[HN Gopher] Show HN: Mana Pool - Market for Magic Cards
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Show HN: Mana Pool - Market for Magic Cards
Hi folks. I launched my first startup on HN 15 years ago (see my
profile), and I wanted to post here again now. Like my last one,
this project comes from one of my life's passions. I have played
Magic: The Gathering for 30 years. My co-founders and I think
Magic deserves its own market, and this thinking will lead to
dozens of ways to make a great app. We consider what we have an
MVP, and we are all going to MagicCon this weekend in Las Vegas to
walk around in our Mana Pool shirts and talk to people about the
future. If HN likes the site, I would appreciate you crashing it
before we head out tomorrow night! https://manapool.com/
Author : andrewljohnson
Score : 60 points
Date : 2023-09-20 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (manapool.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (manapool.com)
| turtlebits wrote:
| Site isn't working or is slow. And more frustratingly, the
| buttons below the input seem to use javascript which prevent the
| browser loading indicator from showing - so you can't tell if
| you're using the site incorrectly, or it's just still loading.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| could you please email me at andrew@manapool.com so I can get
| the details of your network and device?
|
| We are using svelte for the front end, which I like and does
| interesting things with letting you decide what to SSR... but
| it'd be nice if we move to rendering things more statically
| with it maybe.
|
| edit: site is degrading, cofounder George is working on the
| bottleneck
| Yhippa wrote:
| See you there! Will give you feedback in person if I can find
| you.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Come to Discord! We have shirts and an AirBnB, and we are happy
| to meet people.
| catlover76 wrote:
| Cool, I will share with my friends who are really into MTG.
|
| Who are your competitors? IIRC there is at least one
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Here's what's in my deck:
|
| eBay/TCGPlayer/ChannelFireBall (US) CardMarket (Europe)
| CardTrader (Europe) Facebook Marketplace Amazon, Walmart (low-
| fee avenue for Magic sellers, some do high volume of sealed
| packs on these sites)
| catlover76 wrote:
| I think someone posted a literal MTG card marketplace on HN
| about a month or two ago
|
| 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).
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Please email me at andrew@manapool.com, there are 3 coders
| including me. I think we will hire next year. Two of the
| founders code, one does ops/logistics.
|
| I am interested to hear anymore competitors!
| catlover76 wrote:
| Thanks, I'll shoot you a line
|
| And I'll let you know the name of that other thing I saw
| if I can dig it up lol
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Aren't they supposed to show up here and comment!
| dublinben wrote:
| Two-sided markets are difficult to bootstrap.
|
| 1. As a seller, why would I use your platform instead of the
| existing ones?
|
| 2. As a buyer, why would I use your platform instead of the
| existing ones?
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| 1. Make integration easy, bring eyeballs. Sellers connect to
| multiple markets already.
|
| 2. I'll make Magic features for you that you'll use weekly.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| My colleagues Nate and George are working on the hug of death.
|
| p.s. come to Discord to discuss Mana Pool for the next many
| years, and for promo codes to purchase cards to help test... I
| will give free money until it gets out of hand, then discounts if
| so.
|
| https://discord.gg/H6DyqsUT
| chews wrote:
| Stay away from crypto... there was once a magic the gathering
| online exchange...
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| lol mtgox
|
| i already had my crypto misadventure in 2013-14
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Forgive this for being slightly off-topic.
|
| But I've wondered for awhile now, if a MTG-style card game might
| not be an ideal application for blockchain technology. The anti-
| counterfeiting concept means that limited numbers of rare
| (virtual) cards could be issued. A mechanism could surely be
| developed where the company or group in charge could periodically
| release new cards (perhaps after the mechanics had been voted on
| by participants), and issued once or twice a year. And of course,
| players could transfer cards to each other whenever they liked,
| either trading them or selling for an agreed upon price.
|
| It just seems like a natural fit. Wonder why no one's doing it.
| stevenicr wrote:
| I want something like the Epson FastFoto FF-680W, that can
| collate and re-sort - and send a list of cards scanned.
|
| I want to take a stack of 100 cards or so, put into a hopper -
| have them all scanned and a database made of every card put into
| the stack..
|
| then have software tell the scanner to pull the stack back in and
| collate / sort it over and over again until the stack is sorted
| in various ways.. like sort by colors, then sort by alpha..
