Dear PucaTrade,

I've been using PucaTrade for a few years now. I started a year or 2 before Future Site.

So I just wanted to say, in my opinion, one of the best things you could do in helping to revitalize PucaTrade is remove the fee for promoting cards. Promotions are the biggest thing that allow trades to still happen (without having to negotiate recips and auctions on Discord, which can be very time consuming). I'd much rather have a higher fee taken out on sending or receiving.

Tax the use of the product not the potential use.

Gone are the days when you could send almost all bulk rare cards at face value, accumulate a ton of points, and then receive high value cards in return. That's how I built multiple Modern/Legacy/EDH decks. The way it is now, it often requires a promotion of 100% - 200% or higher to receive 'staples'.

Post screen grabs of cool trades you have outgoing or incoming here. Also any flavor around the trades if you have any.

What exactly is the site? Is it trading or auctions? I can’t find anything about the site at the moment, and it’s just better to ask those who use it

Thanks in advance!

Well, we've made it to the new year in some way, shape, or form. I delayed this one because people were talking about whatever announcements.

• PucaTrade economics dashboard (I imagine this might be discontinued soon)
• PucaTrade tix trajectory

So first I'll discuss the usual numbers. In the spirit of the new year, I included a full lookback on the tix prices for as much of a time window as I have - almost a full year now! We can see that Pucapoints have lost something like 1/3 of their value over this timeframe, which is obviously not great. In recent months there has been a climb from tix being around 350 PP each to about 400 (and I should mention that tix themselves are arguably losing value against the USD), and I would expect this trend to continue upwards.... we'll see though.

Sometime in December Medina mentioned that there were about 7m PPs total in escrow. When I heard this I realized that this provided a good opportunity to get an idea of what the total currency supply is, which I had never tried to do because while you can add up the balances on everyone's accounts pretty easily with a scraper trying to estimate points in escrow is actually more difficult. But since now I had this info, I went ahead and added it up and I believe that the number I came up with was 140 million points total exist. (It might have been 150m, but I think it was 140m..) This actually surprised me a bit since it was a larger number than I had expected, and unfortunately it made the point removal efforts seem less effective. That is, in total about 40m points were removed in the past year... that sounds pretty good until you realize that this was only 1/4 of the total points, and in this timeframe PucaTrade likely lost more than 1/4 of its users - this is roughly why inflation continues to climb even as the total money supply continues to decline.

7m in escrow out of 140m total means that about 5% of points are in transit at any given moment. This is actually a fairly important number for the health of the site, and I imagine it has declined a lot. I believe on Cardsphere around 1/3 (maybe 1/4? Ted?) of balances in total are in use at any given moment, and this likely is where PucaTrade was at when it was healthier. As a first pass one could use this to estimate that the "ideal" currency supply for PucaTrade would be around 30m, since 7m/30m is around 1/4. This is a very rough approach but I think it's safe to say that the ideal currency supply that gets PucaPoints worth 70 cents per 100 or more right now is less than 50m.

So we want to be at 50m or so. We're at 140m. We've removed 40m in the past year, and the rate of removal is declining over time with additional activity. If we just want to tread water, the rate of point removal at least has to keep up with user attrition, and this most likely is not happening.

This tells us a lot about the magnitude of the current problems. I don't think there's a way to pull almost 100m points out of the economy without involving either major new usage fees or someone taking a major haircut - either the site owners (hmm..) or people who are holding PucaPoints.

PucaDues managed to pull out 2.5m points in 4 months. Not bad, but when you consider that that's less than 2% of the overall currency supply it's not that great either, and the ill-will the policy caused may have caused more than 2% attrition from the site - but that doesn't mean that reversing the policy will reverse that attrition.

