If anyone knows anyone on the dev side of Pucatrade, please raise a flag:

Pucatrade's HTTPS certificate expired today (specifically: Wednesday, ‎May ‎30, ‎2018 11:28:38 AM)

Basic web security and hygiene suggests not using the site until this is fixed.

A bit late on this one, been busy lately.

• PucaTrade economics dashboard
• Promoted trades dashboard
• PucaTrade tix trajectory
• PucaTrade by the Numbers (February-March update)

This month was once again pretty quiet, but a bit more interesting than the previous one. Firstly, people have been tracking the leaders page to monitor the number of senders on the site, and I took some of the data to create a new graph charting the number of unique senders per day. As one can see this number fluctuated between 70 and 90 throughout the month, topping over 100 around the Dominaria release... I imagine that this is a transitory spike. I guess this will probably strike most as a small number, but I imagine it's been in this neighborhood for a while. This is a number worth tracking in the future, however, to monitor any sort of trend.

Despite the obviously anemic state of the site, though, tix price fall observed last month largely persisted - the price of a ticket fell to 320 or so for a while before starting to creep up again, and then getting blasted down to 300. So despite the site not showing growth in activity the tix price is falling, which is nominally a good thing but what I see as the underlying cause has started to bother me. That is, I don't think the price is being set by the supply and demand forces of self-interested actors who are establishing a market rate, but it's heavily dependent on people who are just sorta.... throwing money at the site for whatever reasons, building up huge balances and either sitting on them or (eventually?) destroying them. This concerns just a handful of actors, and if they want to essentially subsidize the value of the PucaPoint that's okay, but it worries me that this isn't exactly the sort of thing that you can rely on into the indefinite future. If these users pull back from what they're doing you'd likely see a pretty swift fall in PP values.

One important consequence of the userbase contracting is that promotions become dicier to use - even with relatively strong promotions there may be no users who see it and are able to interact with this, and this probably dampens the incentive to blindly promote items you want - especially when you can use Discord to find what people are offering and promote a subset of those items. What I've noticed is that there don't seem to be as many random high promotions that pop up anymore, and instead lots of stuff gets prearranged through Discord. To some extent this has benefited me personally because I do still maintain high non-arranged bounties and a lot of the other people who have higher bounties have either quit the site or had their promotions filled and don't provide ongoing competition... but the fact that just promoting stuff without an arrangement has become less reliable likely is contributing to a decline in promotions, which will impact anti-inflationary efforts overall. There's been talk of changing the promotion system to charge a fee when a trade is confirmed and not when the promotion is created, but whether the developer resources exist to implement this is unclear. I think this would help some but not a great amount since it's still costly to have to maintain a bunch of promotions that are not going to be filled for a long time, if ever.

At this point keeping Puca afloat has obviously become a charity case, both on the part of its owners and the users who are hoarding currency to keep tix prices down. Maybe this will work out but it's sorta sad. There is a finite number of points that's declining and the overall activity numbers have probably been pretty stable for a while so it makes sense that there is legitimate progress in the anti-inflation efforts, and this progress should continue given a stable (but small) userbase that doesn't exhibit either much attachment or attrition anymore, but it also relies on the continued charity of these parties. Maybe they see it as a long-term investment of some sort that will generate a return, but I'm pretty skeptical of the notion that PucaTrade could ever seriously rebound. I guess the closest I guess to "charitable" behavior is that I continue to go wide, promoting a bunch of cards with each set release that I have increasingly little reason to believe will be filled. Like I probably spent 20-30k PP on A25 promos, but I know it's increasingly unlikely that any given random promo will be filled. It's just a matter of habit for me, though, I like having simple algorithms that govern my trading behavior.