|
| of course I want the software to pull in pricing info for each
| card in the table at that point, and then let me give a label,
| like bulk-blu-9-20-23-stack1A so I can put the stack in a box and
| come back and pull from it later -
|
| give me an easy scan to scan the label of the box and flash the
| card to 'remove it from the DB'-
|
| I think a lot of people would use such a hardware setup a lot.
| This would make life so much easier
|
| For some years I have wanted to send a suggestion to those who
| could make it happen.. I'd love to help make it a reality in some
| way. One day.
| [deleted]
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Sure, those robots exists! Many actually, it's crazy.
|
| If you come to Discord, I will tell you about the robots in the
| market.
|
| https://discord.gg/u4J5aGU2
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Discord is literally the worst place for something like this.
| A forum or even a subreddit is much better at maintaining a
| repository of knowledge.
|
| 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.
| valbaca wrote:
| Consider Card Kingdom, they (used to) do exactly this:
| https://www.cardkingdom.com/purchasing/sell_collection
|
| EDIT: added the (used to)
|
| Consider joining a local MtG group on facebook (yes, I
| know). There are often a few people willing to buy
| collections. Get a couple or three to come and take a look
| and give you an offer.
| [deleted]
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| hey man this looks interesting! My Magic days are long over, but
| I still figured I'd give some input. This day and age wouldn't a
| value-add from such marketplace be the validation of
| authenticity? Kind of like what Ebay or StockX are doing?
| HanClinto wrote:
| Looking at seller tools, I could really use a help document
| explaining what sorts of CSV columns you support on this page:
| https://manapool.com/seller/inventory/import
|
| It just says "accepted file formats: csv" but nothing beyond
| that.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| It will take TCGPlayer and BinderPOS export formats, and you
| can email me at andrew@manapool.com if you want something else.
| Mizza wrote:
| Website has that slow, React-y feeling, unfortunately. Good name
| though.
| HanClinto wrote:
| Nice job launching this site -- that's a big venture, and no easy
| feat! With recent consolidations (and shutdowns, like CardSphere)
| that the MTG world has seen, I think we're definitely in prime
| territory for needing a competing marketplace.
|
| What would you say are your key differentiators in the market
| space? Lower fees? Better tools?
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| 1) We want to do things like this:
| https://x.com/manapoolinc/status/1704199592601080241?s=20
|
| 2) We have low fees (5%) and my vision is zero fees, with all
| revenue coming from value-add SaaS for buyers and sellers. I
| hope to get there in a gradual way.
|
| 3) I do think we're really good at software too, and that stuff
| like Stripe Marketplace and off-the-shelf computer vision make
| the lift low.
|
| 4) We know a lot of Magic people, and the network is so dense
| that if our website gets good, everyone will know.
| hi5eyes wrote:
| so it definitely wont involve ML and bitcoin inevitably right
| [deleted]
| jmuguy wrote:
| Some sort of loading indicator(s) would be good. Clicking around
| and I guess its loading but I think its getting hugged pretty
| hard by HN right now.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Getting hugged hard by HN. Any pages or sections in particular
| you're missing loading indicators?
| jmuguy wrote:
| On the homepage clicking through to each set and there's no
| indication anything is happening. Back button is pretty
| unresponsive as well.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Thanks, we'll work on improving.
| oflannabhra wrote:
| This is awesome, just signed up! I love it when hobbies collide
| :)
|
| Some context for others: Magic: the Gathering has grown
| enormously over the past 30 years, and it has an enormous
| secondary market, which covers several segments: highly
| collectible early cards, newly playable cards ("staples" across a
| variety of formats), and unopened packs of cards ("sealed").
| Early sets had print runs that totaled 2-40 million cards in
| total, nowadays sets have billions of cards printed.
|
| Interestingly enough, early cards are relatively counterfeit-
| proof mostly due to changes in printing technology, although the
| counterfeits are getting better each year.
|
| The biggest players in this secondary market are TCGPlayer, which
| was recently acquired by eBay, eBay itself, CardMarket in the EU,
| and lots of local game stores (LGS) that have built up online
| market share (CardKingdom is the biggest of these) or niche.
|
| Fees drive revenue for most of these sites, and those fees are
| variable across different products each platform offers to
| sellers.