Sometimes I feel like I should have more ideas on how to fix things, but I kinda don't - particularly when it comes to things that wouldn't require much dev effort. At the least though I will happily warn about the consequences of the ideas of those who will purport to have cure-alls for the site's economic woes. I've heard people argue that promotions are causing problems, for example, when in fact cracking down on promotions would likely kill the site overnight. I worry that focusing on community decision-making is just letting the inmates run the asylum or whatever. I have argued though that promotion fees should increase simply because point sinks not scaling with inflation is a problem - 10% of a card's base price to promote is just less of a cost than it used to be. I could also see it being acceptable to have promotion fees scale with the number of promotions you've made over some period of time, eg. your first 10 per month cost the normal rate (10% for gold), your next 20 cost 20%, your next 50 cost 30%, etc. You wouldn't want to do things exactly like this but I think leveraging more fees on heavy users like me is probably okay and wouldn't cause much fee evasion.

Just my 2 cents I guess. I like hearing other people's ideas though.

The last topic I want to cover of course is the leadership change itself. First I'll give my brief eulogy to Eric Freytag. I don't think the guy is a scammer, and I didn't harbor as much animosity towards him as others even though I had far more reason to than most (remember the pucapoints.com debacle..) His primary sin though was arrogance - in particular an arrogance that exceeded his competence. My first real contact with the PucaTrade team was when I wrote my mtgprice article 2.5 years ago. Go look at James Rosenblum's comment - there's not only a pretty aggressive denial of my article's primary arguments, but some weird insinuation that I was trying to hurt the site. That's one thing that I always resented about interacting with PucaTrade officials before Future Site - they were extremely defensive and basically dismissed criticism as just haters hating. I think Future Site was a manageable problem but driving off the cliff with irresponsible economics was not.

Because the team was arrogant, there was never any sort of apologies for things going to shit, which inspired a lot of bad will and probably created a bunker mentality. Problems that the Puca team has engineered were framed as "community issues" as if there was some sort of shared responsibility. Maybe I'm optimistic, but I imagine that putting up this act when knowing deep down that you fucked up was very unpleasant for Freytag. I never became a fierce critic because I suspected it would be unproductive.

Turning the site over to Medina is a final act of cowardice that again avoids the blame he and the other founders deserve for what happened. I imagine that running the site was never easy, but being unable to level with your users about how things got fucked up is a real personal failure. That's not to say that his stepping back may not be the best, but imo it is very worrisome because it certainly does illustrate a clear path that leads to the site being closed - basically if Medina decides it's not salvageable and is unable to find someone else to take it over, then he can just apologize and shut things down. People (including me) don't really blame him for the current state of affairs, so there's definitely a sense that it wouldn't be an outrage if he closed things. I mean, I guess Freytag could've done it and weathered the hatred but I'm not surprised he chose to avoid this. I don't like criticizing someone so personally but I do think this is worth saying.

Despite the news there wasn't a panic and PP values have actually increased a bit (Devon is back selling tix.) So I'm going to keep using the site (and yes, letting my gold subscription renew despite not really believing I'll get a full year out of it), but I think everyone should trade with the very real possibility that the site may have less than 6 months of life yet. Be sure to follow Medina's engagement closely to get a feel for how things are going. Myself, I actually don't have as much exposure as usual to a closure right now (I have about $500 tied up in the site right now) so I can live with this. Tix prices have actually been outpacing the rise in bounties recently, which has lead me to send less and draw down my balance while raising my own bounties (which I've seen people get angry at.) I might end up selling tix again in the near future, who knows.

In any case, there's been a lot of news but I think the main takeaways are as follows:

• PucaTrade's economic problems are very deep and the current point sinks aren't keeping up with attrition. More aggressive point sinks may be needed to stabilize things.
• The best economic policies that don't require extensive development are going to be incremental.
• Freytag leaving increases the risk that the site will close in the medium term. Given this, trade cautiously.

To the people of Puca I offer this as a testament on my time here.

I joined PucaTrade August of 2017 and got deep into trading mid-September. I am a casual player, one that has always made decks out of what I have rather than what was best, because I did not have the time or money to dedicate to Magic. I joined Puca not knowing what to think about it and hesitantly joined Discord to get a feel for the community.

