Technology Update Supply-Side Challenges WRITTEN BY Mitch Trale

Good Afternoon. I'm Mitch Trale. As a Technologist at PucaTrade, I'm responsible for the software and hardware that keeps our exchange open and running smoothly. I also spend a lot of my time thinking about our marketplace dynamics -- supply, demand, pricing, rate of trade, and other econometrics.

This is the first in a two-part series on the state of the PucaTrade marketplace. In this post I will lay out my understanding of some forces that are impacting total trade efficiency across the site -- specifically, how easy or hard it can be to find a trade as a Sender on Puca. In my second post, I will lay out our new strategies for tuning trade, and will provide examples of features and changes we will be implementing towards this goal.

On PucaTrade, we often compete to give, and almost never to receive. The vast majority of the feedback we get is from people who want to send more cards out but feel like it’s a challenge to do so, especially for Standard staples of value. The recent popularity of PucaTrade and the ever-expanding scale of the marketplace has put strains on the Send Cards page as the primary place to find trades on the site. Survival of the Clickest -- or, the race to initiate a trade on the Send Cards page -- served us well in the early days of the site, but at this point it’s no longer really a skill-based game to snag trades: there’s way more variance, and the amount of work involved in winning the race against your trading peers is increasing all the time.

PucaTrade has taught me that Magic is fundamentally a game of excess supply. Whether you participate in a draft or buy a booster box to crack open, Magic cards enter your collection as random assortments that you may or may not want. So here, when I talk about supply, I am talking about the number of copies of a given card which PucaTraders are collectively ready to send to someone else. Right now there are 5800+ Siege Rhinos on Have lists. Many of these Haves are not actually For Trade by their owners (closed accounts, stale records, etc). So let’s reduce that 5800 to something more manageable, and estimate that at any given time, there are at least 500 people on PucaTrade who are actively interested in sending a Siege Rhino.

When I talk about real demand, I am talking about the number people who Want a card and can afford it. Right now we have 680 Siege Rhino Wants, but there are no available Rhinos on the Send Cards page, so the real demand for the Rhino is currently at 0. The central issue we are dealing with now is the imbalance between the 500+ people who want to send a Rhino, and the 0 people who seem to want to receive one.

But wait: on average, about 10 Siege Rhinos trades are initiated on Puca each day. This means that around 10 people decide that they really do want the Rhino, and they have the points for it, so they add it to their Want list, and they get a trade commitment in < 5 seconds. Or perhaps one of those 680 people with Rhino Wants get some points, and now their Want is visible on the Send Cards page, and a trade commitment comes through very quickly.

We can look at this quick trade commitment as a symptom of supply-side competition. In order to get your Siege Rhino out the door, you must compete with hundreds or thousands of other people who actively want to send that same card. This competition has led people to run tools like Page Monitor or PucaPower or Mise Bot, which refresh the Send Cards page, filter trades in various ways, and send alerts when a new trade becomes available.

A word about bots: In recent weeks we have noticed an uptick in conversation around automated trading tools. Many users have expressed frustration or fear that the bots are snagging trades out from under them. We do not believe this is strictly true. A relatively small percentage of our members use these tools, and many of our most active traders have great success without them. The primary reason competition has increased on the Send Cards page is the addition of tens of thousands of new users to PucaTrade in the last three months.

Of course the use of automated tools negatively impacts the PucaTrade community. Our servers are under near-constant load from these page refreshers, which slows things down for everyone. And we don’t want people to feel like they have to run these tools to compete, because if everyone does run them, then that fear becomes a reality.

So this must change. We must build features and trade structures that make these 3rd-party tools less useful or irrelevant. We must create better trade filtering, better package management, and a more dynamic internal alert system, so that we can trade with each other from the same baseline, using the same set of tools. Moreover, supply and demand must be brought into greater accordance, and Puca must do more to facilitate the fluidity of trade between its members.

Join me in part two of this series, where I’ll discuss our approach to addressing these issues.

Mitch Trale, aka MCT, aka JOHAN MAGNUS '94, is a Technologist at PucaTrade.

Living & thriving in Oakland, California. Thanks for the trades.