As you guys know, we have been using TcgPlayer prices to show the value of cards, decks and trades.

Our plans going forward were to add our own Deckbox Prices as soon as the Market feature got enough traction to provide meaningful values, but to keep the TcgPlayer ones as an option for users that considered them more useful or relevant. This is sadly no longer possible.

We have received very insistent requests (i.e. legal threats) from TcgPlayer asking us to remove all price information we get from their website. While using publicly displayed prices does not (as far as I can tell) actually represent copyright infringement [1], we want to build useful websites for our users, not argue and fight with other companies, so we hereby fully comply.


So what now?

Since the market feature has just launched and cannot provide meaningful price data yet, we will move to use prices imported from amazon.com for valuing cards & trades. We hope to switch to our own prices in a few weeks time.

If you see prices that are completely off or missing please let us know in this topic: http://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=85547

Until then, we will provide a warning message on trade & set pages so all users are aware of the change. There is also link on each card page to the tcgplayer page, for easy access for users that wish to quickly assess the prices there.


We are sorry for the inconveniences caused, and we will do our best to find a good, permanent solution for varied and relevant price data as fast as we can.


[1] http://web.mit.edu/smadnick/www/wp/2010-05.pdf


Later edit: Posting a reply I made later in this thread, for clarification of our intent:

We are really sorry for this situation, and if it had been avoidable, we would have avoided it, but sadly we cannot.

I have tried to discuss and reason with Tcgplayer, offered my thanks for the collaboration until now, explained our position on the market and general strategy / plans for the future. All we received in return were legal threats.

We do understand the need for reliable pricing, and we will find a way to provide them. We want them to be more reliable than the tcgplayer ones and fix all the issues that we had with them, the ones our users kept reporting.

We were not able to do that before, but we are able to do that in the future. The future is bright :)[/1][/1]

This seems to have really complicated things since Amazon seems to be very off comparatively to TCGplayer and they seem to lack data points in general for many, many cards.

How will deckbox prices work? What if the card has never been sold in your marketplace?

EDIT: You even get some Yu-Gi-Oh card prices with this new system.

http://deckbox.org/mtg/Berserk --> Click Amazon.com.

I know you must have hastily set this up to comply with TCGplayer, but I just wanted to point out some initial flaws I saw.

Sorry, I know this must be really annoying.

Actinide wrote:This seems to have really complicated things since Amazon seems to be very off comparatively to TCGplayer and they seem to lack data points in general for many, many cards.

We are still importing some of the foil prices, and fixing some of the missing ones, so this should be better later today.

How will deckbox prices work? What if the card has never been sold in your marketplace?

We will base our prices, much like tcgplayer does, on min/max and median values for all currently listed cards for sale. We are pretty sure we will have enough price points for this a month from now at the latest.

sebi wrote: We will base our prices, much like tcgplayer does, on min/max and median values for all currently listed cards for sale. We are pretty sure we will have enough price points for this a month from now.

What if the card is not listed for sale anywhere on your website, like some really rare stuff that isn't often found as frequently? How will those be priced? I'm obviously playing devil's advocate here a bit since we as users can and should still refer to TCGPlayer for the time being and for anything we are unsure of.

EDIT: Or, will this be abusable with people setting prices on a separate account for rare stuff and forcing a particular price on certain cards in trades?

Thanks for reporting Berserk, I fixed it. I also just opened a new topic in Site Feedback for people to easily report this kind of issues: http://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=85547

For really rare stuff we will still display amazon prices, or pherhaps other price source from the web that we can use (i.e. from companies that will not sue us for it).

The pricing will not be abusable. We will have treshholds for seller accounts that count in price calculations (i.e. if you have not sold anything or have negative score, you do not count) etc.

In addition, we will also actively ban and suspend anyone who tries to manipulate pricing. We want to have a body of serious and respected sellers here, on whose prices and service to buyers we (and the buyers) can count.

Do you know if any of the random conglomerate sites (mtgprice/mtgstocks) have their pricing data available for use? They aren't actually selling websites, so I don't know if they would care if you used their pricing.

Again, we are really sorry for this situation, and if it had been avoidable, we would have avoided it, but sadly we cannot.

I have tried to discuss and reason with the president of Tcgplayer, offered my thanks for the collaboration until now, explained our position on the market and general strategy for the future in a clear way. All we received were legal threats.

But we do understand the need for reliable pricing, and we will find a way to provide them. We want them to be more reliable than the tcgplayer ones and fix all the issues that we had with them, and that people kept reporting.

We were not able to do that before, but we are able to do that in the future.

Oh, I totally don't blame you and I totally believe that you did everything in your power to keep the pricing model as stable as possible. I hope I don't come off that way. I just want to be clear on what your plans are going forward because I do love using deckbox as a vehicle for my trading (and hope I have provided you some money via the TCGplayer API referrals at some point). I just don't want everything to fall apart because the pricing situation got a bit weird.