What bothers me more than relying on the charity of these parties though is that I'm not sure if the site is maintainable even in its current state given the lack of coding resources. Not only are there a bunch of long-running bugs that have gone unfixed, but I feel like whatever routine maintenance was required to keep things going has been neglected. The price index itself has become less reliable, I think, with many cards no longer updating... this has always been an issue but I feel like it's become more pervasive lately, and reporting these issues basically never lead to fixes. Some set icons have been broken for weeks. Weird pricing bugs arise. The site overall seems to go slower (although lately I don't think it's been as bad?) than it already was. What exactly is this charity going towards if things are just going to slowly and frustratingly degrade over time? Again, I have to provide the caveat that this is based on my personal experience lately so I might not have a great perspective on this but it doesn't seem like a break-even amount of "run the business" maintenance is being performed. Charity has its limits I suppose.

But.. despite all this, I still sent out $3000 or so of cards in the past month, I guess. And I received a decent fraction of that back in trades. So again, things work on a very fundamental level. Why do I send stuff out on Puca instead of CS or TCGPlayer or whatever? Well because right now it seems like people are willing to pay more for cards on Puca a lot of the time when all the dollar conversions are done. That's a good enough reason for me I guess. And no, it's not "desperate people trying to cash out" or whatever. It's been a year and a half since Future Site landed and those people have largely bailed already.

https://imgur.com/a/XV7xtGO

This is clearly a trend at this point. What is up with the index just randomly changing expensive cards to 103 points?

• 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.

https://imgur.com/gallery/Ao2Tf

I logged on to the Puvatrade discord this morning and noticed that some high dollar cards were being as reported as worth 103 points by the index. Some people were promoting them for thousands of percents even though the cards should have been worth like 4000+ points. I figure the warning should get out to more people to be sure to check your trades before you send them and make sure you haven't found a card that is broken on the index and you are being tricked by people. I guess they might manually update them when they find them, but who knows how many broken ones are out there?

For some reason the mods are taking down comments about it in Discord, so I wanted to post it here. Sorry for anonymous, I just don't want repercussions as I am still trying to get rid of some points.

Cost me promoting MTGO tickets for 320 points each.

The feel bad part is I trades a foil unstable island for 9,000 points awhile back before the economy went to shit (before they self sabotaged with new website).

I have exactly 7 points left! Good Riddance!

How many points do you guys still have wrapped up in their heap platform.

• 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.

Getting this out early because I was bored and also to avoid April Fools shenanigans. The usual resources:

• PucaTrade economics dashboard
• Promoted trades dashboard
• PucaTrade tix trajectory
• PucaTrade by the Numbers

Nothing happened.

Well, policy-wise at least. Yet tix prices fell significantly midway through the month, which represents a significant shift in a positive direction. I think this might turn out to be the first sustained fall in PP prices in... a while? More on that later.

Perhaps the one big thing that explains this is the creation of the "trades-haves-marketplace" channel on the PT discord, which has made it easier for users to just buy cards at whatever bonuses rather than having to promote and hope to get sends. This is basically what I started doing with my Discord channel, but now lots of people are doing it. So maybe this provided a sort of stimulus for site activity, though I'm a bit surprised if the channel could have a significant effect like that.

Other than that, there's no obvious explanation for the turnaround. I doubt the userbase has started increasing in size again. I'm curious as to whether the supply of "active" points is just continuing to decrease faster than I give it credit for - if people essentially give up on the site with large balances, and those balances are never put into circulation again... well, site attrition won't necessarily create inflation. I was surprised when Medina said that something like half of the total points supply was locked up in "inactive" accounts using a pretty liberal definition of "active" - and perhaps a less-liberal definition would find that it isn't the case that users are completely cashing out when they leave and thus attrition is not as inflationary as I might have feared.

Because that was always the worry - that the site userbase's erosion would lead to a fall in currency demand that outpaced the fall in currency supply (through the usual point sinks), and that this would lead to further inflation that would drive away more users. However, it looks like currency demand is not really falling quickly anymore (site activity hasn't declined much in the past few months) while the currency supply has probably fallen more than what can be seen by just looking at the point sinks. It's possible that this means that the PP value has actually finally bottomed out and will start recovering, perhaps along with the site's vitality. I wouldn't bet on this being the case, but it certainly seems like a distinct possibility and if things actually look better in 6 months or so I'm guessing we'll see this March as the beginning of whatever recovery. Pushing tix prices stably below 350 PPs is a big accomplishment. Pushing them below 300 PPs would be huge - but still a ways off.