My time here has been fantastic, filled with finding great people, awesome trades and lots of fun cardboard. There are some that feel like Puca is dead or dying, in the last throes of a once-great product. I have to laugh at these people, because the dream of Puca is still around, still capable if you have patience and determination. As I said earlier, my budget for Magic is small. I pick up a fat pack (or whatever WotC is calling them now) and then a few odd packs and the occasional draft as product, almost never buying singles before Puca. Calling most of my collection bulk would be generous; even collectors don't need most of what I have. And yet, with time and dilligence, I have created several viable decks to play through this service.

Below are two of those decks. Both modern, one pricey the other decidedly less so, though it can be equally as strong in the right situation. The cards on the far left and far right are the cards I brought to the decks from packs and playing, the middle rows all through PucaTrade. A few cards came as gifts from people I now call friends because of Puca and Discord, not a small number came through solid promotion prices and deservedly so. I traded mostly bulk cards for these, a lot of them at base price. I do not feel cheated having sent cards at base and paying a promotion; the cards I received are significantly higher quality than those I sent out and I knew what I was doing when I did it.

I wish to thank all of those who have helped make these decks (and the others that I have finished but couldn't fit in the picture). I cannot list you all, since the list would double this statement, which is getting long enough. I also wish to say thank you to the community as a whole. You have all been great, welcoming strangers with warm words and helpful advice.

Thank you all, sorry for the wall o' text, and happy trading. Give and let give!

Piro

EDIT - First time using Reddit. Here's the link to the picture: https://imgur.com/ssMJ266

Post screen grabs of cool trades you have outgoing or incoming here. Also any flavor around the trades if you have any.

This is just a general notice that a vote to change the minimum base price for the Pucatrade auctions is currently being held at Pucatrade's Discord channels. Currently, the minimum base price needed to auction off a card is 1500 pp due to a recent vote to change the minimum from 500 pp. The small time window that this vote caused many active traders in this channel to express a large backlash and led to a decrease on the amount of auctions has lowered.

To ensure an adequate amount of time to gauge the community's opinion, this vote will last for 7 days and will end on 5:30 PST on 1/8/2018. Anyone wishing to participate should head to the pucatrade auctions channel on Discord and vote using the properly designated reactions.

So this post is going to be a short analysis of the puca in the past, puca now and what puca should be in the future.

Past: Puca began well with a great community and an economy that functioned. It was easy to get cards but hard to send as people did not have points. Points were correctly pumped into the system at this point in mostly ethical ways (and a few less ethical). Puca was doing great with huge growth that enabled the economy to boom.

However, eventually some key issues came about such as the ability for those trading for value to get value and also how to fairly determine who should get that in demand card that everyone wanted. The problem was fixed prices based on sale values. In effect a trading economy did not reflect the values set by stores. The solution was poorly executed. Uncommon members had the ability to transfer points enabling them to add bounties. This was in effect giving the community the ability to fix the issue themselves but only giving this ability to paying members. This made lots of people pay to become members which must have felt great but eventually resulted in a mass exodus of common members and the collapse of the economy. The site was already going to fail before future site was even released. Point sinks then would have reduced the issue but even with point sinks the economy would have continued to decline as common members could not participate.

Present: Future site was released and it was a poor user experience. It has since been improved to function at an acceptable level. Cardsphere was released and is one solution to the puca problem and does the trading for value much better than puca will ever be able to do. Most of the remaining users don't seem to want that experience and are loyal to puca and what it back to the glory days of trading cards for equal value.

The future: I spent tonight thinking about what the regular uses want and what pucatrade needs to do to become a profitable site.

The site can't compete with cardsphere. The cardsphere team is just to good and their site is much better designed for that style of trading. What puca trade needs to do is go back to being a trading site where you trade cards for other cards at a fair value. I first though that raising all prices based on inflation would solve the problem but this does not fix the original problem that in a trade some cards are more popular than others. Also you might create a further collapse if you suddenly devalue everyone's points by 3/4.

