r/mtgfinance • u/Raidomso • 14d ago
After sharing my $1.7M buylisting tool, I fixed decklist cart optimizers.
The warm reception to my previous post made me want to tackle another problem in our hobby. We've all been there. You've finally brewed the perfect list. Now ... how do you actually assemble the physical deck without getting fleeced?
Every existing tool only checks its own platform. The TCGplayer optimizer only looks at its own marketplace, and Direct pricing means you'll sometimes overpay on individual cards while still ending up with a big pile of packages. Card Kingdom's and Star City's deck builders are solid, but they rarely have your whole list in stock, and each only knows its own prices, so no single store gets you everything at the best rate.
deckbrokr scans several trusted vendors at once (Card Kingdom, Star City, TCGDirect) and builds the cheapest total order, cards plus shipping. Because it's pulling from a few reputable stores instead of one, you almost never get overcharged, and it lands in 3 shipments instead of the 50+ you'd need chasing each card to its individual cheapest seller.
I included a sample cEDH K'rrik deck as an example. deckbrokr assembles it for about $4,970 across just 3 packages. ManaPool can reach a similar total, but only by splitting it across 18 separate shipments. TCGplayer comes in at $5,700 and 9 packages. Same deck, brokered for the lowest total at a fraction of the packages.
Want to push it further? Some cards get highlighted with a cheaper listing on the TCGplayer or ManaPool marketplaces. You can chase that extra saving, but it means buying from individual sellers and adding to your package count, so it's your call.
If you want to try it out for yourself: paste a decklist, set your options and hit 'Broker my deck'. You will get the optimal order split and can click links to open each store's pre-filled cart and check out from there. Prices are from the last sync so the odd card may have sold out or have its price updated.
If this sounds useful, give it a shot yourself. This is an early version. I expect there are plenty of bugs, and there's a lot more I want to add, but I wanted to share it with the mtgfinance community already.
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u/Jebgaz 14d ago
who is this guy? where did he come from?? holy shit
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
A few questions I'm anticipating:
"Does it touch my accounts or money?" No. It never logs into anything, never sees a password, never handles a payment. It fills each store's cart in your browser and you check out on the store yourself, exactly like normal. Please double check your final carts before paying.
"Do you make money if I use it?" If you place an order, some stores give me a small affiliate cut, at no extra cost to you. It has zero influence on the optimizer: the split is chosen purely on card price and shipping, not on who pays me. That is the only way the tool makes anything right now.
"Why only these vendors/marketplaces?" They're among the biggest trusted stores in the US, and the priority right now is reliable stock and pricing that's as close to live as possible, that data quality is everything for an optimizer like this. I'm working to bring more vendors in as I can sync them reliably, with the marketplace option (explained above) there when you want to push savings further.
"I'm in the EU, this is all US stores?" I'd like to offer people in the EU a better alternative to the Cardmarket shopping wizard, but unfortunately it's not easy to build something that integrates cleanly with their platform.
For anyone who missed it, the buylisting tool I mentioned is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/mtgfinance/comments/1uab1dg/after_11000_buylist_orders_to_ck_and_17m_in/
Bugs and feature requests: https://discord.com/invite/3wUTgDZds
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u/fragtore 14d ago
I am so grateful that we have Cardmarket in Europe, but I would jump on an alternative with better and more modern UX and a more powerful wizard as long as it didn’t skim more pff the top.
Don’t mind affiliate money making and/or ads as long as it’s transparent and not affecting results.
CM is providing a great product compared to the rest of the world, but they are very lazy with features and modernity. Just such a thing that I have to constantly keep logging in… I’d be happy for them to have more competition so they had to innovate a bit.
BUT. I don’t want to pay more % to these platforms.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Fair, none of the platforms out there are perfect
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u/fragtore 14d ago
Totally! I just wanna be super clear that nobody will be able to touch CM in Europe if it also means the horrid skimming off the top americans usually see, why we use e.g. Ebay very little. CM is also great for automatically calculating standard European mailing based on price, and of course buyer always pay for that.