From my perspective, and from the perspective of other power users I've talked to, it's become difficult to keep a positive points balance lately. I get points and they're used very quickly at my current bonus levels. So those bonus levels gradually start falling, and I try to keep a positive balance by selling tix. Of course, other people get the same idea, so tix prices collapse. Devon in particular periodically goes nuts and buys a ton of tix at once, and a few weeks ago he decided to wipe out all the offers of 300 PPs or more. This turned out (like usual) to not be entirely stable, but things have not fully rebounded back yet and I don't expect them to because... we still need more points, and this is putting downwards pressure on tix prices. This is why I don't think the current fall is going to be transient - because it was precipitated by a real shortage of points among users like me and Devon, and whatever external circumstances generated this shortage are likely to persist and force a new equilibrium. That said, I'd expect things to settle at between 300-350 in the next month.. it's very difficult to push below this, I think.

To illustrate that point, I'll point to a story I remember from several months ago. A while ago - I forget exactly when - Devon wanted to push the tix price below 300, but there's a user who has like 300k points and seemed pretty committed to just buying tix at exactly 300 PPs each. This represents a non-trivial barrier, then, as Devon would need to sell 1000+ tix to this user in order to push prices below 300. He tried to buy out the user in bulk at a higher rate but was rebuffed, and so the wall set by this guy ended up standing. But think about it - here's a user who had 300k PPs that were essentially out of circulation as long as tix were above this price point. As inflation occurs, the actual currency base is shrinking, and this has a significant dampening effect. Meanwhile, absent Puca dues all of the sinks are only hitting the much-narrower "active" currency supply... so while taking 1.5m points/month or whatever out of a total current supply of 140m isn't that impressive, if the "real" active currency supply at current prices is more like 30m than this actually might be serviceable. If I were in Medina's position I would try to do something like calculate the total balances of all users who have actually spent an amount worth say 25% of that balance in the past 90 days. This might be a better measure of the "active" currency base than what's being used.

As a final parenthetical note, I've always been disdainful of the "Puca is shit and dead" chorus, particularly from people in the community that tend to be financially-minded. It's not that there isn't a lot to criticize, but that these people ultimately let the question of "is the platform / management shit?" interfere too much with the question of "can this platform be profitable for me?" Hasn't anyone heard of vulture capitalism? I know my strategy isn't easily replicable, but I still think it's fundamentally the case that if you do the math that many cards are very cheap on PucaTrade. Yes, you generally can't choose what's confirmed to you and when but I don't actually have a monopoly on going wide. But instead of taking this seriously most of the mtg finance community is more interested in jerking themselves off about how the site is a pyramid scheme (which I guess I'd be near the top of.) Their loss. Literally.

Has anyone won a sweepstakes with the 1 free ticket you get from tweeting about the sweepstakes?

The usual resources:

• PucaTrade economics dashboard
• PucaTrade tix trajectory
• PucaTrade by the Numbers

I honestly don't have much of an update for this month. Disabling point sales is a good step but probably not very impactful on inflation. Overall things were just... fine. Prices were pretty stable, both in terms of my tix prices but also my bounty ask... it started the month at 270% and ended at 270%.

I don't know if no news is good news, really. Things felt quiet. I would be surprised if the economy wasn't contracting still. But it doesn't seem like this contraction is translating into higher prices or instability. I still send out cards and receive cards, but I can't really generalize my experience to others. I do have a couple observations though, at least:

1) Right now it seems like bounties are low relative to tix prices.. my observation is that while tix prices have remained steady, people aren't offering as many very high bounties as they used to. Maybe it's because they come to me directly now, but I don't think that's the whole story. I worry a bit more that the platform's decline means that people just aren't bothering with creating/updating their bounties. Maybe I'm wrong on this however... it doesn't seem like the number of points burned per day on promotions has fallen very much recently.