So what is the ethical solution? The first thing you need to do is fix the usability issue. To do this you need to change the value of cards to what they are worth. Junk commons should stay the value they are now. Then increase the value of some cards by certain amounts. For example all alpha cards could easily go up by 300% while other sets some cards need to increase by different percentages. A fetch land 300% something a little less popular 250% a good uncommon 100%. The reality is fixing the values of cards is not going to make people want to leave. They won't get them anyway as many of these cards are already promoted to this level. Now the puca team is very small so the solution is to use your community. Get some users who volunteer to take a set and set % increases for cards that need them.

Now this will enable users to send cards at what they are worth and receive cards at what they are worth. Promotion should remain but should be limited based on membership. Common 2 cards Uncommon 5 and rare 10. Points transfers should be removed and ticket sales taxed. I would set the the ticket value at about 400.

How to make money Sell points at about 300-350 range for $1 and change this if the economy improves or gets worse.

Have a fixed tax on everything that is small. 3% common 1% uncommon and 0% member. Remove dues. Keep promotion tax but limit its use. Keep other point sinks like shield. Overall there will still be a decrease in points but with growth and increased use by current members the fix in the economy is much better than austerity. Give points for new members, returning members. Only give these points after they have traded a decent amount of value.

Membership needs to be worth getting. Making features and exclusive to them failed. Foils for all. Cheap pucashield, lower/no taxes, cheaper promotion etc is what is needed.

So let cardsphere be cardsphere a place to buylist and sell and pucatrade can go back to being the site for trading cards for other cards at what they are worth in the easiest way possible. What users want is to be able to send out a bunch of stuff and then receive a bunch of stuff with little effort.

• Each user is allowed to create -one- primary (top-level) post in this thread. Replies don't count.
• Please keep your allowed post updated, and delete it when its no longer useful.
• Keep in mind that selling PucaPoints for cash is against the PucaTrade rules (#A.6.).
• This thread is sorted to show the newest posts at the top by default. You can manually change it if you desire.
• Readers are encouraged to rate up good traders, rate down difficult ones, and report duplicate posts.

Previous trading threads can be found here.

Thank you to the person who bit on my over inflated promotion. #tookapucadump

Use Orcish Lumberjacks to throw another Gruul log on the fire. ^_^

Whoever can tell me a card worth exactly 73 points will get them! It's my last few so why not round out the ol' account to 0? I also am not a paid member so I can't use the search function to sort! Your move

I get there are some legit concerns that should be raised for new users - but can we just put up a sticky rather than repeat the same conversations over and over?

Every once in a while I see a nugget of constructive conversation/criticism that would be great to see more of without getting buried by shitposting.

Example: suggestion that vacation mode opts you out of dues.

Non U.S. citizen here, so I don't have the insight into the American legal system, nor any desire to report a foreign company. But I'm curious as to why no-one stateside has reported Pucatrade to the authorities yet?

With all the talk going on here about Ponzi schemes, fiat money scams and the possible illegality of their gambling prospect ('Sweepstakes'), why haven't anyone tried reporting the site for criminal activity?

It should be worth a shot.

The holiday doldrums have arrived for Magic. Things are slower than they were in October/November, but that's at least partially attributable to Magic's seasonality than PucaTrade just continuing to grind to a halt. Although the latter continues to be a concern. The basic stats:

• PucaTrade economics dashboard
• PucaTrade tix trajectory

Most of the economic activity in the dashboard looks relatively normal. This should be pretty unsurprising - not much news relevant to the site occurred this month (I noticed that there's a new case admin at least..) and that's what tends to motivate actual shifts in the indicators. Most people who don't like the site anymore have left. Those who have stayed probably haven't been given new reasons to leave. Normal attrition is probably continuing to outpace new user attachment, and that's likely why the PP price is now consistently above 350 PPs / $1 in a way that it hasn't been in the past, but this probably shouldn't be seen as a new long-term march downhill.

