Show HN: Mana Pool – Market for Magic Cards (manapool.com)

Anyways, it's a cool site. I've been interested in dabbling in MTG software for a little while now. I have mostly played on Arena, but I have friends who play paper Magic religiously. Was thinking of AI/LLM-based deck-building tools, etc.

I'm not sure what your goals are with this (if you're trying to make it a legit business or it's just a hobbyist project), but I'd be interested in freelancing if that's something you guys ever look for. I have previous experience as a software engineer at a marketplace startup (which is mostly valuable as an experience of a couple things to watch out for from a business perspective--the technical aspects of a basic P2P marketplace are pretty simple).

You can see the deck/mass uploader start here: https://manapool.com/deck/add

I've got about 2,000 M:TG cards bought between 1995 and 2001 just sitting in a couple boxes collecting dust. I'd love to have a fast way to scan them all and inventory them and figure out what's worth trying to sell and what I should just throw away.

At this point, I'd be willing to pay a 25% commission to just ship the entire boxes somewhere and let them handle it all.

YIKES. That's certainly one way to look at a market: unbridled optimism that it will never shrink!

Selling a collection as a whole will likely get you 60-70% of market value, piecing it out will get you closer to 90 after shipping and fees. Sealed product of that wera has a much higher valuation being sealed. There’s not much left.

Of course, if you don’t want to sell, the apps will still let you track valuations and deltas.

Magic has recently had a downturn, retracing from 2020-2021 peaks )some might even call a bubble). Collectors for your era of cards are reaching peak purchasing power, though, so there likely won’t be a crash until they die off (if at all).

Everyone I know who exited said selling their early stuff has always been their biggest regret.

What I'm trying to say is what sets you guys apart, or why would I as a seller (or buyer) prefer to use Mana Pool over TCG?

Is it commission? I'll say from personal experience that 10% commission (or 10.25% or whatever) is quite expensive as a seller. If the commission is the killer, are you hoping to capture more of the market from TCG for Magic? Is it sustainable to run a price war on commission?

Genuinely asking all of this btw, I do prefer the design here to tcg

1. Limiting cards to standard. 2. Making the game 1v1 instead of a 4-player deathmatch.

(1) is unpopular with existing players for obvious reasons, but it is great for new players because it makes it much easier to get cards (even cheap cards can be difficult to actually obtain if they were only printed once back in 2003) and because you limit the number of mechanics players need to know about. For example, there are plenty of confusing mechanics present in eternal formats not present in standard like reanimate, splice, and morph.

(2) simplifies the game immensely because you only need to deal with two boards. It's also a much better fit for tournaments and game store events. I'm so much of a more competent player in 1v1 because I can actually read the board.

For many enfranchised players, that’s because they keep printing chase rares that power creep their way into staple status in older formats. Meaning, if you play competitively or semi-competitive eternal formats like legacy or edh, what used to be a very slow trickle of relevant cards from every other standard set is now 2-3 additional major releases a year, with dozens of cards at or above your format’s power level.

In addition to printing more products that you must interface with to play it competitively, they also decide that more products should be allowed into those formats that previously would not be. As an example, the joke sets now are split between cards that are legal in legacy and commander and cards that aren’t, when before joke sets were entirely self contained and would never need to be considered by competitive players.

Beyond power creep, the pressure to continually design new things that aren’t obviously just better versions of old things has driven them to use more and more text with more and more new rules per year, to the point where they don’t fit on the cards anymore and they must make reference to other cards outside the game. Take the recent initiative ability that brings up a card of more abilities, the rules of how to travel through them aren’t explained on either the original card or the dungeon card! It was created for fans of D&D, but it was strong enough to have a card banned from the legacy format. Established players in that format could not ignore it and still play competitively.

I quit the game because I believe it's so far the opposite in the other direction. Secret lair sets with fomo limited time high cost mechanically unique cards. So much power creep, bans happening practically every set now, increasingly ridiculous monetization strategies, I could go on.

Even the OG golden goose TCG is dead to me now. I wish we could have a good card game but the TCG model is just doomed to head in this direction, I'll play all inclusive board games and card games now.

It's still a little clunky, but handling priority is generally a nightmare in a 4 person game. I think that's part of why Arena doesn't even bother trying. Waiting for 4 people to pass priority is annoyingly long when it happens like 12 times per turn. Games would take all day to complete.

Sadly, Netrunner is dead and the license lost, so not a lot of hope for new, official cards any time soon.

But more seriously, we might have other brands in the future... the domains need to all be awesome.