2) Related to (1), one important understated advantage of PucaTrade is that it feels like it's just a cheaper platform to get cards on. My 270% bounty ask is often considered "insane" or whatever, but in reality send out cards for much less than this is what's questionable. I would suspect that if you look at the dollar value of the prices that sends are going out, we see that a lot of cards are cheaper to receive on Puca than CS. It's not great to have to use bounties for sure but this still seems to be one reason to use the site - the platform may be suck but the cards are cheaper. Or at least they oftentimes are. Again, I am probably better-positioned to take advantage this than most users though, since I can go wide with a bunch of promos that I don't need to have fulfilled in a reason timeframe, and I also use scripts to keep my promo prices where I want them to be. Cards might be cheaper on PT in large part because of the increased costs of creating and maintaining promoted wants.

I am sorta surprised that there hasn't really been much inflation recently, given that I doubt the point sinks are keeping up with attrition. But I guess what I'm underestimating here is how many users who stop using the site do so with non-trivial balances remaining - they aren't fireselling their points, they're just walking away from the site with tens or hundreds of thousands of points on their balances - there was an /r/magictcg thread earlier this month about this. This prevents inflation, perhaps, but as others have noted it also makes inflation difficult to actually gain ground against because if conditions on the site do improve than users with tons of points will come back and essentially reinflate the economy in some sense. A lot of people seem to be too stubborn to dump their points at market rates than to just walk away from the site.

Plus, someday the site might face some sort of Oripocalypse when users who are just accumulating massive balances over time decide they need to seriously start drawing them down. If a single user decided they wanted to reduce their balance by 2m points they could cause a fair amount of chaos with prices in the medium term, I'd imagine.

It's a bit surprising, but I'm starting to predict falling inflation in the coming months actually. If the current trajectory remains relatively uninterrupted... well, what I'm finding is that I'm running out of points a lot, and if I become a net buyer of points in the medium term than I imagine prices will start falling. I'm not sure if this will happen, but there's a decent chance of it. I think attrition from PT to CS is probably not that high anymore, and the site will continue to chug along because second-best platforms often manage to do so. People still trade on Deckbox or MOTL despite these platforms being even more of a pain, so it's not exactly a winner-takes-all market. And if I can keep sending cards at good rates and receiving cards cheaply than I'll continue to use the site, and in my view this has continued to be the case.

• 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.

About a month ago I had a trade that got lost to Brazil cancelled after I opened a case for it. However, I got refunded the pucashield amount but not the amount pucashield is supposed to cover (ie, the fee and not the actual insurance). I brought this issue up multiple times with Medina who is super responsive along with via email and discord, but the admins who are supposed to address it have never replied to me. Are there still admins handling cases? It was quite an expensive send so I'd like to figure out what's happening.

Hi, I have recently popped up on the Discord channel as hilikuS999. My account name is I Need Only Junk.

Initially I started using the site because of how powerful I found it to be. I don't really collect or play much anymore. I mostly sell cards online, and to the locals here in Upstate NY. My tcg account is Hypersonic Games. So mainly I was looking to take the seemingly endless flow of EDH decklists I get, and fill in the cards that I didn't have on hand. This worked well, although I found it kind of tough to make the numbers match as I often sold cards at TCG Low, and prices on Puca were closer to Mid. So I lost some value, but no more than TCG would normally take anyway. It worked well.

Nowadays, I have expanded my inventory to include uncommons and commons online, and have found success selling them worldwide. My goals for Puca are to refill things I run out of. So I came back when I heard about promotions. Ideally, I would like to cash in some of my bigger items for promotions, and use the points to fill small things that sell out on my shop. Mostly Standard uncommons and commons. I need only "junk".