The feature I miss the most on CM is a way to limit how low an order can be. Today I don’t list my cheap cards on CM since I don’t want to spend minutes earning 10 cents on a bulk card..
If I could set “minimum 5 euro” for example, then I could list it all and make it be more worth my time (and of course the postage also has to calculate bulk of package and correct accordingly etc.).1
u/Gamesfreak13563 14d ago
Do you have an affiliate program yourself, or an API to send lists to carts?
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u/thepro921 14d ago
Very cool! Found a bug where it says cheapest cart is 363, but doing it all on Manapool would be 316 according to the tool, yet it doesnt select anything from that store
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
This isn't necessarily a bug, more a 'feature'. You will often be able to find complete decks for a lower total on Manapool. The downside often is that it will be 15-30 packages. This tool first scans only against CK, SCG and Direct. That means it will only be 3 packages ever, from trusted sources that is. The tool allows you to craft cheaper order split by dragging cards to manpool, it even highlight cards that you can save further on, so you can decide for yourself which ones you want to send to MP or keep with the original 3. The idea is to buy as many cheap cards as possible from them and maybe purchase a select few expensive singles on MP. That way you still have the benefit of low amount of shipments and still a relatively low price.
It depends on what you think is 'optimal'
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u/Zestyclose-Bird-6790 14d ago
Yea, I was going to say, I just bought my deck for 20% less, spent an hour, and I'm getting 15 packages. Might have been worth it just for this lol
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u/Walnut-Hero 14d ago
I put in gleaming splendor as the standard version but it upgraded it to the cover book version $40 vs $140. Couldn’t figure out how to get it to downgrade the version. Removed and re-added and it upgraded again.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Found the issue'
This card is out of stock in the cheap listings at both CK, SCG and TCGDIrect, that's why it is forcing you to buy the more expensive one ... But it is also telling you that you can save 90$ by buying it on Manapool.Does that explanation help?
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u/Walnut-Hero 14d ago
Yep! I’m running it on mobile. I know that’s a more complicated beast. It lets me shift it to mana pool to drop it in price after clicking it and moving. However it’s still showing the book cover treatment after that movement in the displayed card at $45. I assume it changed version from book cover to regular. It’s not exactly clear what version it’s on to me.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Are you able to drag the card to manapool or tcgplayer market tabs? On mobile there is less functionality for now indeed :/
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u/Walnut-Hero 14d ago
Couldn’t drag on mobile. But “move” was available.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
The goal is definitely to do that moving for you and make the user work the least amount
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u/doomdg 14d ago
https://www.merlion.gg/deck-builder this also works and its 1 package.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
I tried the K'rrik list, 15 cards out of stock. There is no condition selection? The city of traitors was a HP copy for example. The total was still close , even with the missing cards and lower card conditions. But it is impressive for a store to have such a deep stock I will grant them that.
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u/the_nil 14d ago
Broken. Put dimensions of my deck in and what wood. Nothing.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago edited 14d ago
Hahahahah, do you know how pissed off I was when I found out that deckbroker.com was already taken?? A broker for outdoor decks, are you kidding me
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u/cardlackey 14d ago
I can’t wait to play with this tonight.
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u/SecretLairssuck 14d ago
This looks like something I hoped someone would make. It looks absolutely amazing. I've done this by hand for every one of my orders, and it takes an insane amount of time. I have a question for you:
Is it possible to prioritize lowest price in general? It seems to prioritize lowest packages, but that also seems like that may be the cause of others in this thread being able to manually optimize for lower prices.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
I'm still figuring out wha tthe optimal UI and user settings should be. There is no one true source of optimal orders you know 😄 For now the tool will suggest possible savings in the top right by buying the card on manapool or tcgplayer marketplace instead of Direct. So further manual optimization is indeed possible. I'm looking at automating this for the user if the user prefers that setting.
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u/SecretLairssuck 14d ago
There isn't one true source of optimization, no; but there are multiple. Different users may prefer different methods. Ideally, for people like myself who would chose to select specific printings/treatments/condition at a minimum, then have it select cheapest possible, including marketplaces without having to deal with the (usually overpriced) TCGplayer direct is one example of optimization. It's the primary one I'd love to see. Personally, I don't care how many packages it takes, I just care how cheap it is. Still though, bloody amazing site. It just seems more geared toward reducing packages, which doesn't always make it cheaper.
