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It puts you way ahead of most, but I honestly can't understand the presumption that you're entitled to additional value to trade with you. I'm willing to give my LGS margin on buylist deals because I see returns on that extra expense in the form of the community they foster. I get literally nothing for giving someone extra value just to trade with them through this platform.

But the fact that you at least put that in your profile so I can know up front to not even bother is infinitely more than most do, and does in fact save me time in that I would read that, say "fuck that guy", and close the tab. It's when it's not there and they just add a message, "Oh, btw..." to a trade that it's a dick move, since now I've invested time and energy into looking up proper pricing (because this site shot itself in the foot and lost its TCGPlayer API access in the dumbest move I have ever seen).

I may not like you, and may wish you would stop cluttering up this platform with your nonsense, but at least if you're up front about it on your profile the rest of us can just skip over you and not end up wasting our time.

It's not exclusive to this platform either, I run into it all the time at GPs where people will spend 10 minutes pulling things out of binders, then start trying to sneak in that they're looking to turn a profit. It's a classic used car salesman tactic, set up the sunk cost and make them want to not walk away without a completed deal.

PucaTrade used to be great, but it's really gone downhill in the last year and a half. I dumped a bunch of stuff on there this summer, not knowing how much things had shifted....it took me 4 months just to get some standard garbage back, and I still have like 10k points sitting there doing nothing. Apparently almost all trading is now organized as "recip" via Discord, which I think entirely defeats the purpose (like you said, no negotiation, and no need to find a perfect match of haves vs wants). Two years ago when I first tried Puca I had to keep putting myself on vacation mode for a few days at a time because I couldn't keep points in my ledger for more than an hour to save up for a bundle of cards.

I have been intrigued by CardSphere, which seems to be going for what PucaTrade was supposed to be. It's just really young so I'm watching it to see what happens before I get into it.

It's sad that this interface is the bets for inventory management, because speaking as a software engineer, it's painful to use and look at (I can't stop laughing that they hide a mobile friendly interface behind a paywall in 2017). But hey, it's what we have for now, and I will eventually get off my ass and finish writing my own. If not to facilitate trading at first, I at least want a better inventory tool with so many more features that I wish deckbox had.....starting with a modern layout that doesn't look like it's from 2004.

(side note: full of disappointed amusement that I can drag the text box resizer outside of the container)

Super late to this party, but I'm bored this morning and came across this post.

It's something I've had on my (admittedly lengthy) profile for a while.

I will give up extra value to entice someone reluctant to part with a card. I'll give up extra value if I'm trading up into your reserve list card or something.

But if you say flat out "I don't do any trades where I don't get a 15% premium", you can fuck right off.

They often cite store buylists when I challenge them on that attitude of entitlement. Sure, stores buy low and sell at retail....but think about what a store provides. They give you confidence of dealing with an actual business that can be held accountable for any number of things. They provide a nexus for the community by providing a space for gaming, running events, marketing said events to attract players, etc. You support your local store for the convenience of not having to wait for things to come in the mail, but also because of the intangible value you're purchasing that you might not necessarily notice.

The guy on here claiming to be "a store" and demands a premium? Even if you own a brick and mortar store and this is a sideline (doubtful), so what? Your "store" is 1500 miles away and provides nothing to me beyond the awe-inspiring privilege of trading a card with you.

I'll be honest, I've been working on and off on my own trading site to fix a lot of the flaws I see with systems like Deckbox and PucaTrade. The biggest is lack of feedback options.

My partner is getting her PhD in Behavior Analysis, and one of the FIRST things talked about in the OBM unit of the intro class she teaches is that binary feedback scores are utterly useless. Trade feedback should ideally use a Likert scale, something you're probably very familiar with from any satisfaction survey you've ever taken from a restaurant or whatever: 1 (strongly disagree) -> 4 (neither agree or disagree) -> 7 (strongly agree). Further, there should be more than one metric....overall satisfaction with the trade, trader was easy to deal with, shipping was fast and things packed appropriately, etc.

Especially when deckbox almost never allows negative feedback to be used, a binary positive/neutral/negative is useless. A graded scale and aggregate averages also smooths out anomalies. My own profile has a neutral here and there that were simply retaliatory dings when I had a legitimate complaint about my trade partner and gave justifiable neutral feedback. That only really gets smoothed out when you have a few hundred trades like I do....for most, with under 100 trades, a numerical score is much more helpful.

Lastly, I'd add feedback for attempted deals. How quickly would people be motivated to keep their tradelists in order if constantly turning people down saying "that card isn't actually for trade" resulted in a trend in their feedback that warned others away from dealing with them? This would go hand in hand with the original problem in this post, people demanding trade premiums. Suddenly, there's a feedback trend showing the reason the deal was declined, and you can see most of his trades don't connect because of pricing differences? You know to avoid that guy, he gets fewer trades, and consequences shape a change in behavior.

