3 Tiers of PucaTrade Membership

Big changes are happening on PucaTrade this month. I know, I know. Finally, right? We’re almost ready to drop the “Beta” and unveil PucaTrade “Revised.” In my last post, I talked about the cool new features you can expect from Revised. Today, let’s take a look at the changes that are coming to PucaPro (our paid membership program). To give you the bad news before the good—we’re phasing out the deck manager (for now). My feeling is that this is a peripheral feature that would take an extraordinary amount of time and effort to do right. And PucaTrade is a trading website. We want to really nail the trade-oriented features before we offer support for deck management. We may bring this back one day, and when we do, we’ll be sure to give it our fullest attention, and make sure it’s done right. I know some of you may have used this feature for list prioritization (like Wish Lists, etc). We feel that Wish Lists are a key feature of the trading experience, so in addition to Have and Want lists, we’ll be offering a Wish List as well for the cards you want, but aren’t fully ready to trade for. 3 Tiers of PucaTrade Membership As you know, there’s currently 2 tiers of PucaTrade Membership; “Free” and “PucaPro.” When we launch Revised, there will be 3 tiers: Common, Uncommon, and Rare. Common The common level is (unsurprisingly) the free level. This tier is undergoing a huge facelift, and will be exactly 1 million times cooler. But I’m actually not here to hype the coolness right now. There are a couple things that are pretty radically different that I want to communicate to you guys. First off, the Send a Card page will no longer show only the cards you have that other people want and can afford. Now, the Send a Card page will show every card that anyone can afford. The reason we’re structuring it this way is to make the whole signup process easier for new members. Right now, there’s a ton of opacity to the trading process on PucaTrade. People are understandably dejected and confused when they sign up for PucaTrade and immediately go to the Send a Card page—only to find that it’s blank. The fact is, constructing a complete Have List takes time and is a barrier to entry. We want to live up to our promise that you can start trading on PucaTrade in 30 seconds. An important thing to note with this change is that Want Lists will have increased visibility now. Indeed, Want Lists will be publicly visible to other PucaTraders from your profile. That reminds me: you’ll also have customizable profiles now. In the beginning, they’ll be pretty basic. They’ll have support for Avatars, and some optional personal info like your Facebook and Twitter accounts, a text field for anything you wish to share with the world, and your Want Lists. But as we continue to develop some of the more mission-critical features on the site (and get feedback from you guys), we’ll take a closer look at the profile spaces and add the features you all want the most. Uncommon This will be the new PucaPro. Uncommon will be the least expensive paid tier, for the rate of $3.75 per month at the yearly rate (and $5 at the monthly rate). Existing Pro members will be grandfathered in at the current rate until their existing subscription ends. Among other features, PucaTraders at the Uncommon level will be able to trade Foils. By the end of October, our goal is to support Condition and Non-English cards for Uncommon members as well. It was a tough decision to limit the trade of foils to our Pro-Tier members; in my heart of hearts I want everyone to be able to trade foils (and every card, for that matter) for free, but what we realized is that we’re converting almost every existing Pro-feature to a free Common feature, and it was really important to me that you guys still feel like you’re getting great value out of the Uncommon Tier. I don’t doubt that there will come a time in the future when we fully develop the Uncommon Tier and feel that we’re offering $3.75 per month worth of fantastic value to our Uncommon members. At that time it may be appropriate to release Foils, Condition, and Non-English cards at the Common level. But for now, it’s critical that we recoup some of the costs of development for these new features, so that we can finance the development of even better ones. Rare We’re working on a 3rd tier with even more amazing features, but this post is getting a bit long, so I’ll save it for the next one. Until then, Happy Trading! -Eric Freytag Drive a Tranquil Bargain

Cards Traded on PucaTrade:

Mailing out on #pucatrade today: all sorts of wacky Ice Age cards. #mtg

(PucaTrade.com is a new way to trade MtG cards by mail)