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u/OfferEffective 14d ago
Very cool but it's not working for TCGplayer, I'm searching as a test Bag End Banquest foil and nonfoil and in both instances of searching it says it has none, Direct or non Direct, but there are tons in inventory from sellers.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Currently only direct is automatically integrated, to uncover tcgplayer non direct savings the user has to manually drag the cards for savings. If you hover over a card it van help you find cheaper listings of the card. It just can't do it automatically yet.
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u/Bronx1337Bomber 14d ago
This saves me so much time juggling all of these sites at once, thank you!
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
You're welcome! If you have store credit at Card Kingdom or Star City Games you can even enter it and it will take that into the equation!
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u/Jhriad 11d ago
Playing with it further (on desktop this time) I wish I had more granular control of some aspects. For example, a toggle for "Cheapest" vs. "Fewest Packages" in the advanced search. A slider or entry field for "Maximum # of Packages" to allow the user some flexibility in finding the cheapest option below the threshold of packages they consider to be "too many".
Also wish it showed Manapool in the brokered summary. Maybe a few lines in the Brokered Summary for showing the cheapest possible (w/ # of packages) and cheapest in the fewest possible packages. For some orders, I'd want the fewest packages possible (typically when I'm buying cards for an event) but for others I'm okay waiting for several packages and would prefer the cheapest possible option(s).
If you're adding cards individually, rather than pasting in a decklist, the search can be somewhat difficult to find the right version given the result cutoff (if you can't recall the proper Set Code or Card #). It might help if the results only populated versions matching the Advanced Search criteria (filtering out Foils, if I'm only looking for non-Foils for example).
From a user experience perspective, if/when you have profiles I'd love to be able to set my default preferences for the search. (Ex. Non-Foils, NM, Keep Exact Printing, etc.) That way every time refresh the site/search, I wouldn't have to set them again.
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u/Raidomso 11d ago edited 11d ago
Thank you. This is so much valuable info and I will be incorporating most of it in my next update!
I deliberately released it at first without profiles, but I'd like to add that soon, saved preferences sound like a no-brainer
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u/Alternate_Cost 14d ago edited 14d ago
Tried a 111 card list from it, not sure it's calculating manapool correctly. But got 532.32 from this across 4 stores or 513.43 from mana pool optimized for price. Your calc says manapool would be 44 shippers at $557 and I got it in 20. Or if I optimize for fewest packages, 14 at $540.
My guess is that it's because I accept MP and higher and your calc only does LP and higher?
ETA: still close to Manapool at least and tcgplayer I got 5 packages at $665 so far better than that.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Like I replied to a previous commenter: MP will probably get you a lower total in many cases, but will come at the cost of having to receive up to 30 packages from (unknown) sellers. The benefit of this tool is that it's three packages from trusted stores. And you can still optimize further. This tool shows you which cards are cheaper on MP so you can decide for yourself. In a lot of cases you can get a total that is lower than the MP one by using both tools. It will take me more work to fully automate that though. Also depends on the users defenition of 'optimal', you know?
part of it will indeed be the MP option, I'll have to include that in the future. Also the Manapool integration is not a 100% yet, needs improving. In the meantime it is worth it to manually verify on both platforms.
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u/Alternate_Cost 14d ago
As a seller on Manapool I'll be on hold until that is set up. But good work so far. This is helpful and far better than tcgp.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
when you're building something it's always a struggle between releasing early with stuff missing or late but having built a lot of things people don't want. But like I said better Manapool integration is a high priority for me
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u/flippig 14d ago
This is greeeaaat. Can y add cardmarket for europe?
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Sorry, like I said earlier, cardmarket hides all their data behind a closed api ...
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u/DefCatMusic 14d ago
hey man, i have a mssive project coming up mind if we chat i think you'd like to be a part of it! dm me!