That's my rant on the matter. It's a problem I see not only on this site but all over, with people sitting down IRL with me at GPs, spending 20 minutes going through each other's binders, only when it comes time to close the deal they suddenly add "well, I only trade if it's in my favor, let me add a few more 'small' things to balance it". It wastes everyone's time. Everyone thinks they're clever playing with cardboard stocks, but really they're just hurting this game and community to squeeze out a negligible profit.

Most of the time, their speculating and flipping cards nets them very little, or often they even lost money, and then they give up; I have a number of people at my LGS who tried it and failed miserably after months of self-delusion that they were making so many imaginary dollars.

My advice in the meantime: Do what I do, make it unambiguously clear that you don't tolerate those people. If no one traded with them, they would go away. It would happen quicker if we had a useful feedback system, but with how primitive this site is, the best we can do is ignore them individually for now.

If I go to mail a trade in person, the price is 100% dependent on the employee who helps me. The old guy insists bubble mailers MUST be sent parcel post and have to have a thickness over a certain threshold to receive DC; I have brought him PWEs I've received with DC stickers on them but he is inflexible on this personal policy. Others send them as large non-machinable envelopes but then insist DC isn't allowed. There's only one who recognizes that I'm a regular who knows exactly what he wants to do and does what should be done.

At the same time, I have bubble mailers bounced back to me for insufficient postage when dozens of identical bubble mailers with identical postage have no problem. I have a spreadsheet of shipping prices for every configuration I've encountered, but every so often one gets kicked back.

The only thing that's consistent right now is PayPal. A #000 bubble mailer with tracking anywhere in the US is $1.69; I've gone up to 6 oz without any additional charge. That's another reason I like to insist on DC: it just simplifies the process so much to do it this way, because, at least at my post office, they somehow turn such a simple process into something needlessly complicated.

I'm with Vincentarisen, and at this time I don't trade with anyone except fellow SA goons for exactly the reasons he argues above.

I had a huge problem recently with two separate Canadian traders. One was resolved nicely, but the other was a month-long debacle to recover a lot of lost value. The trader delayed in sending my cards in the first place, then they never materialized after weeks. Because of it being an international shipment, we had to wait longer than usual to agree that it was not going to show up.

There was a second attempt to send replacements, and once again no DC was added because of the expense. Once again, it failed to show up for weeks. Eventually I had to get the value via paypal. In the meantime, I had to modify a deck to run without the missing, expensive cards; didn't exactly have cash to replace a Sphinx's Revelation and a Hallowed Fountain on a whim when they were at their peak value. This trade was made 34 days before the tournament in question, plenty of time to receive them you would think.

Because of the lack of DC, I also have no evidence the cards were ever even sent, as I find it highly unlikely that two separate shipments disappeared back to back like this. With US traders, without fail if a trade goes missing the replacement gets DC to not only prove the sending of the replacement but to ensure its arrival.

LootPinata is also entirely correct, and the BIGGEST issue is that the USPS is horribly inconsistent. I have had over 130 successful trades on this site alone, and for cheap trades, a stamp on a PWE is sufficient for mailing. However, every so often a batch of envelopes gets kicked back to me for insufficient postage.

Someone mentioned going in person to mail every single trade, but that's just not an option for many of us. It's a 17 minute drive to my post office, and given how frequently I trade, that adds a significant hidden cost of gas and time to each trade if I had to do that. For trades requiring DC (read: anything over $15 at this point), I can now use PayPal and it's actually way cheaper than the post office ($1.69, and so far I've sent up to 6 oz of cards without the price going up, whereas 3 of the 5 employees at my post office try to make me send a bubble mailer as a package and tack on all sorts of fees to push the price up over 3 bucks for a 1 oz envelope, god forbid I ship 6 oz...that goes up to over $5). Note that PayPal's shipping system does NOT allow for international shipping labels to be created at this time unless they are generated in relation to a money transaction, like for an ebay item.

I guess the overall point is that DC is an absolute must for me given the issues I've had with traders in the past 2 months, and shipping to Canada makes that prohibitively expensive. Time is sometimes a factor in trades, where I can't get a card locally but need it in time for a tournament. Having to go down to the Post Office to fill out customs form and get a needlessly inflated price is also a big drawback that makes all but the most expensive trades not worth doing.

Aside from the problem cases I've had, I have nothing against Canadian traders....but the USPS makes it such a giant pain in the ass to trade with you that unfortunately it's not worth the added hassle. Maybe if the USPS gets its act together and tightens up their system, but I'm not holding my breath for that to happen this century.

Ok tradelist updated.

I should note something else that's already come up: I'd rather pass on standard staples right now. I added almost all standard to my tradelist because I can just reacquire these for the cube after they rotate, I'd rather not trade for them at peak value when I don't have to.

StarCity, who is ridiculously overpriced, has their price set at $12. Might want to amend what you're asking.

I'm probably going to do the same. I've made, what, 4 trades/orders on the SA thread in the past week, all but one is here already. Trade on the SA Thread? Here in 2-3 days. Trade here? I'm lucky if it's here in under two weeks.

2x Chord of Calling acquired.

They're in the deck I need this stuff for.