|
| Interestingly, although this market does not have derivatives,
| there are several companies and APIs that attempt to offer some
| market advantage for buyers or sellers: indexing the lowest
| available price, providing historical price data, allowing
| comparisons across markets for arbitrage opportunities, plus more
| complex analysis. There's some manipulation that goes on in these
| markets, but nothing as bad as crypto that I've seen.
|
| CardSphere, a smaller player in the market (and my favorite) just
| announced their closure. They mostly inverted the typical market
| dynamic by letting members "trade"-- buyers would offer their
| desired purchase price while sellers would select the best offers
| to fill.
|
| A couple Q's for the founder(s): What's your fee structure like?
| How do you plan to take on the TCG/eBay giant? Do you have
| concerns for the future of the secondary market in general, given
| Hasbro's desire to fuel growth of the property?
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| 1) 5% hopefully headed to 0%
|
| 2) Magic only
|
| 3) I think Hasbro is doing the right thing and what's good for
| Hasbro is good for Mana Pool. MTG is all of Hasbro's profits
| now and 30% of its revenue... the rest is almost margin-free.
| MTG is going to grow a lot further... pandemic brought forward
| revenue but collectibles will keep growing forever.
|
| I'd love to talk more techie mtg stuff on our Discord:
| https://discord.gg/u4J5aGU2
| valbaca wrote:
| > but collectibles will keep growing forever.
|
| YIKES. That's certainly one way to look at a market:
| unbridled optimism that it will never shrink!
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| I did think about doing climate change stuff, but Magic is
| in my blood for better or worse.
|
| I hope we don't destroy the planet, and I hope we get to
| space, and then I think there will be at least a solar-
| system-sized economy of collectibles. Physical ones will be
| extra rare because of distance issues too.
| [deleted]
| rvrs wrote:
| Any plans to add a trading feature? Maybe something similar to
| PucaTrade (though their points system got really inflated towards
| the end)
|
| EDIT: Also, an "add decklist to cart" feature would be sick. I
| want to design an EDH deck and just buy all the singles in a
| couple of clicks
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| love the domain name.
| sneak wrote:
| After a pivot, it can also be repurposed into a Bitcoin mining
| pool, as well, in the great tradition.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Second mtgox ref and counting I think lol.
|
| But more seriously, we might have other brands in the
| future... the domains need to all be awesome.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Credit for that is due to my wife Anna Hentzel Johnson (and
| previously also co-founder).
|
| She came up with the idea and then it was insta-unanimous.
| abatilo wrote:
| Just here to say that's a GREAT name
| sakras wrote:
| Feels like if this takes off there'll be an opportunity for
| arbitrage between TCGPlayer and Mana Pool. I see e.g. All Will Be
| One is $11.67 on TCGPlayer and $12.40 on Mana Pool. Though I
| haven't done the math to see what kind of fees there are.
| zain wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of both Gaia GPS and Magic, so I'm understandably
| excited about Mana Pool. Thanks for sharing!
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Thanks for your help with all of these things :)
| jedberg wrote:
| Based on this site, I'm glad I started playing at Beta. My
| collection is worth like $50,000 according to this. About 1/2 of
| that value is my collection of multiple complete sets of mint
| multilands.
|
| Now to just find where I put them all those years ago...
| bredren wrote:
| Haven't played in many, many years but started when The Dark was
| the expansion set.
|
| Feedback on this, the first card I searched for was "Time Walk"
| and it came up with no results.
|
| I didn't realize at first this only showed things that were for
| sale.
|
| It would be good to at least have a page with the card image and
| information even if there are none available. At least it should
| show a disabled row in the auto-suggest dropdown with the
| annotation "None available for sale."
|
| Perhaps as a future feature you could add a "notify me when this
| is available." I like agents like this on sites like
| camelcamelcamel.com.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback, I also started during The Dark!
| nathancahill wrote:
| We momentarily are hiding out of stock while we adjust some
| things to this traffic spike. Normally you'd see exactly that.
| [deleted]
| a1o wrote:
| Erh, just seeing for how much my alpha cards are going in price,
| are those like, real? The price of power surge, counterspell and
| swords to plowshares feels way to high. It's been a long time I
| haven't played Magic though.