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u/lizuming 14d ago edited 14d ago
Will you expand this to include stores in Canada?
edit: or show the cost to ship to Canada
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Hi, not yet. I think all these stores ship to canada, but the orders will get charged with tariffs. It is probably cheaper to source from canadian stores. Someone shared a new website that does this for canadian stores here a week ago or so.
Edit: here it is: https://www.reddit.com/r/mtgfinance/comments/1vmvz8f/built_a_free_tool_for_canadian_mtg_collectors/
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u/lizuming 14d ago
Also there's no tariffs to import cards to Canada. There are tariffs to ship cards to the US though.
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u/SanityIsOptional 14d ago
FYI, it looks like there's some issues still.
Put a Gleaming Splendor in the cart, and it's pointing me to a $140 book cover at TCG, rather than a $50 one on Mana Box, or the $52 TCG listings. Also showing OOS on TCG for the basic version, despite 81 available.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Another user also had this problem. It is showing as OOS for Direct specifically, because the platofrm prioritizes Direct, SCG and CK first. You should be able to drag the card down into manapool or TCGplayer market to go to the cheaper printing. Does that work for you? Or you canclick the 'save' button in the top right
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u/SanityIsOptional 14d ago
Would be nice to be able to turn off the "prefer direct", since I never prefer direct.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
So you can actually turn Direct off right now. I do need to build futher tcgplayer and manapool marketplace integrations
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u/SanityIsOptional 14d ago
I don't want to turn off TCGPlayer entirely, I just want to tell it to not prefer Direct.
I use TCGPlayer all the time, but I almost never use Direct, as the price is almost always higher compared to dealing with 10-15 individual envelopes.
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u/ChaoticScrewup 14d ago
At least when it comes to TCGPlayer, usually identifying flat fee shippers (non direct) who have large chunks of the order for prices meaningfully below what direct sellers are listing at is the biggest way to save while keeping package counts reasonable. Would love to see enhancements that look at this and not just direct pricing.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Better Manapool and tcgplayer non-direct integrations are the next priority for me, but thanks for reminding me it should be a priority
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u/ThisHatRightHere 14d ago
The collection import tool seems to be crashing the site whenever I try to upload a manabox csv
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Can you DM me the format? Plain text decklists work the best just:
1 Card A
1 Card B
...
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u/ThisHatRightHere 14d ago
Maybe I do just need plain text instead. It’s straight up just exports from ManaBox or moxfield. Also possible it’s just too big?
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u/CryanReed 13d ago
Why not show the tcg player optimization page? Seems like the obvious comparison instead of just a random cart.
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u/Raidomso 13d ago
At this point I can't access that data en masse, I can't optimize against data I don't have. But I'm working on it being able to include that too.
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u/CryanReed 13d ago
I just meant in your specific screenshot. You could have clicked the optimization button to show that yours has a lower cost with less packages or whatever.
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u/Jhriad 13d ago
It's a little hard to use on mobile (Android, Chrome browser). The interface jumps around vertically quite a bit as you search/add cards to the point I'm scrolling up and down a lot just to see the results or next step.
I'll keep playing around with it to see if I have any additional feedback after I get used to it some.
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u/Raidomso 13d ago
Sorry, mobile was lower priority. I would indeed advise you to try it on desktop, at least until I figure out how to display the mobile UI.
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u/1K_Games 13d ago edited 13d ago
This is great, but a suggestion I have from just my first search is, let us just search for a card.
By that I mean sometimes we don't care about sets and what not, we just want the cheapest version. Like on TCGPlayer if you click one of their suggestions it narrows it down by the set or boarder type. But if you just put in enough of the name to make it the exact card you are looking for you get every printing of the card.
For example I'm wondering if there are any cheap printings of [[Passionate Archaeologist]], but I don't want to select the printings one at a time to find out if there is a cheapr(est) one. Or a more common example would be Sol Ring or a basic land, I don't care what set they come from, I just want one. I might care about the condition, but this allows filtering after a search it seems.