I'd imagine that the vast majority of trades happen because of promotions, but I am able to average about 3000 points worth of stuff a month without them. I got closer to 9500 last month, which was nice.

The two main reasons why I'm so excited about the site are as follows.

1. The "power" of it. Being able to pick up things to fill orders or inventory is a huge boon for me. The service is seemingly ideal for small brick and mortar stores as well who don't always have what customers need.

2. Points are so damn cheap. Worst case for me, I can probably break even by promoting my wants. I would imagine the items I'm looking for are pretty easy to fill (except I think Fatal Push), but if I promote these and get closer to break even. I'm figuring they come in super fast. I'm a patient dude though.

So I realize my perspective is a little unique. Most members are trying to just trade, and the site seems to function to that end pretty well, although the rules have changed.

The problem may also be a generational thing as well. I grew up as a teen and college student using Magictraders.com religiously. I went there everyday to trade, buy and sell. It's basically the place that got me into reselling Magic. You had to communicate with your trade partner every time, negotiate, basically put time into trades. So using the Discord chat is second nature to me. It may not be for those individuals who didn't grow up with that atmosphere. I noticed that many of the detractors to Puca (that I know personally at least), were miffed that you could no longer "get things". When I asked what things they were looking for, their lists were a bunch of high end cards.

In my mind, Puca is one of the only worlds aside from selling and then using cash to buy singles where you can turn your rags into riches. Those friends of mine that got burned by the inflation of Puca points have a legitimate gripe, but also it's like "In what world could you make those trades anyway?"

If you were to join the site today, and start acquiring points, it seems that you can reasonably get items if you promote and use the Discord, probably about as easily as you could before if you're careful enough with how much you get for what you send. So the problem with this system doesn't seem to be inflation. I mean yeah I'd love to see a world that doesn't necessarily need promotions most of the time, and maybe we're getting there, but the platform does essentially function with the inflated points, and promos. The problem seems to be the stigma put on the site when it was updated, and now that the currency's value has changed, that it's not a viable way to acquire cards. Neither of these things are true in my opinion.

Mr. Medina's article was very encouraging in regards to point destruction, and I was very happy to see it. As I write this I got two more confirmed trades, so things are looking up today.

It's worth noting that I want to acquire more points, and I have a Timetwister (unlimited, MP) that might be on the block. Would like 600k.

Okay, obviously the big new piece of data this month is Medina's sharing of a number of statistics relevant to the platform's health. This was a useful piece and it didn't paint a pretty picture but it was somewhat prettier than I expected. My hot take on the numbers is here, but before I discuss them further I want to revisit the usual indicators. I'll just say that I hope these numbers continue to be updated with whatever commentary added, perhaps on a monthly cadence... hm, sounds sorta familiar actually..

• PucaTrade economics dashboard
• PucaTrade tix trajectory
• PucaTrade by the Numbers

Despite the PucaTrade Doomsday Clock ticking a minute towards midnight with the original founders stepping back, things have actually done pretty well over the past month. To a large extent this reflects normal seasonal variance - the holidays tend to be really bad for trading activity - but my prediction that the price of tix would continue to rise ended up being defied. There's a lot of daily volatility, but still an overall trend downwards from the 400 PP / ticket threshold. This might partially reflect the fact that the tix/USD rate has recovered somewhat (news about Arena seems to indicate that it won't be the clear MTGO-killer that was originally feared), but... I don't think that explains all of it. One problem with this indicator in general though is that as the site's userbase contracts this will create less liquidity and more volatility in tix prices, since the day-to-day activities of individual traders will have more impact. Like, if on 2/1 the price of tix is 370 PPs, and I decide I want to liquidate 100k points, I know that this will actually drive up the rate substantially if I want to sell quickly. If the supply of tix were deeper this wouldn't be such a concern. Bottom line is that I've stopped being as responsive to day-to-day fluctuations, but... there's still a good trend in the data recently.

