PucaTrade this month.

Below are the top 10 most valuable cards traded on PucaTrade for December:

Below is the list of the 10 most traded cards so far for the month of January. Slitherhead is still going strong!

Highlighted Traders

In this section I want to highlight a couple traders (one new trader and one veteran) who are doing awesome things on PucaTrade!

New Trader:

Jerry AKA JÆther signed up for PucaTrade last month and has already send 143K in cards. He started the game in '94 and played for a couple years, then took a haitus until 2005 (I feel like this is a common theme among players). Another break led him back into the game in October of last year and then he found PucaTrade! Welcome him to the site by sending him a trade or two!

Veteran Trader:

Samantha AKA !(JAGS)! is another one of the top traders on PucaTrade. Samantha started playing casual Magic in high school with friends and went on to her first Prerelease during Tempest. As her friends lost interest she considered cashing out her collection at the local LGS, but thankfully did not! It was then she decided—instead of getting out of the game—to go deeper, vowing to collect one of every set of Magic: The Gathering.

Trading was difficult until she discovered PucaTrade (previously trading on Craiglist). She hopped right in and sent almost 200K PucaPoints in cards, right off the bat. As soon as she got points into her account she started receiving cards almost immediately. She is currently closing in on 1.5 Million points sent in her Puca Career. The highest point card she received was an Unlimited Chaos Orb (48,865 PP) and hopes to receive an Unlimited Mox Ruby or The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale.

Bug Fixes

Membership Dues

There was an issue with the display of dues costs since we changed it to zero. This section has been hidden along with removing it from the pricing page.

Trade Trends

An issue was found where certain promoted cards were showing up in the Top Promoted Trades more than one time. We found and solved the issue for this bug.

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 v3.5.5). 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.

New Features

New User Tour

I know that this is not a feature that legacy members can benefit from, but it's important to streamline the path for new members to begin using PucaTrade. Earlier in 2017 we took a hard look at the tour and realized it was just TOO complicated. We needed to pare it down to 3 simple steps where we make sure a member can confirm their email, enter their address, and instantly be eligible to receive cards.

It was way too much to expect them to got through inputting paper wants, and there was a whole section on setting up Magic Online (often people don't even know what MTGO is if they are primarily paper players or new to the game). We saw a huge dropoff in our analytics mid tour, so hopefully this make it simpler to become a member of the community. Without new traders, PucaTrade likely can't go on.

Wrap Up

Despite my role change, I still love PucaTrade and this community! I think I speak for all of us when I say that we have always wanted PucaTrade to be the best way to trade MTG cards.

I'm around, I'm sending cards and I'm happy to hear from you. Hit me up on discord if you'd like.

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.