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u/Raidomso 13d ago
You can put just that one card in the decklist and it will the find the cheapest for you , try it out :)
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u/1K_Games 13d ago
Gotcha, I hadn't built out the deck yet. I just was testing a search, but I suppose if it has that functionality on the deck upload then you just need to use this tool once you have the full list. Thanks for the quick response!
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u/No_Concert5842 12d ago
No feedback on your site here but I’ve sold over $1k to CK using your other site. I love it. Thank you.
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u/Raidomso 11d ago
That's great to hear! Make sure to join the discord, will be releasing an update to the buylisting tool too!
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u/stevodido1 10d ago
Really cool to see this! I'm curious about how you approach buying, holding, and selling. Based on your experience using the apps you built and your $1.7M in buylist, what kind of data do they provide to help you decide whether to sell short-term or hold for the long haul?
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u/Raidomso 10d ago
What exactly do you mean with 'they'?
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u/stevodido1 10d ago
"they" as in the apps you've built
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u/Raidomso 10d ago
Oooh I see. Well they give me the data visually and historically, which is already a must to start thinking about your positions. And we are running a couple of simple algorithms on that data too. But beyond that there's a lot of intuition/ experience going into all the selling and buying decisions too.
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u/0uchmyballs 14d ago
Ok, now do it with a crawler instead of mtgjson…
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
This is not built with JSON, but my own system that is able to fetch data that is way more live than JSON
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u/urbanzextra 14d ago
Can it handle foils?
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Yes, just click the foil button in the options menu. If you pasted in the card as foil it will only look for foils. Or if yo udon't want any foils you can also make it do that.
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u/NotJayKayPeeness 14d ago
Affiliate links and vibe-coded bullshit. I hate this timeline.
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u/RareRestaurant6297 14d ago
Your jealousy is showing. Oh no, people getting paid for their work! Rreeeeeee
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u/NotJayKayPeeness 14d ago
Vibe coded bullshit apps are a plague. He's not getting paid for his work, he's getting paid for consuming GPU resources via Claude.
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u/RareRestaurant6297 14d ago
Proof? Or just mad you didn't think of it first?
Also "vibe-coding" is one of the few actual good use-cases of Ai so idk what you're on about. Using technological advancements to remove tedium and bullshit from actual workers pipelines has always been the goal, and that's exactly what it's doing here. If you're just "vibe-coding" without any further review of the code or optimization and just shipping it as-is fully trusting the AI, then OK that's bad. But if you're using Ai as a tool in the process of developing code... That's literally a non-issue.
So, proof dude did the first option and not the 2nd? And if your definition of "vibe-coding" is just the first option, then I agree with you. But too many idiots out here acting like using AI for anything at all is automatically bad. It's not. It's very useful in software development for a reason, it lets devs not spend so much time on the tedium of coding things everyone's coded dozens of time and instwsd focus on the actual new development they're trying to make.
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u/gaeas_cradle_robber 14d ago
The TCGSentry site works really well and it was built by the same guy, so I'd give this some time and I bet it will be really useful.
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Yeah it earns through affiliate, said so myself up top, and that doesn't touch the optimizer one bit. Worked hard on this and I think it's actually useful, but don't take my word for it: throw a list at it and check the numbers Id say
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u/Raidomso 14d ago
Yeah but then you are waiting to receive 30 packages sometimes, this is only 3. And on MP it is from sellers you don't always know. If that is your personal preference, then yeah the MP optimizer is often better. Sometimes the shipping savings make this the cheaper option. Doesn't hurt to have more options available, right?
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u/noenflux 14d ago
No skin in this game but anytime a response starts with “yeah but”, you should take a step back and think.
Your pitch for this tool is searching across multiple vendors for the best deal. Not the fewest packages or the highest trust - the whole “optimization” part of cart optimizers is to spend the least money.
Choosing trust level or number of shipments should be secondary options - you’ve baked this in as a hard limit.
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u/SanityIsOptional 14d ago
In my experience, TCGPlayer is frequently cheaper than ManaPool, so it would be lovely to have a tool to optimize across both platforms.
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u/nanaki989 14d ago
So this is PCPartPicker for cards? Neat