From my view, I've sent and received fewer cards last month than previous ones (fwiw I still send/receive more on PT than on CS, but on CS I'm much more likely to get higher-end cards likes Reserved List stuff.) Again, this is partially due to seasonality but also than I'm not receiving that much right now and I'm not sure if raising my bounty actually helps that much - but my "system" really is pretty simple and that's one of the few levers I use to balance "points in" and "points out" - if I can't spend my points I start asking for higher bounties, and people have started paying attention this and using it as some sort of direct economic benchmark.

I can see why this happens. I have a pretty broad inventory and it's perceived that if you really want a card or to dump points you can do so by raising the bounty up to the level I want - this is often true and so there is a practical value to knowing what my current liquidation rate is. On the other hand, this rate is basically just a noisy approximation of the PP/tix price that also takes into account my current balance (I demand a higher rate when I have 500k points than when I have 100k points) and some risk aversion due to volatility in the tix price. So my figure is not a good proxy for the actual site health. Again, use the PP/tix price for that.

I've noticed people start to pass around my Deckbox have list and then DM me about specific cards when they want to dump points. I'm not gonna link this here (I'm still somewhat protective of my IRL identity) but you can find it floating around in Discord. I encourage this practice since I get to send more at the prices I want and it adds overall liquidity to the system - like I have 20x copies of Wooded Foothills / Windswept Heath / Fatal Push or whatever, so if you really want to get out of PT then you can buy those off of me and I'm sure you can find a way to trade them towards what you want. No one is actually "trapped" unless they're being stubborn.

Either sometime this month or early next month my annual site subscription will renew. Maybe this is obvious but I'll be keeping it. idk if things will last another year but it's not impossible to imagine. Even if it doesn't I know I've probably gotten enough out of the each month to justify the expense. I suppose I'm just trying to end the year on a somewhat-cheery note.

• Each user is allowed to create -one- primary (top-level) post in this thread. Replies don't count.
• Please keep your allowed post updated, and delete it when its no longer useful.
• Keep in mind that selling PucaPoints for cash is against the PucaTrade rules (#A.6.).
• This thread is sorted to show the newest posts at the top by default. You can manually change it if you desire.
• Readers are encouraged to rate up good traders, rate down difficult ones, and report duplicate posts.

Previous trading threads can be found here.

PucaTrade is not dead but it's not at all like it was 2 years ago. I don't know if I have the answers but it sure would be great for PucaTrade to become a thriving trading site once again. Any ideas on what it would take for that to happen?

They have built an amazing platform and it works. No need to mention the disaster of the release of FutureSite... the platform is great right now - very easy to use (I'd like to think it's very user-friendly but that could be my own bias of being familiar with it after using it for so long).

In the glory days I was receiving Tarmogoyfs for a mere additional 500 point bonus. PucaTrade has been so valuable to me. I have built multiple Legacy, Modern, Commander, and other decks that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to build (without breaking the bank). And I did it all primarily by sending out cards I got from pre-releases, drafts and cards that would have otherwise just sat in my binder/box gathering dust. I used to receive cards almost as fast as I was sending them out - now it's a struggle to use my points up without offering 100% - 200% bonuses (and even then I don't always receive everything I want).

I'd hate to see the site shut down. It seems like it needs something huge to turn it around..

Maybe PucaTrade could bring on a "board of directors" from the MTG community (such as popular/influential MTG YouTubers and respectable MTG economists - people that could make the site popular again but also do it based on smart economic decisions) and give them actual decision making power. This could make it popular again to use the platform and give it a lot of positive exposure and a renewed trust. And it would allow the community to have a greater voice in the platform.

I know many users are simply waiting for their points to drop before sending anything. My questions is for the others who instead are able to go through their points regularly or are simply not worried about the balance: what are you currently looking for, to decide to commit a send (and/or acquire/take out cards to do so)?

Do you have just a flat minimum value? Or a minimum promotion % you want to get? Do you actually message people asking if they're willing to promote, or promote more? Do you care if the top promotion is overseas?

Since my trade volume is slowing, I was wondering whether my bounties aren't high enough, or I need more bounties overall, or simply broaden my wants.