Cards Traded on PucaTrade:

Mailing out on #pucatrade today, Taiga! #mtg

(PucaTrade.com is a new way to trade MtG cards by mail)

Cards Traded on PucaTrade:

Welcome home from vacation with a Beta Bolt! #pucatrade

(PucaTrade.com is a new way to trade MtG cards by mail)

twotibsawhisker: gotta sickload of magic cards ready to mail out tomorrow for PucaTrade! Hellll yeaaah gonna get me some points. got this crazy guy being shipped to me at the moment, VERY EXCITING but for now it’s time to shower and sleep! and maybe draw a bit in between that uwu

What are we doing? #PucaTrade Week 32 of 52:

Guess what? We’re getting to the point where we can start announcing a timeline for completed features! Today’s post is all about lifting the veil that surrounds the process of PucaTrade’s development. I’ve been hesitant to write about this in the past because previously the dev process has been a bit nebulous, and I had no interest in setting deadlines that we couldn’t meet. But as we make progress, a timeline for completion is becoming a bit more clear. Anyone who’s checked out PucaTrade’s forums knows that we have over 14 pages of features we want to build. So it’s been a challenge to identify the mission-critical features, and organize the rest by priority. Ordinarily, this might not be the most complicated task in the world, but for those of you who don’t know, my previous developer quit about a year ago and I (Eric Freytag) don’t know any code beyond basic html and css. The new development team consists of some awesome dudes named Mitch Trale and Chris Powell. They’re both visionary developers, masters of code, and MtG enthusiasts. In short, they’re perfect for the job of building a better PucaTrade. So part of the challenge that faced us was that the new dev team basically had to start from scratch. Our original plan was to release all of the version 2.0 features at the same time, but we quickly realized that it would be way better to start making improvements and releasing them incrementally. This would enable you guys to enjoy the progress as soon as possible, while allowing you to participate by offering feedback and suggestions for improvement. So we set about clustering these changes into categories. Since PucaTrade is currently in the “Beta” stage, we decided to continue using this lexicon and started defining the feature-set for “Revised.” The Revised feature set is essentially a re-build of the existing site, with a few awesome improvements mixed in. It turns out that there were some inefficiencies with how the original site was written that would prevent us from scaling the site properly as our membership grew, so first priority was addressing things like that. So the major purpose of Revised is just to get the existing site transferred over to our new platform, and make sure that this transition happens smoothly and seamlessly. This is a huge job, but the good news is that once it’s done we can start releasing features with incredible agility and ease. But don’t worry—along with these (somewhat invisible) back-end improvements, we’ll be able to pick some low-hanging fruit that will really improve your experience of the site. Here’s a list of the new improvements we have scheduled for the Revised stage of development. The site will look way better (thank Godsire). Recipients and Senders will both have visibility on the address information for their trading partners When you log in, you’ll be able to stay logged in. The signup process will utilize 2-factor authentication and e-mail verification. All members will have access to e-mail notification settings, and be able to adjust these from their Profile. The bulk card adder will accept .csv files Lists can be exported into common text-based formats (MODO, mtg workstation, .csv). The Search will include parameters for price, card-format (Standard, Legacy, etc.), and min/max Converted Mana Cost The Search will include sorting mechanisms for Alphabetical, Most Wanted, Most Offered, and Highest/Lowest Price I’m sure there’s a couple items on that list that will cause you to all to collectively breathe sighs of relief, but much of the really cool stuff is scheduled for the next stage of development, which we’ve titled “Legends.” I’ll save some discussion of Legends for another blog post, but to save you from the agony of anticipation, I’ll leave you with this tidbit of inside knowledge: Our goal for the release of these Revised features is early September. PucaTrade levels up this fall.

Cards Traded on PucaTrade:

Just received on #pucatrade Old Man of the Sea! Blue Braids #cmdr is stoked.

(PucaTrade.com is a new way to trade MtG cards by mail)