Actinide wrote:Oh, I totally don't blame you and I totally believe that you did everything in your power to keep the pricing model as stable as possible. I hope I don't come off that way. I just want to be clear on what your plans are going forward because I do love using deckbox as a vehicle for my trading (and hope I have provided you some money via the TCGplayer API referrals at some point).

Yep, sure! We totally understand. Keep the questions / suggestions coming, glad to answer.

I just don't want everything to fall apart because the pricing situation got a bit weird.

I am very convinced it will not only not fall apart, but it will be better! And I am rarely convinced of things, as laura might confirm :D

It shouldn't be a shock that your business model to facilitate 3rd-party transactions is in conflict with your sources card pricing. I'd recommend scraping eBay regularly and creating your own historical DB of card values.

EDIT: typo

Have you looked at MTG stocks? I heard they recently opened an API.

EDIT: is this because you guys explicitly added a market/sales functionality? If so... Get rid of it. I feel like your primary user base is traders not sellers (though I could be wrong). Maybe you should do some research or poll your active user base. I've sold stuff here occasionally, but I'd rather have TCG pricing integrated rather than a specific sales function.

Almost all of the cards, especially lower value cards, have a price of zero for me. There's no way I'm going to individually look up prices of dozens of <$1 cards, and then negotiate manually over them with a trading partner, so the site essentially becomes useless for me until then -- trust in a price is what makes the system work. If people can't trust the prices, trading (and buying) basically grinds to a halt for most folks. This isn't really a happy tradeoff for most of us in exchange for the marketplace feature. I think almost everyone sees would see this as a worse version of deckbox than the one we had two weeks ago. Hopefully your plans to fix this come about soon, and most importantly, hopefully the prices are ones that the community as a whole can buy into. Bad or unstable prices are worse than no prices.

Best of luck!

Paddock wrote:It shouldn't be a shock that your business model to facilitate 3rd-party transactions is in conflict with your sources card pricing. I'd recommend scraping eBay regularly and creating your own historical DB of card values.

EDIT: typo

The problem with this is the inability to keep up with price spikes which is already difficult enough as it is.

buughost wrote:is this because you guys explicitly added a market/sales functionality? If so... Get rid of it.

Thank you for the (very candid) feedback, but we are pretty determined to create a functional and successful marketplace in addition to trading.

Almost all of the cards, especially lower value cards, have a price of zero for me.

Yep, we are looking at this issue today. It's because there are many sellers on amazon that set prices to 1 cent for commons and charge for shipping.

I too would recommend pursuing an alternative way to monetize deckbox that doesn't step on tcgplayer's toes and allows you to keep access to their data. Deckbox does not have an adequate critical mass of sellers to generate consistent pricing and tcgplayer pricing a collection was a big draw to coming here. It seems like adding premium paid features and commission based referrals may be a safer way to monetize.

bactgudz wrote:I too would recommend pursuing an alternative way to monetize deckbox that doesn't step on tcgplayer's toes and allows you to keep access to their data.

They will not allow us to do this anymore, and we do not want their help anymore. :) Tcgplayer prices are gone forever.

sebi wrote:

buughost wrote:is this because you guys explicitly added a market/sales functionality? If so... Get rid of it.

Thank you for the (very candid) feedback, but we are pretty determined to create a functional and successful marketplace in addition to trading.

Then I'm sure you can expect quite a number of users to become frustrated with the site and largely stop using it.

You were doing one thing really well. Why compromise that in order to add half-baked functionality as well as diminish your ability to fulfill your original goal. I would strongly suggest polling your audience before making such huge decisions on their behalf. I understand you're the product owner, but you also don't want to leave your user-base feeling abandoned. I'm speaking not only as a user of the system, but as a UX/Usability professional.

This is why usability and focus-group testing are so important to the software/product life-cycle.

buughost wrote: You were doing one thing really well. Why compromise that in order to add half-baked functionality as well as diminish your ability to fulfill your original goal. I would strongly suggest polling your audience before making such huge decisions on their behalf. I understand you're the product owner, but you also don't want to leave your user-base feeling abandoned. I'm speaking not only as a user of the system, but as a UX/Usability professional.

Because we would have had to completely shut the website down in absence of a monetization strategy.

sebi wrote:

buughost wrote: You were doing one thing really well. Why compromise that in order to add half-baked functionality as well as diminish your ability to fulfill your original goal. I would strongly suggest polling your audience before making such huge decisions on their behalf. I understand you're the product owner, but you also don't want to leave your user-base feeling abandoned. I'm speaking not only as a user of the system, but as a UX/Usability professional.

Because we would have had to completely shut the website down in absence of a monetization strategy.

And certainly there are other options to explore than this.

buughost wrote: And certainly there are other options to explore than this.