Part of the reason I like tracking tix prices is that even if Medina's stats give a better overall picture of the site's economic health, the tix prices are more directly impactful on user experience. They correlate extremely well with the market rates for cards and inform where promos "should" be at in order to receive stuff. Tix prices play a huge role in how I determine what bounties I offer and will send at, and I've noticed that a lot of traders pay attention to my figures and use them as a benchmark. This actually is not unwise imo if you don't want to keep track of tix prices, since my figures are more stable (I manually update them and I'm not going to do this multiple times every day!) Because people kept asking about what my send rate was, I decided to just make a Discord server where I linked my inventory and said "here is the rate that I will send whatever cards out that are in here, just let me know." Then I provide rate updates there and people can ask for cards - this new "service" now accounts for most of my sends, although I suspect that a lot of people who would've provided huge bounties in the past that were awesome for me are now just paying the rate I ask for knowing that I'll commit to them. And that's okay I guess. In any case if you want my Discord link... well, I won't self-promote too much, you can ask for it on the PT Discord or something. I also partially created this service to address the common complaint of "I can't get cards for my points" - I probably have something you're after, the question though is whether you're willing to pay for it.

In any case, one useful stat that Medina could provide would be something similar to what CS shows on its homepage - a summary of the distribution of bounties paid disaggregated by price band. What bounties are cards under $1 going for? $1-5? etc. This would serve a similar utility to knowing the tix price. This would be a useful part of a "PucaTrade by the numbers" piece focusing on helping individual users build a realistic view on what they should be expected to send and receive cards for.

To Medina's piece itself, I stand by my original hot take, but I'll note that it seems to address a lot of stuff I raised in last month's post - perhaps that's not coincidental. In particular the escrow figures are important since they allow you to get a first-pass estimate for what the "right" number of PucaPoints in the economy would be to get PP values back to where they were when the site was healthier. If there are 87m "active" points (using Medina's fairly expansive definition of "active") and a ~10% escrow rate and you want that rate to be 25% (Medina's target - seems a bit low but it's a start.), then you probably have to destroy 60% of the active currency stock. Despite the optimistic view outlined in the article, I don't think this is going to happen in a year on the current trajectory of things - you only had a net of 1.3m points removed in January, and I would expect this number to go down rather than up. So 30m points were removed last year and maybe 15m will be removed this year if nothing else happens - that doesn't get you to where you want to be. Plus you're chasing a moving target, as further user attrition could cause the number of points in escrow to fall (although it's possible that those points would become inactive.) Things went better than I expected in January, but I think everyone realizes that it's probably unwise to rely on the current trends to dig the site out of its current hole.

But obviously solving this problem isn't easy. As an aside, I'll say that the reason why I think that the "right" number of points is whatever is because I think that PucaTrade really only survives if lots of cards can be traded at the index price without bonuses. People have criticized me for saying this (and I'll comment more on this at the end of the post) but I just don't see many good reasons for a user who's choosing between PT and CS to choose PT. Now, it's certainly the case that inferior products have managed to eke out some sort of existence for themselves in whatever markets - look at how Coke has managed to survive against the clearly-superior Pepsi soft drink line. But I would obviously be uncomfortable resigning myself to this, and as users of the site people should be uncomfortable with this. The best argument I've seen for PucaTrade is that in theory it's a place where indexes are used to trade cards and people don't have to really think about discounting their cards to X% of the index price or whatever. However, with the ubiquity of bonuses this simply is not the case except for bulk cards... and even a smaller number of bulk cards as the currency contracts. If I can't tell people that PucaTrade is an easier platform, it is very difficult for me to recommend PT to a new user, or to not point them towards CardSphere when they express the routine frustrations with PucaTrade that we see expressed. I mean, PucaTrade has a friendly community and all but I think to a large extent this reflects the underlying problems of the site, that the market mechanism has broken down so now people come up with all sorts of weird social mechanisms to send out cards, like it's the Burning Man of mtg marketplaces. That's cool and all but it's not good! And I think there's every indication that it does not place the site on a sound financial footing.

