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Some very welcoming members of the Magic community. All comments from the Pro Tour album by @wizards_magic #mtg pic.twitter.com/C3ketq6nED

— Cary (@Vronos) February 10, 2015

The above tweet gave us at MTGPrice.com an excellent idea: we should cynically do something to promote women in MTG  in order to ride this bandwagon and make Google-like profits from it.

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This is a 100% capitalistic venture. In no way are we doing this because the above tweet encapsulates an attitude that is complete fucking bullshit. Let there be no mistake – the proposal below solely exists to make us money and for no other reason. (It’s certainly does not, for example, have anything to do with the fact that I’d like to take my daughter to a magic tournament one day and not have her see this kind of completely fucking appalling attitude.)

Anyway, we’d like to do the following:

Are you female? Do you want to play in a Grand Prix  but need some urging (financial or otherwise)? Do you have a torso? Awesome!

We will come up with some kind of tasteful t-shirt featuring our logo in all its capitalistic glory.  We will pay you to wear this t-shirt on your aforementioned torso and then play in GP Vegas.

The rules:

• We will pay $50 to at least ten woman who wear our shirt at GP Vegas. More if we can afford it. (EDIT: We have increased the number of corporate shills to twenty!)
• The participant who ranks highest in the main event will receive an extra $300 and the person who ranks second-highest will receive an extra $200.
• You must wear our shirt for the entire day and play in at least five rounds of swiss to receive your money.
• You must high-five any other shirt wearer you come across for the remainder of the day.
• Email webmaster@mtgprice.com to sign up. 

NOTES:

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1. If you sign up, please actually attend the event. My plan is to send the shirts to the event itself for pickup.

2. Please be female, however you personally choose to define that. We don’t care if you are trans, gay or any other label you choose to affix to yourself. Remember, this is a cynical marketing ploy for us to make as much money from you as possible: being bigoted would get in the way of cash generation.

3. I have no idea if this is legal. If it isn’t, we’ll donate the money to some related charity instead. For the tax write-offs, obviously.

Track your collection's value over time, see which cards moved the most, track wishlists, tradelists and more. Sign up at MTGPrice.com - it's free!

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(Kickstarter link is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1365447257/magic-the-gathering-mtg-pricing-trading-and-collec)

We’ve almost hit our target and it’s been less than two days from launch!

First, a sincere thank you to everyone who backed us or shared the app on social media: you guys rock!

Since it looks likely that we will hit out target, it’s time to consider some “stretch goals” – extra things we can spend any funds above the $10,000 raised on.

We have five ideas. Most of the ideas will work on both the current website AND the mobile app so feel free to comment even if you don’t plan on using the smartphone version.

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1. Add UK/Canada and EU prices and currency. Also add MTGO prices and currency (tix).
2. Add all/almost all foreign printings of cards, along with prices.
3. Support multiple conditions (played/ heavily played etc.)
4. Update prices every 15 to 30 minutes (recent sets only).
5. Add a “camera” option for bulk card upload (take a photo of a stack of card names, import them into your collection).

Your feedback will help us decide on the order in which we do these things to please comment below!

Link to our Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1365447257/magic-the-gathering-mtg-pricing-trading-and-collec

Hi, I’m Alasdair. I run MTGPrice.com: a site that helps people price, collect and trade Magic cards. I’ve been playing magic since Revised and I’ve played a LOT of tournament magic, including on the Pro Tour (I did terribly 🙂

MTGPrice.com has been around for almost three years and more than 200,000 magic players use it every month to track the value of their collections, look up historical prices, see what cards are currently rising or falling or just to compare prices across different vendors (unlike some other sites that use a single source, we pull prices for everyone from TCGPlayer, eBay and Amazon to ChannelFireball, StrikeZone and ABUGames).

For almost the full three years, people have been asking for us to create an iOS and Android app.  We’ve decided that now is the time to build one.

The thing is, we want the app to be really, really good. We don’t just want to repackage our website and call it an app – we want the thing to be native and fast and slick and wonderful – all the things a really great app should be. Thus, we’ve turned to kickstarted to help us get the cash needed to hire a world-class designer and a developer to help us.

What we’re building

We’re building an Android and iOS app with the following features:

1. Fast price lookup with autocomplete. Shows our “Fair Trade Price”, current price at a bunch of stores, historical price graph. We pull prices from many difference sources, not just a single site.

The premium version of the app will also show buylist prices (the cash price a vendor will pay you).

This is our core use-case: the idea is that you’ll be able to pull out your phone and know the price and price history of a card (in any printing) in under five seconds.

2. “My Collection” tool. Track your complete magic collection and its total value. Track the value over time in a graph. See which cards have changed in price recently.

Manage your “wishlist” of cards and receive alerts when we find especially good deals on these cards.

Track multiple collections – perhaps you want to track all the cards you lent a friend, or all the cards in a particular deck.

3. Fair Trade Wizard. Trading with someone at a GP? Just pull out the MTGPrice.com App and you can tally up each side of the trade. The premium version of the app (which you’ll receive if you back us) also has an option to show buylist prices of every card in the trade.

We don’t stop there. The Fair Trade Wizard will log this trade for you, automatically updating your collection and wishlists. It will also let you review these trades in the future so you can see if you’re making good trades over time.

4. Trade Matcher. Want to trade with another app user? Just enter their username (or scan a QR code) and be told all of the things someone wants from you and what you can give them.