I'm sorry if I have a beligerent tone, was not intended. I'm also trying to candidly respond to your worries. They are our worries too. :)

We're here for 6 years, with basically no revenue, and we devoted a lot of days and nights and weekends to this website. Sadly, life catches up and you can't do that anymore.

We did search for options. This one seemed to be the best one for us, but most importantly it seemed be best one for you, our users.

We know we can do better than tcgplayer, and we will try to do that, for trades, sales, and collectors. I'm fully commited to this.

First and foremost, you guys, this stinks, and I am disappointed in TCG. I was wondering whether they considered their prices some sort of intellectual property, as well as if the marketplace launch intensified their efforts, if for nothing else than stamping out a potential competitor. At any rate, once things stabilize and you get a reliable set of prices, it could turn out to be a strong alternative to what's already out there in the secondary market, which is a good thing.

rfioren wrote:Almost all of the cards, especially lower value cards, have a price of zero for me.

I've noticed the same here, even with more recent high-dollar cards such as Archangel of Thune. Suffice it to say, I'm putting any future trades on hold for a while. I can't imagine how many heated discussions are afoot with folks trying to salvage existing trades. :(

What precisely are you pulling from Amazon? I've observed a massive range of prices on cards based on the selling price + the shipping price, and it seems a decent percentage of them charge way more than the mean. If you're doing an average of all sellers, that helps, but the padding of shipping prices and sellers' practice of cheap buy price + high shipping price to entice a sale seems unreliable (as I see sebi has already alluded to in a recent reply).

Supreme best of luck to you all.

I don't understand the negativeness. TCG Player has a lot of problems that not a lot of other mtg market websites address. If Deckbox can do a better job at facilitating person to person sales of cards, then I for one am happy to be along for the experimental ride.

It shouldn't take too long for enough data to come through to balance the prices. Rome wasn't built in a day, so they say. Deckbox is my favorite way to inventory cards, so the addition of a market (besides the already robust trading system) seems like a perfect fit. In fact, when I first started using Deckbox, I had expected them to already have something like that in place.

This is an april fool's joke, right?

Well, if early indicators are to believed, this is probably going to end very badly. :(

Amazon prices are a disaster, I'm going to suspend all non-accepted trades and go inactive until something more reliable can be arranged. Mtgprice.com also offers an API which may be somewhat better just amazon prices. Any chance you could try something like that out?

jambarama wrote:Amazon prices are a disaster, I'm going to suspend all non-accepted trades and go inactive until something more reliable can be arranged. Mtgprice.com also offers an API which may be somewhat better just amazon prices. Any chance you could try something like that out?

I kind of have to agree, for the time being until things get sorted out, I'm putting my account on vacation. Not that I can price reference trades myself but Amazon is not reliable for pricing imo. I would also suggest looking into the new MTGprice API.

Number1TheLarch wrote:I don't understand the negativeness.

The negativity is coming from the fact that there was no warning. There was no survey to see what users of the site wanted to do. There was no transition period. We woke up this morning, and it was "SURPRISE! The site is currently broken. Trading as you once knew it doesn't work anymore. Wheeee!"

I would also second (third, or whatever) the MTGPrice avenue.

Link to the Relevant API page on MTGPrice

Current Stipulations:

• If you use the prices from the API on a web page or in a mobile app, please include the following html on the page the price appears in at least 10-point font: "MTG Price data provided by: MTGPrice.com" (with the link)
• If you plan to use this data to keep your store prices up to date, let us know first. This use is fine but we may want to talk to you to improve it.
• This service is free. It costs us money to run it. Please don't abuse it. We reserve the right to cut service, without notice, from anyone we deem to be misusing the service.
• Please cache the results you get back. Right now, we only update daily (it will be hourly by January 2014) so there is no need to re-fetch the same data more than 1-2 times in a day, per set.
• (very important!) This is a BETA product. Prices will be wrong, period. All we can promise is to try to get them fixed if anyone tells us. In particular, I would not trust Alpha/Beta/Unlimited prices yet, nor some of the obscure "promo" cards. We have a fix in the works for those sets. All of that being said, having good prices is important to us, so let us know if anything looks odd.

cancelled all open trades due to this pricing issue that adding the market place has caused. Now past trades i cant track the performance of them or my collection value awesome.

Let me know when this is fixed so i can bother with this site again

It absolutely sucks for you and all of us users that TCGPlayer has cut access to their pricing API. But you'd have to be pretty naïve to believe that they would continue to let you have access to one of their most valuable assets, at their largesse, when you are setting up a site that essentially directly competes with them.

And while I feel bad about your financial struggles and greatly appreciate all the work you have done for us over the years, I admit that it's hard to feel too sympathetic when you have steadfastly refused to accept any form of support via donations or the like for the many years that I have been around. I have, and continue to financially support sites like Cube Tutor, that provide a similar service.

For those suggesting MTGPrice, I would be surprised if they would hand out an API key to deckbox when doing so would jeopardize their access to TCGPlayer's and other site's data.