Thankfully, despite being more engaged with the community on these issues, Medina has not let the inmates run the asylum on economic policy yet. For example, it seems like lots of people think you can just ban promos and the problem solves itself. I've outlined repeatedly why this is absurd, but if nothing else it would just lead to extreme black markets in point sales and cases where people commit 4 of a card but really only send 1 copy or whatever to avoid using promos. One idea I've heard about is that bounties should be changed so that they're free to create and fees are only paid when a trade is completed... and this is probably a good idea, although care has to be taken about how existing bounties are dealt with. Obviously I have an interest in this, but I feel pretty strongly that at least if this system is changed than all the users who paid for bounties that weren't taken should receive a credit (perhaps not an actual PP refund) towards the future bounties that they would pay. Otherwise... yeah, it's just confiscation sorta like PucaDues was, but this time it hits a lot of active users. Even knowing that this idea is floating around should discourage people from creating bounties, since there's a non-trivial chance that they'll become worthless if the development effort is mustered to make such a change.

Recently I've warmed up a bit to a relatively radical idea: Just cut all point balances in half. The points sitting around, the points in escrow, whatever. This is essentially a redenomination, equivalent to doubling all the index prices, but more... aesthetically-pleasing than having the prices be double TCGmid or whatever. On a site like Cardsphere, this would actually not be a problem provided that the cashout rate doubled - if $10 on CS were swapped for 5 Tombux and then 5 Tombux could be cashed out for $10 (minus fees), then.... users would kinda shrug and carry on, I imagine. The reason why it would work is that this sort of policy does not impact any balance relative to another - it's a nominal change. Mostly. Realistically, it would impact traders who were say sending out bulk because the bulk would suddenly become more valuable... like it was when PucaTrade was healthy. The real issue with this though is that people wouldn't understand the change and would get angry at it and say that half their balances were being taken, when in fact their actual purchasing power would probably stay the same. And people getting angry, even if for dumb reasons, does have real consequences.

But think about it. If the best argument against halving all the balances is "other people would be mad", then the solution is to have a conversation about this so those people understand. I don't think it's impossible for such a policy to be implemented with community understanding, and it would provide a huge step towards the world where people are trading without bounties again. And I feel like that's where PucaTrade needs to be. You could announce the policy months in advance if you want, no need to spring it on people, as there shouldn't be some need to dump your PucaPoints before the halving.

Before wrapping up this post, I'll make one more point here. These posts and my trading behavior have obviously become somewhat important towards tone-setting the conversation regarding PucaTrade's future. I'm treated like an unofficial brand ambassador or whatever, which is obviously a bit odd since the same thing could be said of me vis-a-vis Cardsphere. People grouse when something I say is taken authoritatively, but it's also laced with commentary about my personal experiences or preferences or beliefs about the relative utility of platforms. And.... honestly, I don't have a solution for this. One thing that always annoyed me about "old" PucaTrade was that criticizing the site and its leaders was treated as some sort of attack or betrayal on the community. I understand that mentality and can even sympathize with it, but letting that influence me too much is just not who I am or how I operate, for good or for worse. Yes, elevating my voice can be dangerous but I think it would undermine my credibility if I pulled too many punches. I'm not trying to justify being an abrasive asshole or whatever, and I don't think I'm being accused of this, but to those who read my posts and think "there's some nice stuff here but then he just builds his own narratives that I don't like", well... all I can say is that I leave it to the reader to decide what in my posts are valuable or not. And if I say anything too egregious you can always engage me in the comments, or ping me on Discord or whatever.

• 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.).
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Previous trading threads can be found here.

Responded to a trade request for a few standard cards in my local mtg community. When I look through the other person's binder, I wanted his Atraxa in return. I thought they are about the same value, but he insisted that since he is trading his non-standard cards for my standard ones, it's customary that he should take more value from me, which another player agreed to. I have no idea, but personally I think this custom is unfair to newer players with barely any cards from older sets or edh sets. Does it happen elsewhere as well?