| purpleflame1257 wrote:
| Alpha cards have been heavily favored by collectors as Hasbro
| has attempted to create artificial scarcity.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| We don't have super deep inventory yet... you can probably find
| old cards and many cards cheaper elsewhere for now. But yeah
| those alphas are nuts.
| HanClinto wrote:
| Tinkering around with the search tools, and a few things I'm
| noticing.
|
| I feel like Availability should default to In Stock, but maybe
| that will come once you have more inventory on the site.
|
| I haven't figured out exactly how to reproduce it (sometimes it's
| when I go to another page of the search, or sometimes it's when I
| change filter settings), then I get:
|
| "Internal server error Error loading dynamic filter options
|
| The site administrators have been notified."
|
| When browsing "Other versions", it seems like it would be nice if
| it limited it to in-stock items only, or at least showed me the
| lowest available price for each entry so that I can see if
| there's stock there.
|
| Overall it looks like a great start to the tool -- well done!
| nathancahill wrote:
| Bit of a hug of death from the front page. We're working on
| stabilizing.
| HanClinto wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're just getting slammed because you're on
| the front-page of HN, or if there are other issues at play, but
| the speed of the site is a definite barrier to access. I can't
| tell if it's querying the database directly, or if you're using
| a rapid indexing tool like Elastic, but my biggest obstacle to
| wanting to purchase from this site is clear terms that list out
| what the prices of cards are and their shipping, and the speed
| with which I can browse and build a cart.
|
| Having a "mass entry" cart-builder where I can paste in card
| names and it builds the best-priced cart for me would be a nice
| tool as well, but I can imagine you've got a lot on your plate
| just filling all this out.
|
| Overall great job, and I look forward to seeing this progress!
| I hope you have a great trip!
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Yes, getting slammed and George is working on it in real-
| time.
|
| You can see the deck/mass uploader start here:
| https://manapool.com/deck/add
| creativenolo wrote:
| Wow wow wow. It'll be nearly 30 years since I played magic. I
| remember being good at trading. I have a large percentage of the
| cards listed on the first 3 pages when listed by price.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Everyone will remember this name for years to come. Good luck. I
| tried MTG only a couple of times and never got into it, but I can
| see the appeal.
|
| What I don't like too much is that the minter is a private
| company that profits from this artificial scarcity.
| valbaca wrote:
| > What I don't like too much is that the minter is a private
| company that profits from this artificial scarcity.
|
| You might prefer FFG (Fantasy Flight Games) Living Card model.
| Effectively, each new set that comes out, you can buy a full
| play-set (it was 3x for Netrunner).
|
| Unfortunately, it's just hard to compete with the gambli---er--
| addicti---er-- BOSTER PACK model of MtG.
|
| (I've played MtG for 24 years, very much invested and sad that
| it's a _LITERAL_ investment, see https://www.mtgstocks.com)
| kuang_eleven wrote:
| At least for Netrunner, it was only 3x for the _base_ set,
| and 2x would almost certainly get you enough. All the
| additional sets after the base set came with a full playset
| of 3x copies of each card.
|
| Sadly, Netrunner is dead and the license lost, so not a lot
| of hope for new, official cards any time soon.
| valbaca wrote:
| Yes, I glossed over the core set 2x problem
|
| The community did pick up Netrunner:
| https://nullsignal.games/
| wyldfire wrote:
| Is it time to finally sell my "Library of Alexandria"?
|
| Probably I missed the peak. Probably should sell it so someone
| else can enjoy it.
| valbaca wrote:
| Still worth a G:
| https://www.mtgstocks.com/prints/11943-library-of-alexandria
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| You did miss a bubble but the 1993/94 stuff is still crazy
| valuable.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| I've been playing Magic for 22 years. I think this is a good
| idea, but I'm not as confident as you are about the timing. I
| think this would've been a much better idea pre-MTGA.
|
| As you mention, MTG represents all of Hasbro's profits. I don't
| feel that there is a way for them to escape the allure of
| watering down the MTG market in pursuit of more money. I feel
| they will kill the golden goose. At some point the physical
| printing process has to become a liability, right?
|
| I don't know what percent of MTG newcomers play paper-only.
| Perhaps it is a lot, but my gut says that MTGA is the on-ramp for
| newcomers. With the digital cards not being able to be traded -
| newcomers aren't building the expectations that your tool is
| appealing to. Your tool is more useful to those who are already
| entrenched in the physical game space.
|
| A counterpoint to what I'm saying is that Flesh & Blood has been
| doing well enough and Disney just entered into the space with
| their own, paper only, card game. So perhaps I'm wildly off base
| and the physical market is experiencing a resurgence?