The MTGPrice.com app will work out the best possible trade between the two of you, taking into account every single card you have for trade and every card in your wishlist.

The premium version (which all backers receive) will also let you mark specific cards as high or low priority so you can ensure you get those above all others.

5. Trade Locator. Find everyone in the area with the MTGPrice.com App and arrange trades with them!

Imagine being at a GP with four thousand people in the room. You need a foil Snapcaster Mage but can’t find anyone with one to trade. Hit the “Trade Locator” button and see everyone with trades nearby. Type in a card and see any users with that specific card for trade.

(Of course, you can disable this feature whenever you don’t feel like trading.)

6. Price alerts. We’ll give you an alert if a card on your wishlist or in your collection sees a price movement past a particular threshold. We’ll also tell you which cards you don’t own are currently hot and which are drifting downwards.

7. ProTrader features. MTGPrice.com has a service (currently $4.99/month) that provides a TON of extra features for people with larger collections. For example, you can view historical inventory graphs for specific vendors, get daily alert emails showing trending cards and use advanced tools to find the best deals available form each store. (You can read more about ProTrader here: http://www.mtgprice.com/protraderSignup.jsp)

As part of the app, we’ll have additional ProTrader features available for subscribers, including in-app price alerts.

Important Notes

REALLY IMPORTANT: The first $10K will fund an ANDROID version of the app. The next $5K (if we manage to raise it in a stretch goal) will fund concurrent iOS development. If we don’t raise $15K, we will still build the iOS app using our own funds but it will be delayed until the Android app is complete.

Additionally, we have a whole bunch of stretch goals in mind if we can raise above the $15K needed for both platforms. Specifically, we’ll support international vendors, multiple currencies, different card conditions (only NM-M for now), hundreds of different vendors and faster price updates (currently we update daily). We’ll go into more detail if it looks like these stretch goals are reasonable.

Anyway, what are you waiting for? Help us build the most amazing MTG App in the world!

Link to our Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1365447257/magic-the-gathering-mtg-pricing-trading-and-collec

First, a bit of history. This is what version one of MTGPrice.com looked like, two and a half years ago:

 

Sexy, right?

We’ve come a long way but we’re hardly finished. Today, I want to announce some new features we added over the last few weeks. But before I do, let me point out that Fate Reforged Prices are now live!

(Fate Reforged Foil Prices are live too!)

If you visit one of the links above and are logged in, you may notice another column (you did sign up, right? It’s free!), thus:

The “You Own” column shows up on this page and lets you see how many of each card you own. Right now that’s zero, but if you click on the link, you can edit this to any number. This was a heavily requested feature for the “My Collection” tool and it’s now ready for everyone – no more entering card names manually, just visit the set page and go through your binder card by card.

Speaking of My Collection, the filters now let you sort your collection by one or more sets, so if you want to see all Blue Alpha and Beta cards over $10 that you own, just click “Filter” and then select these requirements.

That “Save Filter” thing at the bottom is a new ProTrader feature – I’ll get to it in a moment.

Next up is our new MULTI-COLLECTION feature – something that has been repeatedly requested. Now, instead of just storing everything you own in My Collection and everything you want in the Wishlist, you can make arbitrary collections like “long-term specs”, “short-term specs”, “Modern Delver Deck” and “Cards I loaned Larry last week”. This feature is fairly basic right now but you can see all the same data as in :My Collection” which means you can see things like current price, best buylist price, how much the price changed since yesterday/ last week, etc.

To create a new multi-collection, just click the “My Collection” drop-down and then “+create new list”. You can also choose any of the multi-collections you’ve previously created here – I’ve made one called “Specs”, for example:

The final free upgrade for this week is simple yet a long time coming: the Fair Trade Price for many older cards is now significantly more accurate. For a while (due to a lack of mint-condition copies for sale), the price of a mint Alpha Tundra was around $4. Now it’s a much more accurate $3000.

Does this stuff all sound useful? Great! Sign up for free and you can track your collection’s value over time, get weekly “mtgfinance” news and much more!

We also added several new features for ProTrader, our $4.99 subscription service. I already discussed these features and what we’re working on next at length in the ProTrader-only forums but as a preview, this weeks features were:

1. “Save filters” – remember that image up above where you could filter your collection? ProTrader’s have the ability to save as many of these filters as they wish and access them with a single click. This gets useful when you have a large collection, since you can quickly check to see which modern-legal commons over $1 that you own, or see how your complete set of Alpha changed in price since a week ago. This is especially useful to those ProTraders that own a store or deal online and need a fast pricing tool for their current inventory.
2. Clicking the “wrench” icon near the top-right will let you add many new data sources to your collection. Everyone has access to a few extra sources (for example, best buylist price and who is offering it) but ProTraders can customize the list extensively so they see (for example) the ChannelFireball and ABU price of every card in their collection automatically. Everything saves so that you don’t need to set them every time.
3. For those ProTraders with complete sets, an “Add complete set” lets you add one copy of every card in a set with a single click.

We’ve posted a detailed roadmap of ProTrader features on the forums. If you’re a ProTrader you can read the roadmap here.

If you’re NOT a ProTrader and are interested in what being one gets you, click this link and then click “Tell me more”.

We have a LOT of new features planned, both for ProTraders and free users. If you have any specific requests, please post them in the comments below!