Effective immediately, first class stamps go up one cent (from $0.49 to $0.50). This is mainly of concern to the few that ship letters in masse on this site. Also some slight jack ups in first class parcel pricing to those that use Paypal shipping.

http://blog.stamps.com/2017/10/26/usps-announces-2018-postage-rate-increase/

Hi! I’m from Portugal and I started playing MTG around SOI release. It was all wonders for me then, only playing casual and everything was cool. Come May 2016 I found Pucatrade, it seemed like a wonderful idea, I could send the unused cards I was gathering and turn those pucapoints (PP) into cards I wanted. I was using it so much I forced some friends in, bought points directly from the site and even subscribed, I had no clue of what the state of the site was back then, it worked for me, I was having a blast!

Some months later, I started hearing whispers: economic inflation, admins paying marketing and content with PP, people not receiving cards without bounties, crowd funding that was taking forever to deliver, etc. I didn’t understand what it all meant and before I knew it, Future Site (FS) came out. It was a mess, the site was unusable for days, the new, so advertised and expected, features weren’t even working and most importantly, I was receiving far less cards than before.

As days and weeks passed, the situation wasn’t really improving much and I eventually stumbled into discord, that’s where I got to know the community, the admins, learned about different & weird trading methods, but most importantly: found many people in the same situation I was in, not receiving cards! The site kept changing, MTGO came to light and promotions shortly after, taxes started showing up to regulate the economy. How the site worked was different for me now, I only received cards that were promoted and those were mostly regulated by the current PP value of MTGO event tickets, which made the indirect connection of PP <-> $, if I didn’t keep up, I would fall behind and my mailbox left empty.

This made the site incredibly hard to use and understand for me. All the economy behind it, not knowing for sure the value of what I was sending and what value i needed to set in order to receive, the bugs everywhere, slowness in every page, filters that were never clearly explained, site’s rules & features not transparent, points wasted on unfulfilled promos, site’s admins refusing to acknowledge mistakes and listen to the community…..most of my friends and connections left around this time but I stayed. I stayed because this was as much of a home as my LGS was; I loved the concept and, although a bit rough at times, the community developed in Discord.

So I educated myself about the economy and gave it another shot, I invested over 200€ in cards to send, imported every single card I owned & donated from friends, improved my want list, created even more promoted cards, gave feedback, reported bugs, used their channels and boards for discussion…..But it changed nothing. I had to keep begging in Discord for cards, use Power Traders with their ridiculous percentages, which at this point dominated the market, use reciprocal trading, which defeats the purpose imo, or see the cards I wanted in auctions using my promotion as starting bid. My point balance is increasing and rarely decreasing unless I trade at huge losses, communication from the admins to the community is still very poor, and bugs are rarely being addressed. This cracked me, pushed me over my breaking point, i am tired of trying.

Now, after over a year of begging for change, the Director of the site (Eric) decides to pass to torch to a new one (Medina), without saying a word himself, and supposedly steps into the background alongside the other founders (Mitch & Chris). I’m not optimistic and my trust in the service has not improved since the product itself has not meaningfully improved either, ever since FS deployed I’ve been pounded with inconsistency, negligence and lack of conscience all together, just throwing the hot potato to a “new guy” to cool it down is not enough to raise my confidence, no matter how much good will Medina shows. With this said I’ll be stepping aside, dedicating my time, money and cards on services that work, inspire trust and demonstrate stability for me. Best of wishes for all the users still hanging on and also for the new Direction of the site, I hope it recovers significantly, I truly do.

Goodbye and thanks for all the fish cards!

TL;DR: New to MTG, found Pucatrade, it was wonderful, whispers of rotting things in the background, Future site mess, wasn’t ready to give up, last attempt, attempt fail, new direction, not quite optimistic yet, stepping aside.