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| There still really isn't a good option for playing the most
| popular format, Commander, on any sort of official app and I
| doubt there ever will be. It's an inherently social format (the
| banlist is a complete joke) and MTGA doesn't support Commander
| at all. The closest MTGA has to Commander is Historic Brawl
| which is a completely different format as it is 1v1 and
| Commander is really a 4 player deathmatch. Even playing
| Commander with 3 people has a completely different feel. They
| sort of support Commander on MTGO, but MTGO has an atrocious
| and difficult UI plus it doesn't support a ton of popular
| Commander cards (and always lags behind in support by months or
| even years for the Commander cards they do support). Again, it
| also cannot be understated how social of a format Commander is.
|
| Another thing you're missing about TCGs in general is the
| satisfaction of playing and owning physical cards.
| everforward wrote:
| From the little testing I did, XMage supports commander and
| there were no unsupported cards in the 5 or 6 decks Ive
| tried. You do have to use the beta release though, the stable
| release is like 3 years old.
|
| 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.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| I have a theory about verticalizing the buy-side UX and
| communities.
|
| If I were to make my outdoor app again, I would focus 100% on
| one sport and never branch until we had 85% of the community.
|
| Come to discord to chat more.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| MtG Arena might be under threat from the recently announced
| Unity's ransom-seppuku...
| oflannabhra wrote:
| I actually think WotC has done a great job of stewarding the
| game. I'm not sure if that is because of Hasbro or not,
| although my inclination is that it is in spite of Hasbro's
| ownership. Hasbro's new CEO has a great understanding of MtG,
| though.
|
| The best thing that WotC can do for the health of the game is
| grow the player-base. While they have had several initiatives
| that show them also trying to maximize the revenue they
| generate off their players, they have also done a great job
| attracting new player and providing products that help on-board
| players to become enfranchised.
|
| I think that the closest corollary in the tech world is Apple
| under Tim Cook. They maximized revenue by expanding offerings
| and having a diversified suite of products, none of which were
| targeted at _all_ consumers. For some reason, enfranchised MtG
| players think they have to buy everything WotC makes, and I
| think this leads to product fatigue. Players blame WotC, but
| they are just trying to offer something for everyone.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| Getting new players seems like a difficult problem at the
| moment because the top paper formats are either extremely
| expensive (Modern) or extremely difficult rules wise
| (Commander). I think they tried to simplify Commander/EDH
| with the introduction of Brawl which simplifies rules by:
|
| 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.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| The WOTC CEO became Hasbro CEO last year FYI
| theogravity wrote:
| Awesome site! The card condition label completely covers the
| price on my 6" iPhone 13 pro screen
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Github issue filed
| demondemidi wrote:
| It's always fun to check in on MtG and see what cards are still
| trading for thousands of dollars! (I also started playing in late
| 1993 before it took off, but I pooped out around Ice Age... I'm
| old enough now to just chuckle at how we treated what would one
| day be 10's of 1,000s of dollars of cards.)
| tinco wrote:
| At the place I played as a kid someone had pinned a black lotus
| to a notice board with a dart. I was too young so I don't
| remember the full story, but I remember it was funny because
| the card would've been worth over a hundred dollars if it
| hadn't been destroyed. I bet now someone would pay hundreds for
| the novelty of owning a destroyed black lotus.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| I don't have my original cards, because I did a lot of
| buying/selling on eBay around 1999 when that was a pretty new
| thing to do with MTG cards. An older kid taught me to do it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| fsn4dN69ey wrote:
| It's clean, works well, great job! How does this compare to
| TCGPlayer on a fundamental level?
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Just does Magic!
| fsn4dN69ey wrote:
| I get that, but can't I just go to TCGPlayer and click the
| first category - Magic, and browse the same goods in a more
| liquid market?
|
| 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
| difosfor wrote:
| Cool! Do you intend to compete with Cardmarket in the EU as well?
| Or just start up in the US?
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(page generated 2023-09-20 23:00 UTC)