All the Good News — May WRITTEN BY Chris Powell

Hey traders!

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

First off, I know what you're thinking: There hasn't been an "All the Good News" article in a while. Well, you're right, it has been a couple months. Things have been busy and it's nice to be back!

I guess maybe this is "old" news, but last time I had some concerns about the Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Bloodbraid Elf unbannings. Modern being my primary format these days, my fear was that they might warp it a bit. It doesn't seem like that has been the case and the recent tournament results confirm that. With my mind at ease, I've been tinkering on a brew for GP Vegas, so I'm excited to see what it can do.

Puca News

Dominaria

Dominaria was released on April 27 and everything is tradeable on PucaTrade! I've heard a lot of positive feedback about the set and these cards are flying around PucaTrade. I've already received a number of DOM cards along with sending a bunch out.

New Development

As Jonathan Medina mentioned in his latest article, we have secured some new development resources and are going to start work on restructuring the promoted want feature. There are two main goals in mind:

Currently, power traders are leveraging large point balances to promote a wide spectrum of cards, which is increasing their visibility both on the individual card page and in the package view. The fee redesign will attempt to "level the playing field" for members who cannot leverage a large point balance. We want to allow everyone to compete in the market by shifting the promotion fee from the "front" to the "back" of a trade. This means instead of paying for a promotion when you promote a card, instead, you can freely promote any card without being charged a fee until the card is committed. The other thing we'd like to do with this restructure is changing how the fee is calculated. At the moment the fee is based on the index price of a card. The issue with this is that index price of a card does not rise with inflation like the promoted price does. By calculating the fee based on the promoted price we can keep in step with inflation.

Points Sunk

Most members of PucaTrade are likely aware of our point sinks and how they help the economy. Today I'm telling you that we are close to reaching 50,000,000 points removed from PucaTrade (47,963,639 when this was written). Fifty million points seems like a pretty large number, but what does it actually mean?

In Medina's last PucaTrade by the Numbers article, he stated that the Total Points in the System were 129,880,819. With almost 50 Million points removed, we've taken out approximately 22 percent from circulation. We still have a way to go to meet our economy goals, but for this, we only have the traders to thank! I'm excited to reach and continue reaching milestones like this.

Here's the Point Breakdown of Points sunk by type (taken at the time of the article):

PucaShield 7,132,060 points

points Avatars/Backgrounds 216,100 points (now FREE)

points (now FREE) Sweepstakes 15,854,500 points

points Promoted Wants 22,205,294 p oints

oints Monthly Dues 2,555,685 points (terminated 1/1/2018)

Economic Update

I wanted to pass along a small Economic Update while we're on the topic of numbers. I will let Medina give you the full scoop in his next numbers article.

Recent Sweepstakes:

Yes, you read that right, over a MILLION points were destroyed with the Modern Masters booster box! Rumor has it that one of our dedicated members went crazy on that sweepstakes. I'll close this section with two other numbers:



There are currently 8,857,622 points in escrow, which means trades on their way to your mailbox!



17,040,984 points were traded in 48,030 trades during the month of April.

Top Trades

Typically the top trades section has been top 10 lists of cards traded by value and volume within the previous month. Since we have a couple months worth of data I'm going to mention some highlights.

Really love seeing these duals flying around and a lot of old school cards. Of course, we saw a number of Mind Sculptors due to the Modern demand.

Candelabra of Tawnos Antiquities — 210,000 points

3 Underground Seas Revised Edition — 193,000 and 51,397 points

Volcanic Island Revised Edition — 138,000 points

Shivan Dragon Limited Edition Alpha — 133,895 points

Guardian Beast Arabian Nights — 120,000 points

2 Sol Ring Masterpiece Series: Kaladesh Inventions — 117,000 points

Devouring Deep Legends — 109,290 points

Chains of Mephistopheles Legends — 81,550 points

Bayou Revised Edition — 72,000 points

3 Modern Masters 2017 - Booster Box Modern Masters 2017 Edition — 65,000 and 50,000 points

Tropical Island Revised Edition — 59,479 points

Mana Drain Iconic Masters — 58,800 points

Force of Will Masterpiece Series: Amonkhet Invocations — 51,733 points

4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor Worldwake, EMA, and M25 — 45,000, 37,836, and 37,062 points

2 Mirror Universe Legends — 36,049 points each

Braingeyser Limited Edition Beta — 36,047 points

This time around I thought I'd focus more on some rare and interesting cards that are being traded in larger quantities. There are mostly newer cards here with a few standouts from older sets (Zhur-Taa Ancient, Steel Hellkite, and Angel of Serenity).

Commons

Opt Ixalan — 151 trades

Delver of Secrets Innistrad — 143 trades

Rares

Animation Module Kaladesh — 139 trades

Aetherflux Reservoir Kaladesh — 120 trades

Sigarda's Aid Eldritch Moon — 110 trades

Abbot of Keral Keep Magic Origins — 110 trades

Stone Haven Outfitter Oath of the Gatewatch — 108 trades

Toolcraft Exemplar Kaladesh — 106 trades

Zhur-Taa Ancient Dragon's Maze — 100 trades

Steel Hellkite Commander 2017 — 80 trades

Mythic Rare

Angel of Serenity Commander 2015 — 100 trades

Bug Fixes

High-Value Pricing

An issue cropped up on high-value cards (specifically cards over $1,000). The problem was that any cards over $1,000 were getting updated to somewhere around 100 pts. This is a huge problem specifically for wants and promoted wants. This has been resolved, and high-value card pricing should be back to normal. If you spot an incorrect price on any of these cards feel free to let us know via Discord or the blue question mark on the bottom right of the site.

Values of committed trades not matching the correctly

After some trades were being committed, the value of the committed trade was lower than the values that they were when they were committed. The trade was also reflecting the delta in the green numbers.

This had to do with an issue in the edit modal. If you edited a want through the edit modal the price would get locked in at that time. When someone would go to commit that trade it was still committing the actual price, but the prior display was incorrect. This is where the discrepancy had stemmed from.

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

I'm excited to say that we are on the upswing for development and implementing some new features to help the economy. This community is amazing and I want to bring new and old traders back to the platform!

I personally don't trade any other way, unless it's among friends. Lately, I've been having a hard time keeping points in my account and whenever my balance gets low it's like a little moment of freak out. I HAVE TO DO SOME SENDING!

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.





